All-Purpose NuILX thread for American Politics

former WH speechwriter finally lets it all out. Ned linked to that one before, but it's fun to actually read the entire thing, where the guy goes on about his self-proclaimed hatred for Harry Belafonte, et al.

The trouble is that public opinion is often ignorant, confused and contradictory; and so the policies it produces are often ignorant, confused and contradictory

that thing I quoted above was from allaccess.com, a subscription radio website.

The list of about 100 advertisers is similar to much longer "no-buy" lists for other talk programming, including most top conservative talkers and "shock jocks."

and includes an advertiser or two, like REI, that donates 100% to Democrats

xp

http://www.observer.com/data/articleimages/photoimages/120406_article_horowitz.jpg

TESTOSTERONE: IT'S NOT JUST FOR MEN

I think he left for San Diego to go work for IBM.

i forgot how far Frist had his dick into that whole SchaivoGate thing until reading that CNN peice.

that's not how it works - the Hussein thing will be brought out here and there to reinforce other things more relevant to people who don't have their minds made up.

but anyway, I think some other parts of the world might think differently about us if we elect a guy with Hussein in his name.

The thing is an interesting read, but it's a forced reg site, so here goes. I

The New Republic Online

THE UNSPOKEN TRUTH ABOUT THE GOP.
Southern Discomfort
by Rick Perlstein
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 11.29.06

In the days after the 2004 election, the same CNN exit poll was on every pundit's lips: Asked about their most important issue, a plurality of voters cited "moral values." Eighty percent of that plurality voted for George W. Bush--no matter that cooler heads soon demonstrated these findings to be statistically meaningless. For "most of the last 100 years, politics has been defined by economic interests," Bill Clinton's former press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, pronounced on MSNBC. "That's no longer true." And so, a refrain developed: Without making significant inroads among churchgoing Southerners, Democrats could never hope to win a governing majority.

But this month's election yielded data that, unlike CNN's exit poll, was irrefutable: For the first time since 1953, the party that dominates the South is the minority party in Congress. November 7, 2006, may well go down in history as the day the modern Republican Party became a mere Southern faction. There's only one problem: No one's talking about it on TV. Instead, Heath Shuler became the cable news bookers' new favorite guest, as if the election of a pro-life Democrat from North Carolina was the election's most important trend: As Bob Schieffer announced, "These Democrats that were elected last night are conservative Democrats." Meanwhile, the one man whose book predicted the election's actual revelation--that the South and its conservative ways were irrelevant to the Democrats' victory--has been shut out. "I managed to squeeze onto Chris Matthews once," says Thomas F. Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, "but we didn't even talk about the book."

Schaller's book is Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. Published this October, it argues, "The South is likely to become more Republican in the decades ahead," that Democrats can make and keep the Republicans a mere regional party, and that the best shot at a Democratic majority "in the immediate term is to consolidate electoral control over the Northeast and Pacific Coast blue states, expand the party's Midwestern margins, and cultivate the new-growth areas of the interior West." That's exactly how it went down November 7. The last prognosticator of structural shifts in American politics this accurate--Kevin Phillips, in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority--became a household name. But, because he is a friend, it pains me to have to make a prognostication of my own: Tom Schaller will never become a household name. The reasons are ideological.

The people who have paid most attention to Schaller have been hysterics. Former Representative Glen Browder, a founder of the Blue Dog Democrats, was asked in the Anniston Star what he thought of Whistling Past Dixie. Browder, also a Ph.D. in political science, replied that Schaller was spouting "foolishness," but that "fortunately, most national leaders today understand that the road to the magic 218 number inevitably runs through this region." He said this oblivious to the fact that Schaller's "foolishness" had, in fact, just come true.

Still, Browder will always have an easier time winning a seat alongside Schieffer on Face the Nation than Schaller. TV punditry is not a meritocracy. Points aren't awarded for being right. (If they were, how many talking heads who saw only rosy things ahead in Iraq would still be on air?) It is an ideological system, with perverse ideological rules. And Browder has just honored one of them: Glorify what the French call l'Amerique profunde--the "heartland," of which the South is the sacred center.

Schaller speaks ill of the South. The very heart of his argument is a taboo notion: that the South votes Republican because the Republicans have perfected their appeal to Southern racism, and that Democrats simply can't (and shouldn't) compete.

But, among scholars, this is hardly news. Schaller builds this conclusion on one of the most impressive papers in recent political science, "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South," by Nicholas Valentino and David Sears. Running regressions on a massive data set of ideological opinions, Sears and Valentino demonstrate with precision that, for example, a white Southern man who calls himself a "conservative," controlling for racial attitudes, is no less likely to chance a vote for a Democratic presidential candidate than a Northerner who calls himself a conservative. Likewise, a pro-life or hawkish Southern white man is no less likely--again controlling for racial attitudes--than a pro-life or hawkish Northerner to vote for the Democrat. But, on the other hand, when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions (such as whether one agrees "If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites," or choosing whether blacks are "lazy" or "hardworking"), an untoward result jumps out: white Southerners are twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. Schaller's writes: "Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters ... the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past."

What's more, if Republicans have succeeded by openly baiting a region of the country not really American (the latte-swilling Northeast), Schaller says, "The Democrats need their own 'them,' and the social conservatives who are the bedrock of Southern politics provide the most obvious and burdensome stone to hang around the Republicans' neck." Democrats should cite "Southern obstructionism as a continuing impediment to the investments and progress the country must make in the coming century." There's just one problem: You can't do that on TV.

Once upon a time, of course, pundits used to say what Schaller says: The South, sometimes, is backward. Since the late '60s, however--not coincidentally, around the time Kevin Phillips rose to fame--a new, unspoken set of rules evolved.

It happened in a moment of trauma. After the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, all the top news executives sent a wire to Mayor Richard J. Daley protesting the way their employees "were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten." Such was their presumption of cultural authority they couldn't imagine how anyone could disagree. Then Mayor Daley went on Walter Cronkite's show and shocked the media establishment by refusing to apologize to the beaten reporters: "Many of them are hippies themselves. They're part of this movement." Polls revealed 60 percent of Americans agreed with Daley. For the press, it triggered a dark night of the soul. In an enormously influential column, the pundit Joseph Kraft, shaken, wrote, "Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans--in Middle America."

That air of alienation--that helpless feeling that we have no idea what's going on out there--has structured elite discourse about the rest of the country ever since. A set of constructs about what "the great mass of ordinary Americans" supposedly believes--much more conservative things than any media elitist would believe, basically--became reified. Pundits like Kraft--a social class that spends much of their time among people like themselves, inside the Beltway--learned to bend over backward to be fair, lest they advertise their own alienation from everyone else. On subjects that chafed them--say, the relevance of certain ugly folkways of the South in electoral politics--they just had to bend harder. Or ignore the matter altogether.

It can produce in today's TV talking head a twisted kind of neurosis: an instinctual distrust of the political appeal of anything that can be categorized as liberal, even in defiance of the actual data; and an inability to call a spade a spade--say, that people shouldn't have been beaten indiscriminately in the streets of Chicago in 1968. That's why nobody on TV says Democrats can't win in the South in the short-term--and Schaller, it has to be said, is optimistic about Democrats winning Southern gains in the long term--without playing to white voters' inclinations to see blacks as lazy. It's much easier to say that Heath Shuler represents a trend. That offends nothing but the facts.

RICK PERLSTEIN is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year.

It's only when he has to "act like a politician" that he turns into Gorebot.

http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2006/11/the_2008_democr.html#more

Interesting thought. Maybe after another 4 (or 8) years of Gore as VP, the country might be ready for a Gore presidency.

who else we got? former fattay huckabee?

i am confused. how's this play out? is there a candidate for the loco religious 35%? someone to syphon them so mccain squeaks by? or is it that mccain is just a figment of the media's wild minds and once people really get a load of this pork-chop-hued psycho they'll run into the bland waiting arms of daddy romney?

i don't know.

and while i do agree that the south is likely lost for a while on the presidential level, it doesn't mean there aren't congressional seats, governorships etc to be had there.

i have full confidence that a significant chunk of the electorate will see what an unappealing ass guliani is once they get a good look at him - he's ugly, he's a jerk, even his voice is gross.

if he's the veep, they probably won't

a middle manager is doing his best and providing for those who are closest to him. hive mentality in the face of a harsh world. i think it's the same thing with someone directing a waterboarding

Outside of the rest of the discussion: I just don't get this part. The responsibility levels seem so different to me. Torture spoken of as somehow equivalent to the place of a middle manager, not, like, an executioner or something?

We're all talking about Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia aren't we

well torture, at least as far as i understand how it works currently in the us military, is just as bureaucratically entrenched, with a shared responsibility among many people and policies (some more than others), as fucking people out of their mortgages is. xp

the visionary is protecting the nation and the executioner is just following orders.

best illustration of how distant people can get from other people w/r/t u.s. military torture is still don rumsfeld's scribbled margin note next to the authorization request for "stress positions" at guantanamo: "i stand for eight hours a day! why only four?"

(don rumsfeld in general a pretty rich seam for this sort of thing)

rumsfeld is a psychopath

haha otm

yah but
but
gnnh

welcome to Indefinite Detention Land btw

(with "serious reservations" of course)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/us/politics/obama-signs-military-spending-bill.html?_r=1&hp

Happy New Year!!!

dexneb can tell us how it was politically necessary.

http://news.yahoo.com/republican-candidate-romney-veto-immigration-dream-act-023856783.html

To be fair, his defense of it is pretty sound:

"If I'm the president of the United States I want to end illegal immigration so that we can protect legal immigration. I like legal immigration."

smh

pandering at its best

I mean you'd think even the most hardened anti-illegal people would see the 'serve military' caveat in lieu of school and at least appreciate that but noooooo

there's a GOP thread

nothing like starting the new year off with a nice hit piece: http://exiledonline.com/failing-up-with-joshua-foust-meet-the-evil-genius-massacre-denier-who-shills-for-war-profiteers/

calling a dude who was bullied a twerp and making fun of his height maybe not the best look but other than that

ive been seeing that feud play out on twitter over the last couple weeks... really hard to take any of these people seriously when they are all so bad at zinging

yeah that dude is trying so hard to be taibbi

foust is a dick though i remember him being all "occupy wall street should get a job" stick to foreign policy bro

yeah he def seems like an idiot

heh kev you know that ames and taibbi co-edited the exile for years

no! that explains so much though seriously

that actual signing statement is like unabashedly evil. "I personally won't use these powers, think they're wrong, but let me sign them into law in case somebody more bloodthirsty than me becomes President at some point"

otm