• The United States of America -- a country where only eight years ago, opposition to the right of gay and lesbian couples to form and protect their families, under the color of law, was a winning national election strategy -- for the first time by popular vote defeated an effort to discriminate against such families in one state, and endorsed the right to marry in three others.
• The United States of America, where legal marital rape is in living memory, turned away two men who would minimize that rape and likely turned control of the entire Senate over that issue.
• The United States of America, where under the color of law and under the force of terrorism whole swaths of black people were deprived of the right to vote in recent memory, saw black voting not only match levels achieved in 2008 but exceed them.
• The United States of America, a country of immigrants, saw the Latino share of the vote increase, not decrease as so many predicted.
• The United States of America, whose prison system is a mockery of justice, endorsed a mature and sane drug policy in three [sic - two] states.
• The United States of America, where the disenfranchisement of women is in recent memory, sent a historic number of women to its upper chambers.
• The United States of America, whose media has long been held hostage by the vendors of hair-tonic and lead alchemy, saw those self-same vendors shamed, embarrassed, and reduced to self-mockery before the world.
•The United States of America, a country with the vending of black people barely out of living memory, with the systemic white supremacy very much in its living memory, re-elected a black president.
That president is the killer of Osama bin Laden. That president, a black man, a card-carrying member of this country's pariah class, is now seen by Americans as its most effective guardian. That president is the pivotal figure in what must be one of the most progressive nights in American history, and arguably the most progressive night in American history in some 40 years.
6 Reasons Why the 2012 Election Will Be Considered Historic
By Robert Creamer Posted: 11/07/2012 11:19 pm
Tuesday's election was important for many reasons. Its outcome will certainly benefit millions and millions of people -- both in the United States and around the world. And President Obama's campaign will be remembered as one of the best-run political efforts in the history of American politics.
But beyond the many important short and mid-term consequences, I believe it will likely be remembered as an inflection point in American political history. Here are six reasons why:
1). This election was truly a battle for the soul of America. It presented Americans with the clearest choice in my lifetime between traditional progressive American values -- a vision of a society where we are all in this together on the one hand -- and a vision of a society in which everyone looks out first and foremost for himself alone on the other.
Do we have each other's back? Are we our brothers and sister's keepers? Do we refuse to leave anyone behind? When we give everyone an opportunity to succeed does that make all of us more successful -- or is life and society a zero sum game where one person's success can only be purchased as the expense of another?
Tuesday's election framed up the question of whether we believe all of those values we are taught in Sunday School, or whether we believe that 47 percent of Americans have to be considered victims who cannot be convinced to take responsibility for their lives?
Mitt Romney offered America an opportunity to choose values and leaders that were committed to the radical individualism espoused by his running-mate, Ayn Rand disciple Paul Ryan. America said no.
Instead, Americans chose to move forward in our over 200-year-long quest to create a society where everyone has a fair shot, pays their fair share and plays by the same rules.
2). The right wing viewed this election as a critical opportunity to delegitimize progressive economic policies, return to the trickle down economics that they put in place during the Reagan and Bush Administrations, and abandon the social contract implicit in the New Deal. They failed.
Just four years ago, trickle-down economics suffered a devastating failure. After eight years of promising that tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulating financial markets would bring economic growth and prosperity for everyone, the financial system collapsed and the Bush Administration chalked up the worst record producing private sector jobs in 60 years -- zero net private sector jobs over his entire term.
Obama will now have the opportunity to demonstrate palpably that progressive economic policies are far superior to the trickle down theories that so recently wrecked the economy.
The Great Recession was not just a run of the mill business cycle downturn. Economies take years to recover from recessions that result from catastrophic financial market meltdowns.
Obama's policies, not only prevented a slide into a second Great Depression, they also resulted in a gradual sustained recovery -- 32 months of private sector job growth. But it's been a long slog.
Now, unless the Republican leaders who still control the House precipitate another impasse like the debt-ceiling crisis last year -- the recovery will almost certainly accelerate.
The odds are good that the economic narrative that ultimately won the day in this election will provide future electorates with indisputable proof of the superiority of progressive economic policies by 2012 and 2016.
One of the most painful and misleading political consequences of a Romney election would have been hearing the pundits go on about the "Romney Miracle" as the economy continued to improve in the next two years as a result of the foundation laid by President Obama.
Now that won't happen -- just the opposite.
In fact, the economic choice facing the country was even more extreme than whether or not to return to "trickle-down" economics. In many respects the election became a referendum on the entire progressive political project. The Romney- Ryan budget was a frontal assault on the social contract implicit in the New Deal. In practice, the voters rejected this proposal.
3). America will implement ObamaCare.
The major reason why the Republicans were able to use ObamaCare as an election cudgel in 2010 -- and to a more limited degree this year -- was that it had not yet been fully implemented.
As soon as it is fully up and running, support for ObamaCare will skyrocket -- the same way it did in Massachusetts. The reason is simple. ObamaCare will guarantee that most Americans have access to health insurance regardless of pre-existing conditions, at an affordable price. Once it is implemented, voters will not look kindly on a candidate who wants to take it away.
By 2014 ObamaCare will be revered as a great accomplishment and Republican opposition will be viewed with the same approbation as the GOP's original opposition to Medicare.
4). This election will go down as the final chapter in the right-wing's "culture war." They lost.
The Right made a desperate last ditch attempt to turn the tide in the "culture war" -- on equality for gays and lesbians, on the right of women to control their own bodies, on women's equal status in America's work places and society at large.
They failed. Their positions on rape, contraception and abortion cost them dearly among women. In referenda this fall, the forces favoring marriage equality won in four out of four states.
In the past, the Republicans used the issues of gay rights and reproductive choice as "wedge issues" to divide the Democratic base. Today those issues divide the potential Republican base. It must have been shocking for some Republicans to see video banners saying "Marriage Equality" and "Abortion Rights" displayed across the stage at the Democratic Convention.
The outcome of this election demonstrated that as the millennial generation grows in number in the electorate, it will most likely be impossible for any candidate to win the presidency who wants to take American social policy back to the 1950's.
5). Tuesday's election was a clear rejection of Romney's call to return to a Neo-Con lead foreign policy of go-it-alone recklessness and bluster.
For the next four years, Romney Advisor Dan Senor, former Iraq War spokesman, and other Neo-Cons won't be shaping American foreign policy. Instead the Obama Administration will have another term to build the kind of strong, self-confident, collaborative approach to the world that has so massively improved America's standing among our fellow human beings.
6). This election made it clear that if the Republican Party continues its war on minorities, it is destined for political irrelevancy.
It is no longer possible to be elected President of the United States by depending entirely on the white vote. Forty-five percent of Barack Obama's votes came from minorities -- and especially African Americans and Hispanics.
The white share of the vote dropped from 74 percent in 2008 to 72 percent this year. In presidential politics, demographics are destiny.
It turned out that African-American voters were every bit as enthusiastic about re-electing President Obama as they were about electing him in the first place. He carried African-American voters 96 percent to 4 percent -- and they turned out at the same levels they had in 2008.
And Obama won Hispanic voters by 44 percent -- 72 percent Obama to 28 percent Romney. Clearly the Hispanic vote cost Romney the states of Colorado and Nevada -- and in all likelihood Florida. And if Republicans continue to demonize immigrants in general and Hispanics in particular -- Texas will be next. That would make it statistically impossible for a Republican to take the White House any time in the near future.
The GOP's problem with Hispanics goes well beyond its opposition to immigration reform. Republicans like to delude themselves that many Hispanics are "conservative." While many are very religious and have strong commitments to family, the polling shows that Hispanic voters believe in a society where everyone has each other's back -- a society like a family -- where government plays an integral role.
This election demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that if the GOP's attitude and openness to minorities doesn't change, then it will become increasingly isolated from the diverse mainstream of Americans society.
As the President said in his victory speech, America is exceptional precisely because we have created a diverse nation where people of every background and religion and culture can live together in a tolerant, prosperous society. That's what makes us the shining city on the hill -- the example for the rest of the world.
Most Americans -- and certainly the Millennial Generation -- get that. If the Republican Party fails to get it as well, it will cease to be a major contender for national leadership.
When President Obama took the stage at McCormick Place in Chicago well after midnight, we were all too wiped out with joy or depression or Nate Silver auto-refresh fatigue to pay careful attention to the speech the newly reelected president delivered. The phrase that lingered in most of our sleepy ears was the reprise of his career-launching invocation of the United States as being more than red and blue states. So soaring, so unifying. But those words were merely the trappings of magnanimity draped over an argument that was, at its core, harsher than the one he had regularly delivered during the campaign.
The telling phrase came when Obama turned away from the thank-yous and patriotic hymnals into the guts of his remarks. “Despite all our differences,” he transitioned, “most of us share certain hopes for America’s future.” The key term here is “most,” as opposed to “all”—“most” meaning less than 100 percent and possibly as little as 51 percent. He attributed to most Americans a desire for great schools, a desire to limit debt and inequality: “a generous America, a compassionate America.”
Obama then proceeded to define the American idea in a way that excludes the makers-versus-takers conception of individual responsibility propounded by Paul Ryan and the tea party. Since Obama took office, angry men in Colonial garb or on Fox News have harped on “American exceptionalism,” which boils our national virtue down to the freedom from having to subsidize some other sap’s health insurance. Obama turned this on its head. “What makes America exceptional,” he announced, “are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth. The belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.” Obama invoked average Americans living out this ethos of mutual responsibility (such as a “family business whose owners would rather cut their own pay than lay off their neighbors,” the example of which stands at odds with the corporate ethos of a certain Boston-based private-equity executive). And even the line about red states and blue states began with the following statement: “We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions.”
Presumably more was at work here than mere uplift. The president was establishing the meaning of his victory. Even in the days leading up to Tuesday, clouds of dismissal had already begun to hover overhead. The election was “small,” in the words of one story in the conventional-wisdom-generating machine Politico, and “too narrow and too rooted in the Democratic base to grant him anything close to a mandate,” in the words of another. “I don’t think the Obama victory is a policy victory,” sniffed Romney adviser Kevin Hassett. “In the end what mattered was that it was about Bain and frightening people that Romney is an evil capitalist.”
Like every president, Obama won for myriad reasons, important and petty. But his reelection was hardly small and hardly devoid of ideas. Indeed, it was entirely about a single idea. The campaign, from beginning to end, was an extended argument about economic class.
It began last December, when Obama delivered a trademark Big Speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, where Teddy Roosevelt once spoke, on government’s place in mitigating income inequality. It was, in a sense, an extension of his failed budget negotiations with House Republicans. Obama had decided that his reelection effort would be an attempt to go over Speaker of the House John Boehner’s head and bring to the voters the proposition he couldn’t get the opposing party to accept: that both moral decency and plausible budgeting required an end to George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich.
Though liberals may have found Obama’s second presidential campaign less joyful than his first, it’s worth noting that it was thematically sharper and more progressive. Even the ads attacking Mitt Romney’s history at Bain Capital, which could charitably be described as one-sided, supported the general theme. Republicans had deified the rich—they were “job creators” whose interests were wholly synonymous with those of the rest of us. The testimonials of the victims of Bain Capital certainly were a personal attack on Romney, but to view them as just a personal attack is to miss the blunt symbolic overtones.
Conservatives, of course, were dying to join the great debate over class—dying to listen to their standard-bearer assail Obama as a redistributionist and lay out a ringing defense of economic freedom. Romney constructed much of his summer campaign around Obama’s wrenched-out-of-context line “You didn’t build that,” conveying the party’s belief in the centrality of business owners, a notion for which Romney himself served as the main avatar. And when he selected Paul Ryan, the chief party ideologist, as his running mate, it seemed as though the battle of ideas was about to be joined in full.
But Ryan’s role on the ticket turned out to be an early indicator of which party had the upper hand. The great debate over entitlements and the role of the state turned out to consist, at least from the Republican end, of swaggering declarations that they wanted to have a debate. (Ryan: “We want this debate. We need this debate. We will win this debate.”) Ryan did launch an assault against Obama—from the left, lambasting him for having cut Medicare. After an initial star turn, the campaign whisked Ryan from the spotlight. Ladies and gentlemen, Paul Ryan! Catch him again when he returns in 2016!
Another clue came the night of Romney’s greatest triumph: the first debate, in Denver. Romney trounced Obama precisely because he refused to take up the ideological fight. Rather than argue for the freedom-restoring, incentive-jolting power of tax cuts, as he had before, Romney insisted he would not cut taxes for the rich at all and might even increase them. He presented his opposition to Obamacare not as a crusade against socialism but as a tweak, promising to provide insurance for people with preexisting conditions and reminding the audience of Romneycare, once his secret shame. The next night, in an interview on Fox News, he fully renounced his secretly recorded sneering at the 47 percent—the campaign’s most vivid expression of the makers-versus-takers philosophy—after having previously defended it as merely an inelegant expression.
It was a shrewd, necessary concession but one that demonstrated just how unwinnable Romney’s campaign grasped the larger argument to be. Romney pulled close to Obama in the polls precisely because he dulled the philosophical distinction, reducing the points of difference between him and the president to managerial competence and a superior knack for bipartisan negotiation. A wave of endorsements for Romney—by the Des Moines Register, David Brooks, Ross Douthat—explicitly hinged their support on the expectation that Romney would not carry out the program to which he had pledged himself. This was the furthest possible thing from winning a battle of ideas.
*
If there is a single plank in the Democratic platform on which Obama can claim to have won, it is taxing the rich. Obama ignored vast swaths of his agenda, barely mentioning climate change or education reform, but by God did he hammer home the fact that his winning would bring higher taxes on the rich. He raised it so relentlessly that at times it seemed out of proportion even to me, and I wrote a book on the topic. But polls consistently showed the public was on his side.
Obama’s goal was to prove to the GOP that their rigid defense of the richest one percent was political poison and to force them to bend. For now, at least, their same monomaniacal refusal to increase any taxes on the rich is leading Republicans to deny any connection between the tax issue and Obama’s victory. Numerous Republicans pointed last week to the party’s restrictionist immigration agenda as the source of its dismal performance with the growing (and increasingly Democratic) Latino bloc. But the party’s Latino problem does not rest with immigration law. Polls show that Hispanics are just plain liberal on the main role-of-government questions dividing the parties. More than three fifths want to leave Obamacare in place rather than repeal it; a mere 12 percent agree with the Republican position of closing the deficit entirely through spending cuts. The harsh truth that fend-for-yourself economic libertarianism is a worldview mainly confined to the shrinking, aging white electorate is a reality Republicans prefer not to acknowledge.
Republicans in Congress have been similarly intransigent. Americans “reelected our majority in the House,” Boehner asserted last week, and thus they “made clear that there is no mandate for raising tax rates.” Never mind that voters clearly indicated the opposite when asked directly by pollsters, or that the GOP’s continued House majority reflects its advantage in drawing up districts comfortably gerrymandered to its benefit.
Of course, what the people want is all fairly beside the point now. What matters in Washington is power and leverage—two things that accrued dramatically in Obama’s favor last week. But it’s not irrelevant that American voters had a chance to lay down their marker on the major social divide of our time: whether government can mitigate the skyrocketing inequality generated by the marketplace. For so many years, conservatives have endeavored to fend off such a debate by screaming “class war” at the faintest wisp of populist rhetoric. Somehow the endless repetition of the scare line inured us to the real thing. Here it was, right before our eyes: a class war, or the closest thing one might find to one in modern American history, as a presidential election. The outcome was plain. The 47 percent turned out to be the 51 percent.
Struggling to remain optimistic the day after the election, the anti-abortion activist Charles A. Donovan, president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute [ http://www.lozierinstitute.org/ ], argued that the moral collapse he sees in the re-election of President Obama and in Democratic Senate victories is only a temporary setback.
We may be on the verge of a new Babylonian captivity for religious conservatives. As we know, the story does not end there.
Actually, Donovan and his fellow right-wingers can expect to be living in a Babylonian captivity for quite some time. The right has lost the culture war.
To the dismay of the conservative movement, on virtually every burning issue that preoccupies the right, the country has moved steadily leftward. Election Day exit polling [ http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2012-exit-poll ] found, by a margin of 49 to 46, that a plurality of voters supported same-sex marriage. The same survey found that 59 percent of voters believe abortion should be legal in all (29 percent) or most (30 percent) cases, while only 36 percent believe it should be illegal in most (23 percent) or all (13 percent) cases.
The chart, Fig. 1 [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/154634/Acceptance-Gay-Lesbian-Relations-New-Normal.aspx ], from Gallup on the “morality” of same-sex “relations” reflects the leftward cultural trend with the percentage of respondents saying that homosexual relations are morally acceptable growing from 40 percent in 2001 to 54 percent in 2012:
We must lay the groundwork now with fresh ideas embedded with timeless principles sold by voices who understand people forget and must be reminded why America is great and why conservatism helped make it that way. We must continue, as a conservative movement, challenging and ending the political careers of Republicans who carry the banner of conservatism while selling it out.
It is unlikely, however, that bloodletting within the Republican Party will solve its current problems. The roots of the party’s dilemma run deeper, with two parallel and mutually reinforcing developments structuring political change
The first is the coalescing of “issue clusters” – particularly on the left.
Throughout much of the period of conservative domination of presidential elections from 1968 to 1988 — and in terms of Congressional power from 1994 to 2006 — the Republican Party had a major election-day edge: there was far more ideological cohesion and less divisive conflict on the right than on the left. Conservatives, from white evangelicals to corporate C.E.O.s, found common ground in their support for an aggressive national defense and in their opposition to what they saw as a coercive, redistributive tax collecting and intrusively regulatory domestic government.
The left was often split: between environmentalists and pro-development unions; between proponents and opponents of affirmative action; between law-and-order whites and liberal advocates of criminal defendants’ rights. As a result, the Democratic Party was vulnerable to Republican wedge issue strategies that produced such famous political commercials as Jesse Helms’s “Hands [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIyewCdXMzk (next below)]” — a k a. “White Hands”
More recently, there has been a steady diminution of conflict and a growing consensus on the left culminating in the 2008 and 2012 election victories. Issues now linked – clustered — in the minds of many Democratic voters include not only traditional socio-cultural, moral and racial issues like women’s, minority and gay rights, abortion and contraception, non-marital child-bearing, and the obligation of government to provide a safety net, but also to matters pertaining to the overarching role of government in generating greater social justice [ http://www.fordfoundation.org/issues ].
Essentially, the new core of the party – minorities, unmarried men and women, young voters and whites with advanced degrees – is in general agreement on this broader spectrum of issues, forming a coalition of shared ideas.
The aggregation of a broad set of issues in forming a left or right political orientation marks a major change in American politics. Philip Converse, of the University of Michigan, studied data from the 1956 and 1960 elections and found that only a small minority [ http://wikisum.com/w/Converse:_The_nature_of_belief_systems_in_mass_publics ] of highly educated and well-informed voters viewed politics through what might be called an ideological lens.
But things have really changed since then.
Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has documented a major shift [ http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/sccraig/readings/abramowitz_fiorina.polarization.2011.pdf ] as voters have made decisions based on a collection of variables that once would have been seen as unrelated. In a study based on 2008 polling, Abramowitz found majorities or solid pluralities of voters formed consistently liberal or conservative views – not centrist positions – on a continuum of issues including gay rights and abortion; off-shore oil drilling; the Iraq war; health care; financial regulation; climate change and mortgage assistance to low-income homeowners.
In effect, Abramowitz writes, the historical dependence of the Democratic Party on moderate-to-conservative whites
has decreased considerably while the contribution of liberal whites and especially nonwhites has increased. While moderate-to-conservative whites made up a majority of those who voted for Carter, they comprised barely a quarter of those who voted for Obama.
Demographic groups that favor social justice dispute the even-handedness of the marketplace; they often view business and corporations with suspicion; and they believe that the state has an obligation to provide for those struggling in a free market system. These demographic constituencies have grown in numbers, and today form a relatively robust coalition: the Democratic Party.
Single voters are more amenable than are their married counterparts to a government focused on social justice. Unmarried voters are substantially more vulnerable to economic downturns and the loss of a job; they look more favorably on such safety net programs as unemployment benefits, government-sponsored health insurance, and government initiatives to ensure food security. Married couples, on the other hand, are more focused [ http://www.democracycorps.com/National-Surveys/winning-the-47-percent/ ] on minimizing their tax burden [ http://www.iwf.org/blog/2789846/Voting-While-Single ].
On a larger scale, the Pew Research Center has produced an analysis, Fig. 3 [ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/11/07/a-milestone-en-route-to-a-majority-minority-nation/ ], that shows that minority voters, who backed Obama by an 8-2 margin, will be an absolute majority of the population in 38 years, growing from 15.1 percent in 1960 to 34 percent in 2011 to 51 percent in 2050. Minority voters hold policy and ideological views very similar to those of unmarried men and women – they are in fact an overlapping population because a much lower percentage [ http://media.al.com/bn/other/Marriage-report-Pew-Research-Center-Dec-2011.pdf ] of African American (at 31 percent) and Hispanic adults (at 48 percent) are married than whites (at 55 percent). Minority voters are noticeably more supportive of activist government policies than the average white voter.
Fig. 3
The contrasting issue priorities of Democrats and Republicans — marital status aside — were evident in the answer to a particular question the 2012 exit polls asked [ http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2012-exit-poll ]. When voters were prompted to pick the most important issue facing the country – foreign policy, the federal deficit, the economy or health care – only 15 percent chose the deficit, but those who chose the deficit were overwhelmingly Romney voters by a 2-1 margin, 66-32. A slightly higher percentage, 18 percent, chose health care, and these voters supported Obama voters by a 3-1 margin, 75-24.
Compared to 2008, Obama’s major gains this year were limited to Hispanics, who went from 67-31 Democratic in 2008 to 71-27 in 2008; and Asian-Americans, who went from 62-35 Democratic to 73-26. Those gains were adequate to produce victory by off-setting enough of the decline in support for Obama from many other groups, including men, who went from 48-49 to 45-52; whites, down from 43-55 to 39-59; voters with incomes above $100,000, from 49-49 to 44-54; Jewish voters, from 78-21 to 69-30; independents, from 52-44 to 45-50; and young voters below the age of 30, from 66-32 to 60-37.
In a setback to conservatives, the Nov. 6 exit polls [ http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2012-exit-poll ] gave strong support to liberalized immigration reform, which is likely to become a top priority for the Obama administration, with 65 percent of respondents agreeing that illegal immigrants should be “offered a chance to apply for legal status,” while only 28 percent of those surveyed opposed such reform. Since the election, a number of conservative pundits [ http://americasvoiceonline.org/research/election-central/ ], including Sean Hannity of Fox News and Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist, have called on the Republican Party to reevaluate its opposition to comprehensive immigration reform.
Voters gave a more modest boost to the administration’s call to raise taxes on those making over $250,000, with a 47 percent plurality backing the proposal, another 13 percent supporting raising everyone’s taxes, and 35 percent opposed to any tax hike.
The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007.
The story points out that many people
say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age.
Social, cultural and moral issues have become favorable terrain for the Democratic Party, in the way that they once were for the Republicans, but there are economic trends that do not bode so well for core Democratic constituencies, given their disproportionately low income and high-unemployment rates. The issue of mounting salience – unaddressed so far by Democrats and Republicans – is the hollowing out [ http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/the-future-of-joblessness/ (sixth item at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78944571 and preceding and following)] of the job market.
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that jobs that provide mid-range incomes are disappearing, but just as important, the kinds of jobs that have long served as stepping-stones up the ladder of opportunity are disappearing too. One recent contribution [ http://www.voxeu.org/article/jobless-recoveries-and-disappearance-routine-occupations ] to this literature, “Jobless Recoveries and the Disappearance of Routine Occupations” by Henry Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, and Nir Jaimovich, an economist at Duke, reports that there is job growth at the top and bottom of the payscale, but declining employment throughout the mid-pay range. The technical term is job polarization:
The fact that polarization is occurring should not surprise anyone who understands the influence of robotics and automation on machinists and machine operators in manufacturing. Indeed, the influence of robotics is increasingly being felt on routine occupations in transportation and warehousing. Of equal importance is the disappearance of routine employment in “white-collar” occupations — think bank tellers being replaced by ATMs, or secretarial work being replaced by personal computers and Siri, Apple’s iPhone-integrated “intelligent personal assistant.”
In the authors’ view, past trends suggest a worsening future:
Thus, all of the per capita employment growth of the past 30 years has either been in ‘non-routine’ occupations located at the high-end of the wage distribution, such as software engineers and economists, or in low-paying jobs, such as service occupations like restaurant waiters and janitors. For this last set of occupations, this has been especially true in the past decade.
Siu and Jaimovich find that the decline in routine middle-income jobs that lend themselves to mechanization and automation occurs during recessions, and, most importantly, does not reverse itself in periods of subsequent recovery. This chart, Fig. 4, in which the pink areas represent economic recessions, demonstrates how, starting during the recession of 1991, recoveries do not lead to revived job markets:
Fig. 4: “Jobless recoveries and the disappearance of routine occupations” by Henry Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, and Nir Jaimovich, an economist at Duke.
The conclusions reached by Siu and Jaimovich are pessimistic:
Automation and the adoption of computing technology are leading to the decline of middle-wage jobs of many stripes, both blue-collar jobs in production and maintenance occupations and white-collar jobs in office and administrative support. It is affecting both male- and female-dominated professions and it is happening broadly across industries –manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, financial services, and even public administration.
The authors offer scant hope for the future.
The pace of job polarization was greatly accelerated in this last recession, and the pace of automation and progress in robotics and computing technology is not slowing down either. If the past 30 years is any guide, we should expect future recessions to continue to spur job polarization. Jobless recoveries may be the new norm.
Should it continue, lack of economic opportunity is likely to undermine the workings of American democratic capitalism: the willingness of the have-nots and have-lesses to tolerate high levels of inequality in the belief that everyone has a shot at making it into the middle class.
The forces driving the evisceration of middle-income jobs — global production and automation — threaten the newly acquired rights of recently enfranchised populations. The “perennial gale of creative destruction” may be so powerful and inexorable that the political system cannot provide a remedy. Even so, if the Democrats fail to take on the issue, they will leave their party open to challenge as discontent over employment stagnation mounts.
An alternative strategy would be for Democrats to unilaterally declare victory in the culture war — allowing Republicans to waste time on futile rear guard actions — and to shift the political agenda to the jobs crisis. The question is: Does the new and enlarged Democratic coalition have the capacity to re-engineer capitalism to produce sustained economic growth while working toward social justice?
Republican vice presidential candidate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) speaks to volunteers at a GOP field office, Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012, in Henrico County, Va. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
By Luke Johnson Posted: 11/07/2012 11:58 am EST Updated: 11/08/2012 3:53 am EST
Former GOP vice-presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had his own vision for the campaign.
Ryan got his wish and gave a speech in Cleveland on poverty on Oct. 24. But there was a central contradiction in it -- Ryan has authored budgets to slash the social safety net [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3723 ] for poor people, which would necessarily exacerbate poverty.
Ryan told the audience that he would limit the federal government's role.
"The federal government would continue to provide the resources, but we would remove the endless federal mandates and restrictions that hamper state efforts to make these programs more effective," he said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/24/paul-ryan-poverty-speech_n_2010827.html ]. "If the question is what's best for low-income Ohioans, shouldn’t we let Ohioans make that call?"
"But the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity in the inner cities, is to help people get out of poverty in the inner cities, is to help teach people good discipline, good character," Ryan said. "That is civil society. That's what charities, and civic groups, and churches do to help one another make sure that they can realize the value in one another."
The reporter then replied, "And you can do all that by cutting taxes? By ... with a big tax cut?"
"Those are your words, not mine," Ryan said. Ryan's spokesman ended the interview from off-camera.
"That was kind of strange," Ryan added. "You're trying to stuff words in people's mouths?"
On November 6th 2012 America reelected Barack Hussein Obama as president of the United States.
This election, in my opinion, is historic in a myriad of ways. President Obama is now the second Democrat, following Bill Clinton, to win reelection since Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is also the first black president to win reelection ever. While these accomplishments are important in their own respect, what has struck me the most in the days following the election is the make-up of those who reelected President Obama.
The election commentary over this past week has been wonderful to watch. One, because I'm not afraid to admit that I love seeing Karl Rove, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and the Republican party in general distraught, and two, because I have finally caught the "hope" bug. The Republican Party has a problem that it hasn't yet been brave enough to admit: This country has in fact changed.
Exit polls show that 71 percent of the Latino vote, 93 percent of the Black vote, and 55 percent of the woman vote went to Barack Obama [ http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/Decoder-Wire/2012/1107/Election-results-2012-Who-won-it-for-Obama-video ]. Essentially President Obama was reelected by "minorities" (read: everyone but the richest, most powerful white men). America is increasingly becoming a country of "others." Entire populations of people are thriving in a country that for so long has been control by so few. While Republicans are horrified by this realization, the rest of America is joyous.
To the rest of us, the end of a certain group being in complete control of the government, and by default the United States, is progress. If the reelection of President Obama by a large populace of the American electorate is the death of America, then I'm glad to see it go. There can be no rebirth without death. I'm glad the America that worked for some Americans while leaving others out in the cold is dead.
Republicans are having a hard time believing that Barack Obama was elected by "the people," and the problem they are having is that "the people" is no longer a phrase synonymous with white America. The coalition that reelected President Obama is inclusive of all Americans.
There are are also those who are saying that Romney would have won but Hurricane Sandy ruined his chances. So I guess God was an undecided voter until a week before the election. Hell, even God is a part of this new coalition of Obama supporters.
The inscription on the Statue of Liberty, which greeted those immigrated to the United States from across the world, reads: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me; I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" President Obama's reelection is America finally living up to what we've been saying about ourselves since this country's founding.
I am proud that Washington, Maryland and Maine approved measures that support the right for all Americans regardless of their sexual orientation to marry whomever they want. I am definitely glad that Colorado and Washington now have legal weed! I'm proud that Tammy Baldwin, who I had the pleasure of hearing speak at my oldest daughters' graduation from Smith College, is the first openly gay woman to win a Senate seat. It was Chik-fil-A v. Glee and Glee won!
It's about time we became the America we always talk about, an inclusive country with a representative government that serves "the people" and is a reflection of them. I was glad to cast my vote for President Obama because I believe we as a nation are on our way to the more perfect union we should strive to be every day. After Tuesday night's election, I have hope that we are in fact, on the right path.
"For the first time in US history, the Latino vote can plausibly claim to be nationally decisive," Stanford University university professor Gary Segura, who conducted the study, told reporters. According to Segura, the Latino vote provided Obama with 5.4 percent of his margin over Romney, well more than his overall lead in the popular vote. Had Romney managed even 35 percent of the Latino vote, he said, the results may have flipped nationally.
The effect was at least as dramatic in swing states, most notably in Colorado, which Obama won on Tuesday. There Latinos went for the president by an astounding 87-10 margin, an edge not far from the near-monolithic support he received from African American voters. In Ohio, with a smaller but still significant Latino population, Obama won by an 82-17 margin.
"This poll makes clear what we've known for a long time: the Latino giant is wide awake, cranky, and its taking names," Eliseo Medina, Secretary-Treasurer of the SEIU, told reporters Wednesday on a conference call discussing the results.
Romneys 16 percent of the Latino vote does not merely approach the black vote in Ohio, it nearly mirrors Bush's 16 percent of the black vote from 2004. This should scare the hell out of any non-delusional GOP operative.
I am hearing a great deal of talk about "appealing to Hispanics" and "appealing to women." But I am not hearing much about endorsing actual policies. What happened last night is not a matter of cosmetics. This is not false consciousness. This a real response to real policies. Mitt Romney actually endorsed Arizona's immigration policies [the debate video, above as embedded, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbPcGu0RS14 ]. You can't fix this by flashing more pictures of brown people.
This is not a "branding problem." This is a "problem problem." Latino voters didn't go crazy. Latino voters went voter [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGEv5dC0lo4 (next below)].
Carlos Gutierrez, Mitt Romney Adviser: Latinos 'Were Scared' (VIDEO)
By Elise Foley Posted: 11/11/2012 10:50 am EST Updated: 11/11/2012 3:42 pm EST
WASHINGTON -- Former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, an adviser to former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Latino outreach, said Sunday the candidate's failure with those voters was due to hardliners in the Republican party who were "scaring the heck out of them."
"The Hispanics I know were scared of the Republican party," he said on CNN's "State of the Union" in a blunt assessment of Romney's loss. "I think it has to do with our incredibly ridiculous primary process where we force people to say outrageous things, they get nominated, and they have to come back."
Gutierrez worked under former President George W. Bush, who won around 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004 -- over 10 points more than Romney won this year. The Latino vote was a pivotal part of the 2012 election, and it is widely acknowledged that the Republican Party could be forever damaged if it can't win over more Latinos in the future.
He said extremists in the party were fully to blame for Romney's loss, pointing to "the anti-immigration talk, the xenophobes." "It's almost as if we are living in the past," he added.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), appearing in the same segment, defended the party, saying it needs to become more modern but not more moderate to win over more Latino, women and young voters.
"Whether it's Hispanics, whether it's women, whether it's young people, the Republican Party has to make it a priority to take our values, take our vision, to every corner of this country, to every demographic group," she said. "And I am confident that we can do it."
When she said the party is pro-immigration, Gutierrez interrupted with "Really?"
"In order to be modern in the twenty-first century, we cannot be extreme right," Gutierrez said.
His advice to the party was to begin to lead on immigration reform, particular new laws that allow some undocumented immigrants to become citizens.
"If we want to be the party of growth and prosperity, we have to be the party of immigration," he said. "We should be leading comprehensive immigration reform. We should be leading the Dream Act, and not the military Dream Act, students as well. We should be getting rid of things like English as the official language of government. We have to be welcoming immigrants."
The Republicans’ Fallacy About Latino Voters and What Motivates Them
Latino protesters march by the hotel where Mitt Romney is scheduled to attend a fundraising event in Salt Lake City in September. (Nicholas Kamm / Getty Images)
The GOP’s post-election tendency to reduce Latinos to people who are motivated by immigration and social issues rather than by economic concerns or merely want government handouts is wrong—and dangerous to the party.
The first can be summed up in a term deployed by Charles Krauthammer, and numerous other conservative pundits, in recent days: Hispanics are “natural” Republicans [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/11/michael-tomasky-on-how-the-right-is-still-racist.html ]. They’re culturally traditional; they run small businesses; they’d have voted for Romney in a heartbeat if only he’d not asked them to deport themselves. For right-wing Beltway pundits, many of whom were already more pro-immigration than their party’s grassroots, the answer is obvious: cut a deal that gives illegal immigrants a path to citizenship; eliminate immigration as a wedge issue and watch Hispanics embrace the GOP.
The nice thing about this view is that it’s not racist. It envisions Hispanics as Tea Partiers with visa problems. But it’s wrong.
For one thing, Hispanics aren’t all that conservative on cultural issues. According to the Pew Research Center, half of Hispanics now favor gay marriage compared with one third who oppose it. Hispanic Catholics are about as pro-gay marriage as white, non-Hispanic Catholics, and Hispanic evangelicals are less opposed than their white, non-Hispanic counterparts. And while some past polling has shown Hispanics to be more anti-abortion than other Americans, the distinction is diminishing as second- and third-generation Hispanics prove far more pro-choice than their immigrant parents and grandparents. In fact, according to ABC News, 2012 exit polls actually showed Hispanics to be more supportive of keeping abortion legal than other Americans.
If Hispanics aren’t all that culturally conservative, they’re not obsessed with immigration either. According to Pew, 60 percent of Hispanics rated the economy as their top issue (almost exactly the same as the public at large). After that came health care, the deficit, and foreign policy. A USA Today/Gallup poll this summer found that Hispanic registered voters prioritized health care, unemployment, economic growth, and the gap between rich and poor over immigration.
So what’s the real reason Hispanics aren’t voting Republican? Economics. And some conservatives know it. Over the past week, at the same time one group of right-wing pundits was cheerfully insisting that Hispanics are natural Republicans, another was warning darkly that Hispanics threaten everything conservatives hold dear.
“The white establishment is now the minority,” Bill O’Reilly declared [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/videos/2012/11/06/o-reilly-white-establishment-gone.html ] on election night. “And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them, and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama ... People feel that they are entitled to things.”
But if you strip away the racial bias, O’Reilly’s analysis is more accurate than Krauthammer’s. Hispanics do feel that the economic system is “stacked against them” and they do “want stuff” like health care, college-tuition assistance, and other government benefits that might help them get ahead. According to Pew, while only 41 percent of Americans as a whole say they want a bigger government that provides more services, a whopping 75 percent of Hispanics do.
According to ABC, 68 percent of Latinos said Romney’s policies favored the rich, compared with only 53 percent of Americans overall. And according to this summer’s USA Today/Gallup poll, Obama led Romney by an astounding 50 points among Hispanics who cited health care as their top concern. In fact, Hispanics are a third more likely than other Americans to describe their political views as liberal.
There’s nothing sinister about this. If O’Reilly and company were more honest, they’d acknowledge that their older, white fan base has been living happily for decades at the government teat. In the real world, as opposed to the one imagined by the right, Washington redistributes money less from rich to poor than from young to old. The government bureaucracy that provides its members the most generous social-welfare benefits is the United States military. And the Americans who have benefited most dramatically from government spending since the mid-20th century are white Southerners, whose region enjoys a disproportionate share of military bases and agricultural subsidies.
It’s quite normal that Hispanics, whose average household income trails non-Hispanic whites by more than a third, would seek government assistance in bridging the gap. Right now the GOP is split between commentators who deny this core motivation behind Hispanic support for the Democrats and those who demonize it. Neither attitude is likely to change the political reality that helped doom Mitt Romney last week.
Left: Paul Labbe and Donna Lozon at a Republican watch party on Election Day, in Sarasota. Photograph by Chip Litherland. Right: In Denver, Democrats celebrate as Barack Obama wins a second Presidential term. Photograph by Landon Nordeman.
As immigration turns red states blue, how can Republicans transform their platform?
by Ryan Lizza November 19, 2012
When historians look back on Mitt Romney’s bid for the Presidency, one trend will be clear: no Republican candidate ever ran a similar campaign again. For four decades, from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan through the two Bush Presidencies, the Republican Party won the White House by amassing large margins among white voters. Nixon summoned the silent majority. Reagan cemented this bloc of voters, many of whom were former Democrats. Both Bushes won the Presidency by relying on broad support from Reagan Democrats. In that time, Republicans transformed the South from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican, and they held the White House for twenty-eight out of forty years. Last Tuesday, Romney won three-fifths of the white vote, matching or exceeding what several winning Presidential candidates, including Reagan in 1980 and Bush in 1988, achieved, but it wasn’t enough. The white share of the electorate, which was eighty-seven per cent in 1992, has steadily declined by about three points in every Presidential election since then. At the present rate, by 2016, whites will make up less than seventy per cent of voters. Romney’s loss to Barack Obama brought an end not just to his eight-year quest for the Presidency but to the Republican Party’s assumptions about the American electorate.
Some interpretations of the election results by conservatives were particularly dark. Mary Matalin, the Republican commentator, wrote that Obama was a “political narcissistic sociopath” who “leveraged fear and ignorance” to win. On Tuesday evening, before the race was called, Bill O’Reilly, after acknowledging that “the demographics are changing,” offered the following explanation for an Obama victory: “It’s not a traditional America anymore. And there are fifty per cent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it and he ran on it. Whereby twenty years ago President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority.” He added, “You’re going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama.”
But far from Fox News Channel’s newsroom in Manhattan and the insular world of the Beltway’s conservative commentariat, one significant element of the Republican Party has for the past two years been grappling with and adapting to the demographic future that was so starkly revealed by last Tuesday’s outcome. On Halloween, less than a week before Election Day, I rode with Ted Cruz, now the senator-elect from Texas, who was folded into the back seat of a Toyota Corolla as an aide drove him from San Antonio to Austin. Cruz, who has a thick head of pomaded, neatly combed hair, is a former college debate champion and Supreme Court litigator, and is a commanding public speaker. That morning, he had addressed a small crowd of employees eating Kit Kats and candy corn at Valero, a major oil refiner whose headquarters are in San Antonio. As he told the story of his father’s journey from Cuba to Texas, the room fell silent. Cruz, who is forty-one, eschews teleprompters, instead roaming across the stage and speaking slowly and dramatically, with well-rehearsed sweeps of his hands. He is one of several political newcomers who offer hope to Republicans after a disappointing election.
In the car, sipping a Diet Dr Pepper while he talked about his background and discussed the future of the Party, Cruz was more down to earth than his Hermès tie and Patek Philippe watch suggested. He said that he had relaxed the previous evening at his hotel by watching “Cowboys and Aliens.” “It is every bit as stupid as it sounds,” he said. “But it actually has a really good cast.”
Cruz, a lawyer who was solicitor general of Texas from 2003 to 2008, combines a compelling personal biography with philosophically pure conservatism. He won his Senate primary in an upset, earlier this year, partly by adhering to the secure-the-borders mentality popular with most Texas Republicans. He promised to triple the size of the U.S. Border Patrol and to build a larger border wall than his opponent proposed. In January, when he is sworn in, he will become one of the most right-wing members of the U.S. Senate. A Tea Party favorite who also happens to be Hispanic, Cruz is viewed by many as a key figure in helping to transform the Party. According to exit polls, Hispanics, one of the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. population, made up ten per cent of the electorate, their highest share in American history, and Romney lost the Hispanic vote to Obama by a margin of seventy-one per cent to twenty-seven per cent, the lowest level of support for a Republican since 1996.
Cruz is a first-generation citizen. His father, Rafael, as a teen-ager in Cuba, fought alongside Castro’s revolutionaries against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He was jailed and beaten by the regime. “My grandmother said that his suit, which had started out bright white, you couldn’t see a spot of white on it,” Cruz said. “It was just stained with blood and mud, and his teeth were dangling from his mouth.” Rafael left for the United States, and in 1957 started at the University of Texas on a student visa. He continued to support Castro. “He learned English very quickly and began going around to local Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis Clubs and speaking about the Revolution and raising money for Castro,” Cruz said. “He was a young revolutionary. He would get Austin businesspeople to write checks.”
When Castro came to power, in 1959, the elder Cruz quickly grew disillusioned. His younger sister fought in the counter-revolution and was tortured by the new regime. Rafael returned to Cuba in 1960 to see his family, and was shaken by what Castro’s Communist dictatorship had wrought. “When my father got back to Austin,” Cruz said, “he sat down and made a list of every place he’d gone to speak, and he made a point of going back to each of them and standing in front of them and saying, ‘I owe you an apology. I misled you. I took your money and I sent it to evil ends.’ And he said, ‘I didn’t do so knowingly, but I did so nonetheless, and for that I’m truly sorry.’ When I was a kid, my dad told me that story over and over again. To me, that always defined character: to have the courage to go back and apologize.”
Rafael made sure that his son entered politics from the opposite side of the political spectrum. In high school, Ted became involved with a group known as the Free Market Education Foundation, which introduced him to the writings of conservative economic philosophers such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Frédéric Bastiat, and Ludwig von Mises. Cruz travelled to Rotary and Kiwanis groups in Texas as his father had a generation earlier. But, instead of expounding on Castro, he competed against other teen-agers in speech contests; the contestants delivered twenty minutes of memorized remarks about free-market economics. He soon joined a spinoff group, the Constitutional Corroborators, and learned a mnemonic device for memorizing an abbreviated version of the Constitution, which he and other club members would write out on easels for lunchtime crowds of Rotarians or local political groups around Texas. By the time he graduated from high school, he had given several dozen speeches across the state.
“It was transformational,” Cruz said. “The two strongest influences on my life were that experience and the personal experience of my family’s story and my father’s flight from Cuba.”
Cruz already has had a remarkably successful career in law and politics. He is the first to point out that he has excelled at almost everything he has set out to do: the early speech contests (“I was one of the city winners all four years when I was in high school”); academics (“I was the first person from my high school ever to go to any Ivy League college”); his Princeton debate career (“I was the No. 1 speaker”); his time at Harvard Law School (“I was on three different law journals, was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, and an executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and then a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review”); his clerkship, from 1995 to 1996, for Judge Michael Luttig (“widely considered the top conservative federal appellate judge in the country”) and, from 1996 to 1997, for former Chief Justice William Rehnquist (“he and I were very, very close”); his five and a half years as solicitor general (“ended up over the years really winning some of the biggest cases in the country—year after year after year”); and his record of arguing nine cases before the Supreme Court (“it is the most of any practicing lawyer in the state of Texas”).
Cruz’s coming challenge is his biggest yet. As with other Hispanic Republicans elected recently—New Mexico’s governor, Susana Martinez; Nevada’s governor, Brian Sandoval; Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida—his last name and heritage, along with his conservative leanings, assure that Republicans will look to him to help lead them out of the demographic wilderness. He might even run for President in 2016. Though he was born in Canada, he informed me that he was qualified to serve. “The Constitution requires that one be a natural-born citizen,” he said, “and my mother was a U.S. citizen when I was born.”
As a senator from Texas, the largest and most important state in the Republican firmament, Cruz has a special role in the post-Romney debate. At the Presidential level, Texas has thirty-eight electoral votes, second only to California, which has fifty-five. It anchors the modern Republican Party, in the same way that California and New York anchor the Democratic Party. But, Cruz told me, the once unthinkable idea of Texas becoming a Democratic state is now a real possibility.
“If Republicans do not do better in the Hispanic community,” he said, “in a few short years Republicans will no longer be the majority party in our state.” He ticked off some statistics: in 2004, George W. Bush won forty-four per cent of the Hispanic vote nationally; in 2008, John McCain won just thirty-one per cent. On Tuesday, Romney fared even worse.
“In not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat,” he said. “If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House. New York and California are for the foreseeable future unalterably Democrat. If Texas turns bright blue, the Electoral College math is simple. We won’t be talking about Ohio, we won’t be talking about Florida or Virginia, because it won’t matter. If Texas is bright blue, you can’t get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist. We would become like the Whig Party. Our kids and grandkids would study how this used to be a national political party. ‘They had Conventions, they nominated Presidential candidates. They don’t exist anymore.’ ”
*
At the headquarters of the Republican Party of Texas, in Austin, an observer finds it difficult to take Cruz’s warning seriously. One wall of the waiting room is plastered with framed photographs of Republicans who hold statewide office in Texas. Governor Rick Perry’s face is in the center; surrounding him is the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the comptroller, various commissioners—which are powerful positions in Texas—and numerous judges. Every one of the twenty-seven statewide offices is held by a Republican, as are both U.S. Senate seats and twenty-four out of thirty-six House seats. At the state capitol, across the street from the G.O.P. headquarters, Republicans control the State Senate and House. Texas is essentially a one-party state.
But others share Cruz’s alarm that this could quickly change. Steve Munisteri, the fifty-four-year-old chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, whose father was an Italian immigrant, grew up in Houston and has been involved in state Republican politics since 1972, when Texas was solidly Democratic. Munisteri saw how racial politics transformed Texas, which gradually shifted from one party to the other when conservative white Democrats fled to the G.O.P. The exodus began in 1964, the year President Lyndon Johnson, the former Texas senator, passed the Civil Rights Act. “There goes the South for a generation,” he is said to have remarked, as he signed the bill into law.
Texas was slower than the other Southern states to see its politics invert. When George H. W. Bush was elected to Congress from Houston, in 1966, he was one of only two Republicans in the House delegation. Jimmy Carter carried the state in 1976. But in 1978 Bill Clements became the state’s first Republican governor in a hundred and four years. A young operative named Karl Rove worked on his campaign and joined his administration as a top adviser. Clements was voted out of office four years later, but, with Rove at the helm of his next effort, he returned in 1986. Since then, the state has become steadily more Republican. The election of the Democrat Ann Richards, who won the governorship in 1990 and served just one term before being defeated by Rove’s next gubernatorial candidate, George W. Bush, was something of a fluke. She had a narrow victory against a weak candidate, who, among other campaign missteps, made a joke about rape and during one encounter refused to shake Richards’s hand.
In 2010, Munisteri, a lawyer who has had stints in real estate and as a color commentator for boxing matches, took over the state Party, winning the chairmanship from an establishment that had all but given up on appealing to Hispanics in the methodical way that George W. Bush did as the state’s governor from 1995 to 2000. Munisteri has the look that most political operatives seem to attain in middle age: rumpled, and filled with nervous energy. “I’m a natural worrywart,” he said.
He was suffering from an allergy attack, and while fighting back a fit of coughing he searched through heaps of papers strewn behind his desk and handed me some charts that foretold the demise of the Republican Party, first in Texas and then nationally. One graph showed four lines falling from left to right, measuring Republican voting trends in Texas. “Look at that; it’ll show you the decline of the Republican Party over ten years,” he said. Actually, there was a significant bump up in 2010, a gift from President Obama, who helped reverse the slide by energizing the Tea Party movement, but what frightened him was the downward slope of the lines from 2000 to 2008. There were fewer and fewer white voters as a percentage of the electorate.
“If I say to you, your life depends on picking whether the following state is Democrat or Republican, what would you pick?” Munisteri asked. “The state is fifty-five per cent traditional minority. Thirty-eight per cent is Hispanic, eleven per cent is African-American, and the rest is Asian-American, and two-thirds of all births are in a traditional minority family. And if I was to tell you that, nationwide, last time, Republicans got only roughly four per cent of the African-American vote and about a third of the Hispanic vote, would you say that state is Democrat or Republican? Well, that’s Texas. We are the only majority-minority state in the union that people consider Republican.”
Immigration from Mexico only partly accounts for the change. More than a million Americans have moved to Texas in the past decade, many from traditionally Democratic states. More than three hundred and fifty thousand Californians have arrived in the past five years; since 2005, over a hundred thousand Louisianans permanently relocated to Texas, mostly in Houston, after Hurricane Katrina. The population is also skewing younger, which means more Democratic. But Munisteri is more preoccupied by the racial and ethnic changes. He turned to a chart showing Texas’s population by ethnic group over the next few decades. A red line, representing the white population, plunged from almost fifty-five per cent, in 2000, to almost twenty-five per cent, in 2040; a blue line, the Hispanic population, climbed from thirty-two per cent to almost sixty per cent during the same period. He pointed to the spot where the two lines crossed, as if it augured a potential apocalypse. “This shows when Hispanics will become the largest group in the state,” he said. “That’s somewhere in 2014. We’re almost at 2013!” He added, “You cannot have a situation with the Hispanic community that we’ve had for forty years with the African-American community, where it’s a bloc of votes that you almost write off. You can’t do that with a group of citizens that are going to compose a majority of this state by 2020, and which will be a plurality of this state in about a year and a half.”
He told me that he had a slide that he wouldn’t show me, because he didn’t want Democrats to know about his calculations. He said that it depicted the percentage of the white vote that Republicans would have to attract if they continued to do as poorly as they have among Hispanics.
“By 2040, you’d have to get over a hundred per cent of the Anglo vote,” he said.
“Over a hundred per cent is not possible,” I offered.
“That’s my point!”
Munisteri travels around the country with his slide show, urgently arguing that Republicans will wither away if they don’t adapt. In the spring, he briefed Republican members of Texas’s congressional delegation. After half an hour, a congressman rose to summarize the material.
“What you’re saying is that if the Republican Party is not doing its job attracting Hispanics to the Party, the Party in a very short time nationally and in Texas will be toast?” Munisteri replied, “That’s it, Congressman.”
Munisteri has been doing all he can to begin to alter the trajectory of Republicans in Texas. One of his first projects has been to rebrand the Party. For years, Texas delegates to the Republican National Convention have worn cowboy hats and loud shirts paid for by the state G.O.P., making them instantly recognizable on the Convention floor and the subject of a disproportionate number of photographs. It’s not the image that Munisteri wants to project. “This state has a population that’s so much more diverse than the rest of the country is aware of,” he said. “Other people think there are cowboys down here and horses and it’s a bunch of Billy Bobs.” This year, he refused to fund the attire that his delegates regularly wore. “I said, ‘We’re not buying hats and shirts, because I’m tired of having to go to the R.N.C. and have everybody think we dress like that in Texas,’ ” he said. But the delegates rebelled, and some Republican donors decided to buy the outfits for them anyway.
Munisteri, who as chairman is not supposed to push his own policy ideas on the Party, has spent a lot of time trying to get Republicans to sound more welcoming to Hispanics. In one sense, he is simply returning to his party’s recent past. As governor, George W. Bush was a zealous advocate of reaching out to Hispanics. He supported bilingual education and was in favor of government services, like health care and education, for unauthorized immigrants. As President, he strongly supported an immigration-reform proposal that would have provided a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants living in the United States illegally. He saw it as both business-friendly and as a way for the Party to attract Hispanic support and build a more durable coalition than relying disproportionately on white voters.
By 2006, the proposal had become anathema to most conservatives, who ridiculed it as “amnesty for illegals.” When Bush tried to push it through Congress, conservatives defeated it, following an often toxic debate that reversed all of Bush’s gains among Hispanics. In 2008, McCain, who had sponsored the Bush legislation, lost Hispanics by sixty-seven per cent to thirty-one per cent. In 2012, Romney, who had once seemed to support the Bush legislation, moved far to the right on immigration, calling on undocumented citizens to “self-deport” and attacking Governor Perry for signing legislation, in 2001, that allowed unauthorized immigrants in Texas to qualify for in-state tuition rates.
Munisteri advises Republicans in Texas to talk about Hispanics as an integral part of the state’s history, whose ancestors, in many cases, arrived in Texas long before those of much of the Anglo population. On immigration, he says, the Republican base needs “reëducating,” so that conservatives understand that immigration is essential to the country’s prosperity.
In his effort to tug the Texas G.O.P. into the future, Munisteri hired David Zapata, a young evangelical Christian from a border town, as his Hispanic-outreach director. And he has embarked on a micro-targeting project that uses consumer data to find Hispanics who don’t vote for Republicans but exhibit buying patterns that suggest they might be conservative, such as subscribing to Guns & Ammo or giving money to pro-life causes. Since 2010, he has succeeded in getting Republicans elected in some of the most Hispanic areas of the state.
Munisteri’s interest in making the Party a home for Hispanics and thus saving his party is partly a result of his own experience. He grew up in the state in the nineteen-sixties, when it was overwhelmingly white. “There was very little diversity at Anglo high schools,” he said. “And I’m not Anglo. When I was younger, not often, but enough, I was subjected to people who didn’t like me just because I was Italian. You don’t ever get to find common ground with other people if they think you’re prejudiced or racist against them.” He added, “If I overhear you tell a Wop joke . . . I mean, personally, I won’t vote for people that I think are prejudiced against Italian-Americans.”
*
Even though many Republicans agree that the Party must become more hospitable to Hispanics, there is little consensus on how best to do so and still qualify as conservative. Ted Cruz argues that Hispanics can be won over by appeals to traditional values of hard work. “I’ve never in my life seen a Hispanic panhandler,” he said, as we rode out of San Antonio. “In the Hispanic community, it would be considered shameful to be out on the street begging.” He added, “They have conservative values. Hispanics don’t want to be on the dole. They’re not here to be dependent on government.” He rejected the idea that Republicans needed to go back to the Bush-era policies on immigration. “I think those that say that, for Republicans to connect with the Hispanic community, they need to adopt amnesty and not secure the borders, I think that’s foolishness.”
Many Republicans in Texas suggested that the fact that Cruz is Hispanic is enough for him to win votes in that community. To prove the point, some mentioned Quico Canseco, a Republican who won a Texas House seat in 2010 in a Democratic district by running as a Tea Party conservative, and whose reëlection bid this year was closely contested. His district is sixty-six per cent Hispanic and spreads some six hundred miles, from San Antonio to the western edge of Texas. It includes most of the state’s border with Mexico. Like Cruz, Canseco, both in 2010 and in 2012, ran as an opponent of the kind of immigration reforms championed by George W. Bush. A few days before the election, when I interviewed Canseco, who is the son of Mexican immigrants and was born in Laredo, a border town that is ninety-six per cent Hispanic, he gave no hint of moderation on any of the immigration issues that have become so important to conservative Republicans in the past few years.
Canseco told me that he didn’t have any problem with how Romney talked about immigration, and he said that he opposed the Obama Administration’s policy on protecting some unauthorized immigrants from deportation. “I’m very much against open borders, because we are a sovereign nation, and I’m against amnesty,” he said. Instead of running on immigration reform, Canseco emphasized social issues. In the final stretch of the campaign, he mailed a bilingual flyer to voters which asserted that Democrats “said no to God” at their Convention, “want to provide abortions for underage girls,” and “want marriage to be between man & man.” The three accusations were illustrated with a picture of Jesus, one of a baby, and a photograph of two men kissing passionately.
But to speak of the “Hispanic population” is an oversimplification, akin to collectively describing the waves of immigrants that arrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as European-Americans. In Florida, Cuban-Americans tend to vote for Republicans and Puerto Ricans tend to vote for Democrats. In Texas, the Tejanos have deep roots in the state and tend to be more open to the Republican Party; the more recent immigrants from across the border are known simply as Mexican-Americans, who largely came to the United States after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when Mexico established a robust welfare state, and are more commonly Democrats.
While Cruz and Canseco embrace a Tea Party approach to the G.O.P.’s Hispanic problem, elsewhere in Texas a different strategy is being tested. One afternoon, I met with Art Martinez de Vara, the mayor of Von Ormy, a town of thirteen hundred residents, southwest of San Antonio, which dates to the eighteenth century. His ancestors arrived in San Antonio, from colonial Mexico, in the seventeen-nineties. “I have family that fought at the Alamo,” he said proudly, as we sat in a local campaign office in a strip mall. Martinez de Vara is thirty-seven, with a Chris Christie-size midsection, and he has arguably been more influential within the Party than any other immigration reformer of the past few years.
In 2008, Martinez de Vara co-founded the Latino National Republican Coalition of Texas, now called the Texas Federation of Hispanic Republicans. “A lot of people don’t like the word ‘Latino,’ ” he said. “They find it offensive, or too Californian.” The group recruits and supports Hispanics to run at the local level in South Texas. In our conversation, he criticized both Cruz’s and Canseco’s approaches to their campaigns. When I asked whether Cruz’s Latin surname was enough for him to win over Hispanics, one of Martinez de Vara’s friends, Gina Castañeda, a political activist who manages local campaigns, interrupted us. She said, “In the Hispanic or Mexican community, there’s some—” She hesitated. “How can I say it nicely? They don’t like Cubans. Or Puerto Ricans.” Martinez de Vara agreed. “Even within Mexico, they look down upon Caribbean Hispanics,” he said.
But his real problem with Cruz and Canseco was their view on immigration. During Cruz’s primary against the state’s lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, Martinez de Vara and his group stayed out of the race. “We didn’t endorse,” he said. “They both competed over who was the most extreme on immigration, which we weren’t that interested in. It was about who was the most conservative.” He mentioned that among the jobs on Cruz’s long résumé was campaign adviser to Bush. “Cruz was part of the Bush team when it proposed immigration reform,” he said, noting with frustration how Republicans have flipped on the issue in recent years. “He was one of his chief policy advisers.”
Martinez de Vara argued that jobs, education, and crime ultimately are more important issues than immigration to Hispanics in Texas. Still, he insisted that Republicans have to move back to the pro-reform positions of the Bush years. “There’s a small faction of the Republican Party that opposes this at every level,” he said. “What are they proposing? A border wall? That’s massive confiscation of private property. We oppose that in every other context. It’s a big-government, big-spending project. We oppose that in every other context. Arming the government with greater police powers? We oppose that in every other context. This is big-government liberalism, and for conservatives it just makes no sense.”
*
In 2010, the platform of the Republican Party of Texas included some of the country’s most restrictionist language on immigration. It referred repeatedly to “illegal aliens” and called for an “unimpeded deportation process,” elimination of all government benefits to unauthorized immigrants, and the adoption of policies that would mirror the controversial “Show me your papers” provision of Arizona’s immigration law.
Early this year, Martinez de Vara and his allies from the Texas Federation of Hispanic Republicans decided that they would rewrite the state Party platform on immigration. “There was a minority in the Party that was vocal and basically hijacking that issue,” he said. “And so we took it to the convention.” The Republican Party of Texas’s convention includes some nine thousand delegates. They met in early June, in Fort Worth. Martinez de Vara pushed new language through a subcommittee on immigration that he chaired and then through a full committee. Munisteri, the Party chairman, made sure that the issue received a thorough hearing, a move that angered a significant faction of his party. The debate came down to a contentious floor fight in which the new language was challenged four times. Martinez de Vara rose at one point and delivered the soliloquy that he gave me about how building a wall and confiscating property was big government. “When I said that on the floor of the Republican Party of Texas convention,” he said, “with nine thousand of the most diehard conservatives, people who paid two or three thousand dollars to go to Fort Worth and participate, I got seventy-five per cent of the vote. Because they all know it’s true!”
The platform no longer refers to “illegal aliens” and no longer has any language that could be construed as calling for Arizona-style laws. Instead, it proposes a “common ground” to find market-based solutions and “the application of effective, practical and reasonable measures to secure our borders.” Rather than expelling eleven million immigrants, it says, “Mass deportation of these individuals would neither be equitable nor practical.” Most significant, Martinez de Vara won adoption of language calling for a temporary-worker program. At around the time that Mitt Romney was winning the primary by attacking his opponents for being too soft on immigration, the largest state Republican Party in America was ridding its platform of its most restrictionist immigration language and calling for a program to allow unauthorized immigrants to stay in the U.S. legally and work.
A few months later, Martinez de Vara and his group took the fight to the national Convention, in Tampa, where he knew almost nobody. His main antagonist there was Kris Kobach, Kansas’s secretary of state and the leader of the movement to spread Arizona-style laws. Martinez de Vara wasn’t on the national committee, so he buttonholed sympathetic members in any way he could. “We had to hustle,” he said. “We were following people to the bathroom.” Although it was little noted at the time, Martinez de Vara and his national allies won the adoption of language saying that Republicans would “consider” a new guest-worker program. That language sits uneasily beside language about building a double-layered fence, stopping all federal funding for benefits for “illegals,” and dismissing the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Arizona’s law. “You have Kobach’s language alongside our language of a national guest-worker program,” Martinez de Vara said. “Which is huge. It was a massive shift. We got it in there.”
The victories have emboldened him. While Cruz and Munisteri and many other Republicans fret about losing the Hispanic vote, Martinez de Vara sees a future in which he and Hispanic Republicans like him inevitably take over the Party. He already talks about the Anglo population as a minority, one that will have to adapt to what’s coming in Texas politics. “If you’re coming from the Anglo community, you may be seeing the death of your party and your political power and the way you understand things,” he said. “You step on our side, the future looks bright. We know that we have so much in common with the Anglo community; we’re not going to alienate it. And in 2040 Texas will be ten per cent African-American, twenty-five per cent Anglo, roughly ten per cent Asian, and the rest is going to be Hispanic. We can build a governing coalition of conservatives among all those people. It’s just a different Republican Party than exists today.”
*
Back in the headquarters of the Republican Party of Texas, I visited with David Zapata, the state Party’s liaison to Hispanics. His parents are from Mexico. (When I asked him the name of their town, he said that he didn’t want it published. “The cartels,” he explained.) Zapata, who is thirty, didn’t learn English until high school; he speaks with an accent. His office was decorated with a photograph of George W. Bush and a Bush-Cheney campaign sign. There was no similarly prominent Romney memorabilia. “I’m a big Bush fan,” he told me with a smile. “Not for everything else—just for the emphasis that he gave to the Hispanic population.”
The Bush-family legacy looms over the Party’s relationship with Hispanics and may yet play a role in shaping it. As governor, George W. Bush won half the Hispanic vote when he was reëlected, in 1998. In Florida, his brother Jeb, the former governor of that state, who is frequently discussed as a potential Presidential candidate, was also popular. “Look at the Jeb Bush model, which is what we try to follow,” Munisteri said. “Jeb Bush got a higher percentage of the Hispanic vote in Florida than Marco Rubio, who is of Hispanic descent.” Next spring, Jeb is scheduled to publish a book outlining his views on immigration reform. In Texas, Jeb’s thirty-six-year-old son, George P., whose mother, Columba, grew up in Guanajuato, Mexico, has recently become a rising voice on the issue of Hispanic outreach. In 2010, he started the Hispanic Republicans of Texas, a group similar to Martinez de Vara’s, which recruits, trains, and funds Hispanic Republicans to run for office. Bush works at a private-equity firm that invests in the oil and gas industry, but his allies in the state told me that he would likely run for statewide office in 2014, and the day after the election he filed the paperwork to do so. “He’s got the talent, and the name, and he’s Hispanic,” said George P.’s friend Juan Hernandez, a Republican consultant who works closely with him. “What a combination! A Hispanic Bush! And he’s moreno—he’s dark.” Bush’s policy views are opaque, but he has surrounded himself with immigration reformers. For instance, Hernandez has come under attack from conservatives for his liberal views on the issue. On the other hand, Bush endorsed Cruz in his contentious primary. He could serve as a bridge between diehard conservatives and immigration reformers in the way that his uncle and his father did.
Despite the doomsday scenarios outlined by people like Munisteri, the Texas G.O.P. is far ahead of the national Party in dealing with the future. Two strategies are being tested. One is the kind of Republican identity politics exemplified by Cruz: the Party can continue its ideological shift to the right, especially on immigration, and appeal to Hispanics with candidates who share their ethnicity and perhaps speak their language. The more difficult path would see the G.O.P. retreat from its current position on immigration and take the direction advocated by Martinez de Vara and the Bush family.
If neither of these strategies succeeds, the consequences are clear. California was once a competitive state, the place that launched Ronald Reagan, but the G.O.P. there has now been reduced to a rump party, ideologically extreme and preponderately white. Republicans hold no statewide offices. After Tuesday, the Democrats also have a super-majority in the legislature, making it easier to raise taxes and overcome parliamentary obstacles like filibusters. In most accounts, the beginning of the Republican decline in California is traced to former Governor Pete Wilson’s attacks on benefits for unauthorized immigrants, which sounded to many voters like attacks on Hispanics. Farther east, in 2000 and 2004, New Mexico was one of the closest states in Presidential politics. In 2008, Obama won it by fifteen points. By 2012, it was no longer contested. Similarly, Nevada, which was fought over by both candidates this year, and which Obama won by six points, seems to have gone the way of California and New Mexico and will likely be safe for Democrats in 2016. The states aren’t identical: for example, California is more culturally liberal than Texas. But they all have growing nonwhite populations that overwhelmingly reject Republicans.
Demography is not necessarily destiny, however. The Democratic Party in Texas is leaderless and disorganized, ill-equipped to capitalize on the Republicans’ fear of their own extinction. Hispanic turnout is much lower in Texas than in other states with large Hispanic populations, such as California, and nobody seems to be moving aggressively to change the situation. “You don’t have one person trying to unify the collective energies of the Democratic Party with a goal toward putting a Democrat on the map statewide,” said Trey Martinez Fischer, a Democratic state representative who chairs the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.
“There’s groundwork that needs to be done in Texas that simply hasn’t been done,” Julián Castro, a Democrat and the mayor of San Antonio, told me during an interview on CNN. He noted that whereas in California Hispanics vote at rates that are ten per cent lower than those of the rest of the electorate, in Texas Hispanics are twenty-five per cent less likely to vote. But he insisted that change was coming. “Within the next six to eight years,” he said, “I believe Texas will be at least a purple state, if not a blue state.”
Last Tuesday, the Democrats showed some signs of life. Zapata had given me a list of thirteen Hispanic Republicans I should watch on Election Day in Texas. Eleven of them lost, including Canseco. Cruz won, but his margin in Texas was the same as Romney’s, suggesting that he had no crossover appeal to Hispanic Democrats.
Like the G.O.P.’s contradictory language on immigration in its party platform, the two strategies for courting Hispanics co-exist uneasily. The debate in Texas is about to seize Washington. Obama has strongly indicated that he intends to see immigration reform—likely some version of the so-called DREAM Act, which would offer a path to citizenship for millions of unauthorized immigrants—passed in 2013. Before the election, Obama told the Des Moines Register that he was “confident” he could get it done, because “a big reason I will win a second term is because the Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community.” Kay Bailey Hutchinson, the Republican senator from Texas whom Cruz is replacing, told me after the election, “A compromise on the DREAM Act should be easy to get done now.”
If Romney had won, his party would have been able to figure out this vexing issue from a position of strength. Instead, it will have to respond to the Democrats, who are certain to play the tensions within the G.O.P. One person who understands this is Cruz. When we arrived in Austin, at the end of our trip together, he revealed his simple recipe for success.
“I think every case in litigation and every argument in politics is about the fundamental narrative,” he said. “If you can frame the narrative, you win. As Sun Tzu said, every battle is won before it is fought. And it is won by choosing the field of terrain on which the fight will be engaged.” For now, the field belongs to Obama and the Democrats, and the storyline on immigration is theirs to lose.
Fox talk show host Bill O'Reilly made waves when, in the aftermath of the president's reelection, he opined that the incumbent had secured victory because of the new majority of voters who wanted 'stuff' from the government thought that they would get it from Obama. His remarks included a distinction between "traditional" Americans who wanted to be left alone by government and the spreading culture of entitlement embraced by these newer participants in the political process. He also stressed that "traditional" Americans were becoming a minority in their own country.
Now, we may want to cut O'Reilly some slack since he, like the rest of the Fox News (sic) team were obviously thrown off balance after the returns came in. They had been confident about a Romney win -- even fighting on air about what the numbers meant as one state after another was called for Obama. Perhaps it was this disappointment and confusion that explains why O'Reilly would make statements that were likely to be interpreted as anti-black, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Asian.
It certainly was clear enough that O'Reilly meant to draw a sharp distinction between these people who wanted "stuff" and the past majority who mostly wanted government to stay out of their way. In his romantic version of this older America, frontier self-reliance dominated the culture of communities both large and small.
There are many problems with O'Reilly's argument but none is more fundamental than his assertion that past majorities of Americans (as a group, as white as the folks at a Republican convention) were not interested in "stuff from the government." There is quite a bit of evidence, in fact, that despite their northern European roots -- a region, by the way, composed of countries with much larger public sectors than we have -- America's white citizens wanted and still want just as much stuff from government as do their less well-off fellow citizens. In fact, there is reason to believe that they often actually get more "stuff" than their less financially and politically advantaged neighbors. Let's look at a few obvious examples.
The mortgage interest deduction -- the biggest tax break of all -- goes largely to middle and upper income homeowners. The cost of the exemption in lost tax revenues is about $105 billion [ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/open-government/news/2011/01/26/8866/tax-expenditure-of-the-week-the-mortgage-interest-deduction/ ] annually and increasing. Because of the deduction home owners owe less federal income tax than do renters with the same incomes. And, in general, the deduction is larger the more expensive your home is. All tax credits and loopholes are more valuable to well-off taxpayers. One man's justifiable tax expenditure, after all, is another's unconscionable loophole.
But all such preferences are often wasteful and a biased way of giving "stuff" to powerful constituencies. In this sense, even the billions in tax breaks given to the oil industry are just "stuff" that their management and shareholders get from the government. So what if Exxon Mobil is reporting larger earnings [ http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/26/news/companies/exxon-profit/index.htm ] than has any corporation in history; they still want their "stuff." So, I guess they have more than you would expect in common with the poor kid who looks forward to the government subsidized school lunch program as his one hot meal of the day. The evidence is all around us that white Americans like that stuff called Social Security and Medicare. These are very popular programs with all almost all Americans, and they are much larger than some of the stuff we bicker about today.
So, in a larger sense, O'Reilly should have talking about the fact that the new majority may not have the same preferences when it comes to stuff that the old majority had. We will find out as future elections unfold. But bear in mind just about anybody has their own list of stuff they want from the government...
And here's a final example: I remember a guy trying to "save" the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. The stuff he wanted and got was a $400 million infusion of cash from the federal government. You know, the good "stuff."
President Obama: The First, And Perhaps Last, Super PAC-Slaying Democrat
President Barack Obama (seen here at his reelection party on Nov. 7, 2012) won despite massive spending by pro-Romney super PACs. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
By Sam Stein Posted: 11/09/2012 12:32 pm EST Updated: 11/09/2012 12:45 pm EST
WASHINGTON -- There has been post-election glee among Democrats, including the highest reaches of the Obama campaign, over the failure of big-moneyed conservative donors to swing the 2012 election.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) declared triumphantly during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast on Thursday morning that "Karl Rove's reputation is going to take a significant hit" after his nonprofit and super PAC arms shot blanks. Later that day, President Barack Obama's top adviser, David Axelrod, said that if he were one of those donors who had funded the Rove groups, he'd be "asking for a refund."
But beneath the gloating, there's a belief among party operatives that Obama was uniquely qualified to survive in the super PAC era. As Democratic lawmakers take stock of what happened on Tuesday, there is a renewed sense that, absent some form of campaign finance reform, they will be disadvantaged in future electoral cycles.
"I know some people are looking at the impact of [super PAC spending] on the president and saying it doesn’t matter," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). "I think that overlooks the special characteristics of this presidential race and ignores the fact that it could have huge impacts on congressional races."
Unwilling to risk those impacts and genuinely concerned about the absence of campaign finance regulation, Van Hollen said he will re-introduce his Disclose Act during the next congressional session. The proposed law won't stop or change super PACs, but it would require nearly all outside groups that engage in political spending to identify their donors.
Whether Van Hollen's bill has any chance is another story. It failed in the last two Congresses, and with the conventional wisdom at least coalescing around the notion that outside money didn't make all that much of a difference in 2012, it may be even harder to pass this go-around.
Yet even Obama's own advisers, in their post-election bluster, argue that reforms are needed. In a follow-up statement to The Huffington Post, Axelrod marveled at how super PACs "pummeled the Senate [Democratic] nominees where, arguably, they should have had more influence, and they lost seats." But he added there was "no doubt" that the president "was well-fortified to take them on in ways future nominees may not."
There are several reasons why Obama was uniquely qualified to run in the post-Citizens United era. His ability to draw historic levels of youth and minority support provided one element of fortification against big money's influence. African-American turnout was higher [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57547239/adviser-romney-shellshocked-by-loss/ ( http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57547239/adviser-romney-shellshocked-by-loss/?pageNum=2&tag=page )] in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida in 2012 than it was in 2008. One Obama staffer said that the reelection team could sense early on that the black community felt emotionally "protective" of the president in addition to being angered by various voter restriction laws pushed by Republican governors. By the time Election Day rolled around, the implications were clear. One campaign volunteer, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said he spent Tuesday getting out the vote in predominantly black neighborhoods in Richmond, Va.
"Every door I knocked on, the person said they either had voted already or were going soon," the volunteer said. "I didn't really have to do much work."
The ability to turn out minority voters was a manifestation of the Obama campaign's robust ground game. Organizing for America will serve as a template to follow for future presidential candidates. But it won't be easy. A far-reaching, grass-roots-oriented infrastructure requires a legion of devoted volunteers and a never-ending reservoir of cash. And on that front, again, the Obama campaign was unique.
The most important attribute that allowed Obama to maneuver past the pro-Romney super PACs, however, was that he was already a defined figure. Top Obama aides were heartened when the public's perception of the president stayed largely positive despite months of hammering from outside groups.
"We had no idea what the impact of unlimited spending would be in this election -- we knew going in we would be outspent and wouldn’t be able to counter it dollar for dollar on the air," said the Obama campaign's press secretary, Ben LaBolt. "We won't know the full scope of its impact for some time, but we helped diminish it by countering with a strong ground organization on the theory that a call from a friend or neighbor is more effective than any advertisement. And ultimately, the American people knew Barack Obama, his values, and what he stood for, and his numbers never went through seismic shifts throughout the course of the general election."
Whether a non-incumbent candidate with a smaller campaign infrastructure could withstand the super PAC spending that Obama faced is a proposition that may be tested in the next cycle.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden, two potential 2016 Democratic nominees, are well-known commodities. Having both served in the Obama administration, they have cachet among his followers. Clinton, in particular, could have the same type of emotional appeal for women voters that the president was able to invoke among African-Americans. She also could inspire the type of super PAC culture on the Democratic side that conservatives built in 2012.
But simply assuming that she or Biden could replicate the Obama model is a risk that Democrats aren't eager to take. And not just for the presidential contest. Even though Senate Democrats nearly swept the 2012 elections, the battle for the House was altered by outside cash.
"The influence of money is still pernicious, bad, and I would hope that reform of financial contributions would be something high up on the agenda in 2013," said Schumer, as a coda to his glee over Rove's 2012 failures.
Campaign finance reformers are already airing warnings that Tuesday's results should not be used as an excuse to maintain the status quo.
David Donnelly, Executive Director of Public Campaign Action Fund, declared, "This entire system is teetering, and those that argue super PACs don't have influence are whistling by the graveyard."
Bill O'Reilly: 'The Far Left Is A Dangerous Outfit, Bent On Destroying Traditional America' (VIDEO)
Posted: 11/13/2012 9:07 am EST Updated: 11/13/2012 9:07 am EST
"Is traditional America gone for good?" Bill O'Reilly wondered on his Monday Fox News program.
The "O'Reilly Factor" host said that he thought "traditional America" could return, but it would take a "very special politician" to make that happen.
O'Reilly said that President Obama's reelection was due to "entitlement" voters. "It's clear that left-wing ideology did not win the day for Barack Obama, big spending on federal programs did. That's the key, because many in the media would have us believe that liberal ideology was confirmed by this election. It was not. However, secularism is certainly eroding traditional power," O'Reilly said.
The Fox News host then charged that Obama was the "the poster boy for progressive secularism," a movement that, he said, was bad for America.
"Secular progressives don't want limitations on so-called private behavior," O'Reilly said. Speaking as a "secular progressive," O'Reilly continued, "Want to smoke drugs? Fine! Want to abort a fetus? We'll drive you to the clinic! Want to have a kid when you're 16? No problem at all, we'll support you."
He then concluded that the far left was a "dangerous outfit, bent on destroying traditional America and replacing it with a social free-fire zone that drives dependency and poverty."
Bill O'Reilly Decries 'Secular Progressives' Who Are 'Bent On Destroying Traditional America'
Published on Nov 12, 2012 by NewsPoliticsNow2
Is traditional America gone for good? That's the question Bill O'Reilly tackled during his Talking Points Memo on Monday night. Criticizing "secular progressives," O'Reilly called for the right kind of politician who will help us confront the "reality of our situation."
Traditional America can come back, O'Reilly said, with the right person to make it happen. Specifically, he pointed to Mitt Romney's electoral loss among blacks, women and Latinos. "It was an entitlement election," he said.
The media would have you believing the election confirmed election ideology. While that's not true, he said, secularism is "eroding traditional power."
"On paper, the stats look hopeless for traditional Americans," O'Reilly said. "But they can be reversed. However, it will take a very special politician to do that. By the way, Mitt Romney didn't even try to marginalize secularism. He basically ignored it."
Secular progressives don't have the right approach, he argued, because they don't want judgment on personal behavior. For examples, O'Reilly pointed to the issues of out-of-wedlock births, abortion and entitlements. Secular progressives "don't want limitations on so-called private behavior," he said.
The majority of Americans can be persuaded, O'Reilly said, "that the far-left is dangerous outfit, bent of destroying traditional America and replacing it with a social free-fire zone that drives dependency and poverty." We need to confront that, he added. But too many of our politicians are too cowardly to do so.
It's outrageous that Perkins would even remotely suggest violence ("I hate to use the words," he said, "but I mean a revolt, a revolution"), particularly given that FRC was itself targeted by a gunman [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelangelo-signorile/a-shooting-at-family-rese_b_1789256.html ] and Perkins was the first to claim that rhetoric against his group is what caused that violence. It betrays the fear and desperation now gripping the leaders of the decades-old political movement known as the Christian right, which is faced with some vexing realities:
1. There may no longer be enough of them. Contrary to what some may have predicted, evangelical voters turned out for Mitt Romney, a Mormon, making up a greater percentage of the electorate than they did in 2004 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/us/politics/christian-conservatives-failed-to-sway-voters.html (the second item in the post to which this is a reply)], when they helped reelect George W. Bush, and giving a larger percentage of their vote (78 percent) to Romney than they did to John McCain in 2008. It's not about loyalty. What they're facing is something much more difficult: the rise of the "nones," which I wrote about [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelangelo-signorile/nones-on-the-rise-how-ant_b_1966453.html ] a few weeks ago. The fastest-growing religious category comprises those who have no religious affiliation, now the second largest category after Catholics, and even larger among younger voters. They overwhelmingly support same-sex marriage and abortion rights, and they largely vote Democratic. And polls show that even a majority of younger evangelicals themselves support marriage equality [ http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/07/02/12524736-could-gay-marriage-debate-drive-young-christians-from-church ].
5. Nine states now have marriage equality. According to Freedom to Marry [ http://www.freedomtomarry.org/states/ ], nearly 17 percent of the U.S. population lives in states that allow gays and lesbians to legally marry or that honor out-of-state marriages of same-sex couples. If the Supreme Court allows the Prop 8 decision to stand in California, that number will jump to well over 25 percent. Nearly 39 percent of the U.S. population lives in states with either full marriage equality or some sort of broad legal recognition of same-sex relationships, such as civil unions or domestic partnerships. As Joe Sudbay demonstrated [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-sudbay/on-lgbt-equality-its-very-clear-where-the-trend-lines-are-going_b_2092814.html ] in a smart post last week, the trend lines are going in the wrong direction on this issue for the Christian right. The GOP sees this and will be forced to either cleave off NOM, FRC and others or see public support for the party continue to erode.
I'm not suggesting that the Christian right is dead or going away anytime soon. While barely over 50 percent of Americans support marriage equality in most national polls, there obviously is a large minority that is opposed to it. And in some states, like North Carolina, which passed a ban on gay marriage just this past May with 64 percent of the vote, a large majority of the population is in line with the religious right's agenda. The hate we've seen spewed into the political discourse this year was bone-chilling and among the worst we've seen, with preachers speaking out against gay marriage by calling for gays to be rounded up [ http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/22/video-of-north-carolina-pastors-plan-to-get-rid-of-gays-goes-viral/ ] or killed by the government [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/31/curtis-knapp-kansas-pastor-death-of-gays-defense-cnn_n_1559293.html ], but it's going to get uglier and nastier, and the battles only more intense. When they start talking about "revolution" and "revolt," we all had better pay attention. The last thing we should be doing is sitting around thinking we've won.
Frank Szabo Leaves Country Former Hillsborough County Sheriff candidate heads to South America. November 13, 2012 Frank Szabo made national headlines in August when he made controversial comments regarding his staunch pro-life platform. Today, the Concord Monitor first reported that Szabo has emigrated to South America. An admitted Free Stater, Szabo, in an interview with Bedford Patch compared abortion to slavery and said he'd condone the use of deadly force in extreme circumstances pertaining to abortion. "I don't think anybody would have trouble with preventing a full-grown human being from being murdered," Szabo told Patch, "so why would anyone object to the use of deadly force to prevent the murder of an unborn human?" Szabo, who apologized and retracted his comments a day later, lost his bid for the Republican nomination for county sheriff during the Sept. 11 Primary election. [...] http://bedford-nh.patch.com/articles/frank-szabo-leaves-country [no comments yet]
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