Well, if Ruth Marcus thinks that Jeb Bush should run for president because “It would be good for Bush’s party and good for the country,” then, by all means, Jeb Bush should run for president. All I can say is that this is not a sign of how bad things have become for the GOP but a sign of how bad things have become for the country. If going another round with the Bush Crime Family would be an appreciable improvement, then we might as well just hand off our “exceptional” baton to Australia and go sit in the backbench at the United Nations.
It’s over.
This is mostly Ruth Marcus doing her “liberal contrarian” schtick. Ignore her, she’ll make you crazy.
Yes, there are a lot of reasons why it’s over, starting with the fact that global carbon emissions are still rising. But stupid pundits saying stupid things is not one of them.
Great idea, Ruth. Let’s let the GOP come back to what appears to be sanity but never is, never was (post-Ike), and never will be.
Here’s an idea: why not let them go as extreme as possible until they are a small White Supremacist Party explicitly. Then they can stay the hell out of politics completely.
Fucking Beltway idiots.
>>we might as well just hand off our “exceptional” baton to Australia and go sit in the backbench at the United Nations
this would be good for the country no matter who we elect.
Maybe we should just swap places with the Marshal Islands.
The real issue of how bad it is. Is the fact that people that used to be able to vote can not vote this election.
I wonder just what it is going to take for the average citizen to final decide enough.
When denied the right to vote you have lost your voice. This is not the Federal Government doing this, this is the GOP. People need to wake up and revolt against All of the GOP.
Why? For the media it would set up the story of the ultimate inter-family grudge match. The Captain Ahabs of the Bush family seek to the great white whale of Clinton family, elimination of the last Democratic threat, and the establishment of the permanent Republican majority. Will the Bush’s be able to sieze a three-fer from the two-fers?
Color commentary, punditry, and ratings heaven for the media-lites and billions in campaign fund media buys for their bosses.
It’s why they’ve treated the 2014 election as a distraction.
No less crazy than Democrats pining for Hillary Clinton. The one difference is that Jeb! would give Republicans/conservatives somethings they want and Hillary would would only satisfy the neoliberalcons.
There are many people I know who love Hillary and will eagerly campaign for her. Their liberal credentials are impeccable. They campaigned for Obama in 2008. One of them I know voted for Dean in 2004. And they love Hillary.
I can’t claim to understand it, but I know their eagerness is genuine.
Women? Somewhat understandable when one wants to see one more like oneself so much that one’s core principals get tossed aside. “Impeccable liberal credentials” means that one never lets “identity” trump one’s values.
The danger in doing that is that more often than not, that “identity” choice fails in the general election or in office. And the failure in office isn’t always strictly limited to the shortcomings of the person but because as a first, she/he has the burden of being attacked unmercifully by the opposition. That is only somewhat blunted when the individual’s performance in office is significantly better than what the opposition has to offer. I’m thinking of Carol Mosely Braun here. But on reflection, have to put Jimmy Carter in that category as well. After eight long years of Nixon/Ford, Democrats/liberals were so desperate for a Democrat in the WH that we accepted and elected a man that wasn’t really qualified and in many ways was out of step with Democratic base. His “god talk” (which was new at the level of the WH) also set up something the GOP could steal and run with.
Had there been a viable alternative to Hillary in 2008 other than Obama, that’s where I would have gone. While I didn’t doubt for a moment that the country would reject either a black man or white woman in 2007 based on status, I wasn’t clear as to when or why a majority of the electorate had made such a large shift. It’s clearer now — GWB had been such a bad POTUS that we wanted to feel better about ourselves. And I sort of forgot that “firsts” are only healing for a moment and a long period of backlash ensues.
The only things I can still say are that Obama wasn’t a (crappy) legacy/dynasty candidate and has been better than Clinton would have been, but in the long run, he might have been a better Senator. There will not be another black POTUS for a very long time — and it’s a shame that the first one wasn’t Deval Patrick who has better executive/managerial skills.
Agree with you on Obama as a Senator.
Regarding 2008, initially I supported Edwards. He had the right message. His accent grated on me, but I dismissed that as prejudice. Too bad he turned out to be morally much worse than Clinton, maybe even Cheney. For all Cheney’s sins, I don’t see him shopping for a new wife while his present wife is dying of cancer. What a scumbag! If he can’t keep his vows to his wife, how do we expect him to keep his oath of office?
I have a good nose for slick sleazebags. A useful skill for a single woman in a male dominated business that often included a certain amount of business dinners. Guys pretending to be single and hitting on me easily got back in line when I simply inquired about their wife’s profession.
Disagree on your analysis of Carter’s qualifications and the fact that he legitimized God talk in US politics. The fact that the Reagan campaign and its Southern religious operatives like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and W. A. Criswell of First Baptist Church-Dallas went to the trouble of creating a politicized religious movement showed that the GOP view Carter as a huge threat on a lot of levels.
Carter won election in 1970 and succeed the most conspicuous racist of the post-civil rights era, Lester Maddox. Carter’s inaugural address was a rhetorical end to segregation in Georgia, and his policies as governor followed suit, despite being hobbled by having Lester Maddox as his Lieutenant Governor.
Carter’s amnesty for Vietnam draft resisters, signing of the Panama Canal Treaty and shoving it through Congress, and pro-choice positions fueled a backlash among some former supporters but earned him few credits from a progressive wing of the Democratic Party longing for the last Kennedy. (Echos in GOP Jeb fever?) Negotiating the Camp David agreement was a major foreign policy accomplishment for any President, even given the fact that Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel provided the opening.
Eisenhower’s god-talk was no different from Carter’s, but Eisenhower didn’t let loose with it in an interview in Playboy magazine of all places. Carter caught flak from two directions over that one, which elevated his apparent religiosity. It was a libel like the so-called “malaise” speech that tried to treat Americans as serious adults. Likely the last time that that was possible.
Carter did not create the religious right. The religious right was put together specifically to delegitimize Carter among his own supporters and to defeat him in the 1980 election. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the strategy was not seen as a serious danger (nor was Ronald Reagan for that matter) by progressives and it worked. Progressives in 1978 thought that Ronald Reagan was too conservative to be electable even within the Republican Party. Some of them were even seduced by Republican John Anderson, who functioned as a stalking horse for Democratic votes.
Perhaps in your neck of the woods, “god talk” was a more prevalent component of political speak. Except for the generic “god bless America,” it was foreign to those in the west and probably not too familiar to those in the mid-west and upper east coast. I cannot be dissuaded that he unleashed a latency in the electorate that was best left unsaid because it only caused trouble.
Not dismissing Carter’s accomplishments. Many were far more in line with the DEM base than Clinton’s, but he was terrible at forging alliances with non-GA Democrats. That combined with being to the right of the base, is what set up the Teddy Kennedy’s primary challenge. One of the more boneheaded moves by party elites. It was painful to watch him dragging around an obviously unhappy wife.
The Democratic Party in the period after 1972 was a free-for-all between reformer and establishment Dems. In GA, Carter was the reformer and Zell Miller was the establishment (Lester Maddox was the circus). In Illinois, Richard J. Daley, the hero of the Battle of Chicago was the establishment. In Massaschusetts, the Kennedys were the establishment (and something of reformers). In California, Brown was through-and-through reformer.
Between 1976 and 1980, the base of the Democratic Party changed. In a sense the reformers won the party with Carter. The amnesty for Vietnam resisters killed the labor support (and Carter as a Southern governor did not have a strong labor record) and the Carter pro-choice position killed support from urban pro-life Catholics. Carter moving to Kennedy’s positions would likely have accelerated that given that Carter’s base was moderate (not conservative) Southern Baptists. What the 1978 coup of the Southern Baptist convention did was politicize the convention for Republicans and strip the moderate Baptists that were Carter’s base from power in the denomination. The me-toos that went along with the moderate Baptists in 1976 were galvanized against Carter all over the South in 1980.
In 1980 in fact the base of the Democratic Party lost its right wing, effectively moving the center of the base leftward. Thus Mondale and Dukakis in 1984 and 1988. And that trend continued as Southern and Western Democrats changed parties in the 1980s. Clinton’s original strategy was to rerun the Carter strategy and re-establish a moderate Southern Democratic Party. What happened in the Gingrich Revolution is that the Southern Democratic party mostly collapsed, effectively truncating more of the right wing from the Democratic base. And the culture war began in earnest with Clinton seeking to co-opt it instead of being run over by it. He mostly succeeded, with disastrous consequences of the compromises he made. Labor essentially sat out because of internal rank-and-file divisions, and labor lost big over those two decades.
North Carolina was among the last to experience this right-wing collapse because moderate Jim Hunt came back as governor for two terms. But the corporatist rot had set in and the last two Democratic governors were taken down because they succumbed to the system.
Likely god talk was foreign on the West Coast in the 1970s, but it certainly was not in the rural West.
The Carter administration came to DC as outsiders intent to reform the way the place worked. Democrats already in DC weren’t as keen to reform the way the place worked. Carter’s strategy was to have as many people he could trust in positions of advising him; that meant the peanut brigade from his governors office staff. Both Clinton and Obama, who also came as post-Republican reformers, learned from Carter’s difficulties. Some would argue that Obama overlearned from Carter’s difficulties and became an instant part of key elements of the DC establishment.
Reforming DC requires a skilled combination of outside-inside personnel managed in a way that moves things along. Carter’s folks tried to get the details so that there would be no surprises. Clinton wheeled and dealed. Obama sought to have any consensus within the party and across party lines at all. Over the three presidencies, Republicans became more determined to sabotage presidential initiatives. To the point that now only the absolutely necessary according to the GOP gets done legislatively.
During the 1970s I traveled extensively in Georgia, South Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Montana doing field organizing types of work. Everywhere I went there was a strong undercurrent of god talk that helped or hindered political events. In those western and midwestern states, the tone was not that much different than the South at that time, and much more restrained than it is now. Carter’s positions at the time were unremarkable and mainstream and essentially nonpolitical. Politicization was the backlash to Carter’s success and possible re-election.
Progressives then and now overestimated their proportion of the base of the Democratic Party. And underestimated the extent to which the New Deal was forced on the Democratic Party by other parties and outside events. And the extent to which the Truman presidency was rebound from the New Deal and WWII even within the Democratic Party.
Remember that the Carter era was when California was represented by Allen Cranston and S. I. Hayakawa.
We could argue endlessly. I’d say that the DEM Party began to lose its base by not repealing Taft-Hartley and the National Security Act in 1949. Playing “me too” wrt to the communist witch hunts instead of following Eleanor Roosevelt’s lead and standing up to those fascists. Or LBJ lost the DEM Party with passage of equal rights amendments and his wars on Poverty and Vietnam. And not telling Daley to leave the anti-war protesters alone.
That SI Hayakawa senate seat had been unsettled since 1964 with the election of George Murphy. The corrective six years later wasn’t any more satisfying and Hayakawa came in as the last of the anti-student protest politicians and he too only lasted one term. It ultimately passed to the odious Feinstein as the conservative CA DEM Senate seat. Cranston was acceptable for many terms until he got caught in the Lincoln Savings scandal — which should also have taken down John McCain. Boxer replaced Cranston for the liberal CA DEM Senate seat.
US politics might have been better if in 1966 CA voters hadn’t tossed one of the better governors for Reagan. But we have to remember that his rise was facilitated by COINTELPRO — and he’d long been an asset for Hoover and the FBI – to take down Clark Kerr and blame Pat Brown. So, it was like a “color revolution” based on disinformation.
Not much different from the color revolution in the Southern Baptist Church. Would be interesting to know what Pat Robertson’s relationship is/was to the Agency. His rise conveniently tracks Reagan’s ascendancy in the 1980 primaries. US Senator’s sons are not out-of-bounds for duty; rumors abound about George H. W. Bush’s role in the 1950s and early 1960s. Not that Criswell and Falwell and friends weren’t capable of handling church politics by themselves.
Agreed that the Dem capitulation in 1946 to the Red Scare created huge problems, even given a competitive threat from Stalin. And amputated the legitimacy of left wing politics in the US, a process that has not ended.
Thanks for this post and the one above. Having lived through all that you revisit your analyses are very helpful.
Somewhat off topic, but Jason Carter was campaigning in my small city two days ago and Roslyn was with him. I actually was able to have a bit of conversation with her. She said they were able to raise money in dribs and drabs and couldn’t compete with the gobs of money that Deal has. She also said she’s come to hate politics because of all the terrible lying ads being run against her grandson but has found that she enjoys the actual ground campaigning. I’m not the best judge but I actually think Jason is a talented campaigner. There is genuine African American support for him.
I agree with her about the political ads and they are turning lots of voters off. Another one to chalk up to too much money in the political process.
Screeching Kettle: The Republicanization of the Liberty Movement
Or…will Jeb Bush be Hillary Clinton’s Democratic running mate?
Hey, Charlie Crist crossed over.
Just a little thought experiment to break out of the conventional wisdom.
Consider the source. I have felt sooooo much better since not bothering to visit the WaPo site any more. It’s not worth the aggravation of wading through all the neocon and faux-liberal effluvia there to find something decent there: like looking for a rose in a dungheap.