Category Archives: Politics

An election nightmare approacheth?

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John Heilemann thinks there’s a decent chance we may be headed for some major turbulence after November 6th. He presents four possible situations in which the closing of the polls does not end the election. His fourth (and one that has been gaining traction, mostly by media types who seem to be secretly wishing it):

4. The Tie-Goes-to-the-Romney Scenario

Now we come to the most nightmarish possibility of all: Obama ekes out a popular-vote victory but he and Romney are deadlocked, 269-269, in terms of electoral votes. Sounds crazy, right? Yeah, of course, but all it would require is the following (entirely credible) chain of results: Romney wins the southern battleground trio and Ohio, Obama holds on to Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and Wisconsin but loses in New Hampshire. What would happen then? The election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where the Constitution ordains that every state receive one vote as determined by the party makeup of its congressional delegation. Today, that would likely mean 32 Republican votes and 18 Democratic ones, a composition unlikely to change on November 6—and hence, voilà, President Romney.

To be crystalline, this would not be a nightmare because Romney would prevail. It would be a nightmare because he’d prevail in opposition to the popular vote and outside of the Electoral College—through an unprecedented process in which Idaho and Wyoming would have a weight equal to New York and California. For millions of Americans, and not just partisan extremists, it would call into question our entire system of selecting the dude in charge, and make the U.S. look like a superrich banana republic around the world. To be honest, though, it would only be barely worse than Scenarios 1, 2, and 3 in terms of rending the nation asunder. Which is why, on Election Night, you won’t find me rooting for either candidate but for clarity: a solid, sustainable victory for Obama or Romney in the popular and electoral votes—52-48, say, and north of 300 EVs to … whomever.

Which I know is probably a fantasy, but, hey, a boy can dream.

The most bizarre part of this possibility is the fact that Joe Biden would then be selected by the (almost certainly) Democratic-majority Senate to the vice presidency, creating a split executive branch. Even stranger still, unless I’m misreading the Twelfth Amendment, the appointment of both the president and the vice president must take place with a “quorum” of two-thirds of the states present and voting (but only a simple majority vote by those present is required for the election to become official). But if the state of the nation, following such a polarizing Election Day result, is truly as explosive as Heilemann fears, doesn’t that mean there would be a significant danger that the representatives of Democratic states would all refuse to show up en masse, thus just barely denying the likely 32 Republican states from establishing a quorum and, therefore, electing a president? What then?

The Obama I remember

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It’s the same one Andrew Sullivan remembers (in response to a Peggy Noonan column blaming the president for the rabid partisanship that characterizes Washington today):

Funny how the first group of non-pols that Obama sat down with were leading conservative writers, like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer (the liberals came second); that he asked Rick Warren to give the invocation at his Inauguration; that his stimulus was a third tax cuts (the only big tax cuts Republicans have ever voted against in my memory); that his healthcare reform was not single-payer, but one modeled on Mitt Romney’s moderate version in Massachusetts; that he has given Israel more military and technological support than any previous president; that his foreign policy is now praised by his opponent; that he killed bin Laden; and gave a speech urging freedom in the Arab world in his first few months, and that popular democratic revolutions broke out in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya on his watch. Funny also how one of the first things Obama did was to extend the Bush tax cuts – such an obvious partisan move designed to shut Republican ideas out of his agenda…

More to the point, the set of actions I have outlined above could quite easily have been George W. Bush’s agenda (or David Cameron’s, if he were on the right of his own party). There was plenty of compromise by Obama from the beginning, both symbolically and substantively. But a Republican decision was made that, even in the worst recession since the 1930s (whose impact on unemployment was devastating) not a single Republican House vote would go for the stimulus. It shocked me at the time, coming so soon after such a big election. I was naive enough to think that an emergency action that prevented a second Great Depression was something the opposition party might have supported, after losing an election badly to a newly elected president in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. I naively believed that just as a group of Democrats had supported Ronald Reagan’s massive tax cut because they thought he had a mandate for one, a group of House Republicans might put country before party and give the man who ran on bipartisanship a chance.

Instead, they set out from Day One to destroy him, because they knew that if his moderation and modern cultural identity succeeded, their reactionary radicalism would be sidelined for good. And Rove’s method is always to see what your party’s own worst flaw is among the public and, with a straight face, accuse your opponent of it.

You know what we’re fighting in this election? That cumulative, snow-balling, post-modern, cynical faction of deceit and partisan amnesia. If we are to get past the Cold Civil War we are in, the defeat of the rigidly ideological and theiological GOP is vital.

Amen, brother. Obama’s greatest mistake was to harbor any illusions whatsoever that the Republican Party was even remotely interested in governing the country like a responsible group of elected representatives.

The Onion gets inside Obama’s head

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On how he’ll react if he loses the election:

The question is: Do I even deserve to live if I can’t beat Mitt Romney? And I don’t think I do, really. That’s why I’ll more than likely be packing a little gun with me on election night. Because the sooner I can end it all, the less pain I’ll feel.

I mean, wouldn’t you kill yourself if the U.S. population felt that Mitt Romney—a man who basically wrote off half the American population as entitled victims incapable of taking care of themselves—was a more viable leader than you? Wouldn’t you take your own life if a massive segment of the citizenry basically said, “You know what, you ended the war in Iraq, you passed health care reform, you saved the auto industry, you repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, you had 32 straight months of job creation, and you killed Osama bin Laden, but sorry, I’m going with Romney”?

Of course you would. Just reading that sentence makes me want to reach for my pen right now and jab myself in the throat over and over and over again. Hell, I considered killing myself last week when Colorado and Virginia suddenly became a toss up. The first African-American president in the history of the United States loses his reelection bid to none other than…Mitt Romney. Mitt fucking Romney. The only way I could look at myself in the mirror if that happened would be if there were a cocked shotgun lodged in my mouth.

I hope you don’t think I’m overreacting. In fact, I think my attitude is just about right. Mitt Romney spent the past year blaming me for setting a withdrawal date for our troops to leave Afghanistan, but then in our last debate he not only set a withdrawal date himself, but picked one that was identical to mine—2014. Nobody seems to give a fuck about that. And that must mean nobody really gives a fuck about me. It’s like I’m living in the goddamn Twilight Zone and nothing I’ve done matters at all. Look, a world in which people believe Mitt Romney is a better communicator than me is a world I don’t want to live in. So that’s why I’ll either hang myself in the Lincoln Bedroom or slit my wrists right there in the middle of the Oval Office. I haven’t decided which yet.

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The Democrats’ tent is about to get bigger

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David Wasserman takes a look at the glory and the peril of the impending demographic milestone for the Democratic Party:

The Cook Political Report projects that when a new Congress is sworn into office in January,  white males will for the first time in American history be a minority of one party’s caucus in the House. It’s a milestone that Democrats will celebrate regardless of whether Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wins back the speaker’s gavel.

Yet the party will pay a price for making this history: The Democrats’ path to power in the House will likely be rockier than ever. As more Democratic-friendly minority-majority districts result from redistricting, and as the Democratic caucus gravitates to the left, Republicans have strengthened their grip on the vast number of seats in less-affluent, predominantly white areas. These are boom times for nonwhite Democrats in the House, and more nonwhite than white Democrats tend to be women. But these are also bust times for white Democratic men.

The 2012 cycle represents a rare alignment of the stars. It’s the first time in 20 years that the strong minority turnout of a presidential election cycle will coincide with a bonanza of new and open seats following the census and redistricting. After decades of progress, minorities and women running for Congress were already poised for a banner year, yet the pace of change is picking up as November approaches.

One small step forward

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The New York Times reports that the nearly bottomless budget for counterterrorism operations at home and abroad may finally, at long last, be facing some scrutiny:

The drumbeat of terrorism news never quite stops. And as a result, for 11 years since the Sept. 11 attacks, the security colossus constructed to protect the nation from Al Qaeda and its ilk has continued to grow, propelled by public anxiety, stunning advances in surveillance technology and lavish spending — about $690 billion over a decade, by one estimate, not including the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now that may be changing. The looming federal budget crunch, a sense that major attacks on the United States are unlikely and new bipartisan criticism of the sprawling counterterrorism bureaucracy may mean that the open checkbook era is nearing an end.

While the presidential candidates have clashed over security for American diplomats in Libya, their campaigns have barely mentioned domestic security. That is for a reason: fewer than one-half of 1 percent of Americans, in a Gallup poll in September, said that terrorism was the country’s most important problem.

But the next administration may face a decision: Has the time come to scale back security spending, eliminating the least productive programs? Or, with tumult in the Arab world and America still a prime target, would that be dangerous?

Many security experts believe that a retrenchment is inevitable and justified.

“After 9/11, we had to respond with everything we had, not knowing what would work best,” said Rick Nelson, a former Navy helicopter pilot who served in several counterterrorism positions and is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That’s a model we can no longer afford, financially or politically.”

Thank the good Lord. The fortress mindset that has descended on the country over the past decade has been colossally damaging for a variety of reasons, but the budgetary aspect of it is definitely one of its worst offenses. So it’s long past time we reexamined the efficacy and costs of our security measures. Let’s keep the momentum going.

For domestic politics, refer to the foreign bureau

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iDpsGNPO-I]

This is decreasingly surprising, but Al Jazeera is picking up where the more traditional American news organizations are failing. In this case, I’m referring to our third-party presidential candidates — I know! Can you believe we have those? — and the debate they held last night in Chicago:

Tuesday’s debate was hosted by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, a group promoting a more open electoral process, and moderated by talk show host Larry King.

“It’s a two-party system, but not a two-party system by law,” King said. Obama and Romney were also invited, but declined to attend.

The participants included former Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson, former Virginia congressman Virgil Goode, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, who ran against Romney in Massachusetts in 2002.

When asked about the Pentagon’s budget, during the debate, all four candidates agreed that military spending should be cut. Goode was perhaps the most circumspect; the other candidates called for big cuts.

For instance, Johnson said military spending should be cut by 43 per cent.

Goode, who voted to authorise the war in Iraq in 2003, said: “If I’m elected president … part of the cuts have to be in the Deparmtent of Defence. We cannot do as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan suggest. I support a strong defence but we need to retrench rather than being the policeman of the world.”

In response, Johnson said: “The biggest threat to our national security is the fact that we’re bankrupt.” He supports a 43 per cent reduction in military spending – 2003 spending levels, he pointed out.

Stein, the Green Party nominee, said: “A foreign policy based on militarism … is making us less secure, not more secure. We need to cut the budget and bring the troops home.”

I have to say, I really like the tenor of these statements, even if I’m not personally persuaded yet that, say, a 43% military budget reduction is exactly what we need to do at the moment. (I’m not a priori against it, either. But 43% is a very big number.)

It’s truly a shame that the only networks to broadcast the event live were Al Jazeera and Russia Today.

Welcome to the National Review. Please check your sense of irony at the door.

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How this piece ever made its way to publication is a question for which there is no possible good answer. Now, brought to you by the “You Completely, Deliberately, and Entirely Unconvincingly Missed the Point” Department:

President Obama might want to drop his attacks on Mitt Romney’s “Romnesia.” During Monday’s foreign-policy debate, Obama sarcastically informed the governor about “these things called aircraft carriers” and “ships that go underwater.” For one, voters in Norfolk, Va., and Groton, Conn., might tell the president that ships that “go underwater” are sunk, but boats that go underwater are called submarines.

But the president’s condescending dismissal of criticism about defense budget cuts — noting that today’s military has “fewer horses and bayonets” — also was a gaffe. Land combat soldiers and Marines train with bayonets and still use them in battle when other weapons fail. What’s more, perhaps it was a case of “Obamnesia” that accounts for the president’s failure to remember the indispensible role that horses played in the early days of war in Afghanistan.

Somehow President Obama forgot that on November 11, 2011, Vice President Joe Biden was present at the unveiling of the magnificent 16-foot Horse Soldier Memorial in New York City. During the 2011 Veterans Day parade, members of the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) marched down New York’s Fifth Avenue toward a dedication ceremony that was made possible by donors who had raised $750,000.

Oh, it goes on. And on.