by Cliston Brown | Dec 13, 2012 | Political Commentary
United Nations ambassador Susan Rice took one for the team today, formally withdrawing from consideration to be Secretary of State after weeks of unending attacks by a swarm of Republican Senators led by John McCain (R-Arizona), Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire).
The criticism of Ambassador Rice, based on what I can see, was completely unwarranted and unjustified. The statement she made after the Benghazi tragedy was based on what the intelligence services gave her to work with. Perhaps she can take some small comfort in knowing that this really had nothing to do with her. This was strictly about politics. Unable to turn the tragedy in Libya into electoral defeat for President Barack Obama last month, the Republicans went after Rice in part so they wouldn’t come away completely empty-handed; they wanted a scalp, and they got one.
But this is also about ensuring that Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) becomes the next Secretary of State, so that his Senate seat can be opened up for a special election, possibly helping Sen. Scott Brown (R) return after his decisive loss to incoming Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D).
As much as I respect and admire Sen. Kerry, a great public servant and true American hero, I almost hope the president picks someone else, just to demonstrate that these kinds of antics by McCain and his fellow travelers will not produce the results they want. It would be terribly unfair to Kerry, whose qualifications for the job are unquestionable, but then, what’s happened here has been terribly unfair to Susan Rice, too.
Wouldn’t McCain, Graham, Ayotte and every Republican in Washington be taken completely by surprise if President Obama nominated outgoing Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) as the next Secretary of State? It is hard to imagine Lugar wouldn’t be unanimously approved, and nobody in America is better qualified for the job. He also has a history of working together with President Obama, who spent a great deal of time as a Senator accompanying Lugar on overseas trips to help lock down loose nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union.
We’d get a terrific Secretary of State who would inevitably be confirmed with the support of both Republicans and Democrats; there would be no chance that the Republican tactics would be rewarded with the return Scott Brown to the Senate; and Obama would send a message to the Republicans that he cannot be played.
Well, it’s just a thought.
by Cliston Brown | Dec 3, 2012 | Political Commentary
In the wake of the highly publicized gun deaths brought about by a Kansas City Chiefs football player who killed the mother of his child and then committed suicide, I’ve been thinking seriously about the issue of gun violence in America.
I’ll be honest: I don’t know what the right answer is on this issue. I am not a gun owner myself, but many of my male relatives are avid hunters and own plenty of guns. None of them have ever used any of their guns improperly, and I have no doubt that the same is true of the vast majority of gun owners.
That said, the statistics clearly demonstrate that this country has a serious problem with gun violence and gun-related deaths as compared to almost every other country on earth, and certainly as compared to other modern, advanced democracies. There are only a handful of countries that average more gun deaths, per 100,000 inhabitants, than the United States, and most of these are countries that have severe drug violence (such as Mexico and Colombia) or persistent civil unrest.
I’ve done some research online, and in recent years, U.S. gun homicides and accidental gun deaths average more than 4 out of every 100,000 Americans in a year’s time. This is compared to less than one-tenth of a person per 100,000 in England; slightly more than two-tenths of a person per 100,000 in Scotland; slightly more than half a person per 100,000 in Australia and about half that rate in nearby New Zealand; about 1 person per 100,000 in Canada; and just slightly more than that in Ireland.
I’ve often heard it said that “Guns don’t kill people; people do,” and that you can’t blame guns for the actions of bad people or those who are mentally ill. However, on a per-capita basis, we have anywhere from four to 40 times more gun deaths per year than other socially and educationally advanced countries that are very similar to us historically and culturally. Does that mean we have four to 40 times as many bad people or crazy people as our contemporaries? I don’t think so.
While banning guns is not the answer (and clearly unconstitutional), other post-industrial democracies are having much more success avoiding gun deaths than we are. We need to be having some discussions as a country as to why this is and what we can do. Can we make it harder for the wrong people (those with criminal backgrounds or a history of mental illness) to get guns? Can we at least regulate guns that have an exclusively military purpose? Let’s face it, folks, you don’t need an Uzi to shoot Bambi—unless you’ve got a taste for some Bambi McNuggets. And a shooter who needs to reload occasionally will be able to shoot a lot fewer people before he is stopped than he could shoot with an automatic weapon.
Unfortunately, because of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and its skillful lobbying and public relations efforts, we as a country are now afraid to even broach the subject of gun violence. Our politicians, both on the right and on much of the left, have been so cowed by the NRA (and its vast reserves of campaign cash) that even suggesting we might have a gun problem in this country has become politically problematic. As a result, we have closed our collective eyes to the fact that, statistically speaking, we clearly do have a problem. So the problem persists, and every time we have a highly publicized gun tragedy, we move on without even talking about how we can avoid similar tragedies in the future. This is shameful, cowardly—and bordering on criminal neglect.
America isn’t the only place where there are gun massacres. There have recently been mass shootings in Germany and Norway, for example, but those were notable because they happen so rarely. Here, we’ve gotten to a point where we barely even notice whenever we have a new Virginia Tech or Northern Illinois or Columbine or Tucson.
We’ve got a problem. I’m not entirely sure how we should deal with it, but we at least need to start by admitting a problem exists. We can’t just continue to bury our heads in the sand and hope that if we ignore it, it will go away. America has a problem with gun violence. What are we going to do about it?
by Cliston Brown | Nov 25, 2012 | Election Analysis
Let me begin this preview with a note of humility: when the 2012 election season began, it was widely reported that President Obama was going to have serious trouble getting reelected, and that the Republicans were odds-on favorites to recapture the U.S. Senate. As we know, President Obama won reelection by margins that, when all the votes are counted, will not be that far off his sweeping 2008 victory, and Republicans not only failed to take the Senate but actually lost a net of two seats.
The preceding disclaimer should demonstrate that likelihoods are not guarantees, and that any preview of an upcoming election two years out is a risky proposition. Who could have foreseen, in 2010, that Republicans would lose not one but two Senate races because their nominees in those races would make idiotic comments about rape?
That said, all indications right now point to 2014 being a tough year for Democrats and a good one for Republicans.
First, although Democrats did spectacularly well in 2012, there were still some indicators that should cause concern. President Obama became the first president in U.S. history to win reelection with a smaller percentage of the popular vote than he won in his first election, and only the third reelected president to receive fewer electoral votes in his reelection campaign. The first was James Madison in 1812, in the midst of an unpopular war with Britain. The second was Woodrow Wilson in 1916, but that comes with a big caveat: his sweeping 1912 victory was due entirely to President William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt splitting the GOP vote and, thereby, helping deliver 40 states to Wilson. And although Democrats did pick up a net of eight seats in the U.S. House, they left another dozen on the table that they could have won if they had performed just a percentage point or two better. So, yes, the Democrats did well in 2012, but their performance was not nearly as strong as their results in 2006 and 2008, when there were true Democratic waves.
Secondly, just as in 2010, Democrats are far more exposed in U.S. Senate races than Republicans are. The Democratic class of 2008, which netted their party an eight-seat pickup in the Senate, faces its first reelection test. Democrats are defending 20 of the 33 seats up for election, and of the 13 Republicans who are up, it is hard to find even one who looks vulnerable now. Perhaps Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) may face a tough race; he struggled in each of his last two elections and may be ripe for an upset, but even that is a longshot for Democrats; it is a certainty that McConnell will raise stunning amounts of money. But no fewer than eight Democratic Senators will face difficult challenges in 2014, and perhaps as many as 10. If Republicans net six seats, they will reclaim the chamber. It is true that Democrats faced longer odds in 2012 but still prevailed—and in fact increased their majority in the Senate. How likely is it that they can defy the odds two cycles in a row?
Third, Democrats will have a hard time hanging on to a number of the U.S. House seats they captured in 2012. Of 33 House races decided by less than six percentage points this year, Democrats won 20 and Republicans only 13. Additionally, Democrats won two seats—in Florida’s 26th District and Illinois’ 8th District—by double digits, but this was largely due to the implosion of Republican incumbents David Rivera and Joe Walsh, respectively.
We have seen, as we saw in 2010, that Democratic turnout in midterms can lag significantly as compared to presidential election years. If Democrats fail to turn out their voters in the 2014 midterms, it is not hard to see Democratic losses of 10-20 House seats and 4-8 Senate seats.
Couple the potential for a falloff in Democratic turnout with the likelihood that Republicans will continue to obstruct the process—thereby denying President Obama and the Democrats significant victories—and the prospects for a Republican turnaround in 2014 look strong.
Then there’s history. Since the founding of both of the current major political parties, there have been 11 midterm elections under presidents serving their second terms. In 10 of those 11 elections, the president’s party has lost seats in both the House and the Senate—on average, 34 House seats and six Senate seats. The only exception was the 1998 midterm election, in which Republican investigations of President Bill Clinton backfired and cost the GOP a modest net loss of four House seats. Let’s have a look:
1874
President Ulysses S. Grant (R)
Republicans lost 93 House seats
Senators were not elected by popular vote at this time.
1906
President Theodore Roosevelt (R)
Republicans lost 28 House seats
Senators were not elected by popular vote at this time.
1918
President Woodrow Wilson (D)
Democrats lost 19 House seats and 6 Senate seats
1926
President Calvin Coolidge (R)
Republicans lost 10 House seats and 6 Senate seats
1938
President Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)
Democrats lost 71 House seats and 6 Senate seats
1950
President Harry S. Truman (D)
Democrats lost 29 House seats and 6 Senate seats
1958
President Dwight D. Eisenhower (R)
Republicans lost 48 House seats and 13 Senate seats
1966
President Lyndon B. Johnson (D)
Democrats lost 47 House seats and 4 Senate seats
1986
President Ronald Reagan (R)
Republicans lost 5 House seats and 8 Senate seats
1998
President Bill Clinton (D)
Democrats picked up 4 House seats and broke even in the Senate
2006
President George W. Bush (R)
Republicans lost 30 House seats and 6 Senate seats
In short, every indicator demonstrates that Democrats should lose big in the upcoming midterm elections. As we saw this year, and in 1998, what is expected to happen doesn’t always necessarily occur. But Democrats must be prepared to work very hard if they want to avoid the usual midterm losses that almost always happen to the party of a president at his second midterm.
by Cliston Brown | Nov 13, 2012 | Election Analysis
Today I read a story about a dispute between different exit pollsters over whether or not the Republicans lost the Cuban vote in Florida.
The fact that Republicans are arguing over whether they won or lost the Cuban vote in south Florida, a week after an election in which they got their heads handed to them, tells us all we need to know. The Republicans have far bigger problems than whether they won or lost the Cuban-American vote in Florida. Rather than trying to determine how the Titanic failed to avoid the iceberg, the GOP is arguing over where the deck chairs were placed. Brilliant.
The Titanic metaphor is apt, because the Republican Party, as currently constituted, is a complete shipwreck. It hit the iceberg with the botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and has been sinking, in terms of the public’s confidence, ever since. The party suffered a triple whammy in 2005, with Katrina, the Terri Schiavo controversy and the ill-fated attempt to privatize Social Security; the 2006 midterm election wave that delivered Congress to the Democrats for the first time in 12 years resulted directly from what occurred in 2005.
Then, after the economic meltdown at the end of the Bush administration, the Republicans got whipped again in the 2008 elections. Their brief revival in 2010, from today’s vantage point, appears to have been more of a last gasp than a recovery. Two years after that fleeting triumph, they lost to a president suffering the highest unemployment rate of any reelected president since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, and still, their loss to the Democrats wasn’t even especially close. Additionally, they lost a net of two Senate seats in a year in which they were defending only 10 seats to their opponents’ 23; and if it hadn’t been for the massive gerrymandering in key states in 2011, they may well have lost the House, too. Democratic House candidates, cumulatively, received more votes than Republican House candidates nationwide.
The Republicans are clearly in free fall at this point, and they seem to have no understanding of why this is the case or how to fix it. The party’s establishment wing and its populist wing are at loggerheads, especially now that it has dawned on the rank-and-file that the Wall Street crowd has been using them as pawns for years. But the GOP populists have the wrong formula for reviving the party’s fortunes. The Tea Party element is preaching that the Republicans lost either because they weren’t conservative enough, while many Republicans of all stripes, both populist and establishment, believe they were not clear enough in their messaging. Neither hypothesis is correct. The Republicans have never been more right-wing, not even when they nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964, and they conveyed their rabid conservatism loudly and clearly at every turn. Voters in 2012 did not simply reject the Republican sales pitch; they rejected the Republican product.
The Republican asylum burned to the ground on November 6th, and now the inmates and the guards, rather than figuring out how to rebuild the building, are getting ready to fight to the death to determine who will preside over the ashes. Democrats are gleefully heating up the popcorn and getting ready to enjoy the spectacle.
But Democrats had better not get too comfortable. While the Republicans clearly appear to be learning the wrong lessons from this election, there is always the danger that Democrats will do the same. Democrats must understand that victory does not mean, necessarily, that the country has embraced their entire agenda. The fact is that the Republicans lost this election much more than the Democrats won it. The voters compared their two options, found the former unacceptable, and grudgingly took a gamble on the latter. And while it is true that astute Democratic carpet-bombing of Mitt Romney and the GOP team helped the voters make that choice, the Democrats couldn’t have pulled off that political Dresden if the Republicans hadn’t handed them all the ammunition they needed.
If Democrats don’t justify the voters’ choice, and don’t avoid the massive turnout dropoff of two years ago, the nation’s electoral fortunes will swing back to the Republicans in 2014, just as they did in 2010. The Democrats need to put down the popcorn and go back for a second helping of elbow grease.
by Cliston Brown | Nov 11, 2012 | Election Analysis
I am still working on tying everything together from the 2012 election into a singular theme, but for now, I just want to make some brief observations:
1) That demographic revolution Democrats have been talking about? It’s here. Non-white voters made up approximately 28 percent of the electorate. The Romney team and right-leaning pollsters like Rasmussen and Gallup were modeling for 25-26 percent, and that’s why they were stunned when Obama won. Increasing percentages of non-white voters is the new normal. The Republican Party must adapt, or die.
2) The state-by-state polls showing Obama ahead in virtually every battleground state? Yeah, they were pretty much right on target. (Except, of course, for Rasmussen. Rasmussen still skews to the right and will continue to have credibility issues as long as it’s wrong, which is quite often. But most credible polling turned out to be right on the money or pretty close to it.) So all of you poll deniers out there: Are you convinced yet? Or are you going to continue denying things like, oh, math and science?
3) Gallup is no longer the gold standard in polling. Honestly, it hasn’t been for quite some time, but this election should prove the deathblow to its credibility. In perhaps the most embarrassingly bad performance since, well, Gallup in the 1948 Truman-Dewey miscall, the supposed leading pollster in America went into the final week showing a significant Romney lead, and still had him winning at the end despite a sudden, dramatic tightening after suspending polling due to Hurricane Sandy. Even Rasmussen, always notoriously right-leaning, never showed a seven-point national lead for Romney as Gallup did. Gallup’s numbers on the race were reflective of nothing resembling reality, and this organization either needs to right the ship or—pardon the pun—Gallup off to the glue factory.
4) The pundits, particularly on the right? Completely disgraced. George Will and Peggy Noonan, formerly voices of reason, blew every shred of credibility they had in predicting a near-landslide for Romney. And then there was Dick Morris, but the good news for him was that he didn’t have any credibility to lose. But even some pundits who are usually relatively even-handed were sucked in to the fallacy that this was a dead-even race, and that’s in part due to all the smoke the Obama team blew for months and months, lulling Team Romney and the press into a completely false narrative.
5) Women actually do make up their own minds about what’s important to them. We saw a lot of female Republican politicians and Ann Romney go on television to say that reproductive choice issues really weren’t all that important to women. Well, it turns out that a lot of women actually do care when politicians attempt to tell them what kind of reproductive decisions they can and can’t make. And guess what, folks—quite a few women who would never choose to have an abortion themselves still don’t like the idea that politicians might want to make that decision on their behalf. Oh, and contraception? Stay away from that one, OK? This is 2012. That issue was settled for most people a long time ago. Even among Catholics, an estimated 90-plus percent use contraception at some point in their lives, and if you don’t believe that, ask yourself a question: When was the last time you saw a family with eight kids at Mass?
6) Stay away from rape. The next politician who mentions rape in any context (other than it is a horrible crime and must be severely punished) is not just a bad choice on women’s issues, but also too stupid to hold office. Just about any candidate who brought up this topic got beat. If the lesson here isn’t obvious, I don’t know what is.
7) Irrational hatred is not a viable electoral strategy. Much of the wacky wing of the GOP has spent most of the last four-plus years demonizing President Obama. What did it get them? Well, it got them somewhere in the ball park of 48 percent of the vote. Many on the right were so convinced that the country was dead-set on firing Obama that they neglected the need for a strong candidate or any raison d’etre beyond firing Obama. They just figured any Republican would beat him. Well, a lot of people hated George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon and Franklin Roosevelt. What did they all have in common? They all got reelected, three of them in landslides. Learn this lesson and learn it well: A president vilified by his opponents almost always gets reelected. It’s the presidents who people feel sorry for who get beat.
8) Failure to acknowledge reality does not change reality. Many Republicans were stunned when Romney lost (including, by various accounts, Romney himself and his entire team). But all the scientific polling pointed to an Obama victory all along. The signs were clear for anybody who was willing to see them. There was never a single day, during the entire election cycle, when the state-level polling showed Romney anywhere near the lead in the electoral-vote count. Many leading Republican politicians pooh-poohed the notion of a “gender gap,” but it was there all along, and it was there on election day; 55 percent of women voted for Obama. Many on the right (including the Romney team and, by its own admission, Rasmussen) believed young voters and non-white voters would not show up in anywhere near the numbers they showed up in 2008, but they formed a larger share of the electorate in 2012 than they did in any previous election. As Robert J. Ringer noted in his landmark book Winning Through Intimidation, failure to acknowledge reality and use it to your advantage ensures that reality will work against you. That is exactly what happened to the Republicans in 2012.
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