by Cliston Brown | May 12, 2013 | Political Commentary
So it seems that the latest hyped-up Republican balderdash regarding the White House response to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi centers on the discovery that the talking points developed for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice were edited.
Pardon me while I yawn.
Seriously, this is the big, damning revelation that’s going to make Benghazi a bigger scandal than Watergate? Please. This is a bunch of hyped-up horse crap that doesn’t mean diddly squat, except that it is being used as a political cudgel by a bunch of hypocrites who engage in the same, largely innocuous practices on a daily basis.
First, let me tell you a little bit about talking points. People who work in politics and public relations are very familiar with talking points, which, for those who do not know, is a list of answers to questions that a politician, or a public or corporate official, might be asked by media or investigators. Talking points are crafted to keep the spokesperson from saying anything that might conceivably be used to attack the person, or the office, or the company, that the spokesperson represents. They are used as a defense against the “gotcha” culture that today prevails in politics and journalism, in which any poorly considered word can be turned into an attack (justifiably or unjustifiably), even if that word is taken wildly out of context.
Every politician, and every politician’s staff, uses talking points for exactly this reason (just as the ridiculous people who attack President Obama for using a teleprompter also use teleprompters virtually every time they make a major speech). And, with every politician’s office or corporate entity that uses talking points, there is always a multilayered review process that almost inevitably leads to revisions, because of the hair-trigger sensitivity involved. There is a justifiable fear that any single word that isn’t perfect (and perfectly innocuous) may boomerang, and this leads to a hypersensitivity on the part of the people who write and edit the talking points.
So what have we learned here about the talking points the administration initially used after the Benghazi attack? We learned that they went through multiple iterations and that a State Department official spent a lot of time quibbling about a few words because she was worried about what some unnamed senior officials in her department might think.
As someone who has spent most of the last dozen years writing talking points until they’re coming out of my ears, and dealing with the hypersensitive worrywarts who parse every word, I understand exactly what happened here. And what occurred here was almost certainly a case of overzealous caution that, in all likelihood, amounts to nothing more.
But the Republicans in Congress know that most people have no idea what talking points are, why they are used, and what the process is in developing them and using them. And they are counting on this fact to help them make something sinister out of this. Certain media organizations who undoubtedly know better are not only allowing them to get away with it, but helping them spread it, and this, sadly, is nothing new. Scandals, trumped up or otherwise, are good for ratings. And anybody out there who seriously believes that the “liberal media” is in bed with the Democrats, consider how much we heard about Whitewater, or Monica Lewinsky, or dozens of other things even more ridiculous, during the Bill Clinton presidency. Media outlets want viewers and readers because this is how they make money, and scandals are good for business.
What’s really happening here is happening for multiple reasons, none of which emanate from a legitimate concern about the security of our embassies. While numerous outlets reflect different numbers, a well-documented article by the admittedly liberal-leaning Media Matters for America demonstrates, through usage of independent sources, no fewer than seven such attacks during the George W. Bush administration. Where were these investigation-demanding Republicans then?
What’s really going on can be summed up in four quick points:
1) The fact that Republican members of Congress, in order to impress their political base, must attack the president constantly. Any Republican who doesn’t appear sufficiently aggressive against the president (see Charlie Crist, Chris Christie, etc.) immediately gets torn apart by the conservative base, and in some cases, such as what happened to Crist (now a Democrat), ends up facing a primary challenge.
2) The fact that Republican politicians have never gained any traction in their constant attempts to stoke hatred against the president and thereby weaken his personal brand. It has driven Republicans to distraction, as noted in a proposed super-PAC attack against President Obama during the 2012 election, that “Americans still aren’t ready to hate this president.”
3) The desire to bog the Obama Administration down in defending itself against ridiculous attacks rather than continuing to create uncomfortable pressure on the Republicans on actual issues, such as background checks for gun purchases. If you don’t think the president’s efforts on this issue have been producing results, look only at how Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire) and other Senators, of both parties, have seen their approval ratings fall off a cliff since voting against the background-check bill.
4) The Republicans’ abject fear of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gaining the Democratic nomination in 2016. As Time magazine reported on April 12th—just before this ridiculous tempest in a teapot was ginning up—numerous Republican political movers-and-shakers were all but conceding that Secretary Clinton would be unbeatable in a 2016 presidential run. They need to tarnish her now and either convince her not to run, or at least dent her approval ratings.
This isn’t about national security or a “cover up.” This is about the Republicans’ ongoing efforts to find a silver bullet against a president who, just like Bill Clinton, they couldn’t beat fairly at the polls. It’s also an attempt to preemptively destroy Hillary Clinton, whom they know they can’t beat at the polls. Don’t buy the hype.
by Cliston Brown | May 7, 2013 | Election Analysis
My boss asked me this morning who was going to win the special U.S. House election between former Gov. Mark Sanford (R-South Carolina) and his Democratic opponent, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, sister of comedian extraordinaire Stephen Colbert. I told him Sanford was going to win by about 52% to 48%. I was a little short on the margin, which ended up around 55%-45%, but correct on the result.
I was able to pick Sanford in part because the polling had swung wildly in his direction, but also due to the inescapable fact that the 1st District of South Carolina is heavily Republican. It voted for Mitt Romney by 18 percentage points last year, a significantly larger margin than Romney achieved in the state as a whole. And if your district is to the right of South Carolina as a whole, it’s not voting for any Democrat, regardless of circumstances.
I also picked Sanford because of the trend we are seeing across the country, which is that voters are voting much more based on ideology than on personal characteristics. We saw an example of this in the easy reelection of Sen. David Vitter (R-Louisiana) despite his prostitution scandal.
It is true that sometimes, people go against their own partisan grain if their party’s candidate says or does something particularly offensive, and we saw that in the landslide defeat last year of former U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Missouri) in his Senate race against Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri). I’m not convinced that Akin would have won that race if he hadn’t made his idiotic comment about rape—I think McCaskill is a much better politician than she gets credit for, and I cannot believe that her landslide win was entirely due to Akin’s flub—but I think it’s clear that the race would have been much closer without Akin’s disastrous gaffe.
That said, it appears, more and more, that while some mistakes can still sink a candidate, a candidate’s marital infidelity is no longer one of those fatal miscues. Admittedly, this hasn’t really been tested when it comes to female candidates—and it would be interesting to see how such a scenario would play out—but can you name the last male candidate for high office who lost an election, which he otherwise would likely have won, strictly because he cheated on his wife? We might have to go back to Gary Hart, whose promising 1988 presidential run tanked after he was discovered to be having an affair.
For all the talk about “family values” and the “sanctity of marriage” emanating from the GOP, Republicans in South Carolina’s 1st District had no qualms today about sending an admitted adulterer to represent them in Congress, just as their Republican compatriots in Louisiana had no issue reelecting Vitter. And on the other side, the job approval of Democratic President Bill Clinton was never higher than it was when Republicans—led by confirmed adulterers Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde—impeached him for the fallout surrounding his affair with an intern.
It looks like the big lesson from Mark Sanford’s victory tonight was that marital infidelity doesn’t matter in politics, as long as a candidate remains faithful to the ideology of his constituents.
by Cliston Brown | Apr 27, 2013 | Election Analysis
A few weeks ago, I did an analysis of all the final 2012 election results broken down by region. I wanted to see how the results came out if we compared the South against the rest of the country, and also to see what kind of majority President Obama compiled outside the South.
While the results were by no means a surprise, they did demonstrate, as expected, a stark political difference between the South and the rest of the country.
I broke the country into four regions: Northeast, Midwest, West and South, each containing either 12 or 13 states in order to make the comparisons as apples-to-apples as possible. As a result, West Virginia ended up as the only red (Republican) state in the Northeast, even though I think most people would rightly consider West Virginia a Southern state, culturally and politically. But it also has historical ties to the Northeast as well, so one can make a case either way.
And I included Oklahoma in the South, which—based upon virtually every interaction I’ve ever had with Oklahomans—seems to me to be a fair and correct designation. I know many Oklahomans consider themselves Midwesterners, but as a native Midwesterner myself, I see Oklahoma having far more in common—culturally, politically and geographically—with the South than the Midwest.
I also designated Kentucky as a Southern state, and I can’t imagine I’d get much disagreement from anyone on that one. I challenge anyone to find a Midwesterner, or even very many Kentuckians, who’d consider Kentucky a Midwestern state.
Feel free to disagree with any of those designations, but let’s say, for instance, that we shifted Oklahoma into the Midwest and West Virginia out of the Northeast and into the South; neither move would have changed the results for any of those regions by very much. For example, the Midwest would have gone from favoring President Obama by about 51%-48% to about 50%-49%.
The results were clear: the South is not just a political outlier, as compared to the rest of the country, but it is out of touch with the rest of the country by an extremely large margin. Using the breakdown I employed, I found that President Obama won the Northeast 58.6%-39.8%; the West 54.2%-43.2%; and the Midwest 50.7%-47.6%. His victories in the Northeast and West were by double-digit, landslide margins; his victory in the Midwest was close, but clear.
Taking all the non-Southern states as a unit, President Obama walked away with a double-digit landslide: 54.3%-43.7% For purposes of comparison, this margin of victory in the Northeast, Midwest and West would be roughly on a par with the national victories won by Presidents Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956; George H.W. Bush in 1988; Clinton in 1996; and even Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and 1944. President Obama’s reelection victory was a landslide—if we exclude the South.
But in the South, it was an entirely different story. In this part of the country, even taking into account President Obama’s victories in the two most non-Southern states in this region (Florida and Virginia), Mitt Romney came away with a landslide victory of his own: 54.3%-44.5%. This is almost a mirror image of what happened in the rest of the country.
So when you’re thinking about how close the national popular vote was in the 2012 election (51.1%-47.2%) and thinking that we have a closely divided nation, you’re partly right and you’re partly wrong. The bottom line is that most of the country reelected the President by a large margin. But the dominance of cultural and political conservatism in the South is what created this artificial closeness in the overall electorate. When conservatives talk about “Heartland values,” they are really talking about Southern values. Don’t be fooled by this hooey; the Midwestern “Heartland” voted for the president.
Most of the country backed the president and his program by decisive margins. It is the South, the conservative outlier, that continues to pull the rest of country’s politics away from its natural, more moderate orbit. And it has been this way from the dawn of American independence. The tail, to a large degree, is wagging the dog.
So the next time you hear about “blue states” vs. “red states,” remember that it’s really more about the Blue vs. the Gray—just as it always has been and probably always will be.
by Cliston Brown | Mar 17, 2013 | Political Commentary
Last week, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) made news by announcing that, upon learning his son is gay, he has changed his position on gay marriage and now supports it.
It wasn’t unpredictable that there would be those on the political right who would criticize him for his change of heart. But what disturbs me is the blowback he is getting from some on the left.
I’ve seen a lot of social media chatter, since Portman’s announcement, along these lines: “So it took his son coming out for Portman to change his tune—why didn’t anybody else’s sons or daughters matter to him?”
First of all: Really? A Republican changes his mind and takes your side, publicly, on a crucial civil rights issue, and the first thing you do is criticize him for his motives, or for not doing it soon enough? Focus, people, will you?
Why Senator Portman changed his mind doesn’t really matter. The fact is that, regardless of his motives, he has taken a courageous stand that is almost certain to create political problems for him with at least a segment of his base. Any time a conservative changes his or her mind on this issue, that’s another crack in the wall of intolerance.
But there’s another reason why this is important. Remember when President Obama said one of the key characteristics he was looking for in a Supreme Court justice was empathy? Republicans reacted as if he had committed blasphemy.
Senator Portman’s love for his son enabled him to have empathy, and when that light of empathy went on over his head, he was able to extend it to everyone in the LGBT community and publicly change his position on marriage equality. That’s huge, and it took real guts. But more than anything else, it demonstrated the power of empathy in promoting progressive change.
The reason why the enemies of change are so afraid of empathy is pretty simple. It’s much harder to support policies that hurt a particular group—gays, the poor, ethnic minorities, etc.—when empathy enables you, for a moment, to walk in their shoes and see them as fellow human beings. Senator Portman has demonstrated—intentionally or not—why empathy is the number-one weapon against the opponents of social progress.
The Republican Senator from Ohio should be congratulated and praised for his decision, and those of us on the left should do a better job of understanding what it means: When people feel empathy, we win.
by Cliston Brown | Feb 27, 2013 | Political Commentary
I have a theory on this sequester business. I think a number of Republican and Democratic politicians secretly want it. Some Democrats (most notably, Howard Dean) believe this is the only way they’re going to get military spending under control, and some Republicans feel this is the only way they’re going to get any spending cuts at all.
Neither side is happy with all the cuts, but none of them are ever going to happen any other way, and this option, which requires nothing but continued inaction, enables each party to blame the other. Ask yourself a question: would Congress have passed this ticking time bomb in the first place if it really didn’t want it to go off?
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