Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Charles Pierce at his best:


The Ron Fournier Effect: Because Democracy Disturbs the Horses
In which people are scared to death about democracy and populism.
By Charles P. Pierce

Earlier this weekend, The New York Times ran a preposterous story about how Hillary Rodham Clinton's recent turn towards obvious populism may be a mistake. This was according to such leading lights of the Democratic party as Senator Heidi Heitkamp of the newly established petro-state of North Dakota and Senator Joe Manchin (D-Bituminous), who comes from West Virginia. Together, wielding their vast political influence, they could swing eight entire electoral votes behind HRC. (They and their constituent industries have a bigger impact on the destruction of the climate than they do on the Democratic nominating process, but never mind.) The ridiculousness of the piece has been fairly well chewed over but, wouldn't you just know it, it's found a champion in Ron Fournier, former Karl Rove life coach, who now runs a shelter for orphaned political idiocy at National Journal. It doesn't take long for Fournier to back his argument over his own feet.

Amid a wave of dissatisfaction with the U.S. political system, the percentage of self-identified independents is at the highest level in decades, far exceeding support given to either the GOP or Democratic Party. The approval rating for both parties is at a record low. A plurality of voters calls themselves moderate—38 percent, compared with 33 percent who identify as conservatives and just 26 percent who say they're liberal. And yet, a large and growing number of self-identified independents consistently vote only Republican or Democratic. That explains Clinton's strategy: Technological advances will allow her team to pinpoint every possible backer and motivate them to vote with messages designed to stoke fear and hatred toward the GOP.

Actually, what it means is that most people who self-identify as "independents" to pollsters are lying their tailfeathers off. It has become a way to buff up your intellect by staying above the hurly-burly of ordinary politics. Fournier then returns to ride his own ass into his own private Jerusalem. Again.

Until a bold new leader breaks the cycle of negative partisanship, support for the two major parties will continue to bleed away, lesser-of-two-evils voters will dominate a sad electorate, and more Americans will check out of the system all together. Barack Obama managed to run a campaign in 2008 that leveraged his demographic advantages while appealing to a broad swath of the electorate. The fact that he didn't follow through on his promise to unite the country after Election Day doesn't meant that it can't be done.

Right on cue, in today's Times, renowned public intellectual David Brooks chimes in on the same theme. He makes even less sense than Fournier, which is saying something.

This strategy is bad, first, for the country. America has always had tough partisan politics, but for most of its history, the system worked because it had leaders who could reframe debates, reorganize coalitions, build center-out alliances and reach compromises. Politics is broken today because those sorts of leaders have been replaced by highly polarizing, base-mobilizing politicians who hew to party orthodoxy, ignore the 38 percent of voters who identify as moderates and exacerbate partisanship and gridlock. If Clinton decides to be just another unimaginative base-mobilizing politician, she will make our broken politics even worse.

Actually, the worst thing HRC could do to what Brooks laments as "our broken politics" is get herself elected as a Democrat because the Republican party determined as a basic principle that no Democratic president will be allowed to govern as a Democrat. They established this principle about 11 seconds after HRC's husband got elected in 1992. The prion disease that afflicts the higher centers of the Republican brain shows as its most garish symptom a reckless, gleeful vandalism toward political custom.

That is the great failure of our elite political media -- a complete disinclination to look at what is plainly right there in front of them. It is simply not considered good form among our political elites to note that one of our two political parties has lost its mind and that it has committed itself to wrecking our politics if it doesn't always get its way. A radicalized Supreme Court takes up a laughable case through which it seeks to destroy the Affordable Care Act, and the Republicans in Congress already have rejected out of hand the easiest way to solve what never should have been a legal problem in the first place. But the timing of all this thumb-sucking is even more curious.

Last week, HRC gave a thwacking good speech on the efforts by the Republican party, and by various foundation-fattened "independent" political groups, to restrict the franchise of people who are unlikely to vote for Republicans. She called people out. She named names. Suddenly, the respectable political class is horrified by her "base mobilizing." Since when did support for every individual's right to vote become nothing more than a way to charge up your liberal base? (If you answered, "For the Republicans? About a day after the Voting Rights Act was signed in 1965," you win today's grand prize.) Apparently, calling out the new Jim Crow for what it is may wake the children and disturb the horses. Since when did expanding the franchise become a threat to the "center-out" politics over which slobbers David Brooks, who spent his formative years cheering on the destruction of those politics on behalf of wolvering conservatism?

I have no idea whether HRC will "tack back to the center," or whatever the cliche du jour turns out to be in the high midsummer of 2016. But, for now, if she's making the likes of Ron Fournier and David Brooks nervous about their ongoing journalistic malpractice, that's all to the good.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35571/ron-fournier-and-the-fear-of-american-democracy/