This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Posted in: US Politics
Former Arkansas governor, and formerly relevant national political figure, Mike Huckabee is guilty of the latest right wing reductio ad Hitlerumfallacy. The Tea Party and right wing penchant for comparing President Obama to Hitler and Stalin is evidence not of any totalitarian tendencies on the part of Obama. Instead it is evidence that right wing contempt for science is now rivaled by contempt for learning anything about history.
This was a hugely important week for LGBT Americans as well as advocates for equality for all citizens because the Supreme Court heard cases regarding California's Proposition 8 as well as the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). It was also, however, a very important week for the Supreme Court. The Court may or may not decide to overturn both of these discriminatory pieces of legislation, but it is clear that the arc of history is again bending towards equality. LGBT Americans are winning; and those that would continue to seek to deny equality to all Americans are losing. This puts the Court in the position of either helping to bring about an inevitable, and positive, change, or of being conspicuous in support of bigoted laws and prejudices from another era.
Perhaps learning that his son is gay forced Portman to rethink his views about gay people, leading him to question things that in the back, or front, of his mind he had believed: that being gay is a lifestyle choice, that gay people are unfit to raise children or that they are not capable of establishing enduring loving relationships. However, believing these things today can only be the product of a mind that is deliberately closed to the mountains of scientific, personal and anecdotal evidence around us. In fairness to Portman, and conservatives generally, many progressives had also been notably silent on marriage equality until very recently.
It must be springtime. The weather is finally getting warmer, baseball season is almost here and Paul Ryan is presenting a budget proposal which, despite his assurances that it is innovative and reflects new thinking, is little more than a right-wing economic program seeking to balance the budget by cutting expenditures for poor people while doing little or nothing to ask wealthier Americans to do their share.
Over the next 20 months, the campaign for Senate in Kentucky will undoubtedly become very nasty as Judd will seek to expose McConnell as a right-winger who has spent most of the last decade working for interests that are distinctly not those of the people of Kentucky. McConnell, in turn, will try to overstate the extent to which Judd is an outsider and a creature of the liberal Hollywood elite. The campaign due to Judd's celebrity and McConnell's position will become a national campaign with very high stakes.
During the last several years the American people have become increasingly familiar with this kind of government blackmail, where the politicians tell us that if they cannot make a deal, one kind of fiscal calamity or another will hit the country. Congress seems to no longer debate spending or propose budgets, but rather they lurch from one spending related crisis to another, each with more dire consequences. Debt ceilings, defaults and sequesters have replaced rational, or even irrational, discourse about how to raise and spend that revenue.
In the last few weeks, the buzz about the internal battles inside the Republican Party has been growing. The Roveites hate the Libertarians, the Libertarians hate the mainstream Republicans, the mainstream Republicans hate the Tea Partiers and everybody hates President Obama. It feels more like a Tom Lehrer song than the plight of a serious political party facing a serious struggle.
The two Republican speeches in response to President Obama's speech were more interesting, because they offered a preview of some of the divisions and debates that will inform Republican Party politics between now and the 2016 election. The lasting image from Marco Rubio's speech will likely be one of him awkwardly reaching for a bottle of water to slake his suddenly devastating thirst, but the speech was also an attempt to present Rubio as the new face of the Republican Party. Rubio's speech was characterized by the same tired, and unsuccessful, attacks on the president that the Republicans have been making since Obama became president. Rubio's speech was not meant to present a new Republican philosophy, but a new Republican face and backstory. Rubio's appeal is that he is comfortably in the new far right Republican mainstream while coming from humble immigrant origins, and that as a Cuban American he can help the Republican Party win more support from a diverse Latino population. In this respect, Rubio has Mitt Romney's politics, but without Romney's wealth and upper class affect.
Should Clinton run, it would mean that it is possible that the Democrats, for the first time since the early 1950s will occupy the White House for 12 or more years in a row. This is part of the reason so many Democrats are excited about a potential Clinton bid for the White House. There is another reason, which should have particular resonance for Clinton, why she should consider running. If Clinton runs, she will be uniquely positioned to deal a potentially devastating blow, above and beyond a simple electoral defeat, to the Republican Party in its current extremist and intolerant iteration.
In the aftermath of the election, the notion that the Republican Party was facing what might delicately be called an uphill demographic battle was frequently raised. This was made evident by the age and ethnicity demographics in the U.S., and by President Obama's decisive victory in his bid for reelection. Since the election, the Republican Party's demographic problem has manifested itself in another significant way. Because of their narrow demographic and ideological base, the Republican Party and its leadership, inside and outside of congress, has proven itself to be increasingly out of touch with the citizenry it seeks to govern.
A goal for progressives should be to dislodge these debates around the electoral college and the filibuster from their partisan and temporary foundations and make them into broader discussions about American democracy and its future. In that discussion many different things should be considered in addition to the filibuster and the electoral college, including the role of money in politics, how legislative districts are drawn and limiting restrictions local officials can put on voting. The need for structural reforms in our system is substantial. Filibusters and the electoral college are just the beginning, but they may open the door to more ideas and perhaps even action.
Although there are several different dynamics surrounding the coming fight over the president's proposals, one significant way this is being framed is as a fight between the Obama White House and the NRA. The NRA is an extremely powerful interest group in Washington, but like many interest groups it's power depends heavily on keeping a low profile and maintaining relatively strong popular support, or more accurately, drawing only limited opposition. Accordingly, the NRA is much better positioned for a behind the scenes strategy where policy decisions are made at congressional committee hearings and various regulatory agencies than a legislative fight involving the media and mobilized citizens groups.
Although it is probably good news that congress and President Obama managed to start the New Year by avoiding going over the fiscal cliff, it is hard not to get a sense that, now that we have avoided that, we can go back to the steady decline that has characterized our economy in recent years. Moreover, while avoiding the fiscal cliff is evidence that our elected officials are not completely unable to work together or govern, there is still reason to believe that congress is not capable of governing the country in a serious way or of addressing any of the myriad problems facing the U.S.
President Obama's promise to "use whatever power this office holds," to ensure that horrific shootings like this do not occur again, is the right promise to make. The question the President asked -- "Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?" -- is the right question to ask. Obama's ability to follow through on this promise will be a test of his moral and political leadership. Passing meaningful gun safety laws will require the courage to take on powerful entrenched interests and to speak truth to NRA power, but it will also require deft political maneuvering to push national legislation through a congress in which one house is controlled by the Republicans and where Senate Republicans have enough votes to stop a cloture vote on key legislation.
One of the strangest memes to come out of the Republican Party in recent months has been their critique of Obama supporters as people who just want things, or stuff. This is an extraordinarily bizarre view of politics which lends itself to criticism in many different ways. This view, which has been stated by Bill O'Reilly and other Republican pundits and strategists, reflects shoddy math as advocates of this view, includingmost prominently Mitt Romney, throw around numbers like 47 percent as if that is both the number of people who get things from government and who voted for Obama.
Although Clinton would be a strong general election candidate, her chances of winning in November in 2016 would largely be determined by whether President Obama's second term is viewed as successful by voters. Thus, although Clinton has removed herself from the Obama administration, perhaps to allow herself the time and political space to put together a presidential campaign, the ultimate outcome of that campaign cannot be separated from the fate of a presidential administration of which Clinton is no longer part.
This has been a difficult election season for Fox News. Among the most enduring media images of the last few days of the election are Karl Rove late on election night angrily denying that Ohio, and thus the presidency, had gone to President Obama, and Dick Morris only a few days before the election confidently predicting a Romney landslide. Morris later tried to explain away his mistake after the election by claiming he had done it to create enthusiasm among Republican voters. The incidents involving Rove and Morris, both of whom work as both commentators on Fox and political consultants to conservative clients, are obviously embarrassing for Fox, but also raise the question of whether the network has outlived its value, even to the Republican Party.
The Democratic coalition may look strong, but the critical role played by President Obama in assembling and maintaining this coalition should not be overlooked. Today's Democratic Party base primarily consists of people of color and white liberals. The former category includes people who vote Democratic for economic reasons as well as because of the Democratic Party's positions on issues including civil rights, immigration and equality. The latter category includes mostly people whose political views, framed in some cases by their sexual orientation, religion, or life experience, have pushed them to the Democratic Party. The next Democratic nominee might not be quite as well positioned for this coalition as Obama has been and encounter problems maintaining it. A southern moderate Democrat, for example, might not generate the enthusiasm among white liberals which Obama has enjoyed. Similarly, a white candidate might not hold on to Latino voters as well as Obama, particularly if the Republicans nominate a Latino in 2016.
Republicans are, unsurprisingly, trying to figure out who to blame and what to do next. Obama's victory can be understood as a victory of the future over the past, suggesting his campaign slogan "Forward" was both appropriate and effective. The Republican problem is obvious, they are fighting a Sisyphean demographic battle, not just because of changing demographics but because of the complete collapse of support for the Republican Party among voters who are not white, straight and Christian. At first glance, it seems that a party that wins 59 percent of the white vote, even in today's America, should win a national election handily. However, Romney did not only lose among African American, Latino, Asian, LGBT, Jewish and Muslim voters, but he lost all of these groups by margins of more than 2-1. In some cases, the margin was significantly larger than that. Additionally, Romney's support from white voters was skewed towards older voters as, among whites under 30, Romney's margin was only six points.
This is the situation in which Republican nominee Mitt Romney finds himself, except that this hurricane is also a test of Romney's and, indeed, his party's ideology. The ideology of small government and the belief that taxing people for any reason is not only bad governance, but is also close to immoral, is central to the Republican and Romney worldview. At times like this, it is difficult not to scrutinize that view a bit. During a Republican primary, advocating for abolishing FEMA or making disaster relief the responsibilities of the states is easy, but in the middle of a huge disaster that has wrought havoc across many states, those ideas seem nonsensical. Romney's silence at this time makes it clear that he does not fully stand by his views on FEMA and the role of the federal government. Governor Christie's cooperative approach to working with President Obama also indicates that the New Jersey governor, quite honorably, thinks that helping the people of his state at a very difficult time is more important than his party's ideology.