Ceaselessly, the babble goes on about the crossroads the Republican party faces after its rejection by almost 64 million voters. And, of course, the discussion misses the point. The usual post-election hand-wringing in the wake of a political defeat has gone beyond usual recrimination. Desperation has turned bitter. Ill-informed and/or cynical political strategists and pollsters had hoodwinked the party’s faithful into thinking they were going to win an election with a nominee who truly considers half of the nation way, way beneath him. Despondency has conflated into screeching on the radio about the old America dying. The resentments that right-wing gasbags with microphones spew into the air unfortunately cloud the opportunity that America has before it.
Tag Archives: Republican
Far, Far From a Status Quo Election
Years ago as a young boy in the small town of West Texas where I grew up, I would daydream along the railroad tracks in the shallow valley below our home. I would wait for the high, mighty trains that I imagined came roaring from Los Angeles from the west or Atlanta from the east. The trains would slow down as they sped by an old salt lake but even so would displace enough air to create a powerful force that on occasion sent my thin, reedy body reeling and crashing into the brown dirt. While other boys were sniffing glue, I was getting off on sudden blasts of air from caravans of steel that the day before might have sat idling near the Pacific or come from the other side of the country where Sherman ran roughshod over the Confederacy.
One day, one of the trains slowed to a pace slower than usual. A clump of rail yard workers not far from me waited. One of the crew stood by a thick iron stick that he pushed away from his body. As he did, the tracks moved and separated in part. I watched with fascination. A new set of tracks appeared suddenly and diverted the massive train to another set of tracks. That decades-old image came to mind as I sat with my old college roommate watching the returns of the election of 2012 that some observers have characterized as a status-quo election. It was anything but. In fact, it was a shattering election – far more important than the pedantic conclusion that Democrats retained control of the White House and the Senate and that Republicans maintained their majority in the House.
Teetotaling the Tea Party
The baying at the moon began the instant it became evident that none of the swing states were going Mitt Romney’s way on Tuesday evening. Like gargoyles atop a cathedral, the faces of Republican strategists and their sidekicks on right-wing television looked stunned with surprise then were etched by gall. After denial could no longer hold back the reality of the night, horror began to grip their faces. Barack Obama would be President until 2017, and the billions of dollars that the Supreme Court had sanctioned for corporations to buy the election started going down the drain as each race for the Senate was called. Their only consolation was losing a handful of seats in House of Representatives – and that only because state legislatures throughout the country have so gerrymandered congressional districts that Democrats cannot mount competitive races in most states.
And so before the night was out, the discussion turned to how Republicans “reach out” to HispanicLatinos, who generated supermajorities of as much as 80 percent in some states for the Democratic ticket. Continue reading
Navarrette Denies Himself — and the Rest of Us (Again)
It is almost impossible to understand Ruben Navarrette. On the heels of trying to take down Olympic hero Leo Manzano a couple months ago, Navarrette in a column published by CNN on its website is trying, in effect, to keep HispanicLatinos from voting for President Obama. It is no longer important to understand what makes Navarrette tick, though his point is well taken: HispanicLatinos are not yet respected fully by the political system. But his answer to the problem is particularly atrocious. Navarrette wants HispanicLatinos to vote for neither Mitt Romney nor Obama — a half no-vote for each.
Navarrette when he votes today thereby would deny a full vote to Obama, the one of the two candidates more likely to nominate a member of the Supreme Court likely to defend the constitutional rights that HispanicLatinos need to…become respected fully by the political system.
Election Post-Scripts as Tea Leaves and Footnotes
Whether President Obama wins re-election tomorrow, some electoral post-scripts will be engaged immediately. We will know if the HispanicLatino vote was important as expected, especially in the swing states. One of the two campaigns clearly will not have done enough to win – while hundreds of thousands of HispanicLatinos who did not vote could have made the difference. In either case, the HispanicLatino vote becomes ever more important. On the very day after the election, they will add more potential voters for 2016 proportionately than any other group.
If Obama wins with the HispanicLatino vote having proven decisive, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio will shoot to the head of the pack in his party, and his political action committees will begin to attract immediate money. Just as important, he will draw additional, competent political advisors with national experience to make sure the young legislator does not misstep and try to turn his party away from its harsh anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric. For those reasons, Rubio and sophisticated political analysts – not necessarily the ones on television every morning – will look closely at the results from three distinct congressional races across the country to read tea leaves about the future and to consider other possibilities.
HispanicLatinos: Progressive Voters. True or False?
The current election, however it turns out, presents an opportunity for progressive-minded activists to confront their sometimes-hidden fear that HispanicLatinos could form an antediluvian, conservative wave as they become a larger share of the national population. Indeed, if HispanicLatinos vote in the near-70-percent range for President Obama and he wins re-election, they might give progressives the wrong idea. Worse still would be if Obama loses re-election and progressives see no need to develop the HispanicLatino vote for elections to come. If HispanicLatinos remain within the Democratic fold in future elections as they might on Nov. 6, they undoubtedly could make the years ahead grim for Republicans.
The degree to which HispanicLatinos become truly progressive/liberal is a key question for progressives and Republicans alike. And so now is the time for both to appreciate fully the power of the entire changing demography of the country – not just of the HispanicLatino population – and therein lie lessons to be learned regardless of how the 2012 elections turn out. An indication of how HispanicLatinos might be trending politically comes of late from researchers at the Pew Center. They reported last week that 52 percent of HispanicLatinos approve of same-sex marriage – a turnaround from 56 percent opposed six years ago. Among HispanicLatino Catholics, approval was higher, at 54 percent — a little higher than the national norm..
Paul Ryan: Too Angry Too Young
Gore Vidal many decades before he grew old said in a television interview that the old grow angry when they accept that their youth is indeed lost, never to return. That was rich coming from Gore, who was angry most of his life, living as he did long before more tolerant times changed public sentiment towards his sexual orientation. Gore had a reason to be angry, but by all reports he was not the prototypical angry white male when he lived out his last years with more grace than Clint Eastwood and Jack Welch are displaying in their last decades. Now the times are giving us angry white men like Paul Ryan. His business suit last night during the vice presidential debate seemed a tight fit, perhaps made so by its efforts to contain youthful, muscular ire.
Eastwood, of course, is now remembered for his vulgar empty-chair routine at the Republican National Convention in Tampa that embarrassed himself and Ann Romney and her kids on national television. The Romneys all showed up excitedly to see the bonanza of a Hollywood star endorse Mitt for president. What they got instead were the rantings of an old, angry man taking license with the here and now. Only a couple months later, Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, also took fictitious liberty with reality, accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of cooking the numbers so that the employment rate fell just in time to benefit President Obama’s campaign for re-election.
Go Hard Now at the HispanicLatino Vote
So much has been made of the debate on Wednesday. With good reason. President Obama did not do so well. But my mind goes to the HispanicLatino couple driving off in separate cars to work this morning two days after the debacle in Denver. What should the couple look for now having heard two years of anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric from the Republican party and, two months before the election, having been told by its candidate for President that they are part of the 47 percent of the country that does not matter?
Before the debate, the couple and perhaps their kids already might have been a part of the 70 percent of the HispanicLatino electorate that wanted Obama re-elected. A news report the day before the debate had HispanicLatino support for Obama surpassing 70 percent in some polls. That would be historic, approaching Kennedy-Johnson 1960 and Johnson-Humphrey territory in 1964.
How Should Republicans Spell Landslide? W-h-i-g.
Some 30 years ago, Horace Busby, an advisor to and speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson, famously coined the phrase “electoral lock” arguing that the Republican party would win contests for the White House for decades to come. Busby, a good man of progressive virtue, had no clue about how the HispanicLatino population one day would upset the Electoral College applecart.
The Republican electoral lock on the White House that Busby predicted lasted a little more than one decade (1980-1992) and had the Supreme Court not taken away Al Gore’s win in Florida, the country might have elected a Democrat as President for 20 years running. And now the nation would be on the verge of adding four years to that string if the polls are right that President Obama is more than edging towards re-election. The polls, this week at least, indicate Obama nearing landslide territory.
Now, the General Election: HispanicLatinos, Assets to Victory
After their innumerable convention speeches, backslapping meetings and highly produced self-congratulatory videos in Charlotte and Tampa, the two political parties now confront the challenge of developing a strategy to attract and persuade Hispanic and Latinos to vote for either President Obama’s reelection or Mitt Romney’s candidacy. The polls are testing sorely the conviction of political strategists that a growing number of HispanicLatinos are swing voters whose decisions presumably would make a real difference in the election.