Friday, November 16, 2012 4:40:15 AM
Everything Romney Said to Explain Away Loss
By JOHN SANTUCCI, CHRIS GOOD, and SHUSHANNAH WALSHE
Nov. 15, 2012
Why did Mitt Romney lose the election? If you ask him--as some donors did--it's because President Obama gave "extraordinary financial gifts" to Hispanic voters and other demographic blocs in his voting coalition.
This week Romney explained his election loss to high-level donors on at least two private conference calls, and ABC News obtained a recording of one of them Wednesday. Among the many news tidbits are Romney's repeated comments about "gifts" to demographic groups by Obama (particularly Hispanics), a call from Bill Clinton, Romney's frustration with the GOP primary system, his pollster's case that Hurricane Sandy played a big role, and the campaign's almost awestruck acknowledgement of the minority turnout that did them in.
Below are some highlights from the call, which also featured Campaign Manager Matt Rhoades, Finance Chairman Spencer Zwick, and campaign pollster Neil Newhouse, as they and the former candidate answered questions from donors about what went wrong:
Listen to portions of the call as aired on ABC's World News [ http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/mitt-romney-comments-president-obamas-win-2012-election-17722041 ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_F-UoYEC0 , next below)] Nov. 14th.
No Drama
Romney credited his team with a "no drama" campaign. Romney said there was " really no drama in the campaign. There were no battles, political fights going on, people arguing that other people should be demoted or fired, or whatever, it was a campaign that, we weren't perfect by any means, but people worked around the flat sides of one another and worked as a unified team."
No Regrets
Romney called his campaign strategy "highly effective." Romney: "I think our strategy was highly effective, you know I don't go back and say, 'Oh, I wish we'd have done this differently or done that differently.'"
Obama's 'Gifts' to Interest Groups
Romney: "What the president's campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote, and that strategy worked."
Romney's campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, listed a few specifics: "Whether it was free contraceptives for 18 to 29 year-old women, DREAM Act waivers, student loan interest rate cuts for college students, and other initiatives geared toward energizing their coalition. They succeeded."
Romney: " It's a proven political strategy, which is give a bunch of money to a group and, guess what, they'll vote for you. ... Immigration we can solve, but the giving away free stuff is a hard thing to compete with."
Listen to edited audio of Romney's call HERE [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/mitt-romney-election-loss-due-obamas-gifts-17730260 ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTirIaJwnAk {also at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6hQdmFmORA }, next below)].
On Hispanics in Particular
Romney on the "gifts" to Hispanic voters: "What the president did is he gave them two things. One, he gave them a big gift on immigration with the DREAM Act amnesty program, which was obviously very very popular with Hispanic voters, and then number two was Obamacare ... For any lower-income Hispanic family, Obamacare was massive, I mean for--the average income for a household in America is fifty thousand dollars a year, that's the median, fifty K per year. For the Hispanic household, my guess is it's lower than that, maybe it's forty thousand a year. For a home earning let's say thirty thousand a year, free health care, which is worth about ten thousand dollars a year, I mean is massive, it's huge. So this--he did two very popular things for the Hispanic community."
"In order to get Hispanic voters, what the president did we would be very reluctant to do, which is one, provide amnesty for those that are here illegally, and number two put in place Obamacare which basically is ten thousand dollars a family. It's a proven political strategy, which is give a bunch of money to a group and, guess what, they'll vote for you.
"What I would do if I were a Democrat running four years from now, I'd say, you know what, dental care will be included in Obamcare...and Republicans will say, no, that's going to cost a trillion dollars, and the Democrats will say, that's fine, you know, we'll pay it. So this is a challenge we've got on how to deal with this is a real issue.
"Immigration we can solve, but the giving away free stuff is a hard thing to compete with."
Poll: Fewer People Support Obamacare Repeal [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/11/poll-fewer-support-obamacare-repeal/ ]
Romney acknowledged his policies weren't so popular with Hispanic voters: "And what'd we do with the Hispanic community was not as popular, obviously, we talked tough on immigration and said we weren't going to give amnesty, and of course we were going to repeal Obamacare, so on the issues we were not good, and then of course they followed on not just giving the Hispanic community things they wanted, but a very good turnout effort. Going forward, clearly we have to have an immigration plan, this idea of just kicking this down the field until every four years the Democrats use it as an issue to hit us over the head with is nuts, we have to have an immigration plan and program, and I certainly hope that our leaders in Washington are willing to put that forward."
Romney's pollster said higher minority turnout, and lower white turnout, was what did the ticket in. Pollster Neil Newhouse told donors on the call: "The way we figured it out is 900,000 fewer white men voted in our target states than in 2008, and 607,000 more African-Americans and Hispanics voted."
Listen to more of Romney's donor call HERE [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/mitt-romney-obama-gave-hispanics-obamacare-17730265 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geT2WfuBkTo , next below)].
Romney says president Bill Clinton called him after the election and said he might have won if not for Hurricane Sandy. Romney: "I spoke with president Clinton the day before yesterday, he called and spent thirty minutes chatting with me. He said a week out I thought you were going to win. And he said, but the hurricane happened, and it gave the president a chance to be presidential, and to look bipartisan, and you know he got a little more momentum, and of course he also said that when he was watching Ann speak at the Republican convention, he decided he was tempted to join the Republican Party. So he may have just been effusive with generous comments as he chatted. He was very complimentary, by the way, of how well we did with middle-class voters, and he said they were surprised by how strong we were in Ohio and in other states with middle-class voters, they did exceptionally well with minorities, but white, middle-class voters, we really cleaned up with and that caught them by surprise."
Read Bill Clinton's Speech at Democratic National Convention [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/transcript-bill-clintons-democratic-convention-speech/story?id=17164662 ]
Listen to Romney discuss his conversation with Bill Clinton HERE [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/mitt-romney-bill-clinton-thought-win-17730330 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKx1k438y50 , next below)].
Romney wants his team of donors to influence whom the Republican Party picks as its next nominee. Romney: "I think the question that I have and I'm sure each of you has as you look at the future, is just what we should do with our team to try and influence the direction of our party and to influence the selection of the next nominee, and to help influence the success of that nominee in becoming the next president, and I don't have a particular plan in mind for that at this stage, but I do want to note that I think I'd like us to get together sometime after the beginning of next year with this group."
Obama Thought 'Small'
Newhouse and Rhoades both surmised that the Obama campaign thought "small." Rhoades: "President Obama and his campaign team succeeded, and Neil will highlight this with more data, in changing the electorate, and you know some on our team have said they went small in a very big way, and it worked, and you know we congratulate them."
Newhouse cited numbers indicating that minority turnout cost Romney Ohio and Florida. Newhouse: "In Ohio, we won independents overwhelmingly, but there was a four percent increase in the number of African-American voters who voted in that election, so that at the end of the day in the state, there were 178,000 more African-Americans voted in 2012 than in 2008 in Ohio, and we lost the state by 103,000 ... In Florida, we failed to really bring it home among Hispanic voters. We got--there was an increase in the number of Hispanics who voted in the state from 13 to 17 percent of the electorate, so that went up four points ... our numbers indicate that 263,000 more Hispanics voted [in Florida] in 2012 than '08, and we lost the state by 73,00 votes."
Romney's Margins Among Whites Were 'Historic'
In contrast, Newhouse almost lamented that Romney had won independents and whites, without winning the election: "We thought we were doing extraordinarily well among white middle-class voters, and it was a very tight election, but the success the Obama campaign had in changing the composition of the electorate is what they owe their victory to ... Mitt won independent voters by five points. He won independents in this race, and in Ohio he won independent voters by 19 points--some incredible numbers here. I mean, as much, and you look at the issues that we did well with, among voters who said the economy was the most important problem facing the country, Mitt beat Obama among those voters by 51 47. ... We won white voters by 20 points, which was--a Republican candidate hasn't won white voters by 20 points I think since the 1980s--so it's really won by a historic margin. We won white women by somewhat less than that."
The Primary Was 'Nuts'
Romney: "We had 20 Republican debates, that was absolutely nuts, it opened us up to gaffes and to material that could be used against us in the general, and we were fighting these debates for a year, and the incumbent president just sat back and laughed." Romney said he wants his group of donors to stay together to pressure Republicans to abbreviate their primary process.
Watch: Primary Losers Speak Out [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/08/primary-losers-speak-out-at-republican-national-convention/ ]
Romney criticized networks that hosted some of the GOP primary debates. His suggestion for the debates next time: "agree that we're gonna do, you know, I don't know, eight debates, and we're gonna, we're gonna do one a month, and we're gonna pick stations that are reasonable, it's not all gonna be done by CNN and NBC, alright, I mean we're gonna try and guide this process so that it's designed to showcase the best of our people as opposed to showcasing liberals beating the heck out of us."
Campaign manager Matt Rhoades said the campaign quietly canceled a handful of debates. Rhoades told donors on the call: "We'd often get questions about, how come there's so many debates, why can't you say no? When you're going through a primary process, I think there were 24 total debates during the primary, we probably killed at least 15, 12 to 15 quietly behind the scenes, but you get caught up."
Transition Team Was in Place
Romney had a big transition team already working on the early stages of his administration, the former candidate told donors: "I wish you also had the chance to see the transition team. A large group of folks were working on everything from pieces of legislation to file to the first budget to executive orders, and it's disappointing we won't be able to file those executive orders, but I guess that happens, we're still having a hard time, just contemplating what could have been versus what is, and it just doesn't seem real, we're still in the stage of denial at my house. We still think the campaign is going on."
Turnout was Key
Rhoades, sounding slightly awed by the Obama turnout operation, recommended to donors that they pressure the Republican National Committee to step up its data and targeting operation or create a 527 group to run GOP data and targeting operations from outside the party.
Rhoades: "I think it's absolutely critical that we as a party, and folks on this call, some of you, if you're able to do it, make this an emphasis. Whether it's Speaker Boehner, whether it's the chairman of the RNC, whether it's future leaders of the party, Congressman Ryan, Marco Rubio--whomever--to take a close look at how to do this, because like Neil said we don't know for certain how they turned out all of their voters, but we know for certain that they had a more sophisticated data collection that they had than we had when we became the nominee. We didn't inherit anything close to that. And this is probably why they were able to--you know they had all these people out in the states, and we always wondered what they were doing. We think what they were doing was they would have people assigned to do dorm-room floors, where they would make sure that everybody that was registered to vote either voted absentee or early voting, they had people that worked in urban areas, to make sure that folks would vote absentee or get out the vote on election day, and it was a real you know personal touch that they had on their voter contact. That's what we believe they were doing, I think we'll find out more in the coming days, but as far as something that this group can do for the future of the party, like the Guv said at the outset of the call, I think this is certainly something that you guys should look at."
Copyright © 2012 ABC News Internet Ventures
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/obamas-gifts-small-campaign-bill-clintons-thoughtsromneys-parting/story?id=17727179 [with comments]
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Shocker: It Was Actually Romney Who Campaigned Bearing 'Gifts'
Mitt Romney promised gifts worth billions of taxpayer dollars to for-profit colleges and banks.
11/15/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/davidhalperin/romney-gifts_b_2139611.html [with comments]
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Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy
November 13, 2012
It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8E3ENrKrQ , above, as embedded, next below is a partial transcript)]:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Now, the same indefatigable researcher who brought us Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks, James Carter IV, has dug up the entire forty-two-minute interview from which that quote derives. Here, The Nation publishes it in its entirety for the very first time.
Listen to the full forty-two-minute conversation with Atwater:
[audio embedded]
The back-story goes like this. In 1981, Atwater, after a decade as South Carolina's most effective Republican operative, was working in Ronald Reagan's White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. Lamis published the interview without using Atwater's name in his 1984 book The Two-Party South. Fifteen years later—and eight years after Atwater passed away from cancer—Lamis republished the interview in another book using Atwater’s name. For seven years no one paid much attention. Then the New York Times' Bob Herbert, a bit of an Atwater obsessive, quoted it in an October 6, 2005 column [ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E6DF1E30F935A35753C1A9639C8B63 ]—then five more times over the next four years.
Those words soon became legend—quoted in both screeds (The GOP-Haters Handbook, 2007) and scholarship (Corey Robin's 2011 classic work of political theory, The Reactionary Mind). Google Books records its use in ten books published so far this year alone. Curious about the remarks' context, Carter, who learned Lamis had died in 2012, asked his widow if she would consider releasing the audio of the interview, especially in light of the use of race-baiting dog-whistles (lies [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/28/rick-santorum/Santorum-Romney-claim-Obama-ending-welfare-work/ ] about Obama ending work requirements for welfare; "jokes [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/romney-makes-a-birther-joke-while-campaigning/ ]" about his supposed Kenyan provenance) in the Romney presidential campaign. Renée Lamis, an Obama donor, agreed that very same night. For one thing she was “upset,” Carter told me, that “for some time, conservatives believed [her] husband made up the Atwater interview.” For another, she was eager to illustrate that her husband's use of the Atwater quote was scholarly, not political.
So what does the new contextual wrapping teach us? It vindicates Lamis, who indeed comes off as careful and scholarly. And no surprise, it shows Atwater acting yet again in bad faith.
In the lead-up to the infamous remarks, it is fascinating to witness the confidence with which Atwater believes himself to be establishing the racial innocence of latter-day Republican campaigning: “My generation,” he insists, “will be the first generation of Southerners that won’t be prejudiced.” He proceeds to develop the argument that by dropping talk about civil rights gains like the Voting Rights Act and sticking to the now-mainstream tropes of fiscal conservatism and national defense, consultants like him were proving “people in the South are just like any people in the history of the world.”
It is only upon Professor Lamis’s gently Socratic follow-ups, and those of a co-interviewer named “Saul” (Carter hasn't been able to confirm his identity, but suspects it was the late White House correspondent Saul Friedman), that Atwater begins to loosen up—prefacing his reflections, with a plainly guilty conscience, “Now, y’all aren't quoting me on this?” (Apparently , this is the reason why Atwater’s name wasn’t published in 1984 but was in 1999, after his death).
He then utters his infamous words. The interlocutors go on to kibitz about Huey Long and barbecue. Then Atwater, apparently satisfied that he'd absolved the Southern Republican Party of racism once and for all, follows up with a prediction based on a study he claims demonstrates that Strom Thurmond won 38 percent of South Carolina’s middle-class black vote in his 1978 Senate campaign (run by Atwater).
“That voter, in my judgment,” he claims, “will be more likely to vote his economic interests than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think through a fairly slow but very steady process, will go Republican.” Because race no longer matters: “In my judgment Karl Marx [is right]... the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues.” He continues, in words that uncannily echo the “47 percent tape” (nothing new under the wingnut sun), that “statistically, as the number of non-producers in the system moves toward fifty percent,” the conservative coalition cannot but expand. Voila: a new Republican majority. Racism won't have anything to do with it.
Not bloody likely. In 2005, the political scientists Nicholas Valentino and David Sears demonstrated [ http://web.posc.jmu.edu/seminar/readings/4a-realignment/race+party%20realignment%20in%20the%20south%20old%20times%20not%20forgotten.pdf ] that a Southern man holding conservative positions on issues other than race is no more likely than a conservative Northerner to vote for a Democrat. But when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions—like whether one agrees “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites”—white Southerners were twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote Democratic. As another political scientist, Thomas Schaller, wrote in his 2006 book Whistling Past Dixie [ http://books.google.com/books/about/Whistling_Past_Dixie.html?id=jG5Jhexkjg0C ] (which naturally quotes the infamous Atwater lines), “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters...the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”
Which one particular Republican spinmeister, when he wasn't preening before political scientists, knew fully well—which was why, seven years after that interview, in his stated goal to “rip the bark off the little bastard [Michael Dukakis]” on behalf of his candidate George H.W. Bush, Atwater ran the infamous ad blaming Dukakis for an escaped Massachusetts convict, Willie Horton, “repeatedly raping” an apparently white girl. Indeed, Atwater pledged to make "Willie Horton his running mate." The commercial was sponsored by a dummy outfit called the National Security Political Action Committee [ http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/2012/0524/From-Willie-Horton-to-windsurfing-Five-top-political-attack-ads/Willie-Horton-erases-a-double-digit-lead ]—which it is true, was a whole lot more abstract than saying "nigger, nigger, nigger."
For more on the GOP's effort to roll back enfranchisment, read Ari Berman's Why We Still Need Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act [ http://www.thenation.com/blog/171199/why-we-still-need-section-5-voting-rights-act ].
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Related
The GOP Throws a Tampa Tantrum
The long-running feud between moderates and conservatives is over. The wackos have won.
http://www.thenation.com/article/169851/gop-throws-tampa-tantrum
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Copyright © 2012 The Nation (emphasis in original)
http://www.thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy [with comments]
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Is the Voting Rights Act Doomed?
November 14, 2012
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/is-the-voting-rights-act-doomed/ [with comments]
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Changing Times
November 14, 2012
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/changing-times/ [with comments]
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Affirmative Action Ban in Michigan Is Rejected
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: November 15, 2012
The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled, 8 to 7, on Thursday that Michigan’s voter-approved 2006 ban on affirmative action was unconstitutional.
The ruling [ http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/12a0386p-06.pdf ], in Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action v. University of Michigan, was not based on racial discrimination, but rather on a violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. The ban, the court said, unfairly placed a special burden on supporters of race-conscious admissions policies.
People trying to change any other aspect of university admissions policies, the court said, had several avenues open: they could lobby the admissions committee, petition university leaders, try to influence the college’s governing board or take the issue to a statewide initiative. Those supporting affirmative action, on the other hand, had no alternative but to undertake the “long, expensive and arduous process” of amending the state Constitution.
“The existence of such a comparative structural burden undermines the equal protection clause’s guarantee that all citizens ought to have equal access to the tools of political change,” said Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., writing for the majority.
The United States Supreme Court is considering an affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas, challenging the use of race as a factor in admissions. But the Sixth Circuit case raises a different issue: the legality of statewide bans on affirmative action. Seven states besides Michigan — Arizona, California, Florida, Oklahoma, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Washington — forbid the consideration of race in university admissions.
The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has upheld California’s ban, and with the Michigan ruling, the stage may be set for the issue to go before the Supreme Court.
“I think this is very likely to go to the Supreme Court, because there’s a direct conflict between the circuits, it’s of great national importance and the 8-7 split on the Sixth Circuit is a signal that some ruling is needed,” said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped draft the California ban. “The only thing that might get in the way is if the Fisher case decides that all race-based action in education is unconstitutional, which would make it not technically moot, but less important.”
Bill Schuette, the attorney general of Michigan, said Thursday that he planned to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. “Entrance to our great universities must be based upon merit,” he said in a statement.
George Washington, the Detroit lawyer who argued the case, said Proposal 2, as the Michigan ban is known, does not ensure merit. “The Big Lie told by the supporters of Proposal 2 is that grades and test scores are a neutral means for judging merit,” he said. “But that system is openly biased against black, Latino and Native American applicants.”
The University of Michigan’s affirmative action battle has been roiling for decades. The affirmative action litigation led to the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision that while a university could not establish racial quotas, it could consider race or ethnicity as a “plus” factor in a holistic review.
After those decisions, Ward Connerly, a black former University of California regent who was the driving force behind California’s affirmative action ban, worked with Jennifer Gratz, a white Michigan woman who was the plaintiff in one of the Supreme Court cases, to get the issue onto the Michigan ballot.
Michigan’s affirmative action ban, which applies to government hiring, government contracting and admission to public universities, became part of the state Constitution through a 2006 voter initiative that won 58 percent of the vote.
The district court that heard the challenge to the ban upheld it, but the three-judge appellate panel whose decision was appealed to the full circuit court struck it down, using the same reasoning as the full circuit court.
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Related
Times Topic: Affirmative Action
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/affirmative_action/index.html
Schools Brace for Decision on Affirmative Action (October 11, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/us/colleges-brace-for-court-decision-on-affirmative-action.html
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/education/michigans-affirmative-action-ban-is-ruled-unconstitutional.html
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Bob FitzSimmonds, Virginia GOP Official, Predicts Obama 'Goes To Hell'
Bob FitzSimmonds slammed President Obama on his Facebook page.
By Laura Bassett
Posted: 11/15/2012 3:24 pm EST Updated: 11/15/2012 3:44 pm EST
Bob FitzSimmonds, an official in the Virginia Republican Party and close ally of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, posted a comment on his Facebook page Wednesday that predicts President Barack Obama's eternal damnation.
"When Obama is 90 years old and he dies and goes to Hell, he is going to say 'This is all Bush's fault,'" FitzSimmonds wrote.
FitzSimmonds, who previously worked as a legislative aide for Cuccinelli and ran unsuccessfully for the Virginia state Senate, now serves as chief deputy clerk for Prince William Circuit Court and treasurer of the Virginia Republican Party's State Central Committee. He told the Hampton Roads Pilot [ http://hamptonroads.com.nyud.net/2012/11/gop-official-and-cuccinelli-ally-anticipates-when-obama-goes-hell ] in an email Thursday that he sees nothing wrong with his comment about the president.
"My Facebook post was not about Obama going to Hell," he said. "It was about his obsession with blame shifting and I don't really see anything inappropriate about it."
Cuccinelli's campaign spokesman, Noah Wall, said the Virginia attorney general disagrees with FitzSimmonds' assessment. "Mr. FitzSimmonds does not speak for our campaign," Wall said.
Brian Moran, chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party, issued a statement on Thursday urging Cuccinelli and the Virginia GOP to condemn FitzSimmonds' statement.
"Taking to Facebook to muse on the death of the President of the United States and whether or not he will go to hell is well below the standard of conduct Virginians set for their public officials and political leaders," Moran said. "Mr. FitzSimmonds should apologize and his close allies like Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Pat Mullins should condemn his inflammatory remarks immediately. As leaders in Washington put the elections behind them and try to solve the enormous challenges we face as a country, this type of rhetoric raises serious questions about whether certain factions of the Republican party are capable of putting Virginia families ahead of ugly partisan rancor."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/15/bob-fitzsimmonds-obama-hell_n_2138870.html [with comments]
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The Reality of Secession and Unicorns
By Bob Cesca
[ http://bobcesca.com/ ]
November 15,2012
I hate to disappoint the 675,000 whiny diaper babies [ http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/14/white-house-secede-petitions-reach-660000-signatures-50-state-participation/ ] calling for secession in the wake of the election but, sorry, no matter how hard they stomp their feet and pout and fling their feces at the electoral map, demands for secession might as well be demands for goblins and unicorns. They’re equally as realistic.
Secession from the United States will never happen.
Ever.
Not only is it illegal, but it’s technically an act of treason [ http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A3Sec3.html ] as defined by the Constitution, and it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Texas v. White [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0074_0700_ZO.html ]. Furthermore, the secessionists aren’t merely condemning the Obama administration, secession is by definition a categorical rejection of the United States and its Constitution, say nothing of the beloved Pledge of Allegiance, which specifically includes the word “indivisible” right after the word “God.” I thought these things were sacrosanct to conservatives.
I’m not breaking any news here, but the red states tried this already and it failed miserably. The core motivation behind the 1861 secession movement was, of course, the defense of slavery as the cornerstone of the Southern economy, and, subsequently, state sovereignty over the legality and regulation of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln won the election of 1860, secessionist fire-eaters were convinced that the initially unconvinced [ http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm ] Abraham Lincoln would summarily free the slaves and possibly arm them for an insurrection against their masters, thus undermining the southern economy in a massive display of executive “tyranny.” And so the southern states, one by one, seceded. In the four years that followed, 2.5 percent of the American population was wiped out [ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/death-numbers/ ] in the American Civil War — the equivalent to 7,850,000 people in terms of today’s population, or roughly the entire 2010 population of Virginia. And, in the end, the decimated seceding states were forced by military attrition to return to the Union.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that all of the former Confederate states defied the astronomical one-in-a-million odds and actually seceded again. (I can’t help but to think about Jim Carrey’s reaction in Dumb and Dumber when presented with one-in-a-million odds: “So you’re saying there’s a chance…”)
What would actually happen?
Unless these states were able to muster an army of disloyal soldiers and militia and fired upon military bases loyal to the United States, it’s doubtful that a modern secession movement would result in another civil war. But if it did, the U.S. military of 2012 clearly possesses capabilities and manpower far beyond anything imaged in 1861 and would summarily wipe out an army of rag-tags, even if they did manage to seize a couple of bases and persuade a few commanders to join the cause. If it escalated into war, the bloodshed would be unspeakable. The late Civil War historian Shelby Foote once observed that the most brutal fistfights he’d ever seen were between two brothers.
However, with a modern economy, there would be no need for President Obama to order the military to retake the seceding states by force. Again, we’re talking about pure fantasy here, but if the president took seriously the various Ordinances of Secession and the subsequent formation of an anti-federalist confederation of sovereign states, my strong hunch is that the president would merely starve out the states until they simply gave up.
To avoid the inevitable sanctions, there would be a massive refugee crisis of non-secessionists flooding out of the secessionist states. They’d be the smart ones.
Most of the red states — now the hypothetical “New Confederacy” — had heretofore taken more federal aid than they paid back in federal taxes. South Carolina, for example, takes $1.35 [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/26/blog-posting/red-state-socialism-graphic-says-gop-leaning-state/ ] in federal money for every dollar it pays in federal taxes. Louisiana takes $1.78 for every dollar it pays into the system. Talk about moochers and freeloaders. By the way, this money is redistributed from other states, including the blue states with their abortion-on-demand and evil healthcare mandate. After secession, that gravy train would cease to exist. Farmers, corporations, small businesses, universities and law enforcement would crumble without federal aid — grants, contracts, matching funds, tax breaks, etc.
If the reality of losing federal money wasn’t enough to convince the New Confederacy to stop behaving like petulant, tantrum-throwing children, then an array of more hard-core sanctions would begin. It’s likely the power grid, pipelines, shipping lanes and, yes, satellite and internet communications would be summarily blocked by the U.S. government. The confederacy would be totally cut off from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, without federal regulations on food safety, clean water, clean air, and without the CDC, rampant disease would spread across the confederacy. How would northern medical equipment and pharmaceuticals reach the seceded states? Inflation, especially on medicine, would skyrocket as demand for dwindling supplies increased. Black-marketeers would spring up in every town.
The solidly blue areas inside the seceded states — Austin, for instance — would be the Texas equivalent to West Berlin in the heart of East Germany. We’d have to airlift supplies to those areas and hope that hoards of desperate and well-armed suburban and rural warlords didn’t swoop in try to swipe the supplies. Needless to say, there would be a large scale humanitarian crisis.
At the governmental level of the New Confederacy, presuming there’s something holding all the states together, leaders would quickly learn the hard lessons of both the Articles of Confederation and the CSA: it’s nearly impossible to govern and do business as a confederacy, especially in a 2012 world. There wouldn’t be a standard national currency. There wouldn’t be national trade agreements even though, on the bright side, nations like China, which has been known to do business with rogue nations like Iran, might continue to ship cheap crap to Walmart and other stores inside this loose conglomeration of nations.
Instead of one large national economy, there would be individual state-level economies — each of them too weak to compete in the global marketplace. How would the New Confederacy generate revenue without a central system of taxation? If it came down to a fighting war against the U.S., how would the central government raise and finance a military?
Welcome, New Confederacy, to third world status!
But it gets worse. The impossible reality of a successful confederacy would be further exacerbated by the secession precedent. States would end up splitting into smaller and smaller pieces with parts of states seceded from other parts — subdividing and subdividing until the confederacy vaporized or was reunified into a more traditional federalist system.
Again, this isn’t speculative. This is tested reality. The Confederate States of America ended up with a strong central government because it quickly learned that it couldn’t fight a war and manage its economy without one. Years earlier, the disastrous Articles of Confederation were dismantled and replaced with the U.S. Constitution with a strong central government and a powerful chief executive as its centerpiece.
So if you’re one of the now hundreds of thousands of signatories to these ridiculous petitions, think about the reality of what you’ve endorsed. You signed a petition to disconnect yourself from the United States of America and, perhaps, to wage war against it. If you’re on Social Security — gone. If you’re on Medicare — gone. If your children attend public or charter schools — gone. If you work for a defense contractor or another corporation that relies on government contracts — gone. Hell, if you rely on the internet to do business — gone. And in the worst case scenario, you should be prepared to wage war against the most powerful military in the history of mankind, augmented by the military might of other allied nations.
And if you’re inclined to storm off like a drama-queen reality show contestant — if you’re inclined to “Go Galt” as so many conservatives threatened to do four years ago — then run off into the forest and live off the grid for while until you calm down from your post-election hysteria. While you’re there, wise up.
Copyright © 2012 BanterMediaGroup, L.L.C. (emphasis in original)
http://thedailybanter.com/2012/11/the-reality-of-secession-and-unicorns/ [with comments] [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/secession-obama-2012_b_2138541.html (with comments)]
===
Bill Maher Slams Mitt Romney Hard, Compares Him to Rappers (Real Time New Rules 1-20-12)
Bill Maher calls Mitt Romney phony, arrogant, out of touch. Calls his supporters naive chumps & sycophants.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZnNVgr6xB8
--
Mitt Romney's Top 10 Out Of Touch Moments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFUUDrh9wNg
--
"Mister Romney's Neighborhood" - (Jimmy Fallon)
Mitt Romney recently said he wants to cut funding for PBS, which is odd, considering he hosts his own children's show on the network.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfSqJ9cYIFE
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David Letterman - Why Mitt Romney Won't Appear
Dave thinks he's figured out why Mitt Romney and Mrs. Mitt won't appear on the show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7cuS9KUsiU
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David Letterman - Mitt Romney Calls Dave
He won't appear on the show, but Mitt gives Dave a call to discuss his cereal platform.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LoT2SrrnKA
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Mitt Romney's Greatest Hits (2012 Edition)
The best moments of Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential run, for Pete's sake.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x9s_piBO3o
===
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By JOHN SANTUCCI, CHRIS GOOD, and SHUSHANNAH WALSHE
Nov. 15, 2012
Why did Mitt Romney lose the election? If you ask him--as some donors did--it's because President Obama gave "extraordinary financial gifts" to Hispanic voters and other demographic blocs in his voting coalition.
This week Romney explained his election loss to high-level donors on at least two private conference calls, and ABC News obtained a recording of one of them Wednesday. Among the many news tidbits are Romney's repeated comments about "gifts" to demographic groups by Obama (particularly Hispanics), a call from Bill Clinton, Romney's frustration with the GOP primary system, his pollster's case that Hurricane Sandy played a big role, and the campaign's almost awestruck acknowledgement of the minority turnout that did them in.
Below are some highlights from the call, which also featured Campaign Manager Matt Rhoades, Finance Chairman Spencer Zwick, and campaign pollster Neil Newhouse, as they and the former candidate answered questions from donors about what went wrong:
Listen to portions of the call as aired on ABC's World News [ http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/mitt-romney-comments-president-obamas-win-2012-election-17722041 ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_F-UoYEC0 , next below)] Nov. 14th.
Some conservatives have distanced themselves from Romney's explanation. Read about that HERE [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/11/republicans-return-romneys-parting-gift-the-note/ ].
No Drama
Romney credited his team with a "no drama" campaign. Romney said there was " really no drama in the campaign. There were no battles, political fights going on, people arguing that other people should be demoted or fired, or whatever, it was a campaign that, we weren't perfect by any means, but people worked around the flat sides of one another and worked as a unified team."
No Regrets
Romney called his campaign strategy "highly effective." Romney: "I think our strategy was highly effective, you know I don't go back and say, 'Oh, I wish we'd have done this differently or done that differently.'"
Obama's 'Gifts' to Interest Groups
Romney: "What the president's campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote, and that strategy worked."
Romney's campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, listed a few specifics: "Whether it was free contraceptives for 18 to 29 year-old women, DREAM Act waivers, student loan interest rate cuts for college students, and other initiatives geared toward energizing their coalition. They succeeded."
Romney: " It's a proven political strategy, which is give a bunch of money to a group and, guess what, they'll vote for you. ... Immigration we can solve, but the giving away free stuff is a hard thing to compete with."
Listen to edited audio of Romney's call HERE [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/mitt-romney-election-loss-due-obamas-gifts-17730260 ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTirIaJwnAk {also at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6hQdmFmORA }, next below)].
Obama: Romney Said He Would 'Veto' the DREAM Act [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/obama-romney-veto-dream-act-17495522 ]
On Hispanics in Particular
Romney on the "gifts" to Hispanic voters: "What the president did is he gave them two things. One, he gave them a big gift on immigration with the DREAM Act amnesty program, which was obviously very very popular with Hispanic voters, and then number two was Obamacare ... For any lower-income Hispanic family, Obamacare was massive, I mean for--the average income for a household in America is fifty thousand dollars a year, that's the median, fifty K per year. For the Hispanic household, my guess is it's lower than that, maybe it's forty thousand a year. For a home earning let's say thirty thousand a year, free health care, which is worth about ten thousand dollars a year, I mean is massive, it's huge. So this--he did two very popular things for the Hispanic community."
"In order to get Hispanic voters, what the president did we would be very reluctant to do, which is one, provide amnesty for those that are here illegally, and number two put in place Obamacare which basically is ten thousand dollars a family. It's a proven political strategy, which is give a bunch of money to a group and, guess what, they'll vote for you.
"What I would do if I were a Democrat running four years from now, I'd say, you know what, dental care will be included in Obamcare...and Republicans will say, no, that's going to cost a trillion dollars, and the Democrats will say, that's fine, you know, we'll pay it. So this is a challenge we've got on how to deal with this is a real issue.
"Immigration we can solve, but the giving away free stuff is a hard thing to compete with."
Poll: Fewer People Support Obamacare Repeal [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/11/poll-fewer-support-obamacare-repeal/ ]
Romney acknowledged his policies weren't so popular with Hispanic voters: "And what'd we do with the Hispanic community was not as popular, obviously, we talked tough on immigration and said we weren't going to give amnesty, and of course we were going to repeal Obamacare, so on the issues we were not good, and then of course they followed on not just giving the Hispanic community things they wanted, but a very good turnout effort. Going forward, clearly we have to have an immigration plan, this idea of just kicking this down the field until every four years the Democrats use it as an issue to hit us over the head with is nuts, we have to have an immigration plan and program, and I certainly hope that our leaders in Washington are willing to put that forward."
Romney's pollster said higher minority turnout, and lower white turnout, was what did the ticket in. Pollster Neil Newhouse told donors on the call: "The way we figured it out is 900,000 fewer white men voted in our target states than in 2008, and 607,000 more African-Americans and Hispanics voted."
Listen to more of Romney's donor call HERE [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/mitt-romney-obama-gave-hispanics-obamacare-17730265 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geT2WfuBkTo , next below)].
Bill Clinton's Thoughts
Romney says president Bill Clinton called him after the election and said he might have won if not for Hurricane Sandy. Romney: "I spoke with president Clinton the day before yesterday, he called and spent thirty minutes chatting with me. He said a week out I thought you were going to win. And he said, but the hurricane happened, and it gave the president a chance to be presidential, and to look bipartisan, and you know he got a little more momentum, and of course he also said that when he was watching Ann speak at the Republican convention, he decided he was tempted to join the Republican Party. So he may have just been effusive with generous comments as he chatted. He was very complimentary, by the way, of how well we did with middle-class voters, and he said they were surprised by how strong we were in Ohio and in other states with middle-class voters, they did exceptionally well with minorities, but white, middle-class voters, we really cleaned up with and that caught them by surprise."
Read Bill Clinton's Speech at Democratic National Convention [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/transcript-bill-clintons-democratic-convention-speech/story?id=17164662 ]
Listen to Romney discuss his conversation with Bill Clinton HERE [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/mitt-romney-bill-clinton-thought-win-17730330 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKx1k438y50 , next below)].
Let's Stay Together
Romney wants his team of donors to influence whom the Republican Party picks as its next nominee. Romney: "I think the question that I have and I'm sure each of you has as you look at the future, is just what we should do with our team to try and influence the direction of our party and to influence the selection of the next nominee, and to help influence the success of that nominee in becoming the next president, and I don't have a particular plan in mind for that at this stage, but I do want to note that I think I'd like us to get together sometime after the beginning of next year with this group."
Obama Thought 'Small'
Newhouse and Rhoades both surmised that the Obama campaign thought "small." Rhoades: "President Obama and his campaign team succeeded, and Neil will highlight this with more data, in changing the electorate, and you know some on our team have said they went small in a very big way, and it worked, and you know we congratulate them."
Newhouse cited numbers indicating that minority turnout cost Romney Ohio and Florida. Newhouse: "In Ohio, we won independents overwhelmingly, but there was a four percent increase in the number of African-American voters who voted in that election, so that at the end of the day in the state, there were 178,000 more African-Americans voted in 2012 than in 2008 in Ohio, and we lost the state by 103,000 ... In Florida, we failed to really bring it home among Hispanic voters. We got--there was an increase in the number of Hispanics who voted in the state from 13 to 17 percent of the electorate, so that went up four points ... our numbers indicate that 263,000 more Hispanics voted [in Florida] in 2012 than '08, and we lost the state by 73,00 votes."
Romney's Margins Among Whites Were 'Historic'
In contrast, Newhouse almost lamented that Romney had won independents and whites, without winning the election: "We thought we were doing extraordinarily well among white middle-class voters, and it was a very tight election, but the success the Obama campaign had in changing the composition of the electorate is what they owe their victory to ... Mitt won independent voters by five points. He won independents in this race, and in Ohio he won independent voters by 19 points--some incredible numbers here. I mean, as much, and you look at the issues that we did well with, among voters who said the economy was the most important problem facing the country, Mitt beat Obama among those voters by 51 47. ... We won white voters by 20 points, which was--a Republican candidate hasn't won white voters by 20 points I think since the 1980s--so it's really won by a historic margin. We won white women by somewhat less than that."
The Primary Was 'Nuts'
Romney: "We had 20 Republican debates, that was absolutely nuts, it opened us up to gaffes and to material that could be used against us in the general, and we were fighting these debates for a year, and the incumbent president just sat back and laughed." Romney said he wants his group of donors to stay together to pressure Republicans to abbreviate their primary process.
Watch: Primary Losers Speak Out [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/08/primary-losers-speak-out-at-republican-national-convention/ ]
Romney criticized networks that hosted some of the GOP primary debates. His suggestion for the debates next time: "agree that we're gonna do, you know, I don't know, eight debates, and we're gonna, we're gonna do one a month, and we're gonna pick stations that are reasonable, it's not all gonna be done by CNN and NBC, alright, I mean we're gonna try and guide this process so that it's designed to showcase the best of our people as opposed to showcasing liberals beating the heck out of us."
Campaign manager Matt Rhoades said the campaign quietly canceled a handful of debates. Rhoades told donors on the call: "We'd often get questions about, how come there's so many debates, why can't you say no? When you're going through a primary process, I think there were 24 total debates during the primary, we probably killed at least 15, 12 to 15 quietly behind the scenes, but you get caught up."
Transition Team Was in Place
Romney had a big transition team already working on the early stages of his administration, the former candidate told donors: "I wish you also had the chance to see the transition team. A large group of folks were working on everything from pieces of legislation to file to the first budget to executive orders, and it's disappointing we won't be able to file those executive orders, but I guess that happens, we're still having a hard time, just contemplating what could have been versus what is, and it just doesn't seem real, we're still in the stage of denial at my house. We still think the campaign is going on."
Turnout was Key
Rhoades, sounding slightly awed by the Obama turnout operation, recommended to donors that they pressure the Republican National Committee to step up its data and targeting operation or create a 527 group to run GOP data and targeting operations from outside the party.
Rhoades: "I think it's absolutely critical that we as a party, and folks on this call, some of you, if you're able to do it, make this an emphasis. Whether it's Speaker Boehner, whether it's the chairman of the RNC, whether it's future leaders of the party, Congressman Ryan, Marco Rubio--whomever--to take a close look at how to do this, because like Neil said we don't know for certain how they turned out all of their voters, but we know for certain that they had a more sophisticated data collection that they had than we had when we became the nominee. We didn't inherit anything close to that. And this is probably why they were able to--you know they had all these people out in the states, and we always wondered what they were doing. We think what they were doing was they would have people assigned to do dorm-room floors, where they would make sure that everybody that was registered to vote either voted absentee or early voting, they had people that worked in urban areas, to make sure that folks would vote absentee or get out the vote on election day, and it was a real you know personal touch that they had on their voter contact. That's what we believe they were doing, I think we'll find out more in the coming days, but as far as something that this group can do for the future of the party, like the Guv said at the outset of the call, I think this is certainly something that you guys should look at."
Copyright © 2012 ABC News Internet Ventures
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/obamas-gifts-small-campaign-bill-clintons-thoughtsromneys-parting/story?id=17727179 [with comments]
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Shocker: It Was Actually Romney Who Campaigned Bearing 'Gifts'
Mitt Romney promised gifts worth billions of taxpayer dollars to for-profit colleges and banks.
11/15/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/davidhalperin/romney-gifts_b_2139611.html [with comments]
===
Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy
Rick Perlstein
November 13, 2012
It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8E3ENrKrQ , above, as embedded, next below is a partial transcript)]:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Now, the same indefatigable researcher who brought us Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks, James Carter IV, has dug up the entire forty-two-minute interview from which that quote derives. Here, The Nation publishes it in its entirety for the very first time.
Listen to the full forty-two-minute conversation with Atwater:
[audio embedded]
The back-story goes like this. In 1981, Atwater, after a decade as South Carolina's most effective Republican operative, was working in Ronald Reagan's White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. Lamis published the interview without using Atwater's name in his 1984 book The Two-Party South. Fifteen years later—and eight years after Atwater passed away from cancer—Lamis republished the interview in another book using Atwater’s name. For seven years no one paid much attention. Then the New York Times' Bob Herbert, a bit of an Atwater obsessive, quoted it in an October 6, 2005 column [ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E6DF1E30F935A35753C1A9639C8B63 ]—then five more times over the next four years.
Those words soon became legend—quoted in both screeds (The GOP-Haters Handbook, 2007) and scholarship (Corey Robin's 2011 classic work of political theory, The Reactionary Mind). Google Books records its use in ten books published so far this year alone. Curious about the remarks' context, Carter, who learned Lamis had died in 2012, asked his widow if she would consider releasing the audio of the interview, especially in light of the use of race-baiting dog-whistles (lies [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/28/rick-santorum/Santorum-Romney-claim-Obama-ending-welfare-work/ ] about Obama ending work requirements for welfare; "jokes [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/romney-makes-a-birther-joke-while-campaigning/ ]" about his supposed Kenyan provenance) in the Romney presidential campaign. Renée Lamis, an Obama donor, agreed that very same night. For one thing she was “upset,” Carter told me, that “for some time, conservatives believed [her] husband made up the Atwater interview.” For another, she was eager to illustrate that her husband's use of the Atwater quote was scholarly, not political.
So what does the new contextual wrapping teach us? It vindicates Lamis, who indeed comes off as careful and scholarly. And no surprise, it shows Atwater acting yet again in bad faith.
In the lead-up to the infamous remarks, it is fascinating to witness the confidence with which Atwater believes himself to be establishing the racial innocence of latter-day Republican campaigning: “My generation,” he insists, “will be the first generation of Southerners that won’t be prejudiced.” He proceeds to develop the argument that by dropping talk about civil rights gains like the Voting Rights Act and sticking to the now-mainstream tropes of fiscal conservatism and national defense, consultants like him were proving “people in the South are just like any people in the history of the world.”
It is only upon Professor Lamis’s gently Socratic follow-ups, and those of a co-interviewer named “Saul” (Carter hasn't been able to confirm his identity, but suspects it was the late White House correspondent Saul Friedman), that Atwater begins to loosen up—prefacing his reflections, with a plainly guilty conscience, “Now, y’all aren't quoting me on this?” (Apparently , this is the reason why Atwater’s name wasn’t published in 1984 but was in 1999, after his death).
He then utters his infamous words. The interlocutors go on to kibitz about Huey Long and barbecue. Then Atwater, apparently satisfied that he'd absolved the Southern Republican Party of racism once and for all, follows up with a prediction based on a study he claims demonstrates that Strom Thurmond won 38 percent of South Carolina’s middle-class black vote in his 1978 Senate campaign (run by Atwater).
“That voter, in my judgment,” he claims, “will be more likely to vote his economic interests than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think through a fairly slow but very steady process, will go Republican.” Because race no longer matters: “In my judgment Karl Marx [is right]... the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues.” He continues, in words that uncannily echo the “47 percent tape” (nothing new under the wingnut sun), that “statistically, as the number of non-producers in the system moves toward fifty percent,” the conservative coalition cannot but expand. Voila: a new Republican majority. Racism won't have anything to do with it.
Not bloody likely. In 2005, the political scientists Nicholas Valentino and David Sears demonstrated [ http://web.posc.jmu.edu/seminar/readings/4a-realignment/race+party%20realignment%20in%20the%20south%20old%20times%20not%20forgotten.pdf ] that a Southern man holding conservative positions on issues other than race is no more likely than a conservative Northerner to vote for a Democrat. But when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions—like whether one agrees “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites”—white Southerners were twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote Democratic. As another political scientist, Thomas Schaller, wrote in his 2006 book Whistling Past Dixie [ http://books.google.com/books/about/Whistling_Past_Dixie.html?id=jG5Jhexkjg0C ] (which naturally quotes the infamous Atwater lines), “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters...the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”
Which one particular Republican spinmeister, when he wasn't preening before political scientists, knew fully well—which was why, seven years after that interview, in his stated goal to “rip the bark off the little bastard [Michael Dukakis]” on behalf of his candidate George H.W. Bush, Atwater ran the infamous ad blaming Dukakis for an escaped Massachusetts convict, Willie Horton, “repeatedly raping” an apparently white girl. Indeed, Atwater pledged to make "Willie Horton his running mate." The commercial was sponsored by a dummy outfit called the National Security Political Action Committee [ http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/2012/0524/From-Willie-Horton-to-windsurfing-Five-top-political-attack-ads/Willie-Horton-erases-a-double-digit-lead ]—which it is true, was a whole lot more abstract than saying "nigger, nigger, nigger."
For more on the GOP's effort to roll back enfranchisment, read Ari Berman's Why We Still Need Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act [ http://www.thenation.com/blog/171199/why-we-still-need-section-5-voting-rights-act ].
*
Related
The GOP Throws a Tampa Tantrum
The long-running feud between moderates and conservatives is over. The wackos have won.
http://www.thenation.com/article/169851/gop-throws-tampa-tantrum
*
Copyright © 2012 The Nation (emphasis in original)
http://www.thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy [with comments]
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Is the Voting Rights Act Doomed?
November 14, 2012
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/is-the-voting-rights-act-doomed/ [with comments]
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Changing Times
November 14, 2012
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/changing-times/ [with comments]
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Affirmative Action Ban in Michigan Is Rejected
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: November 15, 2012
The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled, 8 to 7, on Thursday that Michigan’s voter-approved 2006 ban on affirmative action was unconstitutional.
The ruling [ http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/12a0386p-06.pdf ], in Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action v. University of Michigan, was not based on racial discrimination, but rather on a violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. The ban, the court said, unfairly placed a special burden on supporters of race-conscious admissions policies.
People trying to change any other aspect of university admissions policies, the court said, had several avenues open: they could lobby the admissions committee, petition university leaders, try to influence the college’s governing board or take the issue to a statewide initiative. Those supporting affirmative action, on the other hand, had no alternative but to undertake the “long, expensive and arduous process” of amending the state Constitution.
“The existence of such a comparative structural burden undermines the equal protection clause’s guarantee that all citizens ought to have equal access to the tools of political change,” said Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., writing for the majority.
The United States Supreme Court is considering an affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas, challenging the use of race as a factor in admissions. But the Sixth Circuit case raises a different issue: the legality of statewide bans on affirmative action. Seven states besides Michigan — Arizona, California, Florida, Oklahoma, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Washington — forbid the consideration of race in university admissions.
The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has upheld California’s ban, and with the Michigan ruling, the stage may be set for the issue to go before the Supreme Court.
“I think this is very likely to go to the Supreme Court, because there’s a direct conflict between the circuits, it’s of great national importance and the 8-7 split on the Sixth Circuit is a signal that some ruling is needed,” said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped draft the California ban. “The only thing that might get in the way is if the Fisher case decides that all race-based action in education is unconstitutional, which would make it not technically moot, but less important.”
Bill Schuette, the attorney general of Michigan, said Thursday that he planned to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. “Entrance to our great universities must be based upon merit,” he said in a statement.
George Washington, the Detroit lawyer who argued the case, said Proposal 2, as the Michigan ban is known, does not ensure merit. “The Big Lie told by the supporters of Proposal 2 is that grades and test scores are a neutral means for judging merit,” he said. “But that system is openly biased against black, Latino and Native American applicants.”
The University of Michigan’s affirmative action battle has been roiling for decades. The affirmative action litigation led to the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision that while a university could not establish racial quotas, it could consider race or ethnicity as a “plus” factor in a holistic review.
After those decisions, Ward Connerly, a black former University of California regent who was the driving force behind California’s affirmative action ban, worked with Jennifer Gratz, a white Michigan woman who was the plaintiff in one of the Supreme Court cases, to get the issue onto the Michigan ballot.
Michigan’s affirmative action ban, which applies to government hiring, government contracting and admission to public universities, became part of the state Constitution through a 2006 voter initiative that won 58 percent of the vote.
The district court that heard the challenge to the ban upheld it, but the three-judge appellate panel whose decision was appealed to the full circuit court struck it down, using the same reasoning as the full circuit court.
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Related
Times Topic: Affirmative Action
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/affirmative_action/index.html
Schools Brace for Decision on Affirmative Action (October 11, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/us/colleges-brace-for-court-decision-on-affirmative-action.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/education/michigans-affirmative-action-ban-is-ruled-unconstitutional.html
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Bob FitzSimmonds, Virginia GOP Official, Predicts Obama 'Goes To Hell'
Bob FitzSimmonds slammed President Obama on his Facebook page.
By Laura Bassett
Posted: 11/15/2012 3:24 pm EST Updated: 11/15/2012 3:44 pm EST
Bob FitzSimmonds, an official in the Virginia Republican Party and close ally of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, posted a comment on his Facebook page Wednesday that predicts President Barack Obama's eternal damnation.
"When Obama is 90 years old and he dies and goes to Hell, he is going to say 'This is all Bush's fault,'" FitzSimmonds wrote.
FitzSimmonds, who previously worked as a legislative aide for Cuccinelli and ran unsuccessfully for the Virginia state Senate, now serves as chief deputy clerk for Prince William Circuit Court and treasurer of the Virginia Republican Party's State Central Committee. He told the Hampton Roads Pilot [ http://hamptonroads.com.nyud.net/2012/11/gop-official-and-cuccinelli-ally-anticipates-when-obama-goes-hell ] in an email Thursday that he sees nothing wrong with his comment about the president.
"My Facebook post was not about Obama going to Hell," he said. "It was about his obsession with blame shifting and I don't really see anything inappropriate about it."
Cuccinelli's campaign spokesman, Noah Wall, said the Virginia attorney general disagrees with FitzSimmonds' assessment. "Mr. FitzSimmonds does not speak for our campaign," Wall said.
Brian Moran, chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party, issued a statement on Thursday urging Cuccinelli and the Virginia GOP to condemn FitzSimmonds' statement.
"Taking to Facebook to muse on the death of the President of the United States and whether or not he will go to hell is well below the standard of conduct Virginians set for their public officials and political leaders," Moran said. "Mr. FitzSimmonds should apologize and his close allies like Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Pat Mullins should condemn his inflammatory remarks immediately. As leaders in Washington put the elections behind them and try to solve the enormous challenges we face as a country, this type of rhetoric raises serious questions about whether certain factions of the Republican party are capable of putting Virginia families ahead of ugly partisan rancor."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/15/bob-fitzsimmonds-obama-hell_n_2138870.html [with comments]
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The Reality of Secession and Unicorns
By Bob Cesca
[ http://bobcesca.com/ ]
November 15,2012
I hate to disappoint the 675,000 whiny diaper babies [ http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/14/white-house-secede-petitions-reach-660000-signatures-50-state-participation/ ] calling for secession in the wake of the election but, sorry, no matter how hard they stomp their feet and pout and fling their feces at the electoral map, demands for secession might as well be demands for goblins and unicorns. They’re equally as realistic.
Secession from the United States will never happen.
Ever.
Not only is it illegal, but it’s technically an act of treason [ http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A3Sec3.html ] as defined by the Constitution, and it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Texas v. White [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0074_0700_ZO.html ]. Furthermore, the secessionists aren’t merely condemning the Obama administration, secession is by definition a categorical rejection of the United States and its Constitution, say nothing of the beloved Pledge of Allegiance, which specifically includes the word “indivisible” right after the word “God.” I thought these things were sacrosanct to conservatives.
I’m not breaking any news here, but the red states tried this already and it failed miserably. The core motivation behind the 1861 secession movement was, of course, the defense of slavery as the cornerstone of the Southern economy, and, subsequently, state sovereignty over the legality and regulation of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln won the election of 1860, secessionist fire-eaters were convinced that the initially unconvinced [ http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm ] Abraham Lincoln would summarily free the slaves and possibly arm them for an insurrection against their masters, thus undermining the southern economy in a massive display of executive “tyranny.” And so the southern states, one by one, seceded. In the four years that followed, 2.5 percent of the American population was wiped out [ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/death-numbers/ ] in the American Civil War — the equivalent to 7,850,000 people in terms of today’s population, or roughly the entire 2010 population of Virginia. And, in the end, the decimated seceding states were forced by military attrition to return to the Union.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that all of the former Confederate states defied the astronomical one-in-a-million odds and actually seceded again. (I can’t help but to think about Jim Carrey’s reaction in Dumb and Dumber when presented with one-in-a-million odds: “So you’re saying there’s a chance…”)
What would actually happen?
Unless these states were able to muster an army of disloyal soldiers and militia and fired upon military bases loyal to the United States, it’s doubtful that a modern secession movement would result in another civil war. But if it did, the U.S. military of 2012 clearly possesses capabilities and manpower far beyond anything imaged in 1861 and would summarily wipe out an army of rag-tags, even if they did manage to seize a couple of bases and persuade a few commanders to join the cause. If it escalated into war, the bloodshed would be unspeakable. The late Civil War historian Shelby Foote once observed that the most brutal fistfights he’d ever seen were between two brothers.
However, with a modern economy, there would be no need for President Obama to order the military to retake the seceding states by force. Again, we’re talking about pure fantasy here, but if the president took seriously the various Ordinances of Secession and the subsequent formation of an anti-federalist confederation of sovereign states, my strong hunch is that the president would merely starve out the states until they simply gave up.
To avoid the inevitable sanctions, there would be a massive refugee crisis of non-secessionists flooding out of the secessionist states. They’d be the smart ones.
Most of the red states — now the hypothetical “New Confederacy” — had heretofore taken more federal aid than they paid back in federal taxes. South Carolina, for example, takes $1.35 [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/26/blog-posting/red-state-socialism-graphic-says-gop-leaning-state/ ] in federal money for every dollar it pays in federal taxes. Louisiana takes $1.78 for every dollar it pays into the system. Talk about moochers and freeloaders. By the way, this money is redistributed from other states, including the blue states with their abortion-on-demand and evil healthcare mandate. After secession, that gravy train would cease to exist. Farmers, corporations, small businesses, universities and law enforcement would crumble without federal aid — grants, contracts, matching funds, tax breaks, etc.
If the reality of losing federal money wasn’t enough to convince the New Confederacy to stop behaving like petulant, tantrum-throwing children, then an array of more hard-core sanctions would begin. It’s likely the power grid, pipelines, shipping lanes and, yes, satellite and internet communications would be summarily blocked by the U.S. government. The confederacy would be totally cut off from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, without federal regulations on food safety, clean water, clean air, and without the CDC, rampant disease would spread across the confederacy. How would northern medical equipment and pharmaceuticals reach the seceded states? Inflation, especially on medicine, would skyrocket as demand for dwindling supplies increased. Black-marketeers would spring up in every town.
The solidly blue areas inside the seceded states — Austin, for instance — would be the Texas equivalent to West Berlin in the heart of East Germany. We’d have to airlift supplies to those areas and hope that hoards of desperate and well-armed suburban and rural warlords didn’t swoop in try to swipe the supplies. Needless to say, there would be a large scale humanitarian crisis.
At the governmental level of the New Confederacy, presuming there’s something holding all the states together, leaders would quickly learn the hard lessons of both the Articles of Confederation and the CSA: it’s nearly impossible to govern and do business as a confederacy, especially in a 2012 world. There wouldn’t be a standard national currency. There wouldn’t be national trade agreements even though, on the bright side, nations like China, which has been known to do business with rogue nations like Iran, might continue to ship cheap crap to Walmart and other stores inside this loose conglomeration of nations.
Instead of one large national economy, there would be individual state-level economies — each of them too weak to compete in the global marketplace. How would the New Confederacy generate revenue without a central system of taxation? If it came down to a fighting war against the U.S., how would the central government raise and finance a military?
Welcome, New Confederacy, to third world status!
But it gets worse. The impossible reality of a successful confederacy would be further exacerbated by the secession precedent. States would end up splitting into smaller and smaller pieces with parts of states seceded from other parts — subdividing and subdividing until the confederacy vaporized or was reunified into a more traditional federalist system.
Again, this isn’t speculative. This is tested reality. The Confederate States of America ended up with a strong central government because it quickly learned that it couldn’t fight a war and manage its economy without one. Years earlier, the disastrous Articles of Confederation were dismantled and replaced with the U.S. Constitution with a strong central government and a powerful chief executive as its centerpiece.
So if you’re one of the now hundreds of thousands of signatories to these ridiculous petitions, think about the reality of what you’ve endorsed. You signed a petition to disconnect yourself from the United States of America and, perhaps, to wage war against it. If you’re on Social Security — gone. If you’re on Medicare — gone. If your children attend public or charter schools — gone. If you work for a defense contractor or another corporation that relies on government contracts — gone. Hell, if you rely on the internet to do business — gone. And in the worst case scenario, you should be prepared to wage war against the most powerful military in the history of mankind, augmented by the military might of other allied nations.
And if you’re inclined to storm off like a drama-queen reality show contestant — if you’re inclined to “Go Galt” as so many conservatives threatened to do four years ago — then run off into the forest and live off the grid for while until you calm down from your post-election hysteria. While you’re there, wise up.
Copyright © 2012 BanterMediaGroup, L.L.C. (emphasis in original)
http://thedailybanter.com/2012/11/the-reality-of-secession-and-unicorns/ [with comments] [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/secession-obama-2012_b_2138541.html (with comments)]
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Bill Maher Slams Mitt Romney Hard, Compares Him to Rappers (Real Time New Rules 1-20-12)
Uploaded by midesan on Jan 21, 2012
Bill Maher calls Mitt Romney phony, arrogant, out of touch. Calls his supporters naive chumps & sycophants.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZnNVgr6xB8
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Mitt Romney's Top 10 Out Of Touch Moments
Uploaded by ThinkProgressVideo on Feb 27, 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFUUDrh9wNg
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"Mister Romney's Neighborhood" - (Jimmy Fallon)
Published on Oct 9, 2012 by latenight
Mitt Romney recently said he wants to cut funding for PBS, which is odd, considering he hosts his own children's show on the network.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfSqJ9cYIFE
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David Letterman - Why Mitt Romney Won't Appear
Published on Oct 11, 2012 by CBS
Dave thinks he's figured out why Mitt Romney and Mrs. Mitt won't appear on the show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7cuS9KUsiU
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David Letterman - Mitt Romney Calls Dave
Published on Nov 6, 2012 by CBS
He won't appear on the show, but Mitt gives Dave a call to discuss his cereal platform.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LoT2SrrnKA
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Mitt Romney's Greatest Hits (2012 Edition)
Published on Nov 9, 2012 by tpmtv
The best moments of Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential run, for Pete's sake.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x9s_piBO3o
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"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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