In the aftermath of the trouncing last Tuesday, some in the media and on the Right are finally beginning to examine the consequences of the conservative echo chamber. I’ve had friends who have been part of the conservative movement for decades complaining to me about this for years, and the chickens are — yes — finally coming home to roost. How far we’ve come from the days when an editor named William F. Buckley Jr. used media, like National Review and Firing Line (a program broadcast on PBS) to provide a forum for informed debate and exchange of ideas.
Insightful analysis here from POLITICO’s Jonathan Martin, and a personal portrait of one loyal GOPer’s personal bubble-bursting experience in the Post. And for reference, Bill Maher has been talking about this (with a literal bubble as a prop) for years.
After President Obama’s decisive victory last night, the reaction from the conservative chattering class has been fast and furious (to coin a phrase) and they’re all over the map. Starting with Karl Rove’s on-air conspiracy theorizing about stolen votes in Ohio, the bloviators and echo chamber residents — as well as the more thoughtful folks on the right — are at it with a wide array of finger-pointing allegations, none of which seem to include the fact that Americans just plain rejected the Republican message.
6) Liberals like Chris Matthews were happy about the hurricane Sandy, which clinched it for Obama — and Chris Christie is a closet Democrat. (Fox News)
7) The entire mainstream media was in the tank and handed Obama his victory. (Rich Noyes)
8) The Romney campaign was inadequately managed. (Peggy Noonan)
9) Wingnuts like Donald Trump highjacked the mainstream GOP message. (Steve Schmidt)
10) The GOP did not rely enough on its “strong bench” of up and coming leaders. (Charles Krauthammer)
This schizophrenic reaction is telling. Another view, which I and some more thoughtful conservatives and students of conservatism hold, is that the movement has fallen apart, lost its intellectual bearings, and needs to right itself or accept its status as a permanently frustrated, disorganized minority.
The meme of the evening is most certainly President Obama’s rejoinder to Mitt Romney’s assertions about the size of the Navy now versus 1916. The Washington Post examined the matter seriously here.
So, the meme is out of the paddock…facebook is up, as is the tumblr.
But Obama delivered the rhetorical zinger of the night by acknowledging that “we have fewer ships than we did in 1916,” but that “we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”
Couldn’t help thinking of Jeff Daniels in his epic scene from the film Gettysburg, at the battle of Little Roundtop.
The dean of the Actors Studio was back on Hardball tonight with his analysis of the performances of the two candidates in last night’s debate. Lipton’s bottom line: characters are set; Romney is running for boss (and a boss you never liked that much) and Romney is running for President.
Cf. Chris Matthews’ comment that Romney is the fellow sitting in business class who won’t get off his cell phone until the flight attendants come and tell him he is holding up the plane’s departure. (Wait not plane, “aircraft.” As Lipton said in an earlier interview, most of us fly in airplanes, or pilot them — perhaps if you own them, they become “aircraft.”)
After a long hiatus, we are back with debate awards following tonight’s rumble on Strong Island.
Alexander P. Butterfield There Is A Taping System Award: Candy Crowley. For shutting down Mitt Romney’s bogus assertion that Obama did not use the phrase “terror attack” in his initial rose garden comments about the Benghazi consulate attack.
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Big (Organized) Love Award: Mitt Romney, for telling us about all of his binders full of women. Tumblr here. Facebook here. ‘Nuff said.
Bill Mazeroski Bottom of the Ninth Home Run Award: Barack Obama. With one minute to go, in extra innings, Romney served up a “100%” middle-of-the plate softball and the president hit it out of the park. If Obama had once again left out the 47% comment his supporters would have been up in arms. As it turned out, his opponent solved this problem for him.
Warren G. Harding Forgotten President Award: George W. Bush, who was treated as a sad relic from the distant past by both candidates.
Sarah Palin Red Herring Award: Mitt Romney, for his Fast and Furious attempts to throw red meat to the conservative base, who are obsessed with the Fast and Furious investigation. As a classic red herring rhetorical fallacy, it is true but not relevant.
Joseph N. Welch Have You No Decency Award: Barack Obama, for his indignant reaction to Mitt Romney’s suggestion that he was not appropriately presidential in his response to the attack on the Benghazi consulate and the resulting deaths of the Ambassador and embassy personnel.
Dan Rather Folksy Metaphor Award: David Axelrod. While we’d prefer to give the award to a Texan, the Rather Award must go to Axe, who told Lawrence O’Donnell in postgame spin that “the American people are not going to buy a $5 trillion pig in a poke.”
Newt Gingrich Moon Colony Award: Barack Obama. For using Mitt’s own line, used he so effectively in the GOP primaries against Newt, when he pilloried Newt’s goal of lunar colonization by saying that if one of his executives came to him with a proposal like that, he’d fire him.
Frequent Flier Metaphor Award: Chris Matthews. For calling Mitt Romney the guy on the plane who won’t get his cell phone as the flight attendants are trying to prepare for takeoff.
The debate tonight was a needed refresher after the dull performance last week. I’ve argued for years that the administration’s decision to muzzle the Veep was not in its best interest.
Biden was not just verbally aggressive on substance, but also effective in his nonverbals — in stark contrast to the President, who was seen as cold, disinterested, and not engaging. I might criticize Biden for his grins, which suggested a fatherly “oh come on now, young man,” but the spin from the Dems indicates they feel it was an effective way of telegraphing that the other fellow was lying, that his statements were, literally, laughable. Or for his scowls, which similarly expressed a fatherly disdain.
We also came close to a Lloyd Bentsen/Dan Quayle moment with the Veep calling out Ryan on his reference to John F. Kennedy. Biden didn’t know Jack Kennedy, but “Now you’re Jack Kennedy.”
Maybe the laughs were too much; decide for yourself.
Among my favorite moments was Joltin’ Joe confronting Ryan over his hypocrisy in requesting stimulus funds for his district while he voted against the underlying legislation. He was hardly the only GOPer to do this; happy to posture against spending, but then glad to take it.
Hopefully the next Presidential debates will be as lively. Veep debates rarely matter; the Quayle debate did — the Palin debate not as much, though the choice itself was of course controversial and “game changing.” Going back over history, it’s always interesting to note that even political junkies are hard pressed to name many Veeps, even, for example, any of Franklin Roosevelt’s over four terms, other than Harry Truman — and that despite FDR’s age and health. This VP race appears to be of a different category.
Thoughts here today on POLITICO about the ongoing MidEast flareup with its supposed roots in an amateur YouTube video, and a Cairo embassy tweet that Mitt Romney treated as a presidential pronouncement.
Along with the other great speeches tonight from Bill Clinton and others, North Carolina’s own Jim Hunt put the progressive message out in its best form. There’s a reason he served 4 terms as our state’s Governor, and strengthened the University system where I teach.
My comments today in POLITICO on the ongoing use of “dog whistle” politics by conservatives. Racially charged code words and references are continuing to flow from the GOP message machine; the question I raise is whether younger generations, who may not have the context of older voters, will even hear the dog whistles, and be able to decode the rhetoric. And whether this is a good, or a bad thing.
On the same day last week that we learned about an Arizona high school baseball quitting a championship game because there was a woman on the opposing team, President Obama delivered a commencement address to the graduating class at Columbia’s Barnard College that could have served as a pep talk to the walk-off team. Make no mistake: This is part of a theme that’s shaping up around social issues including women’s and minority rights.
“After decades of slow, steady, extraordinary progress, you are now poised to make this the century where women shape not only their own destiny but the destiny of this nation,” Obama told the graduating class. “Never underestimate the power of your example.”
Paige Sulzbach, Second Base, Mesa Prep, is one of those examples. As it happens, my sister was one of those examples too — the first woman to play on her high school baseball team. (That’s her on the left, in the photo below.) She told me she wouldn’t have done anything differently than Paige. “She proved herself a competitor, the same as any other,” my sister said, reiterating homage for the game she still calls “chess on grass,” our national pastime.
It’s unfortunate when examples are met with prejudice. But the chess metaphor also applies to politics.
The President should reach out to Sulzbach, as he reached out to Sandra Fluke, the woman recently berated for speaking out about reproductive rights. The contexts are different but the impact is the same. Radical conservatives stand in the path of social equality. The President spoke out against bigotry last week regarding marriage and sexual orientation; he spoke out last Monday against sexism in general. He spoke to the progress of equality over past decades and also under his presidential watch: Just as a woman should be paid equally for their work, she should be able to qualify for fielding second base. On the boy’s team. If she chooses.
It doesn’t matter if you feel the GOP’s efforts amount to a “war” in their initiatives on contraception, Planned Parenthood, or responses to extremist talkers like Rush Limbaugh, who called Ms. Fluke a “slut” for suggesting a woman’s had the right to control her own body. What matters is that some of us still don’t look at each other equally. Men can only imagine what women who choose to play on the boys’ team get called. I’m sure my sister caught some of it.
“Paige and her teammates have all had a valuable experience that will serve them well both on and off the field and for years to come,” my sister said. It would serve us all well.
“Until a girl can…picture herself as a computer programmer, or a combatant commander, she won’t become one,” the President said Monday. Add playing baseball to that list. “Persevere,” the President advised the graduates.
Let’s hope the team that walked off the field in Arizona will also try to persevere, overcome their biases. It would make us all a stronger team.
