The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off

Frank Rich

Op-Ed Columnist

The New York Times

March 15, 2009

SOMEDAY we’ll learn the whole story of why George W. Bush brushed off that intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” But surely a big distraction was the major speech he was readying for delivery on Aug. 9, his first prime-time address to the nation. The subject — which Bush hyped as “one of the most profound of our time” — was stem cells. For a presidency in thrall to a thriving religious right (and a presidency incapable of multi-tasking), nothing, not even terrorism, could be more urgent.

When Barack Obama ended the Bush stem-cell policy last week, there were no such overheated theatrics. No oversold prime-time address. No hysteria from politicians, the news media or the public. The family-values dinosaurs that once stalked the earth — Falwell, Robertson, Dobson and Reed— are now either dead, retired or disgraced. Their less-famous successors pumped out their pro forma e-mail blasts, but to little avail. The Republican National Committee said nothing whatsoever about Obama’s reversal of Bush stem-cell policy. That’s quite a contrast to 2006, when the party’s wild and crazy (and perhaps transitory) new chairman, Michael Steele, likened embryonic stem-cell research to Nazi medical experimentsduring his failed Senate campaign.

What has happened between 2001 and 2009 to so radically change the cultural climate? Here, at last, is one piece of good news in our global economic meltdown: Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years. Culture wars are a luxury the country — the G.O.P. included — can no longer afford.

Not only was Obama’s stem-cell decree an anticlimactic blip in the news, but so was his earlier reversal of Bush restrictions on the use of federal money by organizations offering abortions overseas. When the administrationtardily ends “don’t ask, don’t tell,” you can bet that this action, too, will be greeted by more yawns than howls.

Once again, both the president and the country are following New Deal-era precedent. In the 1920s boom, the reigning moral crusade was Prohibition, and it packed so much political muscle that F.D.R. didn’t oppose it. The Anti-Saloon League was the Moral Majority of its day, the vanguard of a powerful fundamentalist movement that pushed anti-evolution legislation as vehemently as it did its war on booze. (The Scopes “monkey trial” was in 1925.) But the political standing of this crowd crashed along with the stock market. Roosevelt shrewdly came down on the side of “the wets” in his presidential campaign, leaving Hoover to drown with “the dries.”

Much as Obama repealed the Bush restrictions on abortion and stem-cell research shortly after pushing through his stimulus package, so F.D.R. jump-started the repeal of Prohibition by asking Congress to legalize beer and wine just days after his March 1933 inauguration and declaration of a bank holiday. As Michael A. Lerner writes in his fascinating 2007 book “Dry Manhattan,” Roosevelt’s stance reassured many Americans that they would have a president “who not only cared about their economic well-being” but who also understood their desire to be liberated from “the intrusion of the state into their private lives.” Having lost plenty in the Depression, the public did not want to surrender any more freedoms to the noisy minority that had shut down the nation’s saloons.

In our own hard times, the former moral “majority” has been downsized to more of a minority than ever. Polling shows that nearly 60 percent of Americans agree with ending Bush restrictions on stem-cell research (a Washington Post/ABC News survey in January); that 55 percent endorse either gay civil unions or same-sex marriage (Newsweek, December 2008); and that 75 percent believe openly gay Americans should serve in the military (Post/ABC, July 2008). Even the old indecency wars have subsided. When a federal court last year struck down the F.C.C. fine against CBS for Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl, few Americans either noticed or cared about the latest twist in what had once been a national cause célèbre.

It’s not hard to see why Eric Cantor, the conservative House firebrand who is vehemently opposed to stem-cell research, was disinclined to linger on the subject when asked about it on CNN last Sunday. He instead accused the White House of acting on stem cells as a ploy to distract from the economy. “Let’s take care of business first,” he said. “People are out of jobs.” (On this, he’s joining us late, but better late than never.)

Even were the public still in the mood for fiery invective about family values, the G.O.P. has long since lost any authority to lead the charge. The current Democratic president and his family are exemplars of precisely the Eisenhower-era squareness — albeit refurbished by feminism — that the Republicans often preached but rarely practiced. Obama actually walks the walk. As the former Bush speechwriter David Frum recently wrote, the new president is an “apparently devoted husband and father” whose worst vice is “an occasional cigarette.”

Frum was contrasting Obama to his own party’s star attraction, Rush Limbaugh, whose “history of drug dependency” and “tangled marital history” make him “a walking stereotype of self-indulgence.” Indeed, the two top candidates for leader of the post-Bush G.O.P, Rush and Newt, have six marriages between them. The party that once declared war on unmarried welfare moms, homosexual “recruiters” and Bill Clinton’s private life has been rebranded by Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Vitter and the irrepressible Palins. Even before the economy tanked, Americans had more faith in medical researchers using discarded embryos to battle Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s than in Washington politicians making ad hoc medical decisions for Terri Schiavo.

What’s been revealing about watching conservatives debate their fate since their Election Day Waterloo is how, the occasional Frum excepted, so many of them don’t want to confront the obsolescence of culture wars as a political crutch. They’d rather, like Cantor, just change the subject — much as they avoid talking about Bush and avoid reckoning with the doomed demographics of the G.O.P.’s old white male base. To recognize all these failings would be to confront why a once-national party can now be tucked into the Bible Belt.

The religious right is even more in denial than the Republicans. When Obama nominatedKathleen Sebelius, the Roman Catholic Kansas governor who supports abortion rights, as his secretary of health and human services, Tony Perkins, the leader of the Family Research Council, became nearly as apoplectic as the other Tony Perkins playing Norman Bates. “If Republicans won’t take a stand now, when will they?” the godly Perkinsthundered online. But Congressional Republicans ignored him, sending out (at most) tepid press releases of complaint, much as they did in response to Obama’s stem-cell order. The two antiabortion Kansas Republicans in the Senate, Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts,both endorsed Sebelius.

Perkins is now praying that economic failure will be a stimulus for his family-values business. “As the economy goes downward,” he has theorized, “I think people are going to be driven to religion.” Wrong again. The latest American Religious Identification Survey,published last week, found that most faiths have lost ground since 1990 and that the fastest-growing religious choice is “None,” up from 8 percent to 15 percent (which makes it larger than all denominations except Roman Catholics and Baptists). Another highly regarded poll, the General Social Survey, had an even more startling finding in its preliminary 2008 data released this month: Twice as many Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in the scientific community as do in organized religion. How the almighty has fallen: organized religion is in a dead heat with banks and financial institutions on the confidence scale.

This, too, is a replay of the Great Depression. “One might have expected that in such a crisis great numbers of these people would have turned to the consolations of and inspirations of religion,” wrote Frederick Lewis Allen in “Since Yesterday,” his history of the 1930s published in 1940. But that did not happen: “The long slow retreat of the churches into less and less significance in the life of the country, and even in the lives of the majority of their members, continued almost unabated.”

The new American faith, Allen wrote, was the “secular religion of social consciousness.” It took the form of campaigns for economic and social justice — as exemplified by the New Deal and those movements that challenged it from both the left and the right. It’s too early in our crisis and too early in the new administration to know whether this decade will so closely replicate the 1930s, but so far Obama has far more moral authority than any religious leader in America with the possible exception of his sometime ally, the Rev. Rick Warren.

History is cyclical, and it would be foolhardy to assume that the culture wars will never return. But after the humiliations of the Scopes trial and the repeal of Prohibition, it did take a good four decades for the religious right to begin its comeback in the 1970s. In our tough times, when any happy news can be counted as a miracle, a 40-year exodus for these ayatollahs can pass for an answer to America’s prayers. [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15rich.html?_r=1 ]

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

The Republican Party's Death Wish

Paul Jenkins

The Huffington Post

March 13, 2009 

The political death-watch for RNC Chairman Michael Steele is wildly entertaining: who knew the party that gave us George W. Bush and Sarah Palin was holding back its best buffoon yet? The bigger question, though, is not so much whether Steele will survive, but whether it his party that is doomed.

Defeated, lacking in leadership, deeply divided despite its shrinking size, out of touch with the country, demographically unrepresentative: the GOP has hit the kind of perfect storm that it has not faced in a long time, and it is not an exaggeration to state that the party's survival is at stake. Yes, Republicans have been in deep crises before, most recently in the aftermath of Watergate, and have lived to see another day. Yes, the party's corporate benefactors are not likely to let it go down without a fight. And yes, the US electoral system is not conducive to change: since the demise of the Whig Party 150 years ago, Democrats and Republicans have mostly had the field to themselves.

But the current crisis feels different. The Republican Party's defeat in November was so complete that you have to go back to, well, the post-Watergate 1970s for a comparableimbalance in Congress in favor of the Democratic Party. And it could get worse in 2010: four GOP-held Senate seats are open, with probably more to come. Thanks to infighting, other seats are also endangered: in Kentucky where the party is desperate to get rid of its mad Senator Jim Bunning, who will have none of it; and in Pennsylvania, where the 79 year-old moderate incumbent Arlen Specter is unlikely to make it past the GOP primary, so despised is he in his party. On the presidential front, the numbers are equally as grim: in a two-person race, one has to go back to 1964 for a Republican performance as dismal as John McCain's.

McCain's campaign and defeat, combined with Bush's record unpopularity, have left the party absolutely leaderless. There are at least two-dozen men and women who could claim to be the most powerful person in the Republican Party: from Steele to Palin to Rush Limbaugh, through a list of members of Congress, Governors and failed Presidential candidates, it is a complete free-for-all. Making matters worse, these would-be leaders are mostly a deeply unappealing bunch born to do anything but lead. On what is clearly the most pressing issue of the time, the economy, top Republicans have neither followed, nor lead: not only did they get us into this spot, but they have absolutely no idea how to get us out of it. If there were one, just one, strong voice in the party to argue coherently against the stimulus package and government spending generally, perhaps the country would listen. But instead, there is a cacophony of absurd doomsday forecasts, trickle-down retreads, senile railings against earmarks, rantings about the stimulus' lack of religiosity, or simply silence. We have yet to hear a single realistic scenario from a top Republican that would outline how and when the country could move forward from its current meltdown.

Of course, the Republican Party could go on losing elections ad eternam and still survive, as it did for the twenty years following the Great Depression (with one electoral hiccup of a win in 1946). But the rumblings of discontent from those whose individual political careers are at stake are already getting louder. The split is most evident among Governors: the sniping between moderate, or at least pragmatic Republican chief executives, and their right-wing orthodox counterparts is striking. In one corner, are most prominently Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Charlie Crist of Florida, who are embracing the stimulus funds coming their way. In the other corner are nutjobs Mark Sanford of South Carolina andBobby Jindal of Louisiana, who have threatened to turn down stimulus money, or perhaps some of it, especially that which would go to increasing unemployment checks, because, well, we don't really know. But that's what Ronald Reagan would have done. They're pretty sure. Perhaps. Anyway, it's government money, so it's bad money and they don't want it. Look for the pragmatic wing of the party to chuckle ever louder at their party's economic ayatollahs and, eventually, to ignore them, as Utah Governor Jon Huntsman has decided to do: "I don't even know the congressional leadership. [...] I have not met them. I don't listen or read whatever it is they say because it is inconsequential -- completely."

It is telling that Congressional Republicans' biggest self-perceived achievement in months (or is it years?) was the unanimous rejection of the stimulus package by their House caucus. They partied like it was 1984 in celebration of this symbolic success, ignoring the fact that a growing majority of voters favor increased government spending. This is nothing unusual, as, on nearly every issue, Americans prefer the Democrats' positions, which only seems to harden the besieged Republicans. Rather than make them look strong and consistent on their core values and principles, Republicans increasingly come off as stubborn lunatics sticking to failed policies and dismissive of the country's will. Perhaps one day Americans will again favor economic policies that destroy the middle class, further impoverish the poor, create billionaires by the boatload and threaten the country's stability, but even for a people with a strong capacity to forgive and forget, this does not seem likely to happen soon. That the Republican Party is out of touch with a vast majority of the country should not be a surprise: even as heterosexual Christian white men are shrinking in numbers (probably fewer than a quarter of Americans could be so described), they make up well over 90% of the party's members of Congress. There is nothing inherently wrong with heterosexual Christian white men, but a party this homogeneous does not have a shot at understanding what the country needs. It also explains why Republicans are left dredging for diversity among the Palins, Jindals and Steeles of the world. More ominously, you cannot expect much of a future when you have lost an entire generation of young people, and several generations of immigrants, for the benefit of short-term electoral gains that never materialized. Nor can you beat up on every significant growing constituency and expect it to come around at election time.

For now, Republicans seem to be settling their hopes on the usual suspects: abortion and gay people. When Steele is deposed of his chairmanship, it will be because of his intemperatelymoderate comments on both issues, which have predictably energized the party's social conservatives. Indeed, Barack Obama may well add fuel to the fire if he extends benefits to same-sex partners of federal workers. This, says sex-obsessed right-winger Gary Bauer, will "provoke a furious grass-roots reaction [and] reinvigorate the conservative coalition." So that is what will unify the Republican Party: keeping gay people uninsured. A sure winner. The GOP has long been fissured along social issues, with moderates generally losing the internal battles on abortion and gay rights, but winning the bigger war, as America in general has progressed their way. Now economic policy is proving equally as divisive, except that most Americans actually care deeply about the issue (as opposed to, say, late-term abortions.) This is why Republicans' position on the stimulus package is so unfathomable: what base exactly are they catering to? Surely not to their shrinking bastions in Appalachia and the Deep South, among the poorest states in the country, and precisely those most dependent on federal money. As irrational as we may think they were for voting for McCain, does the Republican Party really think that struggling white voters in, say, Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana will take kindly to the GOP's bizarre last stand on the economy?

The current Republican in-fighting is often described as a battle for the soul of the party. The GOP has no soul, so that description is inaccurate. However, many of its members, like all politicians, have an instinct for self-preservation. The question now is where these survival impulses take individual Republicans. There is talk of some moderates leaving the party, either as independents (Schwarzenegger) or Democrats (Specter). Those who remain will either reengineer the party to look, act and think more like mainstream America; or they will delve deeper into its most extremist recesses. If it is the former, it is hard to imagine the party's right-wingers staying onboard and, with nowhere to go but out, it is likely they would at least attempt the previously unthinkable: forming their own conservative party. If the extremists win and take the party ever further right, what will happen to the middle-of-the-road wing of the Republican party, let alone its moderate and liberal members? Their political careers, already threatened, are likely to become yet more tenuous, at least as Republicans. With the Democratic Party occupying the terrain from the center of the spectrum to the far-left, there is little room for an alternative moderate, centrist party. That would give the more pragmatic members of the GOP little choice: to lose as Republicans, or win as Democrats or independents. In either scenario, the Republican Party in its current incarnation would wither away, or perhaps even disappear.

That the GOP survived the 1970s is no indication that it can survive its current crisis: Watergate was very much about one man, Richard Nixon, and while the Republican brand was badly damaged, its policies were not: Vietnam was not a Republican war, and the dreadful state of the economy was not particularly perceived to be the responsibility of the GOP, or even of Nixon. In fact, Nixon's approval ratings remained quite high until the Watergate scandal fully unfolded. His Republican successor, Gerald Ford, started his own term with sky-high popular approval. The party is in a very different situation now: the Iraq folly and the disastrous economy are widely believed to be the result of Republican policies, which the party endorses to this day. The GOP's bulwark of corporate benefactors is also crumbling: they have far more pressing matters than to prop up a party that has not done much for them lately. Indeed, the US Chamber of Commerce, not exactly a Marxist stronghold, enthusiastically endorsed the stimulus package. The Republicans' best friend remains an electoral system that entrenches the two-party system. That said, there is precedent for more than two parties in countries with similar first-past-the-post elections: the UK, for instance, has three main parties, all of which have parliamentary representation. And, also in the UK, the emergence of the Labour Party in the 20th century spelled the doom of the Liberal Party, until the latter reincarnated and merged with a fourth party in the 1980s.

The Republican Party's predicament bears little resemblance to the one facing Democrats in Bush's first term, when Karl Rove famously predicted a long-lasting Republican majority. This asinine forecast was based on the flimsiest of evidence: four years during which Republicans were in charge of both the White House and Congress, a Bush defeat in the popular vote followed by a narrow win, and a few equally narrow Congressional victories, mostly eked out through a probably illegal redrawing of districts in Texas. To put things in perspective, the only time Republicans have matched the kind of majority Democrats now enjoy was in 1921-23, after which a string of increasingly slim GOP victories eventually yielded the Great Depression (funny how that works). Even so, no one is predicting a permanent Democratic majority: that does not happen in a democracy. What we are predicting is that a party as failed, rudderless, and out-of-touch as the present-day GOP is destined for extinction unless it changes drastically and quickly. And that by staking its future on the likes of Palin, Jindal, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, all of whom have failed every significant test of political leadership, the Republican Party is simply accelerating its increasingly inevitable demise.

Copyright 2009 HuffingtonPost.com

The Case For Walking and Chewing Gum

Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ali Frick, Ryan Powers, and Pat Garofalo
The Progress Report
March 13, 2009

 In September, after Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) famously suspended his presidential campaign to focus on the financial crisis, then-candidate Barack Obama said, "I think that it is going to be part of the President's job to deal with more than one thing at once." Now that President Obama has laid out an ambitious agenda aimed at economic recovery and reforming the nation's health care, energy, and education systems, conservatives are claiming that he is doing too many things at once and should put aside his other plans in order to "fix the economy first." Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) said that Obama "should be focusing on the 'economic crisis,' as opposed to holding four-hour meetings on health care." Meanwhile, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that Americans "want the administration to fix the economy first. That's the first priority." The media has piled on, with cable outlets lending "credence to the accusation that the president has loaded his agenda with unrelated items when he should be focusing on the economy." But as Obama said yesterday while addressing the Business Roundtable, "we must not use the need to confront [financial problems] as an excuse to keep ignoring the long-term threats to our prosperity: the cost of our healthcare and our oil addiction; our education deficit, and our fiscal deficit." Indeed, it is only by addressing all of these areas that the economy can be set on the path toward long-term sustainability.

PRODUCTIVE AND HEALTHY WORKERS: First, the notion that Obama is not focusing on the economy is simply untrue. In the first two months of his presidency, Obama has signed a $787 billion economic stimulus package, proposed a fix for the housing crisis, and laid the groundwork for rescuing the banking system and restoring lending. That said, as Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag pointed out, "the single most important thing we can do to improve the long-term fiscal health of our nation is slow the growth rate in health care costs." Health care spending makes up one out of every six dollars in the economy, and $700 billion per year is wasted on unnecessary or ineffective care. Furthermore, "as the unemployment rate grew by 0.8 points in December and January, nearly 100,000 people a week or 14,000 people a day lost their health coverage," while the percentage of people who reported having trouble paying for needed health care or medicines rose from 18 percent in January 2008 to 21 percent  in December. Even the Business Roundtable pointed out that "Americans in 2006 spent $1,928 per capita on health care, at least two-and-a-half times more per person than any other advanced country." As National Institutes of Health bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel said, "everything is affected by health policy, and every decision should be examined for its impact on health care reform." Both America's short- and long-term fiscal state depend on getting the outlandish costs of health care under control.

GREEN JOBS: As former President Bill Clinton said this week, "it's difficult to see how America can be a preeminent country in the 21st century...without becoming more energy independent through clean energy and greater efficiency." Nevertheless, Cantor has criticized Obama for trying to "impose these cap-and-trade schemes." CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked if cap-and-trade is "wise at a time of economic distress." But Obama's plan -- which does not begin until 2012 -- drives investment in a clean economy and and fuels improvements that will save everyone money. As McKinsey and Company has found, putting a cap on carbon emissions corrects market failures by encouraging investment in efficiency and fuel economy improvements. It also spurs the expansion of renewable energy, creating new green jobs and a competitive advantage in the international marketplace and leading to technologies that America can export. Furthermore, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has found that a properly designed cap-and-trade system actually insulates working Americans from both energy price volatility and costs passed on to them from industrial polluters. In fact, CBPP estimated that "less than 60 percent of the auction revenues [from a cap-and-trade system] would be sufficient to provide relief to a substantial majority of U.S. consumers." Obama has gone above that mark, proposing to use 80 percent of the revenues to fund his 'Making Work Pay' tax credit.

AN EDUCATED WORKFORCE: As Obama said when laying out his education agenda on Tuesday, "America's place as a global economic leader will be put at risk...if we don't do a far better job than we've been doing of educating our sons and daughters." Indeed, investing in education is critical for long-term economic growth, while in the short-term, education funding can provide key economic stimulus. Ensuring that teachers keep working, universities don't layoff staff, and students can continue to pay tuition keeps dollars cycling through the economy. Plus, as former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wrote, "America's future competitiveness and the standard of living of our people depend largely on our peoples' skills, and our capacities to communicate and solve problems and innovate." Projections on the real fiscal rate of return on public educational investments are high: 10 percent for high quality preschool programs, 15 percent for innovative K-12 reforms, and 10.3 percent for investments to encourage college access and graduation. And of course, "one of the best documented relationships in economics is the link between education and income." A lower education level means that "income is lower, which means lower tax contributions to finance public services." As The Wonk Room's Ben Furnas has pointed out, "better educated people are more productive, get sick less often, are less likely to require public assistance, commit fewer crimes, make more money, and pay more in taxes. Creating more of them is a good idea." 

Copyright 2009 Thinkprogress.org

JOE THE MARKETING GENIUS

Lee Stranahan

bobcesca.com

March 10, 2009

In a little reported appearance at a conservative rally in Milwaukee, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka "Joe the Plumber," whacked Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele for trying to hip-hopify conservatism.

"Unfortunately, we have a chairman up there who wants to redefine conservatism; he wants to make it hip hop, put it in a new package and sell it," Wurzelbacher said. "You can't sell principles; either you have them or you don't." The comments were met with applause from most of the 800 in attendance.

Well, add 'consultant' to the list of things Joe Wurzelbacher doesn't do well. That's a little quote that proves that Those Who Do Not Learn From The Past Are Condemned To Lose Elections Over And Over..

Of course you can sell principles, ideas, and candidates. That's exactly what Steele should be doing as head of the RNC. It's nice to see that he's going to be undermined by his base, especially in a blatantly racist way.

Copyright 2009 bobcesca.com