The contradictions within the Republican party are visible on the surface and, in the view of Democrats, have delightfully led to all manner of internecine hand-wringing. The evangelical Christian and social conservatives find themselves in a marriage of convenience (does this violate a marriage’s sanctity?) with economic conservatives, who in turn wonder about the single-minded obsession of the national security–focused conservatives. Consider it as the Pat Robertson Republicans versus the Rockefeller Republicans versus the Reagan Republicans. All represent different wings of the party and, as you might guess, a bird with three wings does not fly so well.
—JAMES CARVILLE, FINANCIAL TIMES, MAY 5, 2008
I’m going to go back to November 2000. I don’t want to be a pedant, but this is important. November 2000 was the month that the entire strategy and underpinnings of the Bush presidency were set into place by a now infamous memo by Matthew Dowd that I mentioned earlier. To refresh your memory, dear reader, in that ignominious memo Dowd concluded that there was no more center, and that the Bush administration could govern and campaign from the right.
With few exceptions classic political strategy until that time, as practiced by literally every consultant and candidate, was simply this: move your candidate as far to the center as possible without alienating your base voters. Your task was to moderate your candidate’s positions without turning off the voters most likely to be for you. Political scientists call it the Median Voter theorem. I call it common sense.
In 1992, for example, on the Clinton campaign, our first paid television commercial was on welfare reform. That commercial was a signal that Clinton was a new kind of Democrat. He was a pro–capital punishment, pro–welfare reform candidate, with the political dexterity to defend those positions while holding together the Democratic coalition.
George H. W. Bush said he wanted a kinder, gentler America. It wasn’t subtle. His message was a blatant appeal to the people in the middle and a forerunner of his son’s flirtation with 2000-era “compassionate conservatism.”
These are all perfect examples of someone trying to move to the center while feverishly working to retain base voters.
With Dowd’s memo, strategic doctrine in the Bush presidency shifted radically. The Bush camp began to operate on the belief that the center no longer existed, and they determined to govern, if it’s not too strong a word, ruthlessly, from the right. Dowd had concluded that as long as they could keep the right jacked up, they could win elections, and Bush bought his thesis hook, line, and sinker.
In two election cycles, Dowd and Rove’s strategy worked brilliantly. But it’s like the classic story where someone sells his soul for temporary gain and ends up in hell for eternity. Dowd, Rove, and Bush made a deal with the devil. They traded victories in 2002 and 2004 for the future of the Republican Party.
Early on, it appeared McCain had taken heed and would stick to campaigning as a maverick. Then in late spring and early summer 2008, McCain went hard right—and later hard negative—in response to his slide in the polls. Every step McCain took toward Bush and Rove’s Dowd-steered strategy grew Obama’s margin over McCain.
The best authority on how McCain’s decision to recycle Dowd’s strategy helped sink his campaign is, well, Matthew Dowd. In March, David Paul Kuhn published then-defected Dowd’s quote that McCain “has sided himself so closely to the administration, especially on Iraq, now having various Bush advisers—that doesn’t sit well with the public.”1
America may be a divided country today, but it is most decidedly not an evenly divided country. It is becoming less and less an evenly divided country. If this were sports, I’d say, let’s go to the videotapes—in politics, we say, let’s go to the polls. So, here’s my take on the death of the Republican Party, as supported at appropriate intervals by surveys and other forms of opinion measurement.
The Evidence: Republicans in Crisis
We already know that Bush was, to put it mildly, spectacularly unpopular. That’s why reminders of John McCain’s habit of voting with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time were a consistent, and successful, component of Obama’s strategy last year.
What seems to be escaping notice is just how serious the problems of the Republican Party as a whole are for the long term. It’s not just a Bush thing, and it’s not just about Republicans’ prospects in 2010, 2012, or 2014. I’ll review the impact of the youth blowback later, when we discuss youth voters. For now, let’s stick to the overview.
Republicans know they tapped out their base strategy by 2006. An article by Tod Lindberg in the Weekly Standard in 2006 explained Republican strategy:
The electoral strategy the 1994 results invited was the one Karl Rove successfully exploited in three elections before stumbling badly in the fourth this year: The way to win elections is to find your people and get them to the polls. The premise is that “your people” are out there in sufficient numbers to produce victories, given a technically competent effort to turn them out. You win elections not through conspicuous efforts to reach out to the middle to persuade undecided voters, who probably don’t pay much attention to politics anyway. Rather, you focus your efforts on “your people.”2
Now the Republicans have done a thorough job of making sure they don’t have “people.” In every election year as the election approaches, people take sides. In 2008, Americans weren’t really taking sides. They were taking side.
In the fall of 2007, 40 percent of Americans identified themselves as independents in Gallup polls. By spring 2008, we saw the number of independents start to shrink. In June, only 36 percent thought of themselves as independent. In most years, polls show a rise in the party identification of both parties as independents take a stance. But in 2008, independents’ defection wasn’t what we’d call evenly distributed—from fall 2007 to June 2008, Democratic Party identification rose by 5 points while Republicans didn’t claim a single convert.3
In Step with Bush, Out of Step with the American People
McCain kept trying to claim he was a “Change” Republican. I don’t really know what that would mean. But I didn’t buy it. Neither did other Americans. McCain was the same as Bush and, although I didn’t think I’d ever be able to say this, even worse on some points. We’ll do a quick review of some of the worst of the Republican policies McCain regurgitated last year on the campaign trail because 2008 won’t be the last time you see them and, dear reader, I’d like you to be prepared for the next Republican masquerading as Change who throws up these same talking points.
On Iraq, McCain parroted Bush. For months the McCain campaign Web site actually read that McCain wanted to send more troops to Iraq. Everyone has a different notion of how to solve Iraq. There are senators who think we should draw down slowly, pundits who say we should just get out, wonks who say that Iraq should be divided into several states, and a strong and sane majority favoring some kind of timeline or timetable for U.S. presence in Iraq. Senator McCain is nowhere to be found in any of these reasonable categories or groups.
Let’s review a few of the statements that were the rhetorical nails in the McCain campaign coffin. McCain said it would be fine if the United States spent one hundred years in Iraq.4 The good senator from Arizona said it wasn’t “too important” when the troops come home.5 Of course, we’re lucky he realizes we’re in Iraq—he also couldn’t keep Shiites and Sunnis straight without Joe Lieberman’s help.6
Americans get it, but McCain suffers from a fundamental misapprehension of what’s going on in the Middle East. This is the guy who said we could “muddle through Afghanistan”7 and that we’d be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq. If that phrase sounds familiar, it’s because Dick Cheney used the same one.8
McCain also followed in Bush’s footsteps on the economy during one of the worst economic crises of the last one hundred years. Simply put, John McCain converted to the Republican religion of stealing from the poor to give to the rich. Back in 2001, McCain opposed Bush’s tax cuts, saying they were “generous tax relief to the wealthiest individuals of our country at the expense of lower-and middle-income American taxpayers.”9 Now he’s for Bush’s billionaire-friendly tax cuts. As the saying goes, there’s no one more zealous than a convert.
In fact, McCain felt so strongly about doing his part to relieve the plight of the upper-middle-class and rich American that he pledged to extend Bush’s tax cuts on the campaign trail. The price tag on McCain’s tax proposals was $2 trillion.10 That means John McCain asked the American people to shell out $2 trillion for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations—the top five oil companies would get almost $4 billion in tax breaks,11 while the top ten health insurance companies would get about $2 billion12—even while spending $200 million a day in Iraq.13
What McCain’s tax proposals made brilliantly clear to Americans is that, like Bush and the rest of the Republican Party, McCain doesn’t really “get” economics. Actually, let me refine that statement: McCain doesn’t even understand arithmetic.
McCain tried to sell his economic plan by telling folks that eliminating earmarks would cover the costs. In America According to the Republicans, the funds he would save from being thrown away on frivolous projects like bridges and hospitals would fund his tax breaks for the hardworking millionaires and corporate giants of America.
The first and most obvious problem with McCain’s promise to cut all earmarks was the simple fact that earmarks do some good. Earmarks do things like keep Israel afloat, provide our veterans with housing, and fund critical medical research.14 (One might also observe that Senator McCain had a bad habit of turning up to give speeches in places that have received earmarks.)15
The second issue, and this is where McCain’s arithmetic really started to stink, was the claim that he could wring $65 billion out of the budget by cutting earmarks.16 He could not, under even the broadest and most generous definition of what an earmark is, find $65 billion in earmarks.17
The third glaring error in McCain’s reasoning would be the fact that $65 billion wouldn’t even come close to bankrolling his tax breaks and corporate welfare plan. Given that the fine points of economics are not my strength, I’ll direct you to Robert Gordon and James Kvaal of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, who exposed McCain’s faulty calculus with embarrassing ease:
The three sets of measures identified by McCain as potential revenue sources…would pay for only about 40 percent of McCain’s proposals. First, eliminating absolutely all earmarks, without funding any of the projects elsewhere, would yield only $18 billion, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. Second, eliminating and deeply cutting every program on a White House list of targeted programs…would yield $18 billion more (including heavy cuts in after-school programs, student aid, public broadcasting, and job training). Third, the corporate tax breaks that McCain is considering eliminating would yield only another $45 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal…. Even in the highly unlikely event that McCain succeeded in obtaining all the savings that he is said to be considering, he would need to make up more than $100 billion per year in revenue. These funds would have to come from unprecedented cuts in Social Security or discretionary spending.
The Carville translation is this: McCain couldn’t pay for his tax breaks without screwing over American families.
Discretionary spending, by the way, is antiseptic Washington jargon for the money the government spends on the services and programs that help Americans, from education to housing to medical research.18 I don’t have to explain to anyone how important Social Security is. Anyone with parents, grandparents, or the intention of living past the age of sixty-five is in favor of Social Security.
The health care plan McCain proposed was unapologetically Bushian. Two reporters at the New York Times wrote dryly, “[McCain’s] proposal to move away from employer-based coverage was similar to one that President Bush pushed for last year.”19 The Washington Post likewise reviewed McCain’s plan as “a market-based solution with an approach similar to a proposal put forth by President Bush last year.”20
Here’s the view of Republican proposals on health care from 30,000 feet: the annihilation of the employer-based health care system,21 a tax credit that won’t cover health insurance to start with and won’t keep up with rising health care costs,22 and almost no oversight or protections.23 Right now, 158 million Americans get health care through their employers. McCain proposed eliminating tax breaks for employers providing health insurance to their workers.24 Instead, McCain and his Republican cohort wanted to give single people a $2,500 tax credit and families only $5,000.25
Math isn’t my field, but I feel compelled to crunch a few numbers. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the most popular employer-provided health insurance plans cost the employer almost $12,000 a year.26 Again, I’m not a mathematician, but by my estimates, taking $5,000 from $12,000 leaves $7,000. That’s $7,000 a year that Americans are going to have to cover themselves. And $12,000 a year is optimistic. If $12,000 is the best bargain big employers can strike, just imagine what happens when they’re out of the picture.
It is a self-evident truth that I have a soft spot for tough, smart women, and there are few women, or people, tougher or smarter than Elizabeth Edwards. She got it right on the Republicans’ 2008 health care plan. I’m just going to turn it over to Mrs. Edwards to explain why it is that tossing people into the individual market is, to put it mildly, unconscionable: “Senator McCain’s never been in the individual market, he doesn’t know how difficult it is, in fact how impossible it is, if you happen to be one of the unlucky Americans who has a preexisting condition. He does, Senator McCain does. I do. Among the people who are employed right now and getting their insurance that way, fifty-six million of them do, and they’re going to find it incredibly expensive, if it’s available at all, for those people who have preexisting conditions.”
Republicans don’t seem to understand that there are only two kinds of people: sick, and not-yet-sick. The individual market doesn’t work out for either type. You may be fine for a while if you’re young and healthy. But as Benjamin Franklin said, only death and taxes are inevitable. And before we die, most of us get sick. Once you’re sick, which we call “a preexisting condition” in Washington, getting insured in the individual market is at best difficult and at times impossible.
A few more numbers, here, and then I promise I’m done until the chapter on the economy. McCain said he’d increase his health care tax credit at the rate of inflation. That’s a classic example of Republicans trying to make the absurd sound reasonable. Health care costs rise about 7 percent every year, and inflation rises only 2 percent. The cost of health care would rise quite a bit faster than the size of Republicans’ already insufficient tax credit. By the calculations of my friends at the Center for American Progress, “In 2009, McCain’s credit [would] cover 36% of the costs of an average family premium, by 2018 it would only cover 24%.”27
The truth is simply this: McCain lined up behind Bush on every major policy issue, and that compounded his already unenviable problem of being a Republican in 2008. All the post-election analysis and policy jargon I can throw at you about how McCain hugged Bush couldn’t make this point stronger than McCain and Bush did. McCain said that he “totally” supported Bush on the “transcendent issues,” which could convince even the most reluctant of holdouts that McCain would continue Bush’s policies.28 (If that’s not strong enough for you, there’s always McCain’s ill-conceived statement that Bush “has earned our admiration and love” in 2004.)29
Bush wanted Americans to elect McCain, in itself perhaps the most damning argument against McCain. Americans heard Bush saying McCain was the best choice to “carry forth his agenda,”30 and Bush’s promise that “If my showing up and endorsing him helps him—or if I’m against him and it helps him—either way, I want him to win.”31 That may be my favorite remark by George Bush on the topic of his own unpopularity. Even Bush knew that his endorsement of McCain was going to hurt McCain.
Americans had enough of Bush, and they weren’t going to elect the guy who presented himself as his successor both substantively and rhetorically. In May 2008, 43 percent of voters said McCain would be too closely aligned with the Bush agenda.32 By June, 49 percent told Gallup that they worried McCain would be too similar to Bush.33 As McCain hugged Bush closer, the number kept climbing.
Just look at The Washington Post survey in May 2008. Let me offer a refresher: in May 2008, the Democratic primary was at its nastiest and most vicious. There were not more than a handful of populated places in the country where you could walk more than a few feet without hearing or seeing something about how the Democrats were attacking one another. (It was ugly, but none of this is to say that the Democratic primary this year was in any way close to being one of the nastiest elections I’ve witnessed in my lifetime—it was downright polite, if you ask me.)
So, going back to May 2008, even as the Democrats were nearly neck-and-neck and McCain was sitting pretty, Americans told The Washington Post that Obama, not McCain, would be more likely to bring change, had a better personality and temperament, better understood Americans, and had a clearer vision for the future. And when I say that people said Obama would be better on these things, I don’t mean that a few more people preferred him—I mean that almost six in ten people thought that Obama would be better than McCain on all of these things, and only about three in ten gave McCain higher marks on any one of these things.34
For more on the demographic and analytical evidence of imminent Republican decline, I’ll share with you the following memo.
To: James Carville
From: Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza
Re: Demographics and the Decline of the Republican Party
You’ve indicated that your sense of the election was that Democrats were doing better with those voters whose vote share was increasing, and that the Republicans were stuck with people like yourself—and by that I mean, old and white. You know, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
With few exceptions, it is true today that growing demographics are Democratic, and shrinking demographics are Republican. Republican base groups—most notably, white men and the Christian right—are decreasing as a share of the electorate, and the Republican Party is becoming a regional party.35 Meanwhile, Democrats are benefiting from growing diversity and from the support of youth, who are overwhelmingly Democratic and increasingly politically engaged.
Bye, Bye, Bubba
The American public is growingly diverse, with more names like mine, and white men—like you—are no longer the kingmakers of presidential politics. Mid-twentieth century, white men made up half of the electorate.36 In 2008, white men made up only 36 percent of the electorate—barely more than a third—and their vote share is dropping by a percentage point a year.37
Republicans’ margin among white men also slimmed significantly in 2008. While McCain defeated Obama among white male voters by 16 points, Obama improved on the Bush-Kerry margin by 9 points for the strongest showing of a Democratic presidential candidate among white male voters since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Fall of the Christian Far Right
Over the past few decades Republicans have come to rely heavily on, and cater to, the Christian right as a key voting bloc, but they now face a problem we might term diminishing electoral returns. After taking a hard right to win the Christian right, Republicans have now maxed out support in a shrinking demographic. In the 1950s, about four in five voters were married white Christians. Now only two in five voters are married, white, and Christian.38
Initially, the GOP’s near monopoly on the Christian right was a tremendous asset. Alan Abramowitz of Emory University writes, “In American politics today, whether you are a married white Christian is a much stronger predictor of your political preferences than your gender or your class.” The Republicans reaped electoral benefits from their steady inroads into the married white Christian demographic over the past forty or fifty years:
The Republican Party has been able to maintain and even slightly increase its share of the electorate since the 1960s by steadily increasing its support among married white Christians…between the 1950s and the first decade of the 21st century, Republican identification among married white Christians increased by more than 20 percentage points, going from about 40 percent to over 60 percent…. Between the 1970s and the first decade of the 21st century, Republican identification among conservative married white Christians increased by 26 points, going from 64 percent to 90 percent.39
There’s nowhere to go from 90 percent, and Republicans aren’t winning moderate and liberal Christians. While they were increasing their margin among conservative married white Christians, Republicans stalled out with moderate and liberal Christians. Since the 1950s, Republicans increased party identification among the moderates by only 5 points, to 43 percent, and they slipped by 10 points with the liberals, to 13 percent.40
The shrinking Christian right leaves a void in the Republicans’ collection of base groups—and they can’t look to any growing groups to replace those votes.
Republicans as a Regional Party
The Republican Party now relies heavily on a few regions for all of its seats in Congress. Of the 41 Republican-held Senate seats, 20 are southern, and of 178 Republican House seats, 86 are in the South. Nearly half of the Republican Party’s representatives in Congress come from the South (48.4 percent). Moreover, Republicans’ strength in regional strongholds is slipping. In 2008, Republicans lost advantages in party identification in the industrial Midwest and farm states and held leads in only two regions of the country, the South and the mountain states, by less than 2 points each.41
Latinos Rising
Latino and Hispanic voters increased their vote share by a percentage point from 2004, from 8 to 9 percent, representing an increase of hundreds of thousands of votes—that went primarily to Obama. In three battleground states—Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico—Latinos increased their vote share by 5 points or more. Nationwide, Latinos voted for Obama by a margin of 36 percent—67 percent to 31 percent for McCain. In Florida, a state where Latinos have traditionally voted Republican, Obama won 57 percent of the Latino vote.42
African-American Turnout
In 2004, African-Americans made up 11 percent of the electorate. Four years later, they accounted for 13 percent of all voters in the presidential election. The 2-point increase in vote share is tremendous. The U.S. Census Bureau will likely find in 2010 that African-American turnout rates surpassed white turnout rates for the first time.43
The Rise of Multiethnic, Multiracial, Multilingual, Overwhelmingly Democratic Young Voters
Young Americans are dramatically Democratic and newly politically active. In 2008, voters ages eighteen to twenty-four gave Obama a 38-point margin, 68 percent to just 30 percent for McCain. The margin was slightly larger among voters age twenty-five to twenty-nine, who broke 69 to 29 (40 points) for Obama.44 Youth also called themselves Democrats in much greater numbers, giving Democrats a 19-point advantage in party identification.
Turnout among eighteen-to twenty-nine-year-olds rose between 4 and 5 percentage points from 2004—and was 11 points higher than in 2000.45 Attempts to undercut the impact of the youth vote mistakenly cite the 1 percent increase in young people’s share of the electorate from 2004 to 2008 as unremarkable. One percent of the total electorate—when more than 131 million votes were cast this year—represents more than 1 million votes.
Contrary to Republican claims, a great body of evidence proves that, once established, patterns of voting remain consistent. Rather than aging out of their Democratic leanings, these young people will continue to vote Democratic over the course of their lifetime.
The youngest generation of voters is multiethnic, multiracial, and multilingual, and future generations will be even more diverse. Last year, 11 percent of young voters identified themselves as Latino (as compared with 6 percent overall), and 19 percent said they were black (as compared with 13 percent of all voters).46 According to the Census Bureau, 33 percent of children under eighteen are ethnic or racial minorities. One in five youth under eighteen is an immigrant or the child of an immigrant.47 Increasing diversity likely translates to further Democratic gains. In 2008, 96 percent of African-Americans and 67 percent of Latinos voted for Obama.48
The Republican Party in 2009
Republicans are reeling in the wake of the 2008 elections. Republicans lost House seats, Senate seats, the presidency, and have the lowest political brand in the history of polling. That set of facts calls for finger-pointing, and it calls for a blame game. There’s plenty of blame to go around. Republicans have been branded by the legacy of a disastrous war and an unprecedented financial crisis. That’s not to mention the fact that the single most prominent member of their party may prove to be the most unpopular president in U.S. history.
Despite themselves, Republicans nominated the best possible candidate last year—a year in which Republicans were about as popular as a root canal. (If possible, they are even less popular now.) Yet the Republicans couldn’t get what’s left of their base to rally behind McCain, proving that the modern GOP is now a regionalized, extreme party that can’t succeed without satisfying the far right and the Christian right.
In July 2008, fewer than six in ten conservatives supported McCain.49 That doesn’t sound too bad, so let’s get a little perspective on it. In 2004, Bush carried 87 percent of conservatives. That means that, as of July 2008, McCain lagged 29 points behind Bush’s 2004 performance among conservatives.50 In the 2008 election, Republican turnout actually dropped. According to Curtis Gans of American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate, “Republican turnout declined by three percentage points to 25 percent of the electorate. The six-point advantage the Democrats had in the eligible vote was the largest since the Lyndon Johnson landslide against Barry Goldwater in 1964—8.8 percentage points. Republican turnout declined in 44 states and the District of Columbia and increased in only six—none by a greater amount than two percentage points.”
The lead of a New York Times article on November 7, 2008, maintained: “President-elect Barack Obama succeeded in chiseling off small but significant chunks of white evangelical voters who have been the foundation of the Republican Party for decades, a close look at voting patterns reveals.”51
The truth is, McCain never managed to mobilize the white evangelical voters critical to Bush’s victory in 2004. They were crazy about Bush, but indifferent to McCain. Only 10 percent of white evangelical Christians said they were excited by the election, compared with 20 percent of Americans overall.52 So here’s the matchup: McCain 2008 vs. Bush 2004. In 2004, Bush won 78 percent of white evangelicals.53 In 2008, McCain won 74 percent of white evangelicals. That means McCain came in 4 points behind Bush’s 2004 level of support from white evangelicals. Considering that the Republican Party has been relying upon and steadily building support among white evangelicals for decades, this backsliding signals serious trouble for the GOP.
With demographics against him, it was crucial that McCain be able to energize all of his shrinking base. But McCain just couldn’t get people excited—even with his Hail Mary pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate, which was, admittedly, probably a smart move so far as mobilizing the Republican base goes.
Here I’ll take a moment to address Governor Palin. Although, again, I think she was a predictable pick by a desperate Republican Party: Sarah Palin is uniquely unqualified to hold the office to which she aspired. One might remember that I did go so far as to show a picture of Wasilla’s City Hall on air while commenting on CNN. It looks just like a Louisiana bait shop. The Katie Couric interviews left me speechless. They might have been the worst interviews in the history of television. The story of Sarah Palin is this: she was exposed as what she is, incompetent.
I found the Palin-inspired post-campaign finger-pointing within the McCain camp to be both intriguing and entertaining. I’ve heard more than a few people who ought to know better ask, was the Republicans’ loss Sarah Palin’s fault?
The McCain campaign and, indeed, much of the Republican Party, being literally exhausted from defending itself from every right-wing blowhard and Bush lackey in the country, did decide to blame Sarah Palin for circumstances beyond their, and her, control. (Namely, the crash of the Republican brand.)
Governor Palin, who may not have learned much in her run for national office but learned enough to participate in the blame game, got her finger out and pointed it right back. And so we have Palin doing interviews with Matt Lauer in her kitchen and deliciously vicious stories ranging from her appearing for meetings in her hotel room wrapped in a towel (somewhat believable) to not knowing the countries of North America (100 percent believable) to not knowing Africa was a continent (95 percent believable). The campaign shouted, screamed, and cried to anyone who would listen about how Palin didn’t read and didn’t prepare for her interviews or the debate.
Even if all of that’s true, let’s go back to the main point here: no one could have overcome the incompetence of the Bush administration. Nothing could have made the shrinking base the Republicans now depend upon suddenly an electoral force capable of securing a victory for McCain. Contemporary American conservativism is an accumulation of reactionary, pseudopopulist, intellectually devoid whiners, xenophobes, racists, and Luddites.
For every step McCain took to try to unify conservatives, he lost crucial swing voters. Although initially popular, Sarah Palin ultimately became an albatross around McCain’s neck. Obama beat McCain among independents by 8 points, 52 to 44 percent—even as the pool of independents became more conservative.
Every four years, the number of independents shrinks as the presidential election approaches. Usually the gains to each party are roughly even; but in 2008, independents moved toward the Democrats, and Republicans became independents. In polling terms, there was an increase in Democratic Party identification—and a small decrease in Republican Party identification. That should surprise no one. Who would really be moved to join the Republican Party by the events of the last year? On November 2, 2008, 38 percent of Americans identified as Democrats, 34 percent identified as independents, and only 26 percent admitted to being Republicans.54
In short, Republicans have no hope of making serious inroads into Democratic advantages in 2010, or likely 2012 or 2014 and so on. It’s time to call TOD on the GOP.
WHY MCCAIN PICKED PALIN
Here’s the scene: the top brains in the McCain campaign and whatever high-ranking Republicans get a say in such matters are in a room, and they’re all very aware that they’re going to lose the election. If they pick Pawlenty, Romney, Ridge, Crist, or any of the other oft-mentioned top contenders for the vice-presidential slot, it doesn’t move any votes. They’re getting ready to go to the convention, and they instinctively know that any of the conventional picks would (a) provide no additional chance to win; (b) ensure that what promised to be a lethargic convention would remain so. In the case of Ridge, they would probably have had walkouts.
This is a campaign that’s looking for a shake-up-the-equation pick to fire up the base, preferably a Republican without Washington connections. Suddenly somebody or some bodies say, we have a brilliant idea: Sarah Palin. Consider the following, they say. Palin is a woman, so she’ll cut into the women antagonized by Hillary, and she neutralizes our diversity problem. She’s not from Washington—she’s the governor of Alaska and she actually ran against corrupt Republicans. This is a woman who isn’t just loved but revered by the Christian right, and she will fire up the party like you’ve never seen. They keep spinning. The governor is great in front of a camera. She’s a former newsperson (and a beauty queen), and she understands the media.
At this point, 99 percent of people in politics would stop and say, this is a perfect story, and the Republicans have just met the woman of their dreams. And it was a dream at that point. Palin was the remedy for every problem they had: a lackluster convention, a depressed base, people hating Washington Republicans, a reputation for an old white guy party with an old white guy candidate, and a flagging maverick brand.
For those old white men in the room, the question was, why not? It seems to me that they skipped that part of the discussion.
People said, we can bring her up to speed. We can brief her. Someone raises Troopergate and her tendency to abuse executive power in Alaska. The answer is easy: there was a deal with her brother-in-law and she stuck up for her sister. Who cares? If they knew at this point, they probably discussed the fact that the eldest Palin daughter was on her way to becoming a teenage mother. At that point they said, the right will love that. It’s a choice families make every day. It humanizes her.
Their plan was to come out and own the narrative they created for this unknown political figure. At a level, it made so much sense it was ridiculous. It was a classic example of a father asking his daughter why she was walking into the house at eight in the morning. She replies, I fell asleep on the couch. It’s up to the father whether he wants to let that go or investigate. Well, the Republican Party and the McCain campaign being the father in this situation, they wanted to believe Sarah fell asleep on the couch.
I almost understand it. From their point of view, what could they have imagined as the worst-case scenario? Who cared that she had no intellectual depth? That’s the last thing that modern conservativism requires from anyone. It had become part of the tapestry of modern conservatism that stupidity was actually a virtue. That intellectualism and thought were things to be contemptuous of.
If you were a Republican or a conservative in the late summer or early fall of 2008, that woman was your dream. Sure, she didn’t know anything about foreign policy and she didn’t even have a passport until the year before. Of course she had no idea about any of the pressing national or international policy issues. But Republicans have come to embrace shallowness and lack of curiosity in their politicians. I actually think that a lot of people in the McCain campaign were encouraged by the fact that she was a simpleton.
Palin might even have a national political career in front of her still as long as there’s a significant part of this country that values simpletons and believes that a solution to our problems can reside in a profoundly unthoughtful person. I would like to think we’re never going to go back to that, that Bush has pretty much ended that strain of belief. But I am also keenly aware that American conservatism has reserved a big place at the table for the reactionary, thoughtless right-winger for the foreseeable future.
Time for a Fox-Hunt
Having reviewed the ridiculous positions the Republican Party has taken, let’s look at how the Republicans do their best to convince Americans that their positions are valid and mainstream. (Or, in other words, it’s time for a Fox-hunt.)
Over the course of decades Republicans have built an infrastructure that allows them to marshal everyone they’ve got, from elected officials to entire news networks (Fox), to create artificial uproars on cue, à la ACORN scandal that wasn’t in 2008.
Analyzing Republicans’ influence on the media is a kind of political “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” Here’s your test:
1. Is Fox fair and balanced, or is it Republican propaganda?
One of the frustrating things in Washington is that you’re supposed to go around with a solemn face and argue things that are really not arguable. Among these non-argument arguments that we’re expected to have, my favorite may be creationism. Naturally I also enjoy spending endless hours cornered in debates about global warming and whether Social Security works or not. (Of course it does.)
So we sit around and pontificate on silly-ass things that have been decided a long time ago. There comes a point at which the body of evidence is so conclusive, is so overwhelming, is so definitive that even unreasonable people don’t attempt to make a contrary argument. For example, the earth is round, not flat. We accept that. There’s no less evidence that the earth is warming, no less evidence that the earth is not 5,000 years old, but somehow or another, we scratch our chins and argue. An argument that fits into the creationism, global warming, flat-earth sphere of issues is the “objectivity” of Fox News.
Only a massive liar or blatant hypocrite would dare argue this point. Consider the following facts about Fox:
2. Is Bill O’Reilly a reasonable, balanced source of news and analysis, or is he a staunch Bush defender who hasn’t met a government policy he didn’t like?
Fox News claims it’s balanced. O’Reilly claims he’s an independent. But as my friend Paul Begala says, “Don’t pee on my boots and tell me it’s raining.” The audience, topics, and guests all ooze conservatism. (And “ooze” is a particularly appropriate word when we’re talking about Republicans, to be clear.) For any viewer unpersuaded after a few minutes tuned to Fox, there’s the set of explicit instructions propagated by Rupert Murdoch on the conservative vent and purpose of the network, and there’s no getting around the fact that O’Reilly is as “red” as they come. When it comes to O’Reilly, the best evidence of his lunacy comes from O’Reilly himself.
Here’s O’Reilly on global warming and the environment:
March 4, 2008: Responding to a viewer’s email about whether the current global warming “scare” is “natural” or “man-made,” Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly asserted: “It’s all guesswork.” Contrary to O’Reilly’s assertion, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that the Earth is warming and human activity is very likely responsible for most of that warming.55
Ready for more? Read on for Bill O’Reilly’s sophisticated understanding of the complex social and economic mechanisms at work in creating poverty in this country:
It’s hard to do it because you gotta look people in the eye and tell ’em they’re irresponsible and lazy. And who’s gonna wanna do that? Because that’s what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen. In this country, you can succeed if you get educated and work hard. Period. Period.56
One might think there’s a limit to the number of stupid things that can come from one individual’s mouth, but Bill O’Reilly keeps proving me wrong. I’m thinking of a gem of a quote from O’Reilly circa January 2000 (see if you can spot the moment when O’Reilly realized what he was saying):
I don’t understand why in the year 2000, with all of the media that we have, that a certain segment of the African-American community does not understand that they must aggressively pursue their child’s welfare. That is they have to stop drinking, they have to stop taking drugs and boozing, and—and whites do it, too! Whites do it, too!57
Here’s Bill O’Reilly’s sympathetic and well-reasoned take on the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, given July 7, 2000:
That’s my advice to all homosexuals, whether they’re in the Boy Scouts, or in the Army or in high school: Shut up, don’t tell anybody what you do, your life will be a lot easier.58
And just to prove he’s remarkably nasty, even for a far right nut job, and that’s stiff competition, Bill O’Reilly on Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post:
I don’t see a difference between [Arianna] Huffington and the Nazis.
What’s the difference between the Ku Klux Klan and Arianna Huffington?
There’s no difference between what Huffington and Nazis do.
The whole [Huffington Post] is a sewer.59
Finally, because the irony of Bill O’Reilly protesting someone taking advantage of freedom of speech is just too ironic to ignore, here’s O’Reilly proposing that we deny Americans protesting the war in Iraq their civil freedoms. Because nothing protects freedom and democracy like tossing Americans exercising their constitutional rights in jail.
You must know the difference between dissent from the Iraq war and the war on terror and undermining it. And any American that undermines that war, with our soldiers in the field, or undermines the war on terror, with 3,000 dead on 9/11, is a traitor. Everybody got it? Dissent, fine; undermining, you’re a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they’re undermining everything and they don’t care, couldn’t care less.60
3. Is Fox’s reporting on the war in Iraq biased?
In 2008, it was discovered that the Bush White House had been manipulating coverage of the war in Iraq by giving select analysts tremendous access—and sending them on camera armed with Bush-approved talking points. As former Fox “news analyst” and retired Green Beret Robert S. Bevelacqua said, “It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.’”61 That’s pretty much all Fox is, ever.
The Center for Excellence in Journalism studied the amount of time each news channel spent on coverage of the war in Iraq early in 2007. Fox spent half as much time as MSNBC, and significantly less than CNN. During the day, CNN could be counted on to spend a fifth of its time on Iraq, with MSNBC only slightly behind. Fox spent only 6 percent of its airtime covering the Iraq War.
Fox’s clear Republican bias on Iraq isn’t exactly a fluke. It’s the tip of the iceberg. Let’s check coverage of the Department of Justice fiasco. MSNBC used 8 percent of its airtime to cover the firings of Justice Department officials, and CNN was on it 4 percent of the time. Fox covered the firings during only 2 percent of the news cycle. That’s only a little more than nine minutes in eight hours for a scandal with tremendous legal and political implications.62
The Republicans close ranks to try to defend Fox. Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center says that Fox focuses on American news, and it’s more balanced in its coverage because it’s showing both the positive and the negative side of the war in Iraq. Unlike the unwaveringly negative coverage on CNN and MSNBC, he argued, Fox’s programs give both positive and negative coverage of the war.
Several glaring issues present themselves here. The first would be, how can the Iraq War not qualify as an American issue? We have thousands of Americans dead and more Americans set to die, and it’s American funding and American resources that we’re pouring into this war. It doesn’t get much more American than that.
The second major problem with Mr. Graham’s response is the fact that there’s no balance to be had in coverage of the Iraq War. Between May 15 and July 21 of 2006, Fox gave twice as many positive accounts of the war as CNN and MSNBC.63 Presumably, although Fox often seems to be off in its own world, all three networks were reporting on the same war. The total number of U.S. soldiers who had died in “Operational Iraqi Freedom” or “Operation Enduring Freedom” as of December 20, 2008, was 4,200. The total number of soldiers who had been wounded in action was more than 30,000. I can say for a fact these numbers are higher now, as you read this.
4. Is Fox that biased, really?
In short, yes. Only if you believe the earth is flat, 5,000 years old, and getting cooler could you believe Fox is a legitimate news network. If you believe the earth is round, millions of years old, getting warmer, and there weren’t WMDs found in Iraq, then you don’t.
Fox anchors and executives seem to think that if they click their heels three times and say “fair and balanced,” it’ll suddenly be true. Take these gems from Brit Hume:
You know, we get a ton of email; everybody does now. It gives us a kind of a pulse that you can feel. What we hear people saying is thank you for being fair; thank you for being balanced. So my sense of that is that within the media world, among my colleagues, the conventional wisdom is we’re a right-wing network. I don’t accept that view, and I don’t think our viewers do either.64
I’ll save my speculation on the likely proportion of “thank-you” emails Brit Hume receives that were written by friends, family, and Hume himself for later. For now, I’ll just repeat a simple fact: saying it’s true doesn’t make it so.
Bill O’Reilly admitted that balance isn’t the guiding principle of his show, ratings are. He complained in December 2006 that the lowest-rated portion of his talk show on the previous night was when he covered the Iraq War. The highest? The Britney Spears segment. Too bad Bill hasn’t returned to entertainment news coverage.
I can hear the objection now. Brit Hume’s saying, “Mr. Carville, you attacked Fox News as liars and hypocrites, but you come on our channel to promote your book.” I have a reply ready. “Yes, Mr. Hume, that’s right. I also went on the Colbert Report, although I don’t believe anything Stephen says.”
Why doesn’t Fox just say it’s a right-wing propaganda channel? Then I can sit back to watch it the same way I watch the Colbert Report. Not for coverage or news or facts. To laugh. For God’s sake, man, don’t sit there and tell me you’re a credible news-gathering organization—you’re not.
During the Democratic primary, it was clear to me and others that certain outlets had a pronounced bias against one Hillary Rodham Clinton. It was a perceptible, problematic, if somewhat understandable, bias. Yet that was nothing compared to Fox’s severe ideological tilt, which is all the more vile for the fact that Fox refuses to admit that it is biased. By comparison, during the general election, Politico’s John Harris and Jim VanderHei, formerly of The Washington Post, examined charges of broad media bias against McCain and for Obama—and confirmed them.65
Not Just Fox
It’s not just Fox that gets it wrong. (Although, generally, the difference between Fox and other news entities is that sometimes other news entities get it right.) Let’s take the New York Times. If you need one statistic that shows the mentality of the twentieth-century mainstream media, here it is: the New York Times printed 588,903 words on the Whitewater scandal during the Clinton administration, and it spent only 395,472 words on the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003.
The media has failed in its duty. The role of the journalist is, fundamentally, to analyze and report events. Not only is the media not covering the big stuff (“I hear there’s something going on in the Middle East”), it’s spending hours on celebrities and socialites. I shouldn’t know who Paris Hilton is.
At least Paris is just wasted coverage. If the media would agree to do a good job on the big issues when they deign to cover them, that’s a deal I could live with. But instead we see lazy reporting. Like Time throwing up a memo written by the McCain campaign during the election as an article on McCain’s campaign strategy.66
Worse than laziness, there is now a pernicious tendency on the part of the media to represent two perspectives on an issue as equally legitimate, even when the vast weight of evidence and proof lies on one side. There aren’t two sides to the global warming debate. There are many different strains of thought on how to solve the environmental crisis, but there are no two sides to the issue of global warming: it’s happening, and it’s caused by human activity. Need another example? One word: evolution.
The media is playing into the hands of the right by giving their hacks and shills credibility on these issues. I don’t want to see another Sunday morning show seating a creationist sitting next to a Harvard professor or another New York Times article quoting a minister who says that abstinence-only education is a really effective way to teach our teens about their bodies. Evolution happened, and teenagers are going to have sex. (These are perhaps two of the most irrefutable facts of our existence.)