Monday, November 12, 2012 7:11:34 AM
Obama On Historic Gay Marriage Wins: President Is 'So Absolutely Delighted'
Posted: 11/09/2012 2:25 pm EST Updated: 11/09/2012 2:51 pm EST
In addition to his own election victory, President Barack Obama is reportedly "so absolutely delighted" by the four historic same-sex marriage wins [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/gay-marriage-victory_n_2085900.html ] across the country.
Buzzfeed's Chris Gelder reports [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/jarrett-obama-so-absolutely-delighted-with-marr ] that Obama Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett spoke to supporters of the Human Rights Campaign on Nov. 8, and said the president believes voters in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington "all came down on the right side of history."
Jarrett also took time to clarify the Obama administration's stance on another benchmark win [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/tammy-baldwin-election-results-2012_n_2049837.html ]: "We couldn't be more thrilled that Wisconsin is sending Tammy Baldwin to the Senate," she said.
Baldwin will become the country's first openly gay senator.
Take a look at other openly LGBT candidates who were victorious on Election Night below:
[slideshow embedded; 13 others]
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/09/obama-historic-gay-marriage-wins_n_2102801.html [with comments]
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Christian Right Failed to Sway Voters on Issues
"Those voters turned out, and they voted overwhelmingly against Obama," said Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, of evangelical Christians.
Win Mcnamee/Getty Images
“The entire moral landscape has changed,” said R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, via Associated Press
“We’re not going away, we just need to recalibrate,” said Bob Vander Plaats, president of the Iowa-based Family Leader.
Steve Hebert for The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: November 9, 2012
Christian conservatives, for more than two decades a pivotal force in American politics, are grappling with Election Day results that repudiated their influence and suggested that the cultural tide — especially on gay issues — has shifted against them.
They are reeling not only from the loss of the presidency, but from what many of them see as a rejection of their agenda. They lost fights against same-sex marriage [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/same_sex_marriage/index.html ] in all four states where it was on the ballot, and saw anti-abortion-rights Senate candidates defeated and two states vote to legalize marijuana [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/marijuana/index.html ] for recreational use.
It is not as though they did not put up a fight; they went all out as never before: The Rev. Billy Graham dropped any pretense of nonpartisanship and all but endorsed Mitt Romney for president. Roman Catholic bishops denounced President Obama’s policies as a threat to life, religious liberty and the traditional nuclear family. Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition distributed more voter guides in churches and contacted more homes by mail and phone than ever before.
“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary [ http://www.sbts.edu/ ], in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.
“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”
Conservative Christian leaders said that they would intensify their efforts to make their case, but were just beginning to discuss how to proceed. “We’re not going away, we just need to recalibrate,” said Bob Vander Plaats, president and chief executive of The Family Leader [ http://www.thefamilyleader.com/ ], an evangelical organization in Iowa.
The election results are just one indication of larger trends in American religion that Christian conservatives are still digesting, political analysts say. Americans who have no religious affiliation — pollsters call them the “nones” — are now about one-fifth of the population over all, according to a study [ http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx ] released last month by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life [ http://www.pewforum.org/ ].
The younger generation is even less religious: about one-third of Americans ages 18 to 22 say they are either atheists, agnostics or nothing in particular. Americans who are secular are far more likely to vote for liberal candidates and for same-sex marriage. Seventy percent of those who said they had no religion voted for Mr. Obama, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.
“This election signaled the last where a white Christian strategy is workable,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute [ http://publicreligion.org/ ], a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and education organization based in Washington.
“Barack Obama’s coalition was less than 4 in 10 white Christian,” Dr. Jones said. “He made up for that with not only overwhelming support from the African-American and Latino community, but also with the support of the religiously unaffiliated.”
In interviews, conservative Christian leaders pointed to other factors that may have blunted their impact in this election: they were outspent by gay rights advocates in the states where marriage was on the ballot; comments on rape by the Senate candidates Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard E. Mourdock in Indiana were ridiculed nationwide and alienated women; and they never trusted Mr. Romney as a reliably conservative voice on social issues.
However, they acknowledge that they are losing ground. The evangelical share of the population is both declining and graying, studies show. Large churches like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Assemblies of God, which have provided an organizing base for the Christian right, are losing members.
“In the long run, this means that the Republican constituency is going to be shrinking on the religious end as well as the ethnic end,” said James L. Guth, a professor of political science at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.
Meanwhile, religious liberals are gradually becoming more visible. Liberal clergy members spoke out in support of same-sex marriage, and one group ran ads praising Mr. Obama’s health care plan for insuring the poor and the sick. In a development that highlighted the diversity within the Catholic Church, the “Nuns on the Bus” [ http://nunsonthebus.com/ ] drove through the Midwest warning that the budget proposed by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, would cut the social safety net.
For the Christian right in this election, fervor and turnout were not the problem, many organizers said in interviews. White evangelicals made up 26 percent of the electorate — 3 percent more than in 2004, when they helped to propel President George W. Bush to re-election. During the Republican primaries, some commentators said that Mr. Romney’s Mormon faith would drive away evangelicals, many of whom consider his church a heretical cult.
And yet, in the end, evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Romney — even matching the presidential vote of Mormons: 78 percent for Mr. Romney and 21 percent for Mr. Obama, according to exit polls by Edison Research.
“We did our job,” said Mr. Reed, who helped pioneer religious voter mobilization with the Christian Coalition in the 1980s and ’90s, and is now founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition [ http://ffcoalition.com/ ]. He said that his organization outdid itself this year, putting out 30 million voter guides in 117,000 churches, 24 million mailings to voters in battleground states and 26 million phone calls.
“Those voters turned out, and they voted overwhelmingly against Obama,” Mr. Reed said. “But you can’t be driving in the front of the boat and leaking in the back of the boat, and win the election.
“You can’t just overperform among voters of faith,” he continued. “There’s got to be a strategy for younger voters, unmarried voters, women voters — especially single women — and minorities.”
The Christian right should have a natural inroad with Hispanics. The vast majority of Hispanics are evangelical or Catholic, and many of those are religious conservatives opposed to same-sex marriage and abortion. And yet, the pressing issue of immigration [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html ] trumped religion, and Mr. Obama won the Hispanic vote by 44 percentage points.
“Latino Protestants were almost as inclined to vote for Mr. Obama as their Catholic brethren were,” said Dr. Guth, at Furman, “and that’s certainly a big change, and going the wrong direction as far as Republicans are concerned.”
The election outcome was also sobering news for Catholic bishops, who this year spoke out on politics more forcefully and more explicitly than ever before, some experts said. The bishops and Catholic conservative groups helped lead the fight against same-sex marriage in the four states where that issue was on the ballot. Nationwide, they undertook a campaign that accused Mr. Obama of undermining religious liberty, redoubling their efforts when a provision in the health care overhaul [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/health_care_reform/index.html ] required most employers to provide coverage for contraception.
Despite this, Mr. Obama retained the Catholic vote, 50 to 48 percent, according to exit polls, although his support slipped from four years ago. Also, solid majorities of Catholics supported same-sex marriage, said Dr. Jones, the pollster.
Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento, who serves on the bishops’ domestic policy committee, said that the bishops spoke out on many issues, including immigration and poverty, but got news media attention only when they talked about abortion, same-sex marriage and religious liberty. Voters who identify as Catholic but do not attend Mass on Sunday may not have been listening, he said, but Catholics who attend Mass probably “weigh what the church has to say.”
“I think good Catholics can be found across the political spectrum,” Bishop Soto said, “but I do think they wrestle with what the church teaches.”
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Related
Beliefs: Politicians Who Reject Labels Based on Religion (November 10, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/us/politics/politicians-who-speak-of-religion-in-unaccustomed-ways.html
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/us/politics/christian-conservatives-failed-to-sway-voters.html
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What's Next For Religious Conservatives?
By David Gibson
Posted: 11/08/2012 4:55 pm EST Updated: 11/08/2012 4:55 pm EST
(RNS) Mitt Romney failed in his bid to win the White House back for Republicans, but the biggest losers in Tuesday's voting may be Christian conservatives who put everything they had into denying President Obama a second term and battling other threats to their agenda.
Instead of the promised victories, the religious right encountered defeat at almost every turn. Not only did Obama win convincingly, but Democrats held onto the Senate -- and the power to confirm judges -- and Wisconsin elected the nation's first openly gay senator, Tammy Baldwin.
Meanwhile, Republican senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock went down to unanticipated defeat in large part because of their strongly anti-abortion views, and an effort in Florida to restrict abortion failed. For the first time ever, same-sex marriage proponents won on ballots in four out of four states, while marijuana for recreational use was legalized in two out of three states where the question was on the ballot.
Even Michele Bachmann, an icon among Christian conservatives, barely held onto her House seat in Minnesota while Tea Party favorite Allen West lost his congressional district in Florida.
"Evangelical Christians must see the 2012 election as a catastrophe for crucial moral concerns," R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in a sobering post-mortem.
"DISASTER," David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network wrote on his blog. He then amended his lament to read: "COLOSSAL DISASTER."
Yet as bad as the results were for social conservatives, they may now face an equally difficult fight as they try to defend their agenda. Sifting through the electoral rubble, some conservatives and GOP leaders argue that the party's positions and presentation on issues like gay marriage and abortion rights turn off more voters than they attract.
This internal battle is in many respects the natural aftermath of a painful political loss, and Republicans are already involved in a process of soul-searching -- and back-biting -- that will likely continue for some time as the GOP tries to figure out how it can find a winning formula.
But this time around, more than in previous election cycles, Christian conservatives are a particularly large target, and they are feeling especially exposed to criticism.
Even before the votes were counted, for example, Romney's shift to the center -- he studiously downplayed social issues like gay rights and abortion in the last month of the campaign -- coincided with a surge in the polls and bolstered arguments that the party should soft-pedal traditional sexual morality in order to win elections and promote economic conservatism.
As Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist who backed Romney, wrote Wednesday in The Washington Post, "the issue of gay marriage is a generational one, a battle that social conservatives have lost ... The American people have changed their minds on the issue and fighting this one is political flat-earthism."
Christian conservatives are not about to accept that view, however, and in the hours after Romney's defeat they seemed to take two main tacks in rebuttal.
One was to double-down on their agenda by pinning the blame on Romney and his campaign for not stressing social issues much more forcefully.
"Mitt Romney is a good man, but let's just be honest -- we Republicans nominated the most liberal Republican nominee in history," said Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who joined a Wednesday morning webcast with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.
Jordan said that doubts about Romney's convictions, as well as his campaign's modulation near the end, disappointed values voters and doomed the ticket.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of the Susan B. Anthony List, a leading anti-abortion lobby, agreed.
"What was presented as discipline by the Romney campaign by staying on one message -- the economy -- was a strategic error that resulted in a winning margin of pro-life votes being left on the table," Dannenfelser said. "Victory was handed to the opponent."
The other tack that emerged, however, was to concede that Christian conservatives may need to change the tone if not the substance of their message in order to appeal to voters who are increasingly non-male, non-white and even non-Christian. The electorate today is increasingly Latino, and younger, and both those groups are turned off by anything that smacks of righteous moralizing.
"No party can win if it is seen as heartless," said Mohler. "No party can win if it appeals only to white and older Americans. No party can win if it looks more like the way to the past than the way to the future."
Indeed, exit polls indicated that evangelicals turned out more strongly for Romney (or against Obama) than they had for any other Republican in history -- but that nearly 80 percent margin was still not enough in raw numbers to put the GOP ticket over the top.
"My message really today is we have more work to do to become more diverse, but the party has to start building bridges and practicing the politics of addition to bring more people in," Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said at a morning-after briefing in Washington.
"My corollary message," he added, "is there is no inherent conflict between those folks coming in and us. In most cases there's a great deal of commonality."
But in the wake of Tuesday's defeat, that's a message that Christian conservatives are going to have to sell to the Republican Party itself before they can make it to the general public.
Copyright 2012 Religion News Service
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/religious-conservatives-2012-election_n_2089983.html [with comments]
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Hey, liberals: You haven’t won the culture war
(Credit: Steven Chiang [ http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-492139p1.html ] via Shutterstock [ http://www.shutterstock.com/ ]/Salon)
Bill O'Reilly may have surrendered, but America's dangerous divisions go deeper than party, race or religion
By Andrew O'Hehir
Saturday, Nov 10, 2012 02:00 PM CST
This may come as news to you, but our country is severely divided. Seriously, though: Tuesday’s election, in which 120 million voters were united only by the belief that the other side’s candidate was a nightmare, was only the most recent illustration of a profound cultural divide in American life that goes back at least 50 or 60 years (and arguably much longer). It’s a major talking point on cable news shows and in opinion columns of all stripes – yes, duh, mea culpa – one that has sparked the careers of numerous pundits and commentators.
David Brooks [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html ] and Thomas Frank [ http://www.tcfrank.com/ ], to cite the obvious examples, have dined out for a decade or more on their purported ability to diagnose the worsening antagonism reflected in the 2012 election, when multicultural metropolitan elite groups on both coasts overwhelmingly voted for one candidate and lower-status white people in the middle of the country overwhelmingly voted for the other. Brooks has long specialized in boiling this down to pithy phrases: Volvos vs. F-150 pickups, Walmart shoppers vs. Whole Foods shoppers, and so on. (As my wife recently observed, in today’s economy it could more accurately be put this way: The people who shop at Target vs. the other people who shop at Target.)
But if we think we can understand this division better by using cute demographic shorthand or by trying to claim that it’s fundamentally about religion or abortion or sexual morality or the role of government or whatever other hobby horse we choose to ride, we’re kidding ourselves. Those are significant issues that provoke strong feelings on both sides, to be sure, but I believe they are symbols or symptoms of division rather than its underlying causes. Anytime we get fixated on the centrality of any one of those factors, we risk being left behind by the rushing river of history.
I recently came upon a column Pat Buchanan [ http://buchanan.org/blog/the-antietam-of-the-culture-war-5074 ] wrote back in April in which he argued that same-sex marriage would be the defining issue of the 2012 campaign and that election day was “shaping up as the Antietam of the culture war.” We’ll get back to Buchanan later — he is a central figure in the history of cultural warfare — but as is so often the case, he was right in an upside-down Bizarro World fashion. Gay marriage was a total non-issue in the campaign, and as every month passes, it becomes an ever-more-ordinary part of American life, roughly as exciting as the other kind of marriage. That in itself suggests that his turning-point analogy may be accurate but also that his side didn’t even show up to fight the battle. (If you need to go Google “Antietam” right now, I will join Buchanan in lamenting the failures of our educational system.)
It’s my premise that the division in America is indeed cultural in nature, using the Lévi-Strauss [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Lévi-Strauss ] anthropological sense of that word, although other senses come into it, too. (The people who watch HBO, for example, or who saw “Moonrise Kingdom [ http://www.salon.com/topic/moonrise_kingdom/ ]” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild [ http://www.salon.com/topic/beasts_of_the_southern_wild/ ]” in theaters fall overwhelmingly on one side.) Defining it as libertarian vs. communitarian, for instance, or as a religious view of society set against a more secular one always simplifies or overlooks some aspect of the problem. It involves values or mores that people hold on a primordial or unconscious level, which are not easily expressed in language and not readily subjected to rational inquiry. Translated into the political realm, these fundamental cultural mores become entrenched ideological positions, modes of expressing the unshakable conviction that my side is right and yours is wrong. It’s easy from there, when you’re convinced of your own righteousness, to tip over into paranoia or caricature: Obama’s a Muslim traitor, born in a Taliban test tube; the Republicans are gaming the voting machines, en route to a 1,000-year Fourth Reich.
If you’re warming up your emailing fingers to type the words “false equivalency,” give me a second here. I live in New York City in a neighborhood where Barack Obama got better than 90 percent of the vote, and I write for Salon. I’m not claiming some neutral position in the culture wars. That would be absurd. My own fundamental cultural precepts point toward the belief that one side descends from the Enlightenment, more or less, while the other traces its roots (again, more or less) back to the medieval Church. Of course, I believe that young-Earth Creationists and climate-change deniers are dangerous nuts and that raising taxes on the rich is a moral imperative.
But part of that post-Enlightenment relativism, I guess, leads me to doubt that either side has a monopoly on truth and to suspect that my side, as well, has major cultural blind spots. On a more pragmatic level, the way these profound cultural differences get filtered into strident political disagreement is precisely the problem. We just had an election that was a de facto contest between America’s competing cultural factions, and one side won a narrow but decisive victory to the intense amazement and anger of the other. More name-calling isn’t going to help. If there were ever a moment to talk about this stuff dispassionately, this would be it.
My point is that we haven’t found ways of talking about this issue that go beyond buzzwords – the Cosmopolitans and the Heartlanders, or whatever terms David Brooks is peddling these days – and that address questions more meaningful than how to win elections. Thomas Frank is clearly right that the Republican Party has manipulated this cultural gulf to persuade working-class whites by the millions to vote against their own economic interests, and my Salon colleague Joan Walsh [ http://www.salon.com/2012/08/15/joan_walsh_on_the_crisis_of_white_america/ ] is correct that the Democrats can fight back, to some degree, by stressing economic populism. (Obama’s victory in Ohio, which left Karl Rove fuming and sputtering in disbelief, turned on that tactic.)
But the American division is not essentially about partisan politics or ideological labels, and it can only sometimes be reduced to questions of economic policy. It is sometimes but not always about racial resentment, sometimes but not always about the contested public role of Christianity, and often but not always about big words that are inherently squashy and subjective, like “patriotism” and “freedom.” One of the key concepts, to my mind, is what sociologists call the loss of “relative privilege.” Many white men perceive, correctly, that they have lost social status relative to women and minorities, especially when they compare themselves to their fathers and grandfathers, who benefited from white supremacy and male supremacy (whether or not they personally held racist or sexist views). But is that really the central issue or just the one that my own cultural and educational backgrounds point me toward? We have to be careful about forming conclusions when the evidence is so deeply buried.
You may have seen a video that made the rounds last weekend, including here on Salon [ http://www.salon.com/2012/11/04/i_believe_in_god_and_god_is_going_to_make_sure_mr_romney_wins/ (the video and related B-roll video at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81134840 {and preceding and following})], in which a lefty sandbagger type interviewed a bunch of white people at a Romney-Ryan rally in Ohio. They wore discount-store clothing and drove pickup trucks, and roughly 100 percent of them appeared to belong to the class most likely to suffer under a Republican budget-slashing regime. Hardly any could come up with coherent reasons for choosing Romney over Obama beyond a few Fox News talking points about nonexistent higher taxes and weak leadership and some free-floating paranoia. (One lady suggested that a drone had followed her from her front door to the rally; whether Obama was operating it personally remained unclear.)
I can’t speak to the intentions of the people who made the video, but on the Internet it became a source of ribaldry, an opportunity to mock the clueless rubes for their half-formed delusions, poor fashion sense and infelicity at crafting sound bites. I laughed too, and then I felt awful. Some of those people may be dumb, and others may be evil; you’ll find that in every cohort. But they’ve suffered from downward mobility for most of the last 40 years. While the educated elite in New York and San Francisco have sneered at their backward tastes and appetites, the captains of capital have crapped on their gimme caps and told them to like it. Because: America! Is it really surprising that they’ve anchored themselves to some sense of shared cultural identity, incoherent as it may be?
I was a young reporter on the floor of the Houston Astrodome during the Republican National Convention of 1992 when Pat Buchanan made his legendary speech [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9gSWZxtN1g (next below)]
Buchanan didn’t start that war. It goes clear back through the history of America, from Vietnam to the Red Scare to the Civil War to the Revolutionary War and the witch-hunting Puritans, and it has its origins, at least arguably, in the social revolutions of early modern Europe. He doesn’t have the power to end it, although his recent work tends toward elegiac pronouncements about “dying Christian America” and the end of Western culture, swamped by lesbians and Muslims and free government marijuana. (Bill O’Reilly’s election-night outburst [ http://www.thewrap.com/tv/column-post/bill-oreilly-its-not-traditional-america-anymore-white-establishment-now-minority-64021 ] about the death of “traditional America” and the eclipse of the “white establishment” was nothing more than warmed-over Buchananism.)
Maybe the fact that the Christian-Caucasian-libertarian-capitalist-nationalist cultural faction has absorbed another bitter political defeat will spark some new dynamic in American life. But I wouldn’t bet on it. An angry, declining minority that believes itself oppressed can be an unstable and dangerous phenomenon. The worst sin of the secular-multicultural-communitarian-internationalist-environmentalist faction (other than all that oaky California chardonnay) is its smugness and superiority, its sense of historical mission and its confidence that it has nothing to learn from its diminished opponents and bears no responsibility for their plight. Pride goeth before the fall, as a text prized by both sides for different reasons puts it. If we can’t find a way to address the American cultural divide, beyond insults and quadrennial beauty contests, it is sure to destroy us.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis on original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/10/hey_liberals_you_havent_won_the_culture_war/ [with comments]
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Best black vs white debate on youtube - REP DAT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irdUmJN_Rc0
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Rachel Maddow smacks down racist Pat Buchanan
Rachel Maddow smacks down racist Pat Buchanan.
On Sunday, the exceedingly thin-skinned Graham was still shocked, saddened and outraged over Obama's throwaway line, spoken days earlier, about not looking like previous presidents. Graham said on "Fox News Sunday" that "there's no doubt in my mind that what Senator Obama is trying to suggest -- that he's a victim of something." Graham later added: "We're not going to run a campaign like he did in the primary. Every time somebody brings up a challenge to who you are and what you believe, 'You're a racist.' That's not going to happen in this campaign."
The key words are "victim" and "racist" -- which Obama did not say. Graham puts them in Obama's mouth because of their power to alienate.
With the first loaded word, Graham is trying to tie Obama to a stereotype: the Great African American Victim. He's playing to the annoyance some whites feel at being reminded of racial sins committed long before they were born or even long before their families came to this country.
As Graham well knows, Obama has taken great pains to sanitize his campaign of even the faintest whiff of victimhood. Obama understands that in order to be elected president, he has to come off as the least-aggrieved black man in America.
Most of his supporters understand this, too. They know that he can't react with anger when his love of country is questioned over a flag pin. They see that he can't be seen to take offense when his self-confidence -- a quality shared by every U.S. senator I've ever met -- is portrayed as arrogance, as if he had somehow reached beyond his station by thinking he is worthy of being elected president.
As the kerfuffle of the past week indicates, it's apparently even problematic for Obama to attempt to describe the Republican Party's obvious game plan of defining him as different, exotic and risky.
Obama could note, however, that the tactic doesn't seem to be working. A new poll by The Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University shows him leading McCain by 10 points, 47 to 37 percent, among white low-income workers. These people have to be made to fear or distrust Obama, and in a hurry, or McCain loses.
The second of the bombshell words that Obama didn't say -- but that Graham would like you to think that he said -- is an even bigger canard. He called me a racist has become a popular and convenient refuge of scoundrels. It's the place, for example, where Geraldine Ferraro went to hide when she was challenged on her claim that Obama wouldn't be where he was if he weren't black. In fact, as far as I'm aware, nobody called Ferraro a racist; to do so would imply knowledge of her most private thoughts, as well as a reassessment of her long career in public life. Rather, what I and many others said was that her remarks were insulting and wrong -- with the focus on what she had said, not on what was in her soul.
There's an obvious difference, which Lindsey Graham surely understands. But on Sunday, when former senator -- and current Obama supporter -- Tom Daschle accurately reminded Graham that Obama "has never said that he believes that John McCain is a racist," Graham wouldn't acknowledge the point. As long as he doesn't, it's possible to create the false impression that Obama accuses his critics of being racists.
This battle over Obama's image as a black man is arguably the central front of the presidential campaign right now. Once-sharp lines between the candidates on issues such as withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq or allowing new offshore oil drilling are becoming blurred. The Democratic Party's structural advantages going into the election are formidable. It's hard to imagine how McCain could possibly win unless he generates doubt in voters' minds about Obama.
One way to do that would be to fabricate the impression that Obama is demanding special treatment and privilege because he is black -- in other words, turn a self-made man into a stereotypical beneficiary of affirmative action.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/04/AR2008080401824.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFXJzLciV2M
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Pat Buchanan earns his racist bona fides on HARDBALL 2.19.09
From http://blog.windycitywatch.com/2009/02/pat-buchanan-with-help-of-mike-barnicle.html :
In what should have been a responsible discussion of Attorney General Eric Holder's comments about race Dr. Eric Michael Dyson and Pat Buchanan appeared on HARDBALL. The discussion which was moderated by Mike Barnicle who was sitting in for Chris Matthews quickly disintegrated when Pat Buchanan lashed out at Black institutions, without knowing their reasons for even existing, and then he basically ran than a list of crime statistics and out of wedlock births.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufsl5p8gtIM
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Pat Buchanan Racist Rant on Rachel Maddow Show
Pat Buchanan once again falls off into the deep end where he flounders around barely keeping his head above the mess he spews. Rachel Maddow draws him out on why only old white males are "normal" in the US, and why affirmative action is necessary to open doors to those who are just as qualified but would otherwise be excluded by that same old white male network that has ruled the top positions of power since the nation's beginning. Buchanan never can or refuses to grasp the concept and is left drowning in the cesspool of his own crap.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfoUuOwAaIc
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Pat Buchanan's racism addressed by Rachel Maddow on Monday
http://www.examiner.com/x-1172-Progressive-Politics-Examiner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUv3LcGom38
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The Bigotry of Patrick J. Buchanan; Calls Obama Al Sharpton's 'Boy' on Debt Deal
Racist & Personal: GOP's Contemptible Disrespect of Obama Goes Beyond The Debt Fight: http://www.politicalarticles.net/blog/2011/08/03/racist-personal-gops-contemptible-disrespect-of-obama-goes-beyond-the-debt-fight/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSr_A6IOsHc
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Pat Buchanan - The End of America
Pat Buchanan on his new book "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"
The coming fall of the United States and Western civilization.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCHi55Cipwc
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The End of White America?
The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?
January/February 2009 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/01/the-end-of-white-america/307208/ [with comments]
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Pat Buchanan on why MSNBC fired him - Part 1 of 2
Pat Buchanan, conservative author, discusses why MSNBC fired him. There is a liberal blacklist in America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Vfuj1sYpw
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Pat Buchanan on why MSNBC fired him - Part 2 of 2
Pat Buchanan, conservative author, discusses why MSNBC fired him. There is a liberal blacklist in America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8ksrG08VUg
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Who's Behind The Firing Of Pat Buchanan?
http://www.realjewnews.com/ http://brothernathanaelfoundation.org/ http://brovids.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcx4B0fibIs
===
How to get ready for 2016 [and 2014]
Sure, rest up. But if you want to really make a difference in American politics, the time to get started is now
Nov 10, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/10/how_to_get_ready_for_2016/ [with comments]
===
(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81376111 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81378664 and preceding (and any future following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81378998 and preceding and following
Posted: 11/09/2012 2:25 pm EST Updated: 11/09/2012 2:51 pm EST
In addition to his own election victory, President Barack Obama is reportedly "so absolutely delighted" by the four historic same-sex marriage wins [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/gay-marriage-victory_n_2085900.html ] across the country.
Buzzfeed's Chris Gelder reports [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/jarrett-obama-so-absolutely-delighted-with-marr ] that Obama Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett spoke to supporters of the Human Rights Campaign on Nov. 8, and said the president believes voters in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington "all came down on the right side of history."
Jarrett also took time to clarify the Obama administration's stance on another benchmark win [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/tammy-baldwin-election-results-2012_n_2049837.html ]: "We couldn't be more thrilled that Wisconsin is sending Tammy Baldwin to the Senate," she said.
Baldwin will become the country's first openly gay senator.
Take a look at other openly LGBT candidates who were victorious on Election Night below:
[slideshow embedded; 13 others]
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/09/obama-historic-gay-marriage-wins_n_2102801.html [with comments]
===
Christian Right Failed to Sway Voters on Issues
"Those voters turned out, and they voted overwhelmingly against Obama," said Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, of evangelical Christians.
Win Mcnamee/Getty Images
“The entire moral landscape has changed,” said R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, via Associated Press
“We’re not going away, we just need to recalibrate,” said Bob Vander Plaats, president of the Iowa-based Family Leader.
Steve Hebert for The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: November 9, 2012
Christian conservatives, for more than two decades a pivotal force in American politics, are grappling with Election Day results that repudiated their influence and suggested that the cultural tide — especially on gay issues — has shifted against them.
They are reeling not only from the loss of the presidency, but from what many of them see as a rejection of their agenda. They lost fights against same-sex marriage [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/same_sex_marriage/index.html ] in all four states where it was on the ballot, and saw anti-abortion-rights Senate candidates defeated and two states vote to legalize marijuana [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/marijuana/index.html ] for recreational use.
It is not as though they did not put up a fight; they went all out as never before: The Rev. Billy Graham dropped any pretense of nonpartisanship and all but endorsed Mitt Romney for president. Roman Catholic bishops denounced President Obama’s policies as a threat to life, religious liberty and the traditional nuclear family. Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition distributed more voter guides in churches and contacted more homes by mail and phone than ever before.
“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary [ http://www.sbts.edu/ ], in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.
“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”
Conservative Christian leaders said that they would intensify their efforts to make their case, but were just beginning to discuss how to proceed. “We’re not going away, we just need to recalibrate,” said Bob Vander Plaats, president and chief executive of The Family Leader [ http://www.thefamilyleader.com/ ], an evangelical organization in Iowa.
The election results are just one indication of larger trends in American religion that Christian conservatives are still digesting, political analysts say. Americans who have no religious affiliation — pollsters call them the “nones” — are now about one-fifth of the population over all, according to a study [ http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx ] released last month by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life [ http://www.pewforum.org/ ].
The younger generation is even less religious: about one-third of Americans ages 18 to 22 say they are either atheists, agnostics or nothing in particular. Americans who are secular are far more likely to vote for liberal candidates and for same-sex marriage. Seventy percent of those who said they had no religion voted for Mr. Obama, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.
“This election signaled the last where a white Christian strategy is workable,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute [ http://publicreligion.org/ ], a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and education organization based in Washington.
“Barack Obama’s coalition was less than 4 in 10 white Christian,” Dr. Jones said. “He made up for that with not only overwhelming support from the African-American and Latino community, but also with the support of the religiously unaffiliated.”
In interviews, conservative Christian leaders pointed to other factors that may have blunted their impact in this election: they were outspent by gay rights advocates in the states where marriage was on the ballot; comments on rape by the Senate candidates Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard E. Mourdock in Indiana were ridiculed nationwide and alienated women; and they never trusted Mr. Romney as a reliably conservative voice on social issues.
However, they acknowledge that they are losing ground. The evangelical share of the population is both declining and graying, studies show. Large churches like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Assemblies of God, which have provided an organizing base for the Christian right, are losing members.
“In the long run, this means that the Republican constituency is going to be shrinking on the religious end as well as the ethnic end,” said James L. Guth, a professor of political science at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.
Meanwhile, religious liberals are gradually becoming more visible. Liberal clergy members spoke out in support of same-sex marriage, and one group ran ads praising Mr. Obama’s health care plan for insuring the poor and the sick. In a development that highlighted the diversity within the Catholic Church, the “Nuns on the Bus” [ http://nunsonthebus.com/ ] drove through the Midwest warning that the budget proposed by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, would cut the social safety net.
For the Christian right in this election, fervor and turnout were not the problem, many organizers said in interviews. White evangelicals made up 26 percent of the electorate — 3 percent more than in 2004, when they helped to propel President George W. Bush to re-election. During the Republican primaries, some commentators said that Mr. Romney’s Mormon faith would drive away evangelicals, many of whom consider his church a heretical cult.
And yet, in the end, evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Romney — even matching the presidential vote of Mormons: 78 percent for Mr. Romney and 21 percent for Mr. Obama, according to exit polls by Edison Research.
“We did our job,” said Mr. Reed, who helped pioneer religious voter mobilization with the Christian Coalition in the 1980s and ’90s, and is now founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition [ http://ffcoalition.com/ ]. He said that his organization outdid itself this year, putting out 30 million voter guides in 117,000 churches, 24 million mailings to voters in battleground states and 26 million phone calls.
“Those voters turned out, and they voted overwhelmingly against Obama,” Mr. Reed said. “But you can’t be driving in the front of the boat and leaking in the back of the boat, and win the election.
“You can’t just overperform among voters of faith,” he continued. “There’s got to be a strategy for younger voters, unmarried voters, women voters — especially single women — and minorities.”
The Christian right should have a natural inroad with Hispanics. The vast majority of Hispanics are evangelical or Catholic, and many of those are religious conservatives opposed to same-sex marriage and abortion. And yet, the pressing issue of immigration [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html ] trumped religion, and Mr. Obama won the Hispanic vote by 44 percentage points.
“Latino Protestants were almost as inclined to vote for Mr. Obama as their Catholic brethren were,” said Dr. Guth, at Furman, “and that’s certainly a big change, and going the wrong direction as far as Republicans are concerned.”
The election outcome was also sobering news for Catholic bishops, who this year spoke out on politics more forcefully and more explicitly than ever before, some experts said. The bishops and Catholic conservative groups helped lead the fight against same-sex marriage in the four states where that issue was on the ballot. Nationwide, they undertook a campaign that accused Mr. Obama of undermining religious liberty, redoubling their efforts when a provision in the health care overhaul [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/health_care_reform/index.html ] required most employers to provide coverage for contraception.
Despite this, Mr. Obama retained the Catholic vote, 50 to 48 percent, according to exit polls, although his support slipped from four years ago. Also, solid majorities of Catholics supported same-sex marriage, said Dr. Jones, the pollster.
Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento, who serves on the bishops’ domestic policy committee, said that the bishops spoke out on many issues, including immigration and poverty, but got news media attention only when they talked about abortion, same-sex marriage and religious liberty. Voters who identify as Catholic but do not attend Mass on Sunday may not have been listening, he said, but Catholics who attend Mass probably “weigh what the church has to say.”
“I think good Catholics can be found across the political spectrum,” Bishop Soto said, “but I do think they wrestle with what the church teaches.”
*
Related
Beliefs: Politicians Who Reject Labels Based on Religion (November 10, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/us/politics/politicians-who-speak-of-religion-in-unaccustomed-ways.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/us/politics/christian-conservatives-failed-to-sway-voters.html
===
What's Next For Religious Conservatives?
By David Gibson
Posted: 11/08/2012 4:55 pm EST Updated: 11/08/2012 4:55 pm EST
(RNS) Mitt Romney failed in his bid to win the White House back for Republicans, but the biggest losers in Tuesday's voting may be Christian conservatives who put everything they had into denying President Obama a second term and battling other threats to their agenda.
Instead of the promised victories, the religious right encountered defeat at almost every turn. Not only did Obama win convincingly, but Democrats held onto the Senate -- and the power to confirm judges -- and Wisconsin elected the nation's first openly gay senator, Tammy Baldwin.
Meanwhile, Republican senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock went down to unanticipated defeat in large part because of their strongly anti-abortion views, and an effort in Florida to restrict abortion failed. For the first time ever, same-sex marriage proponents won on ballots in four out of four states, while marijuana for recreational use was legalized in two out of three states where the question was on the ballot.
Even Michele Bachmann, an icon among Christian conservatives, barely held onto her House seat in Minnesota while Tea Party favorite Allen West lost his congressional district in Florida.
"Evangelical Christians must see the 2012 election as a catastrophe for crucial moral concerns," R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in a sobering post-mortem.
"DISASTER," David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network wrote on his blog. He then amended his lament to read: "COLOSSAL DISASTER."
Yet as bad as the results were for social conservatives, they may now face an equally difficult fight as they try to defend their agenda. Sifting through the electoral rubble, some conservatives and GOP leaders argue that the party's positions and presentation on issues like gay marriage and abortion rights turn off more voters than they attract.
This internal battle is in many respects the natural aftermath of a painful political loss, and Republicans are already involved in a process of soul-searching -- and back-biting -- that will likely continue for some time as the GOP tries to figure out how it can find a winning formula.
But this time around, more than in previous election cycles, Christian conservatives are a particularly large target, and they are feeling especially exposed to criticism.
Even before the votes were counted, for example, Romney's shift to the center -- he studiously downplayed social issues like gay rights and abortion in the last month of the campaign -- coincided with a surge in the polls and bolstered arguments that the party should soft-pedal traditional sexual morality in order to win elections and promote economic conservatism.
As Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist who backed Romney, wrote Wednesday in The Washington Post, "the issue of gay marriage is a generational one, a battle that social conservatives have lost ... The American people have changed their minds on the issue and fighting this one is political flat-earthism."
Christian conservatives are not about to accept that view, however, and in the hours after Romney's defeat they seemed to take two main tacks in rebuttal.
One was to double-down on their agenda by pinning the blame on Romney and his campaign for not stressing social issues much more forcefully.
"Mitt Romney is a good man, but let's just be honest -- we Republicans nominated the most liberal Republican nominee in history," said Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who joined a Wednesday morning webcast with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.
Jordan said that doubts about Romney's convictions, as well as his campaign's modulation near the end, disappointed values voters and doomed the ticket.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of the Susan B. Anthony List, a leading anti-abortion lobby, agreed.
"What was presented as discipline by the Romney campaign by staying on one message -- the economy -- was a strategic error that resulted in a winning margin of pro-life votes being left on the table," Dannenfelser said. "Victory was handed to the opponent."
The other tack that emerged, however, was to concede that Christian conservatives may need to change the tone if not the substance of their message in order to appeal to voters who are increasingly non-male, non-white and even non-Christian. The electorate today is increasingly Latino, and younger, and both those groups are turned off by anything that smacks of righteous moralizing.
"No party can win if it is seen as heartless," said Mohler. "No party can win if it appeals only to white and older Americans. No party can win if it looks more like the way to the past than the way to the future."
Indeed, exit polls indicated that evangelicals turned out more strongly for Romney (or against Obama) than they had for any other Republican in history -- but that nearly 80 percent margin was still not enough in raw numbers to put the GOP ticket over the top.
"My message really today is we have more work to do to become more diverse, but the party has to start building bridges and practicing the politics of addition to bring more people in," Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said at a morning-after briefing in Washington.
"My corollary message," he added, "is there is no inherent conflict between those folks coming in and us. In most cases there's a great deal of commonality."
But in the wake of Tuesday's defeat, that's a message that Christian conservatives are going to have to sell to the Republican Party itself before they can make it to the general public.
Copyright 2012 Religion News Service
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/religious-conservatives-2012-election_n_2089983.html [with comments]
===
Hey, liberals: You haven’t won the culture war
(Credit: Steven Chiang [ http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-492139p1.html ] via Shutterstock [ http://www.shutterstock.com/ ]/Salon)
Bill O'Reilly may have surrendered, but America's dangerous divisions go deeper than party, race or religion
By Andrew O'Hehir
Saturday, Nov 10, 2012 02:00 PM CST
This may come as news to you, but our country is severely divided. Seriously, though: Tuesday’s election, in which 120 million voters were united only by the belief that the other side’s candidate was a nightmare, was only the most recent illustration of a profound cultural divide in American life that goes back at least 50 or 60 years (and arguably much longer). It’s a major talking point on cable news shows and in opinion columns of all stripes – yes, duh, mea culpa – one that has sparked the careers of numerous pundits and commentators.
David Brooks [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html ] and Thomas Frank [ http://www.tcfrank.com/ ], to cite the obvious examples, have dined out for a decade or more on their purported ability to diagnose the worsening antagonism reflected in the 2012 election, when multicultural metropolitan elite groups on both coasts overwhelmingly voted for one candidate and lower-status white people in the middle of the country overwhelmingly voted for the other. Brooks has long specialized in boiling this down to pithy phrases: Volvos vs. F-150 pickups, Walmart shoppers vs. Whole Foods shoppers, and so on. (As my wife recently observed, in today’s economy it could more accurately be put this way: The people who shop at Target vs. the other people who shop at Target.)
But if we think we can understand this division better by using cute demographic shorthand or by trying to claim that it’s fundamentally about religion or abortion or sexual morality or the role of government or whatever other hobby horse we choose to ride, we’re kidding ourselves. Those are significant issues that provoke strong feelings on both sides, to be sure, but I believe they are symbols or symptoms of division rather than its underlying causes. Anytime we get fixated on the centrality of any one of those factors, we risk being left behind by the rushing river of history.
I recently came upon a column Pat Buchanan [ http://buchanan.org/blog/the-antietam-of-the-culture-war-5074 ] wrote back in April in which he argued that same-sex marriage would be the defining issue of the 2012 campaign and that election day was “shaping up as the Antietam of the culture war.” We’ll get back to Buchanan later — he is a central figure in the history of cultural warfare — but as is so often the case, he was right in an upside-down Bizarro World fashion. Gay marriage was a total non-issue in the campaign, and as every month passes, it becomes an ever-more-ordinary part of American life, roughly as exciting as the other kind of marriage. That in itself suggests that his turning-point analogy may be accurate but also that his side didn’t even show up to fight the battle. (If you need to go Google “Antietam” right now, I will join Buchanan in lamenting the failures of our educational system.)
It’s my premise that the division in America is indeed cultural in nature, using the Lévi-Strauss [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Lévi-Strauss ] anthropological sense of that word, although other senses come into it, too. (The people who watch HBO, for example, or who saw “Moonrise Kingdom [ http://www.salon.com/topic/moonrise_kingdom/ ]” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild [ http://www.salon.com/topic/beasts_of_the_southern_wild/ ]” in theaters fall overwhelmingly on one side.) Defining it as libertarian vs. communitarian, for instance, or as a religious view of society set against a more secular one always simplifies or overlooks some aspect of the problem. It involves values or mores that people hold on a primordial or unconscious level, which are not easily expressed in language and not readily subjected to rational inquiry. Translated into the political realm, these fundamental cultural mores become entrenched ideological positions, modes of expressing the unshakable conviction that my side is right and yours is wrong. It’s easy from there, when you’re convinced of your own righteousness, to tip over into paranoia or caricature: Obama’s a Muslim traitor, born in a Taliban test tube; the Republicans are gaming the voting machines, en route to a 1,000-year Fourth Reich.
If you’re warming up your emailing fingers to type the words “false equivalency,” give me a second here. I live in New York City in a neighborhood where Barack Obama got better than 90 percent of the vote, and I write for Salon. I’m not claiming some neutral position in the culture wars. That would be absurd. My own fundamental cultural precepts point toward the belief that one side descends from the Enlightenment, more or less, while the other traces its roots (again, more or less) back to the medieval Church. Of course, I believe that young-Earth Creationists and climate-change deniers are dangerous nuts and that raising taxes on the rich is a moral imperative.
But part of that post-Enlightenment relativism, I guess, leads me to doubt that either side has a monopoly on truth and to suspect that my side, as well, has major cultural blind spots. On a more pragmatic level, the way these profound cultural differences get filtered into strident political disagreement is precisely the problem. We just had an election that was a de facto contest between America’s competing cultural factions, and one side won a narrow but decisive victory to the intense amazement and anger of the other. More name-calling isn’t going to help. If there were ever a moment to talk about this stuff dispassionately, this would be it.
My point is that we haven’t found ways of talking about this issue that go beyond buzzwords – the Cosmopolitans and the Heartlanders, or whatever terms David Brooks is peddling these days – and that address questions more meaningful than how to win elections. Thomas Frank is clearly right that the Republican Party has manipulated this cultural gulf to persuade working-class whites by the millions to vote against their own economic interests, and my Salon colleague Joan Walsh [ http://www.salon.com/2012/08/15/joan_walsh_on_the_crisis_of_white_america/ ] is correct that the Democrats can fight back, to some degree, by stressing economic populism. (Obama’s victory in Ohio, which left Karl Rove fuming and sputtering in disbelief, turned on that tactic.)
But the American division is not essentially about partisan politics or ideological labels, and it can only sometimes be reduced to questions of economic policy. It is sometimes but not always about racial resentment, sometimes but not always about the contested public role of Christianity, and often but not always about big words that are inherently squashy and subjective, like “patriotism” and “freedom.” One of the key concepts, to my mind, is what sociologists call the loss of “relative privilege.” Many white men perceive, correctly, that they have lost social status relative to women and minorities, especially when they compare themselves to their fathers and grandfathers, who benefited from white supremacy and male supremacy (whether or not they personally held racist or sexist views). But is that really the central issue or just the one that my own cultural and educational backgrounds point me toward? We have to be careful about forming conclusions when the evidence is so deeply buried.
You may have seen a video that made the rounds last weekend, including here on Salon [ http://www.salon.com/2012/11/04/i_believe_in_god_and_god_is_going_to_make_sure_mr_romney_wins/ (the video and related B-roll video at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81134840 {and preceding and following})], in which a lefty sandbagger type interviewed a bunch of white people at a Romney-Ryan rally in Ohio. They wore discount-store clothing and drove pickup trucks, and roughly 100 percent of them appeared to belong to the class most likely to suffer under a Republican budget-slashing regime. Hardly any could come up with coherent reasons for choosing Romney over Obama beyond a few Fox News talking points about nonexistent higher taxes and weak leadership and some free-floating paranoia. (One lady suggested that a drone had followed her from her front door to the rally; whether Obama was operating it personally remained unclear.)
I can’t speak to the intentions of the people who made the video, but on the Internet it became a source of ribaldry, an opportunity to mock the clueless rubes for their half-formed delusions, poor fashion sense and infelicity at crafting sound bites. I laughed too, and then I felt awful. Some of those people may be dumb, and others may be evil; you’ll find that in every cohort. But they’ve suffered from downward mobility for most of the last 40 years. While the educated elite in New York and San Francisco have sneered at their backward tastes and appetites, the captains of capital have crapped on their gimme caps and told them to like it. Because: America! Is it really surprising that they’ve anchored themselves to some sense of shared cultural identity, incoherent as it may be?
I was a young reporter on the floor of the Houston Astrodome during the Republican National Convention of 1992 when Pat Buchanan made his legendary speech [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9gSWZxtN1g (next below)]
about the “culture war” in America. As terrifying as that was to witness in person, surrounded by the bull-necked, crewcut-wearing young men of the Texas A&M cheering squad, I thought he was right at the time, and I still think so now. I don’t mean he was right on the issues (although let’s give him credit for opposing NAFTA way back when). I mean that he correctly observed that he and I were on different sides of a long-running conflict over what kind of country America was and how its citizens were to think about themselves.
Buchanan didn’t start that war. It goes clear back through the history of America, from Vietnam to the Red Scare to the Civil War to the Revolutionary War and the witch-hunting Puritans, and it has its origins, at least arguably, in the social revolutions of early modern Europe. He doesn’t have the power to end it, although his recent work tends toward elegiac pronouncements about “dying Christian America” and the end of Western culture, swamped by lesbians and Muslims and free government marijuana. (Bill O’Reilly’s election-night outburst [ http://www.thewrap.com/tv/column-post/bill-oreilly-its-not-traditional-america-anymore-white-establishment-now-minority-64021 ] about the death of “traditional America” and the eclipse of the “white establishment” was nothing more than warmed-over Buchananism.)
Maybe the fact that the Christian-Caucasian-libertarian-capitalist-nationalist cultural faction has absorbed another bitter political defeat will spark some new dynamic in American life. But I wouldn’t bet on it. An angry, declining minority that believes itself oppressed can be an unstable and dangerous phenomenon. The worst sin of the secular-multicultural-communitarian-internationalist-environmentalist faction (other than all that oaky California chardonnay) is its smugness and superiority, its sense of historical mission and its confidence that it has nothing to learn from its diminished opponents and bears no responsibility for their plight. Pride goeth before the fall, as a text prized by both sides for different reasons puts it. If we can’t find a way to address the American cultural divide, beyond insults and quadrennial beauty contests, it is sure to destroy us.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis on original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/10/hey_liberals_you_havent_won_the_culture_war/ [with comments]
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Best black vs white debate on youtube - REP DAT
[obviously from 2008 before the election; not gonna take the time right to now to figure out whether it predates os postdates the next in this sequence of Pat Buchanan videos]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irdUmJN_Rc0
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Rachel Maddow smacks down racist Pat Buchanan
Uploaded by AntiConformist911 on Aug 4, 2008
Rachel Maddow smacks down racist Pat Buchanan.
On Sunday, the exceedingly thin-skinned Graham was still shocked, saddened and outraged over Obama's throwaway line, spoken days earlier, about not looking like previous presidents. Graham said on "Fox News Sunday" that "there's no doubt in my mind that what Senator Obama is trying to suggest -- that he's a victim of something." Graham later added: "We're not going to run a campaign like he did in the primary. Every time somebody brings up a challenge to who you are and what you believe, 'You're a racist.' That's not going to happen in this campaign."
The key words are "victim" and "racist" -- which Obama did not say. Graham puts them in Obama's mouth because of their power to alienate.
With the first loaded word, Graham is trying to tie Obama to a stereotype: the Great African American Victim. He's playing to the annoyance some whites feel at being reminded of racial sins committed long before they were born or even long before their families came to this country.
As Graham well knows, Obama has taken great pains to sanitize his campaign of even the faintest whiff of victimhood. Obama understands that in order to be elected president, he has to come off as the least-aggrieved black man in America.
Most of his supporters understand this, too. They know that he can't react with anger when his love of country is questioned over a flag pin. They see that he can't be seen to take offense when his self-confidence -- a quality shared by every U.S. senator I've ever met -- is portrayed as arrogance, as if he had somehow reached beyond his station by thinking he is worthy of being elected president.
As the kerfuffle of the past week indicates, it's apparently even problematic for Obama to attempt to describe the Republican Party's obvious game plan of defining him as different, exotic and risky.
Obama could note, however, that the tactic doesn't seem to be working. A new poll by The Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University shows him leading McCain by 10 points, 47 to 37 percent, among white low-income workers. These people have to be made to fear or distrust Obama, and in a hurry, or McCain loses.
The second of the bombshell words that Obama didn't say -- but that Graham would like you to think that he said -- is an even bigger canard. He called me a racist has become a popular and convenient refuge of scoundrels. It's the place, for example, where Geraldine Ferraro went to hide when she was challenged on her claim that Obama wouldn't be where he was if he weren't black. In fact, as far as I'm aware, nobody called Ferraro a racist; to do so would imply knowledge of her most private thoughts, as well as a reassessment of her long career in public life. Rather, what I and many others said was that her remarks were insulting and wrong -- with the focus on what she had said, not on what was in her soul.
There's an obvious difference, which Lindsey Graham surely understands. But on Sunday, when former senator -- and current Obama supporter -- Tom Daschle accurately reminded Graham that Obama "has never said that he believes that John McCain is a racist," Graham wouldn't acknowledge the point. As long as he doesn't, it's possible to create the false impression that Obama accuses his critics of being racists.
This battle over Obama's image as a black man is arguably the central front of the presidential campaign right now. Once-sharp lines between the candidates on issues such as withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq or allowing new offshore oil drilling are becoming blurred. The Democratic Party's structural advantages going into the election are formidable. It's hard to imagine how McCain could possibly win unless he generates doubt in voters' minds about Obama.
One way to do that would be to fabricate the impression that Obama is demanding special treatment and privilege because he is black -- in other words, turn a self-made man into a stereotypical beneficiary of affirmative action.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/04/AR2008080401824.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFXJzLciV2M
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Pat Buchanan earns his racist bona fides on HARDBALL 2.19.09
Uploaded by sigmonkeyataol on Feb 19, 2009
From http://blog.windycitywatch.com/2009/02/pat-buchanan-with-help-of-mike-barnicle.html :
In what should have been a responsible discussion of Attorney General Eric Holder's comments about race Dr. Eric Michael Dyson and Pat Buchanan appeared on HARDBALL. The discussion which was moderated by Mike Barnicle who was sitting in for Chris Matthews quickly disintegrated when Pat Buchanan lashed out at Black institutions, without knowing their reasons for even existing, and then he basically ran than a list of crime statistics and out of wedlock births.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufsl5p8gtIM
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Pat Buchanan Racist Rant on Rachel Maddow Show
Uploaded by GateKeeper50hotmail on Jul 19, 2009
Pat Buchanan once again falls off into the deep end where he flounders around barely keeping his head above the mess he spews. Rachel Maddow draws him out on why only old white males are "normal" in the US, and why affirmative action is necessary to open doors to those who are just as qualified but would otherwise be excluded by that same old white male network that has ruled the top positions of power since the nation's beginning. Buchanan never can or refuses to grasp the concept and is left drowning in the cesspool of his own crap.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfoUuOwAaIc
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Pat Buchanan's racism addressed by Rachel Maddow on Monday
Uploaded by Karen Harper on Jul 24, 2009
http://www.examiner.com/x-1172-Progressive-Politics-Examiner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUv3LcGom38
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The Bigotry of Patrick J. Buchanan; Calls Obama Al Sharpton's 'Boy' on Debt Deal
Uploaded by politicalarticles on Aug 3, 2011
Racist & Personal: GOP's Contemptible Disrespect of Obama Goes Beyond The Debt Fight: http://www.politicalarticles.net/blog/2011/08/03/racist-personal-gops-contemptible-disrespect-of-obama-goes-beyond-the-debt-fight/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSr_A6IOsHc
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Pat Buchanan - The End of America
Uploaded by WhiteNewsChannel on Oct 21, 2011
Pat Buchanan on his new book "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"
The coming fall of the United States and Western civilization.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCHi55Cipwc
*
The End of White America?
The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?
January/February 2009 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/01/the-end-of-white-america/307208/ [with comments]
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Pat Buchanan on why MSNBC fired him - Part 1 of 2
Uploaded by ThePoliticalLion on Feb 19, 2012
Pat Buchanan, conservative author, discusses why MSNBC fired him. There is a liberal blacklist in America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Vfuj1sYpw
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Pat Buchanan on why MSNBC fired him - Part 2 of 2
Uploaded by ThePoliticalLion on Feb 19, 2012
Pat Buchanan, conservative author, discusses why MSNBC fired him. There is a liberal blacklist in America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8ksrG08VUg
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Who's Behind The Firing Of Pat Buchanan?
Uploaded by Brother Nathanael on Feb 23, 2012
http://www.realjewnews.com/ http://brothernathanaelfoundation.org/ http://brovids.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcx4B0fibIs
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How to get ready for 2016 [and 2014]
Sure, rest up. But if you want to really make a difference in American politics, the time to get started is now
Nov 10, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/10/how_to_get_ready_for_2016/ [with comments]
===
(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81376111 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81378664 and preceding (and any future following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81378998 and preceding and following
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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