Broder: Save the Endangered Rising GOP Stars!

Broder:

[GOP Sen. John Sununu] has a fan club on both sides of the aisle and is talked about in Republican circles as a potential presidential candidate.

The youngest member of the Senate has found himself running for reelection in one of the toughest years that Republicans have faced since 1974 -- when Democrats elected their big class of "Watergate babies."

His timetable is in serious jeopardy.

All together, now: Awwwwwwwwwww.

Sununu, like McCain, has struggled to convince voters that while he voted 90 percent of the time for Bush policies, he really is independent. He cites his opposition to an early Bush energy bill and his successful fight to add civil liberties protections to the Patriot Act.

It's a bit harder than it used to be a party-line man in Washington, then pass yourself off back home as an independent on the basis of a handful of votes. Maybe he should have just not voted with Bush 90% of the time.

Michael Demmons Hammers the Kraut

I have no idea who Michael Demmons is (other than some guy John Cole trusts enough to turn the keys of Balloon Juice over to), or whether he even read Krauthammer's column this morning before writing this post at Balloon Juice. Either way, I'm gonna outsource the rest of this post to him.

Krauthammer:

Let me get this straight. A couple of agitated yahoos in a rally of thousands yell something offensive and incendiary, and John McCain and Sarah Palin are not just guilty by association -- with total strangers, mind you -- but worse: guilty according to the New York Times of "race-baiting and xenophobia."

Demmons:

You might be excused if you said placing Obama’s face on a $10 food stamp with a bucket of fried chicken, watermelon, ribs, and Kool-Aid was an isolated act.

When a major right-wing network calls Michelle Obama, “Obama’s Baby Mama,” you could dismiss it as as an overzealous producer who just thought it was funny and didn’t mean it to say that black women are just baby machines for black men. You could, I suppose.

You might even get a pass if you thought a Web site that depicted Obama and the word “Waterboard Him” was just created by an obscure group that didn’t represent all Republicans – although you would be wrong.

If a picture of Obama was Photoshopped to make him look a little bit like Osama Bin Laden, you could pass it off as the work of a few idiots on the right. It could be, right?

Supporters who carry racist Obama Monkey Dolls to your rallys are people who don’t represent your campaign. You could argue that.

Of course, this is just a moron on the fringe, right?

What about when a high-level Republican fundraiser sends out an email that includes a joke with the punchline, if an airplane carrying Obama and his wife were blown up “it certainly wouldn’t be a great loss, and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either.”? Sure, you could pass it off as the act of a random dumbass.

If, in response to your question, “Who is Barack Obama?” someone yelled “Terrorist!” you could say that was just one idiot in the crowd and was not indicative of the general sentiment. It’s plausible.

In fact, you could cite dozens of examples of these racist, divisive, dillusiuonal attacks on Barack Obama and conclude that they are just elements of the fringe and don’t represent mainstream Republicans.

Sooner or later though, you will have to acknowledge that this “fringe” is very widespread. You’ll have to come to grips, eventually, with the fact that this “fringe” has become the very definition of the your party.

Chuckles, I think Michael Demmons nailed your sorry ass.

Eve Fairbanks in the WaPo: the GOP Is Getting Crazier

I've got tons of stuff to do today, and a Redskins game to watch, so for now I'll outsource the well-deserved ridicule of Broder to BarbinMD and DemFromCT over at the Great Orange Satan.

But this Outlook piece by TNR's Eve Fairbanks about the GOP freshman class, amazingly enough, tells it like it is. (Ignore the positive spin of the "Audacity of Nope" headline.)

But McCain's triumph actually hid the fact that, at the lower levels of the party, the emerging center of gravity is more conservative, not less. In the House, such young members as Jeb Hensarling (Tex.), Mike Pence (Ind.) and their ideologically purist soulmates on the Republican Study Committee (which absorbed most of the GOP freshmen) began to influence the party's agenda from the right, clamoring to make pork-busting the GOP's focus, demanding legislation to lower taxes and even mounting a prank revolt on a war-funding bill in May, just to flex their muscles. "The American people thought Republicans weren't acting like Republicans," Hensarling explained.

Across the Capitol, Hensarling's ideological allies in the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, hauled their own caucus rightward, forcing appropriations freezes, waylaying an intelligence authorization bill that required the administration to report on its secret CIA prisons and killing the moderate immigration reform bill backed by Bush and McCain. DeMint recently launched a political action committee that donates only to senators who have their right-wing bona fides in order. Over the last two years, these new-guard conservatives -- all of whom were awarded a perfect "100" rating from the American Conservative Union in 2007 -- have arguably fashioned themselves into the most listened-to Republicans on Capitol Hill.

The bailout bill was the new guard's biggest show of force yet. Hensarling's Republican Study Committee ("The Caucus of House Conservatives," proclaims its Web site) gave those GOP freshmen the political cover to buck their leadership. They made it clear that their revolt was more over principle than over details, a stand on behalf of what one GOP Hill staffer calls "true, rock-ribbed, hard-core conservatism." Hensarling derided the bailout as the "slippery slope to socialism," while his ally Tom Feeney (Fla.) insisted that the crisis was actually produced by a failure to adequately venerate deregulation. Another young Turk, Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.), even compared the bailout to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. (I suppose that makes George W. Bush a communist. I told you these guys were audacious.)

Not every Republican is happy about the rise of the new conservatives. Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz wrote last week of "a veteran of a past Republican administration" who "could barely spit out his contempt Monday for the actions of the House Republicans. 'They would rather be right in their views -- that ideology counts more, that ideology is crucial in any decision -- rather than making incremental progress.' "

But Republicans like that guy will have to get used to the growing influence of the conservatives. They have enthusiasm and demographics on their side. Moderate Republicans are getting offed all along the Eastern seaboard; eager grassroots activists are nominating right-wingers such as New Mexico's Steve Pearce and Virginia's Jim Gilmore in Senate primaries; and the American Conservative Union's congressional ratings dramatically show which way the wind is blowing. The Republicans who are retiring this year got an average ACU rating of 78 in 2007, placing them squarely between conservatism and centrism. But by my calculations, the Republican freshmen -- the vanguard of the generation that will be replacing these fleeing moderates -- got an average rating of 97.

If you're a true, rock-ribbed, hard-core conservative, you're probably happy about all this. As a card-carrying moderate weenie, I'm not, obviously. But it's not just the policies of the GOP's new guard that spell trouble; it's the attitude. What these young Turks do share with McCain is a taste for the grand gesture and the attention-getting stunt, the determination not to go gently into defeat and the psychological pleasure derived from creating a whole lot of political Sturm und Drang. After their May revolt on the war-funding bill, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) challenged Mike Pence about why on Earth his faction had bolted on what was supposed to be bipartisan legislation. "Never stop fighting," Pence replied.

But all this drama, fun as it is, doesn't make you look like you're ready to be at the governing wheel. (See McCain, John, and recent polling.) And it's this attitude -- the thrill of doubling down on ideology, of damning those torpedoes -- that helped get people such as Pearce and Gilmore nominated in states that obviously won't support their degree of conservatism. They'll probably lose in November, and Republicans will be two Senate seats closer to being ideological irritants rather than the Democrats' serious rivals.

We in the netroots have observed for some time that, as Dems pick up House and Senate seats in swing states and districts, we could be on the verge of (for the GOP) a vicious cycle where the attrition of the saner Republicans makes the GOP increasingly crazily right-wing, further alienating conservatives with even an ounce of sanity, and continuing the cycle.

But as far as I can tell, this is the first time the MSM has taken significant note that this is where the GOP may be headed.

And more important, Fairbanks' piece explodes the "we need bipartisanship, and both sides are equally to blame that we don't have it" meme. She portrays a GOP that can't be reasoned with. We've known that's true, but to see that in the Outlook section of the WaPo, written by a Joe Lieberman Weekly correspondent - well, dayum. Maybe the WaPo will someday catch up with reality after all.

Yglesias Asks: Where's Corporate America?

Damned good question.

especially on the right, normally when there’s an issue that’s perceived to be important to American business, corporate America makes its views known and conservative legislators, when asked to jump, say “how high?”

But as Matt points out, GOP legislators clearly aren't being given pro-bailout marching orders by the Chamber of Commerce or the National Federation of Independent Businesses. Yet the members of such organizations are supposedly the first wave of casualties in a credit crunch.

As Matt acknowledges, this doesn't mean the crisis is fictitious. But it sure makes you wonder what the game is, doesn't it?

My WAG is that the lobbyists for the C-of-C, the NFIB and all the rest, were in from the beginning on the whole Lucy-and-the-football stunt that the GOP was pulling over the past few days: get the Dems to Be Responsible, sucker them into a bad compromise, then pull out, stick them with the blame, and run against them. They felt safe in assuming a bailout was coming, so they were willing to protect their own, rather than needlessly make them vote for a very unpopular bill.

Like I say, this is no more than a wild-ass guess. But it wouldn't surprise me to find out that it was true.

Gerson the Ignorant

Thank you, WaPo, for moving Michael Gerson's column to the Saturday paper, thereby giving me an easy target to ridicule on a Saturday morning. He'd like to think he's trashing Obama's acceptance speech the other night, but he's only making himself look bad, of course.

In substance, Barack Obama's convention speech could easily have been given by Al Gore or John Kerry -- and, in various forms, was given by Kerry and Gore. It was all in there: the lunchbox economic populism -- based on the assumption that most Americans are filling their lunchboxes with scraps from Dumpsters. The attacks on corporations, millionaires and other sinister job creators. The touching faith in the power of diplomacy.

Well, you know what, Mike? America still has every problem it had in 2004 and 2000, plus a few more: global warming, which your old boss, George W. Bush, conceded was real but never did anything about, is now clearly upon us. New Orleans is still a mess from Katrina, and we can only hope and pray that Gustav goes somewhere else. We got attacked on September 11, 2001, in part because we had a President that was focused on rogue states and ignored terrorism - as demonstrated by his using the terrorist threat as an excuse to invade Iraq, where we're still bogged down, 4,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and a trillion dollars later. Meanwhile, people are losing their jobs, the values of their houses that they can't pay the mortgages on are plummeting, banks are failing, and we're back to the era of mammoth deficits that we'd supposedly left behind forever by the end of the Clinton Administration.

And the result of all this is that Americans, by a wide margin, prefer a generic Democrat to a generic Republican. Maybe it bothers you that Obama's policies are largely generic Democratic policies, but that's what America wants - has wanted for years, in fact, but has been denied by your crew.

Your friends have fucked. things. up. It's that simple, Mike.

Generic Republican ideas - wars, tax cuts for the rich, less regulation - have gotten us into this mess. So maybe it's time to try generic Democratic ideas, to get us out again.

And some of the attacks were simply unfair. Is it really credible to blame McCain for a tripling of oil imports during his time as senator?

Unfair? Awwwwwwwww. Look who's talking about unfair: a shill for a party of smear merchants. Awwwwwwwww.

What is unquestionably fair is to point out that John McCain has voted against everything that might've reduced our dangerous dependence on oil and other fossil fuels: he's voted against higher fuel efficiency standards for cars. He's voted against wind power and other renewables. he abandoned the carbon cap-and-trade proposal that used to have his name on it.

He didn't create the entire problem, but he damned sure did his best to make sure we did nothing about it. As Obama said the other night, it's time for the GOP to own the failure.

What does it mean that McCain "won't even follow [bin Laden] to the cave where he lives" -- that McCain is cowardly? that he knows where bin Laden hides, and won't tell the rest of us? that he doesn't believe in fighting al-Qaeda?

Apparently, Gerson doesn't know that McCain, who said he'd follow bin Laden to the gates of hell, also said this:

KING: If you were president and knew that bin Laden was in Pakistan, you know where, would you have U.S. forces go in after him?

MCCAIN: Larry, I'm not going to go there and here's why, because Pakistan is a sovereign nation.

To the gates of hell, but not past the gates of Pakistan. If bin Laden's in a sovereign nation that won't capture bin Laden itself, and won't let us in, then McCain says our hands are tied.

Now excuse me, but isn't that why we invaded Afghanistan - because they wouldn't let us pursue bin Laden in their country?

There was a bit of a flap about this when McCain said it. Did Gerson entirely miss it? Apparently so.

At any rate, Obama doesn't think these circumstances tie our hands. He believes we need to bring bin Laden to justice, even if he does happen to be hiding in Pakistan.

Obama said nothing interesting about race in America at a moment when that might have been expected. He made no serious effort to reach out to religious conservatives, something that now seems more like a ploy than a project. He offered no creative policy proposals that might transcend partisan divisions.

Maybe Gerson listened to a different speech than I did. The one I listened to (last night via YouTube, since I was sound asleep when Obama's speech began on Thursday night) mentioned some preacher from Georgia at the Lincoln Memorial - who the fuck could that have been, Mike? was that too subtle for you? - and pointed out some things to learn from his example. And if reducing the number of unwanted pregancies, which Obama also mentioned, isn't a place to find common ground with religious conservatives and transcend partisan divisions, then maybe religious conservatives should admit that all their talk about abortion is mere posturing.

Oh, wait: that's not a creative policy proposal. It's a perfectly mundane Democratic idea - part of the backbone of Dem beliefs since Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" formulation 16 years ago - that the GOP has done its best to keep America from actually trying.

The Democratic ticket [now] offers the purest message of partisan aggression and class resentment.

I guess only the GOP is supposed to practice partisan aggression, and only the rich are supposed to practice class resentment. Whatever, Mike.

The weird thing is, the speech that inspired this "partisan aggression" bullshit is one that went after McCain and the GOP on the issues, rather than attacking their character. If you can't take being on the receiving end of a vigorous debate on the issues, Mike, maybe you should give up politics and take up shuffleboard. Because that's what politics ideally should be about - that's what politics looks like when it's being played cleanly, rather than with all the mud your side slings.

Mike, you claim to be a religious sort of guy. So if GOP attacks on Obama based on Ayers, Rezko, 'celebrity' status, and so forth, don't bother you, but attacking McCain on the issues does, then hear the word of the Lord from Chapter 25 of Deuteronomy:

13 Do not have two differing weights in your bag—one heavy, one light. 14 Do not have two differing measures in your house—one large, one small. 15 You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you. 16 For the LORD your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.

That's right, Mike: God says not to apply different measures to one side than you would to the other. Seems like a simple enough message. But I don't think you believe it - to you, God is just another cudgel to use on the other guy.

God's bigger than that, Mike. And you're smaller.