It’s being actively perpetrated by Republican Party officials, not criminally-minded voters. Of course, this isn’t exactly news. This past June, Mike Turzai, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania House, explicitly boasted that voter ID laws in that state would enable Mitt Romney to win the presidential vote there:
“Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation — abortion facility regulations — in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done,” he said to applause at a Republican State Committee this weekend, according to PoliticsPa.com.
The comment contradicted the usual Republican line that voter ID laws are for guarding against voter fraud — which is extremely rare if not nonexistent in practice — and not to help elect Republicans.
Pennsylvania passed a new law in March through a GOP-led legislature requiring voters to show a driver’s license or government issued photo ID before voting.
Turzai’s statement was widely condemned by Democrats and activists, who continued to remind the public that voter fraud is extremely, extremely rare and that Republican harping on it was indicative instead of a desire to suppress certain votes — principally those cast by minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies.
Well, now we have even more evidence that Republican attempts to eliminate Democratic votes was not restricted to Pennsylvania, nor to one erstwhile and tone-deaf state representative. The Palm Beach Postreports:
A new Florida law that contributed to long voter lines and caused some to abandon voting altogether was intentionally designed by Florida GOP staff and consultants to inhibit Democratic voters, former GOP officials and current GOP consultants have told The Palm Beach Post.
Republican leaders said in proposing the law that it was meant to save money and fight voter fraud. But a former GOP chairman and former Gov. Charlie Crist, both of whom have been ousted from the party, now say that fraud concerns were advanced only as subterfuge for the law’s main purpose: GOP victory.
Former Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer says he attended various meetings, beginning in 2009, at which party staffers and consultants pushed for reductions in early voting days and hours.
“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told The Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only. … ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’ ” Greer said he was told by those staffers and consultants.
“They never came in to see me and tell me we had a (voter) fraud issue,” Greer said. “It’s all a marketing ploy.”
It must be noted straightaway that both Crist and Greer are hardly disinterested observers. The latter is, in fact, currently under indictment, “accused of stealing $200,000 from the [Republican] party through a phony campaign fundraising operation.” Crist, likewise, is rumored to be switching to the Democratic side of the aisle after already angering conservatives by realigning as an independent in 2010.
Nevertheless, the article’s extensive investigation is well-conducted and deserving of greater attention. Given the Republican Party’s obsession with the voter fraud phantom menace, it’s nice to see journalists actually digging a little deeper by talking to active participants in the discussions, instead of simply inferring Republican leaders’ intentions from badly-justified voter ID laws.
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch clarifies Mitt Romney’s 47% comments:
Mitt Romney got it wrong: It’s not 47 percent of the nation that is not paying federal income taxes.
“It’s 51 percent!” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said Wednesday.
Hatch, who often talks about the percentage of Americans who don’t have to pay Uncle Sam — aside from payroll taxes — offered that clarification after he was asked whether he has concerns about fallout from a losing presidential campaign in which Romney’s use of the 47 percent figure played a prominent role. Romney argued at a secretly recorded fundraising event that he wasn’t concerned about the 47 percent because they wouldn’t vote for him.
Hatch argued that Romney’s comments “had an effect, but I don’t think much of an effect,” so he was not worried.
He also clarified what he thinks Romney meant and should have said.
“It was distorted because Romney did not explain it right,” Hatch said. “All he had to say was ‘Look, when 51 percent of all households — not just individuals — don’t pay a penny in income taxes, it shows that we’ve got too many people riding in the wagon.’ What he should have said is, ‘I want to get them out of the wagon in good jobs where they can also help pull the wagon.’
“That’s what he meant to say, but he didn’t say it,” added Hatch, who once suggested the poor should pay more taxes. He later clarified that he did not want to tax the “truly poor.”
My humble suggestion to the Republican Party: kindly drop the percentages talk. For a group of people so preoccupied with enumeration, you’d think they’d understand the drop in their own polling percentages.
Frank Rich thinks so. Echoing his comments from mid-October (which I covered here), Rich insists that the post-election Democratic triumphalism is misguided, and that nothing has substantially altered the long-term prospects for Tea Party-style conservatism:
More seriously, if you look at the GOP’s suicidal talk right now, and the Democratic and liberal triumphalism, it’s very much a replay of what I wrote about in last month’s piece. After LBJ beat Goldwater in a far bigger victory, an out-and-out landslide, in 1964, Republicans moaned about being consigned to minority party status and possibly oblivion; Democrats talked about having won the war of ideas and demographics as well as the politics. (Goldwater only carried his home state of Arizona and a swath of the Confederate South.) Two years later, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, and four years later Richard Nixon became president. The core small-government credo of conservatives has been remarkably consistent and resilient ever since and still commands a majority following according to last week’s exit polling. What’s more, the GOP bench — Rubio (who’s very slick by the way), Ryan, Christie, Jindal, etc — is far younger than that of the Hillary-Biden post-Obama Democrats. This new Republican generation will find a way to put a kinder, gentler, Hispanic, female face on the GOP soon enough.
This is a depressing forecast. But it’s a useful counterpoint to jubilant predictions of Republican moderation (which I’ve expressed as recently as yesterday). Jonathan Cohn is on roughly the same page regarding the mindset of the American right:
It’s basically another version of the 47 percent argument—i.e., that 47 percent of the country is dependent on the rest of the taxpaying public. It was kicking around in conservative circles even before Mitt Romney invoked it at that now-infamous Florida fundraiser. And judging by recent commentary, it’s going to keep kicking around for a while longer. Last week, National Review’s Kevin Williamson concluded that “offering Americans a check is a more fruitful political strategy than offering them the opportunity to take control of and responsibility for their own lives.” Just today, Washington Post conservative writer Jennifer Rubin wrote that the Democratic Party won by “feeding its base cotton candy.”
It’s true that Americans, on the whole, are more enthusiastic about receiving public services than they are about paying for them. They always have been. And it creates real policy dilemmas, particularly as an aging population makes services more expensive. Do we scale back these programs or raise taxes to pay for them? Do we trust the marketplace to find efficiencies, or turn to the government? Conservatives need to be more forthright than they have been about their proposed answers to these questions: We can’t cut Medicaid by a third, as Paul Ryanproposed to do, without seriously harming low-income people. But liberals also need to confront some unpleasant realities. Over the long run, we can’t sustain the current level of benefits without asking the middle class to pay at least a little more in taxes.
But sometimes the argument about free stuff has a more insidious meaning—and you don’t have to strain to hear it. During the Fox News broadcast on Election Night, Bill O’Reilly declared, “It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.” In case the reference to “traditional America” was too subtle, O’Reilly went on to talk about Obama’s strong support among blacks, Latinos, and women.
Tangentially, this “maker vs. taker” paradigm is no longer restricted to the United States: it’s taken on a global appeal. Fellow blogger Max Marder notes a very 47%-esque comment coming from a member of Israel’s new Yisrael Beiteinu-Likud party:
An article from Haaretz this afternoon quoted Likud-Beiteinu Knesset member Faina Kirshenbaum Romneyesque’s diatribe against Israeli-Arab citizens:
“The Arabs are an economic burden on the state. They barely pay taxes and receive enormous budgets from the state,” Kirshenbaum told a German-Israeli sister cities conference held in Jerusalem by the Union of Local Authorities in Israel.
“The Arabs in the State of Israel pay NIS 400 million in taxes, but receive benefits worth at least NIS 11 billion,” she said.
“The Arabs in the State of Israel want equal rights, but they don’t contribute to the state. In order to receive equal rights, they must contribute to the state like every other citizen and serve three years, either in national service or in their communities.”
“Only 38 percent of Israeli citizens pay taxes, and a small portion of them are minorities. Tax-paying citizens of the state are carrying the rest of the population on their backs,” she added.
Kirshenbaum’s comments doubly mirror defeated presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who said both that a lack of Palestinian economic success vis-a-vis Israel was the result of cultural inferiority and that 47% of Americans were essentially moochers off of the state. What both Romney and Kirshenbaum miss, obviously, is that Israeli-Arabs are at best second-class citizens in the Jewish State. Israeli-Arabs, like African-Americans, are worse off than the majority because of historic discrimination, not laziness.
It’s a bitter irony that, following on the heels of one of the worst global recessions in modern history, the emerging narrative is that class warfare is being waged by the poor against the successful and wealthy. This seems odd, given the enormous bailouts staged in the United States and elsewhere simply to save this very same Team Successful from irreparable financial ruin. Clearly, no good deed goes unpunished.
I am becoming gradually convinced that one of the chief problems preventing genuine financial and tax reform in the U.S. is the massive blindspot that lower- and middle-class Americans have about…themselves. No one thinks of himself as a taker, but millions think that half the rest of the country is. How convenient, then, that all these nameless, faceless takers all turned out to have voted for Barack Obama. Maybe Frank Rich has a point.
(Video at the top is only marginally related to anything in this post, but I couldn’t let the opportunity to sneak it in slip away.)
The Huffington Postreports on an unlikely ally for Obama’s attempt to allow the Bush tax cuts on the rich to expire:
Conservative commentator and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said Sunday the Republican Party should accept new ideas, including the much-criticized suggestion by Democrats that taxes be allowed to go up on the wealthy.
“It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It really won’t, I don’t think. I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer.”
“Really? The Republican Party is going to fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires, half of whom voted Democratic and half of whom live in Hollywood and are hostile?” he asked.
One of the biggest fights as Congress returns will be over taxes, as cuts put in place by former President George W. Bush are set to expire at the end of the year. Republicans want to extend those tax cuts for all income brackets, while Democrats want to raise revenue by allowing them to expire for wealthy Americans.
We’ve gotta get rid of the immigration issue altogether. It’s simple for me to fix it. I think you control the border first, you create a pathway for those people that are here, you don’t say you gotta go home. And that is a position that I’ve evolved on. Because you know what–it just–it’s gotta be resolved. The majority of people here–if some people have criminal records you can send ’em home–but if people are here, law-abiding, participating, four years, their kids are born here… first secure the border, pathway to citizenship…then it’s done. But you can’t let the problem continue. It’s gotta stop.
The Economistwonders if it would have been better, in the long run, for the Republicans to have been defeated more soundly on November 6th:
Republican pessimism is more than a PR headache. Put simply, it is hard for a party to win national elections in a country that it seems to dislike. Mr Romney’s campaign slogan was “Believe in America”. But too many on his side believe in a version of America from which displeasing facts or arguments are ruthlessly excluded. Todd Akin did not implode as a Senate candidate because of his stern opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest: many Republicans in Congress share those views. His downfall came because in trying to deny that his principles involved a trade-off with compassion for rape victims he came up with the unscientific myth that the bodies of women subjected to rape can shut down a pregnancy.
It was a telling moment of denial, much like the comforting myth that there is no such thing as climate change or, if there is, that humans are not involved. Ensconced in a parallel world of conservative news sources and conservative arguments, all manner of comforting alternative visions of reality surfaced during the 2012 election. Many, like Mr Akin’s outburst, involved avoiding having to think about unwelcome things (often basic science or economics). It became a nostrum among rank-and-file Republicans that mainstream opinion polls are biased and should be ignored, for instance, and that voter fraud is rampant and explains much of the Democrats’ inner-city support. Both conspiracies sounded a lot like ways of wishing the other side away.
Thoughtful Republicans are not oblivious to the dangers that they face. Optimists hope that new leaders will emerge to lead their movement rapidly towards greater realism, and greater cheeriness. If not, electoral defeats far more severe than those inflicted this time will surely impose such changes. Republicans may look back and wish the reckoning had started sooner.
His column in today’s New York Times, “The Party of Work,” makes a lot of good points before crashing and burning in the conclusion (excerpted here at length):
The Pew Research Center does excellent research on Asian-American and Hispanic values. Two findings jump out. First, people in these groups have an awesome commitment to work. By most measures, members of these groups value industriousness more than whites.
Second, they are also tremendously appreciative of government. In survey after survey, they embrace the idea that some government programs can incite hard work, not undermine it; enhance opportunity, not crush it.
Moreover, when they look at the things that undermine the work ethic and threaten their chances to succeed, it’s often not government. It’s a modern economy in which you can work more productively, but your wages still don’t rise. It’s a bloated financial sector that just sent the world into turmoil. It’s a university system that is indispensable but unaffordable. It’s chaotic neighborhoods that can’t be cured by withdrawing government programs.
For these people, the Republican equation is irrelevant. When they hear Romney talk abstractly about Big Government vs. Small Government, they think: He doesn’t get me or people like me.
Let’s just look at one segment, Asian-Americans. Many of these people are leading the lives Republicans celebrate. They are, disproportionately, entrepreneurial, industrious and family-oriented. Yet, on Tuesday, Asian-Americans rejected the Republican Party by 3 to 1. They don’t relate to the Republican equation that more government = less work.
Over all, Republicans have lost the popular vote in five out of the six post-cold-war elections because large parts of the country have moved on. The basic Republican framing no longer resonates.
Some Republicans argue that they can win over these rising groups with a better immigration policy. That’s necessary but insufficient. The real problem is economic values.
If I were given a few minutes with the Republican billionaires, I’d say: spend less money on marketing and more on product development. Spend less on “super PACs” and more on research. Find people who can shift the debate away from the abstract frameworks — like Big Government vs. Small Government. Find people who can go out with notebooks and study specific, grounded everyday problems: what exactly does it take these days to rise? What exactly happens to the ambitious kid in Akron at each stage of life in this new economy? What are the best ways to rouse ambition and open fields of opportunity?
Don’t get hung up on whether the federal government is 20 percent or 22 percent of G.D.P. Let Democrats be the party of security, defending the 20th-century welfare state. Be the party that celebrates work and inflames enterprise. Use any tool, public or private, to help people transform their lives.
Emphasis mine. This is classic Brooks-ian thinking: decrying the failure of the Republican Party to measure up to its potential, admirably encouraging them to reform, and meanwhile forgetting that his prescription for success is exactly what the Democratic Party has been doing for years — and the precise reason they won again this year.
I bolded that last portion because it sets up such a clearly ridiculous straw man: the Democrats as the unimaginative defenders of the “20th-century welfare state,” while the Republican Party “celebrates work and inflames enterprise.” How can he attempt such a tried-and-failed GOP talking point immediately after acknowledging that “the basic Republican framing no longer resonates” for so many Americans? When Brooks says to “use any tool, public or private, to help people transform their lives,” he’s taking a page straight out of the Democratic playbook. This makes his characterization of the Dems as the “party of security” (whatever that means, exactly) all the more ridiculous.
To keep the economy afloat, the White House cut the deals it felt it had to. Many, such as Obama’s agreement to extend all of the Bush tax cuts in 2010, were poorly received by Democrats. Now comes the payoff. The expiration of those cuts and the automatic reductions set to take effect at year’s end—the so-called fiscal cliff—mean that Obama and the Democrats can gain a huge source of new revenue by doing nothing at all. Republican priorities are the ones suddenly in peril. The combination of tax increases on the rich, higher capital-gains taxes, and sharp cuts in defense spending have congressional Republicans deeply worried. To mitigate these, they’ll have to bargain.
Despite their post-election tough talk, Republican leaders have dealt themselves a lousy hand. Obama can propose a “middle-class tax cut” for the 98 percent of American households earning less than $250,000 a year—while letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning more—and dare the Republicans to block it. If they do, everyone’s taxes will rise on Jan. 1. It’s true that going over the fiscal cliff, as some Democrats believe will happen, would set back the recovery and could eventually cause a recession. But Democratic leaders in Congress believe the public furor would be too intense for Republicans to withstand for long.
Going over the cliff would also weaken the Republicans’ greatest point of leverage: renewing their threat to default on the national debt. Right now, the Treasury expects to hit the debt ceiling in February. But if the cliff can’t be avoided, tax rates will rise and government coffers will swell, delaying the date of default—thus diminishing the Republicans’ advantage. Alice Rivlin, the founding director of the Office of Management and Budget and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says that “as quickly as the IRS began changing the withholding schedule, the date would be pushed back.”
Last night, at 11:18 PM Eastern time, FOX News called Ohio — and thus the presidency — for Barack Obama. The announcement followed closely on the heels of ones by NBC, MSNBC, and CBS, and appeared almost simultaneously with a similar declaration from CNN.
But before Mitt Romney would deliver his brief but gracious concession speech, and before the confetti would rain down in Chicago on a thrilling night for the Democratic Party, a minidrama was taking place on FOX News. Karl Rove, the mastermind of George W. Bush’s campaign strategies and the chief fundraiser of American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS (an organization that spent approximately $300 million this election cycle in an almost entirely unsuccessful series of advertising campaigns), insisted that the network had called Ohio too early.
“I don’t know what the outcome is going to be, but we’ve got to be careful about calling things when we have, like, 991 votes separating the two candidates and a quarter of the vote yet to count,” Rove said. “Even if they have made it on the basis of select precincts, I’d be very cautious about intruding into this process.”
Rove, of course, had a big dog in the fight: the near-total failure of his organizations’ efforts over the course of these past two years (echoing the dismal record of fellow Republican tycoon Sheldon Adelson) threatens his credibility as a savvy strategist and, thus, his ability to raise money in the future.
Even so, Rove’s impassioned opposition to the statistically-based consensus was startling in its self-certainty. It was as if, by the mere act of delaying the final announcement for just minutes or seconds more, Rove thought it possible to stave off — or even alter — reality itself. But at long last, the empirical world would wait no longer, and his fever dream finally met its bitter end.
It is precisely because Rove’s delusions echo the larger fantasies of the Republican Party that his earnest entreaties should rattle the moderate voices within a GOP struggling to make sense of its post-election blues. Indeed, his blunt refusal to accept the rapidly descending reality was not an exception, but the norm. Dick Morris predicted a landslide for Romney. George Will similarly forecasted a 321-217 electoral vote triumph. Michael Barone envisioned a nearly identical result of 315-223.
Meanwhile, the New York Times‘ Nate Silver — who first rose to stardom in 2008, when he correctly predicted the electoral outcomes in 49 of 50 states — had been steadfastly forecasting an Obama victory for months. As his stated probability crept steadily closer to 90% and then beyond, Silver’s detractors on the right multiplied. Examiner.com’s Dean Chambers infamously wrote, “Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice…” And MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough lambasted Silver as well, proclaiming, “Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they’re jokes.”
Unlike the analysis conducted by many of his conservative counterparts — to the extent that he has peers at all — Nate Silver’s predictions were grounded firmly in empirical data. He meticulously averaged, weighted, and adjusted polls based on data recency, the historical accuracy of the various polling firms, “house effects,” and so on. While not every aspect of his evaluations was made entirely transparent — every whizkid needs his secret sauce, after all — he explained the bulk of his seemingly alchemical methodology in column after column.
It is useful, then, to transpose the lessons of this Triumph of the Nerds onto the broader political struggle that just culminated in Barack Obama’s reelection last night. Just as Silver’s coolheaded, reason-based analysis prevailed over the flamboyant provocations of right-wing pundits in the months leading up to the election, it was the centrist and well-balanced vision for America that won over the majority of citizens in the voting booths yesterday.
Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are both deeply flawed (and often infuriating) entities, for a variety of reasons that could fill entire volumes of books. But their lack of conviction and courage was dwarfed by the monumental denialism of Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, whose deeply entrenched rage at the president was predicated on an increasingly tenuous grasp of reality.
The list could continue ad nauseum. But it is not simply the misstatement of fiction as fact that characterizes the Mitt Romney-era Republican Party; after all, one could easily compile an impressive list of whoppers told by Obama and his political supporters as well. What Mitt Romney failed to understand was that a platform of extremism — ranging from the “self-deportation” of illegal immigrants to his support of a constitutional ban on gay marriage to his pledge to reject even a 10-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax hikes — is not in line with the views of the American public.
On this issue, the fault lines within the Republican Party are already starting to widen. It is likely that a civil war of sorts is looming within the party, with the moderate wing led by Jeb Bush and Chris Christie facing off against the Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann types for the ideological future of their party.
Today, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standardhas written, “No doubt the media will insist that Republicans must change, must sprint to the center, must embrace social liberalism, must accept that America is destined to play a less dominant role in the world. All that is hogwash, which is why Republicans are likely to reject it. Their ideology is not a problem.”
It is this brand of thinking that the Republican Party must bury if it wishes to emerge from the throes of an eminently avoidable defeat. As Joel Benenson wrote in today’s New York Times, “The president’s victory was a triumph of vision, not of demographics. He won because he articulated a set of values that define an America that the majority of us wish to live in: A nation that makes the investments we need to strengthen and grow the middle class. A nation with a fair tax system, and affordable and excellent education for all its citizens. A nation that believes that we’re most prosperous when we recognize that we are all in it together.”
Mitt Romney was never able to peer beyond the narrow passions of an inflamed base for long enough to understand that the country, as always, is changing. Gone are the days of sole reliance on older white voters. Similarly, a slow national metamorphosis has eliminated the Republican Party’s once-solid, but now anachronistic and non-existent, competitive advantage on social issues. Even on foreign policy, the baton has largely been ceded to a president once derided as naive and unprepared.
The Republican Party of 2012 must see its decisive defeat as an opportunity. Making inroads with Latinos and African-Americans should be a priority. Abandoning its puritanical image — including some truly appalling perspectives on rape — is just as important, especially as the younger generation comes of age in a country of broad diversity in race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and many other facets of life. (As Matthew Dowd so eloquently put it, Republicans have become a “‘Mad Men’ party in a ‘Modern Family’ America.”) Reasserting the GOP’s hegemony on economic and fiscal responsibility will take much work after its free-spending Bush years and its ideological rigidity during the Obama era, but it is not impossible.
Already, there are signs of a Republican thaw. House Speaker John Boehner, appearing today at the Capitol, signaled an openness to raising revenues in exchange for reform of entitlements and the tax code. “Mr. President, this is your moment,” he said. “We’re ready to lead, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.” This is a far cry from Mitch McConnell’s notorious statement in an October 2010 interview: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Now that the GOP has failed at this singular task, perhaps it can take a further step away from the precipice by cleansing its ranks of the vitriol and stubbornness that so characterized its behavior in President Obama’s first term. Today, Jon Huntsman’s strategist, John Weaver, seemed to grasp the significance of this necessary transformation: “We have a choice: we can become a shrinking regional party of middle-aged and older white men, or we can fight to become a national governing party. And to do the latter we have to fix our Hispanic problem as quickly as possible, we’ve got to accept science and start calling out these false equivalencies when they occur within our party about things that are just not true, and not tolerate the intolerant.”
Such a reformation will require the elimination of the type of epistemic closure suffered by Karl Rove on Election Night. It will require a reorientation away from 1950s-style conservatism and towards a more modern variant that embraces our nation’s diversity and encourages the expansion of marriage to include same-sex couples. And it will require the implementation of a form of self-policing to prevent the party of conservatism from devolving into an aspiring theocracy.
In this sense, Barack Obama’s reelection has done the GOP a favor. It has acted as a natural corrective of a national party gone astray, and it establishes in precise numerical terms the unease with which Americans viewed an increasingly unhinged Republican Party. It serves as a reminder that, while we will tolerate all sorts of folly in the name of entertainment and politics, we draw the line at ideological insanity. For the sake of all American citizens, one can only hope the Republican reincarnation will begin in earnest today.
The oft-hysterical Andrew Sullivan (barely) survived this year’s election season and was downright giddy on last night’s live taping of the Colbert Report: