On November 8, 1994 I woke up to a shock. My persistently undefeatable Congressman, Jack Brooks, had been swept away. A thirties leftist who sat atop a typical Southern, Union/Populist Democratic machine; we had come to see the old man as a force that could only be removed by the hand of God. Turns out we were right. Read more »
Month: December, 2009
Scott Brown (R) has released the first advertisement in the general election for the U.S. Senate seat once held by Ted and John F. Kennedy, the Boston Globe reports.
In the ad, called Different People, Same Message, JFK morphs into Brown as both read from a 1962 Kennedy speech
The new meme going in conservative circles is to try to repeal whatever health care overhaul passes next year. The 2010 campaign theme coming from GOP pols and activists is to repeal the bill.
I have to admit that it’s a clever strategy. Too bad it won’t work. Read more »
I’ve done more than a few posts on the quest by some in the GOP to want shrink the so-called “Big Tent.” Many of us have looked at how the Democrats have been able to welcome both liberals and moderates in the party.
However, two articles from two Democrats show that the Left is having its own problems on trying to reach and keep moderates and also please its base.
On Christmas Eve, former Commerce Secretary William Daley wrote in the Washington Post about trying to keep the Dems open to all viewpoints. He notes that Democratic wins in 2006 and 2008 was because the party reached out beyond its liberal base. It was because of the Big Tent, that Dems started winning in Republican-leaning districts for the first time in a long time. But all is now well in the party of FDR. Daley notes that currently liberals in the party are attacking their Centrist brothers and sisters for not being pure enough.
On the one hand, centrist Democrats are being vilified by left-wing bloggers, pundits and partisan news outlets for not being sufficiently liberal, “true” Democrats. On the other, Republicans are pounding them for their association with a party that seems to be advancing an agenda far to the left of most voters.
The political dangers of this situation could not be clearer.
Witness the losses in New Jersey and Virginia in this year’s off-year elections. In those gubernatorial contests, the margin of victory was provided to Republicans by independents — many of whom had voted for Obama. Just one year later, they had crossed back to the Republicans by 2-to-1 margins.
For Daley, the solution is to realize that what might be the agenda of the liberal base might not be the agenda of all Americans:
All that is required for the Democratic Party to recover its political footing is to acknowledge that the agenda of the party’s most liberal supporters has not won the support of a majority of Americans — and, based on that recognition, to steer a more moderate course on the key issues of the day, from health care to the economy to the environment to Afghanistan.
For liberals to accept that inescapable reality is not to concede permanent defeat. Rather, let them take it as a sign that they must continue the hard work of slowly and steadily persuading their fellow citizens to embrace their perspective. In the meantime, liberals — and, indeed, all of us — should have the humility to recognize that there is no monopoly on good ideas, as well as the long-term perspective to know that intraparty warfare will only relegate the Democrats to minority status, which would be disastrous for the very constituents they seek to represent.
Nonsense, says Robert Creamer, in the Huffington Post. The political organizer sees any attempt to become more “moderate” as nothing more than bowing to the political interests that got us into this mess called the “Great Recession.” Creamer believes the nation voted for substantial change is the Democrats must deliver on this change:
“Moderating” our goals is not a recipe for victory. It is a recipe for failure. Last fall, voters overwhelming voted for change, and they knew then — and still know now — the kind of change they wanted.
They wanted to end the stranglehold of the private insurance companies that continues to put every American a single illness — or one layoff — away from financial catastrophe. They want to take bold, clear action to assure that America is in the forefront of creating the clean energy jobs of the future — and leave a thriving healthy planet to our children. They wanted to fundamentally change the bull-in-the-china shop foreign policy of the Bush years and re-establish American leadership in the world. Most importantly, they rejected the failed economic policies that allowed the recklessness of huge Wall Street banks to plunge the economy into free fall — and cost millions their livelihoods. They desperately want leadership that will lay the foundation for long term, bottom-up, widely shared prosperity.
In other words they wanted… and still want… fundamental change.
Why does this all sound so familiar to me?
I think what Daley and Creamer show is that polarization really is taking place within the two parties, leaving those not “pure” enough out in the cold. Both hard core liberals and conservatives feel they have a pulse on what America wants and misinterprets an election win for a mandate for radical change.
But of course, they don’t understand the outside because their whole political lives are spent inside a bubble of their own making. Moderates in both parties tend to be the ones that know that all of America isn’t Berkley or Alabama. They are the ones that have a foot in reality.
Maybe what could happen is that moderates in both parties get tired of being treated like crap and create one or two political parties that are more in tune with the pulse of America. One can hope.
The career politicians will hide behind whatever excuse they can to stop such a thing and the special interest groups will rally behind them; they want their puppets making our laws. We the people, however, are sick of it. The same people in office 15, 20, even 30+ years. Yet they still fail to do what needs to be done. How is it that we are so stupid that we protest out in the streets and in our blogs and on our Twitter pages that we are tired of the status quo and want change to come to Washington and yet we reelect people like Nancy Pelosi, John McCain, Harry Reid, John Boehner, and the late Ted Kennedy over and over again. We say “we’re tired of your policies” and “you are supposed to be serving us” and what the hell do we do on election day? We cast our votes for the incumbents. They have clearly failed us. They should not be in office. Read more »
Patrick Stewart, who play Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation is being knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Mention of Stewart being a staunch Labourite has had a few people at the National Review wonder why some conservatives like Star Trek when it is decidedly left leaning. On the other hand, some think Star Wars is more in line with conservative ideals:
• In Star Trek, law enforcement is armed with phasers. Officers stun people, then lock them up, then subject them to intensive psychiatry until they are “cured†of their criminal impulses. In Star Wars, law enforcement under the Galactic Republic appears to be the job of Jedi Knights who try to avoid violence but, if pressed, will cut you in half with a light saber.
• In Star Trek, evil characters are frequently considered to be the product of a poor environment, a bad childhood, misunderstanding, or miscommunication. It turns out that Captain Kirk and the other original cast members just didn’t understand the Klingons, for example, or the Romulans. The Gorn, a lizard-like race that does a Pearl Harbor on the Federation and kills many innocent people, are later excused from culpability because they say that they saw peaceful Federation colonists as “invaders†in their territory. Killer clouds of space gas or giant space amebas threatening the lives of billions turn out to be lost children or mindless things just trying to survive. Even the Borg, a great source of villainy from The Next Generation, are humanized in subsequent stories.
In Star Wars, evil characters have been seduced by the dark side of the Force. They have given into temptation, and are held accountable for their actions. The Star Wars movies are really morality tales, and have a strong religious component in spite of themselves. No one argues that Sith Lords might have turned out differently if they had just been enrolled in a quality preschool program.
Me? I’ve always like Trek over Wars. I mean, I loved Star Wars, but I’ve always liked how Star Trek dealt with issues of the day and it’s emphasis on diversity. But Trek has not been a liberal love fest in the way that some envision (witness how the Federation deals with the Borg).
At the end of the day, I think both franchises have good things to talk about concerning life, death and evil. I would rather just enjoy both than have to choose what my politics dictate.
The GOP gambled big in not working with the Democrats. Some have hoped the bill passes and then the Democrats will be tossed out of Congress in 2010 because of the health care overhaul. But if anyone thinks this means health care reform would be repealed by the GOP, they’ve got another thing coming. Read more »
TruthDig has an interesting article on Michelle Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican Representative who seems to never find a moment to talk about the coming “socialist takeover” by the President. But it turns out that Ms. Bachmann is also living off the dole: Read more »
Yes, polls of self-identification on this scale do show a very stable “center-right country” in which conservatives typically outnumber liberals three-to-two or even more. This is how Scott arrives at his fundamental argument that polarized elected officials don’t adequately represent the people who elected them, and also how he somehow concludes that the notable shift of Republican opinion to the right in recent years has made the system more, not less representative (that’s his major refutation of the Hacker-Pierson contention that the GOP has dragged the political center to the right).
Self-identification measurements are always iffy, as is made most evident by the vast gap between the number of voters who call themselves “independents” and the number who actually behave in an independent manner. But the hoary liberal-moderate-conservative scale is particularly influenced by the unpopularity of the “liberal” term, even among many voters who are “liberal” by the normal standards. This is what conservatives have bought with so many years and so many billions of dollars invested in the demonization of “liberalism,” compounded by the very different meanings the term has denoted here and abroad.
The kicker here though is what this belief in a “center-right nation” does to the GOP:
It’s worth noting as well that the “center-right nation†meme has the perverse effect of holding Democrats to a higher standard of “bipartisanship†than Republicans, since “liberals†obviously have to move further to reach the actual political center than “conservatives.†And indeed, that’s pretty much what Scott suggests.
Now, Kilgore is a lefty and this is a blog with a liberal bias, but he does share some truth here. I believe one of the reasons that the Republicans have for the most part held their ground and not cooperated with the Democrats is on the belief that the American people don’t want a “government takeover of healthcare.” They believe that the public is on their side since this is a “center-right nation.” In essence, they believe they don’t have to give an inch because most of the nation agrees with them ideologically.
But is that really true? Voters put a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President in office last year. The Democratic President said he was going to reform health care and yet voters voted for him. Also this Democratic President is the first Northern Liberal in the White House in about two generations. If we are such a center-right nation, one would think that President Obama would have had a hard time getting elected.
The danger of believing that we are a center-right country is that it allows Republicans to live in denial. Why do they have to change? Why bother with trying to appeal to independents, or why bother running moderates in Democratic areas? The last two elections should have woken us up and allowed us to make strategic changes, but the belief in the center-right nation allows us to think that 2006 and 2008 are abberations and that sooner or later, America will come back home to the GOP.
But I think there is even a bigger danger: it leaves Republicans thinking they don’t have to solve issues like health care reform or the environment, or the economy. Their vision of the right makes these issues irrelevant.
2010 will be an interesting year to find out if this belief in a center-right nation is real or just something a convenient little lie to hold on to during hard times.
The only local elections that mattered were the Democratic primaries. The only candidates on the Republican primary ballot would be running for Governor or federal office. In a few locations there would be candidates for state legislature. Across vast swaths of the Old South, Republican downballot races would be completely empty with the exception of a few professional candidates – the kind of guys who slept in their cars, and lingered on the courthouse square wearing incoherent sandwich boards, protesting something or other. Read more »
One of the heroes of the Cold War, Russian dissident Natan Sharansky, published a book in 2004 called The Case for Democracy. His book is often cited as an influence on Bush Administration policies. Sharansky makes a bold argument that is seeded with a subtle, catastrophic flaw. Sharansky argues that freedom is a universal value desired by people everywhere. So far, so good perhaps. He fails to take into account that everybody wants freedom for themselves, but significantly fewer people are willing to tolerate their neighbor’s distasteful choices. Unfortunate, but still not the kicker. Read more »
I rarely call out one of our commenters, but his response to Richard Shorter’s article was pretty jaw-dropping:
Any resources that Republicans use to pander to blacks are wasted. Blacks are the most liberal group in the U.S. Attending black baptist or AME churches has nothing to do with being conservative.
Blacks have high rates of out-of-wedlock birthrate, high crime rates, and high fraud rates despite going to church.
My guess is that the black teachers in Detroit who use schools funds to purchase flat panel televisions instead of purchasing textbooks and school supplies all attend church.
The more conservative party needs to give up on the idea of appealing to blacks and work harder at embarrassing any politician who panders to the most liberal group in the U.S.
Now, superdestroyer has said some stupid things before, but I have just ignored them. But this one is practically so racist and ignorant, that I think it needs to be called out.
First, African Americans are not automatically liberal. Indeed, up until mid-century, they tended to vote for Republicans. Second, is his comments about blacks having high out of wedlock rates,crime rates and fraud. As an African American, I do know that out of wedlock births are an issue as is crime. There are many good people, Afircan Americans, who are trying to solve these issues.
But maybe what bothers me most is the blanket assumption of this idiot that all of us who are black basically steal, knock up women and trick people. How the hell can one make such vast opinions?
So, I’ve said my peace. Now I will go to a local store and steal me some flat screens and then go and get some girl pregnant as all good black people do.
Having helped forced Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava out of the race for the 23rd Congressional District and throwing the seat to the Democrats, it seems that Red State’s Erick Erickson is setting his sites on the race for President Obama’s former Senate seat. Read more »
D.R. Tucker writes a hard-hitting post over at the Next Right on the need for intellectuals within the American Right. Read more »
Richard Ivory of Hip-Hop Republicans.com shares his views on social conservatives, African Americans and the GOP.
For decades, social conservatives have relentlessly targeted Black Churches as a way to bring more African-Americans into the Republican Party. Despite many sincere efforts, the numbers of church going African-Americans who vote Republican is smaller now than ever before.
While there has been much debate and talk about the Religious Right within the Republican Party, one could equally and strongly argue that African-Americans make up one of the largest socially conservative voting blocs in the Democrat Party. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life released a detailed study on the religious views of most African-Americans. The research was unique in that the new analysis found blacks to be the most religious group of people in the United States population as a whole.
According to the research, when compared to other racial and ethnic 
groups, African-Americans are among the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation with 87% of African-Americans describing themselves as belonging to one religious group or another. The analysis also finds that nearly eight-in-ten African-Americans (79%) say religion is very important in their lives compared with 56% among all U.S. adults.
The study also states that six-in-ten African-Americans (61%) say Houses of Worship should express their views on social and political matters, while only 36% of African-Americans say churches should avoid these topics. On this question of expression, African-Americans closely resemble White Evangelical Protestants, among whom 59% say churches should express their views while 38% say churches should keep out of social and political matters.
The study finds, additionally, that half of all African-Americans feel that there have been too few expressions of faith by political leaders while an additional 24% say there has been the right amount of religious expression by political leaders. Only 23% of African-Americans say there has been too much religious talk from politicians.
Overall, 49% of African-Americans are in favor of keeping abortion legal in most or all cases, while 44% of African-Americans want abortion to be illegal in most or all cases.
Four-in-ten African-Americans (41%) overall, think that homosexuality should be accepted by society, while 46% of African-Americans say that homosexuality should be discouraged. According to other Pew Research Center surveys, conducted during the summer of 2008, nearly two-thirds of African-Americans (64%) say they oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, which is a significantly higher level of opposition than among Whites (51%).
If the numbers are correct, African-Americans should be running into the arms of Republicans and, especially, socially conservative ones. The same data, nevertheless, shows that despite African-American’s deep social conservative beliefs, the community does not as a whole “vote exclusively†on such issues.
Proof of this is in the same data which demonstrates that despite their conservative, social view, by far African-Americans (76%) self describe themselves as Democrats. The same study found that on an average, only about 10% of African-Americans self describe themselves as being Republicans. Across all religious groups, at least two-thirds of African-Americans express support for the Democratic Party.
My own personal view of the data is that while African- Americans agree with social conservative politicians on many issues, it is concerning the issue of race, social justice and economics that these two groups part company.
With regards race, many blacks who lived in the South remembered that many of the leaders of the Moral Majority had deep connections to the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC’s racist history and its deep connections to the GOP in the 80’s had a great impact on black church members. The SBC’s silence during the Jim Crow Era and during the era of Desegregation was not to be forgotten.
This divide in the south between black churches and white churches is still visible today. It was not surprising, therefore, that when the Religious Right began to grow in political dominance in The Republican Party on a wave of pro- family values that many blacks saw this as the height of hypocrisy and irony given the following:
Where were these ministers who were so outraged over the issue of abortion when little Black Boys were being lynched and denied the right to vote?
Where were these same religious leaders and politicians when their Black and socially conservative brothers were suffering?
Historically, social conservatives have talked about “teaching folks how to fish†but have very little to show for it. In fact, most of the non-profit empowerment groups in minority and urban areas lean toward the left. Social conservative groups will continue to fail in reaching black churches as long as urban folks and minorities worry about getting a job and putting food on their tables.
Views about tax cuts make little sense to a woman who does not pay taxes due to her low -income status. The only way tax cuts will ever make genuine sense to a woman like her is if she owns something or is employed. When the cupboards are bare, and the baby needs milk technical debates about stem cell research or gay marriage will rarely be a priority.
In California, the only way social conservatives could get Blacks out to vote against Proposition 8 was by getting them to come out in large enough numbers to vote for Barrack Obama. What this dichotomy demonstrates is that many minorities agree with social conservatives on many social issues, yet not to the degree that minorities prioritize economic and social justice issues. It does not mean that minorities and social conservatives do not agree; they simply do not agree on what the priorities should be. And as long as these two communities see their “moral issues†as being more important than the other, the two shall never meet.
Richard Ivory is the Publisher and Founder, of Hip-HopRepublican.com, a blog that delves into urban issues from centrist perspective. Mr. Ivory is a political consultant who has worked on over a dozen political campaigns around the country. He has worked for both the Republican National Committee and was the College outreach director for Republican Youth Majority. He is presently the founder of The John Langston Forum and is the College outreach director for Republicans for Black Empowerment.
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