They are the key spokesmen (and they're nearly all men) of the "Alternate Reality" wing of the GOP, which dominated Fox News and the blogosphere over the last four years. As I've consistently said since 2009, I would have been shocked if Barack Obama didn't beat these people.
I didn't like the GM and Chrysler bailouts on principle, but I recognized at the time that there were more practical considerations at hand. As soon as the party decided that they were going to run through the Midwest screaming "Fuck you and your two million jobs," it was hard to see those people as anything but doomed. I knew that Tea Party talking points (which are never intellectually impressive) wouldn't withstand liberal demagoguery. But because it was common sense, Republicans ignored it and deluded themselves to the point that they were convinced that they would win Michigan and Ohio.
These people are doing something far more insidious than lying to you. They're lying to themselves. They really do believe that there's going to be some demographic resurrection of superstitious old white people that they can build a governing majority from. They really do believe that rattling on endlessly about nonsense like "self-deportation" is the best way to get Latinos to vote for them. And don't get me started about what these tools believe about single women.
Want to hear some neat facts? Great! They're good and they're good for you, you know.
The first one is the most important. I'm going italicize it for you to show just how important I think it is. The Republican Party has only won the popular vote in a presidential election once since 1988.
Here's some context into how long ago 1988 was. The majority of the people reading these words couldn't vote then, and I'm pretty sure that a plurality of you weren't even in high school yet. The careers of both Bill Clinton and Rob Lowe were thought to have ended at the Democratic convention that year. Cassettes overtook LPs that year and only real assholes owned CDs. Oh, and a president named Bush was just a year away from engineering a giant bank bailout.
Let's now look at the GOP's presidential nominees since then and examine why they actually lost, as opposed to why some shithead bloggers think they did.
Supposed conservatives like Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot killed my hero, George H.W Bush. Bush 41 did a very dumb thing when he said, "Read my lips, no new taxes," mostly because he didn't know that he might have to invade the Middle East someday.
Reagan's deficits had grown to the point that, by the fall of 1990, the Democrats were threatening a government shutdown over them. At the same time, President Bush was inserting half a million troops into Saudi Arabia to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. A government shutdown during a friggin' war would have been optically less than ideal, so he negotiated and signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, which moved the needle on taxes by about three points.
Gingrich, then the House minority whip, promised to support the bill, but later screwed the president by getting conservatives to vote against it. Buchanan challenged Bush in '92 primaries and Perot ran to his right as an independent, thereby handing the White House to Bill Clinton.
By 1996, Bob Dole saw what happened to Bush and became a full-on Grover Norquist zombie, running on an unaffordable 15% across-the-board tax cut, which allowed Clinton to tie him to Gingrich (ironically, since Dole loathed Gingrich as much as Bush did.) Oh, and Perot won 10% of Dole's vote, thereby handing the White House to Clinton.
George W. Bush and Al Gore ran as essentially the same guy. What killed Bush 43 in the popular vote was the last minute revelation of a DUI, leading superstitious Christian-types to think that he'd model his presidency after the lyrics of "It's So Easy" by Guns N' Roses, and causing them to stay home. Bush became president anyway due to a crafty Fourteenth Amendment argument before the Supreme Court.
John McCain and Mitt Romney, it should be remembered, didn't run as moderates at all. The psychopathic and goofy Republican primary process forced both of them well to the right of their natural positions, the general electorate and common sense. The fact that they were "moderates" (and McCain was only moderate on issues like immigration) didn't kill them, their cowardice did. Both of them relentlessly coddled up to ideas and people that they knew were repugnant to the average voter, but they were more afraid of assholes like Limbaugh, Norquist and Pat Robertson they were of the general electorate.After all, they couldn't lose to a "community organizer," right? Wrong.
In Romney's case, the "conservative" candidates (and it's amazing how frequently the name Newt Gingrich comes up in this story, isn't it?) set the Obama campaign's strategy and themes up for them, with attacks on Bain and his credibility. This year's Republican primaries looked more like the "kill the frontrunner" exercise of the Democratic primaries from 1972-2004 than anything I've ever seen from the GOP.
George W. Bush in 2004 is the only Republican to win the popular vote in 24 years, and he only barely managed that by vastly expanding education and prescription drug entitlements. People forget this, but Bush also promised to spend a trillion dollars more than John Kerry did.
The idea that Bush 41, Dole, McCain and Romney lost because they were "too moderate" is as silly as it is disprovable. In each and every instance, they were kneecapped by the Robespierre Republicans of the alleged right and made unelectable.
In the last week, some voices from that camp have finally started talking sense. And they aren't voices easily discredited by the likes of Limbaugh, Erickson and Norquist.
Bill Kristol (who has a long and storied history of being wrong about everything from the war in Iraq to the wisdom of putting Sarah Palin on a national ticket) has challenged the retarded GOP orthodoxy on tax increases.
Everything that most Republicans know about taxes stops in 1982. What they're either too dumb to know or too dishonest to acknowledge is that Reagan's repeated tax increases didn't hurt economic growth, and Bush's and Clinton's might have actually improved it. More importantly, the GOP has pissed away incalculable political capital defending millionaires and billionaires who often vote for the Democrats anyway.
I've spent the last five years warning Republicans about the long-term viability of Texas as a red state, given its demography. You're probably tired of hearing me talk about it.
The Democrats did something very smart in the last decade that the GOP was too smug to notice. They gave up entirely on the Deep South, preferring to concentrate on states with the fastest-growing Hispanic populations. That led to New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia becoming reliably blue. I'm predicting right now that Arizona will become an important swing-state in 2016.
Which brings me back to Texas. If you don't believe me, maybe you'd prefer to hear it from the Tea Party's newest Jesus figure, the senator-elect from Texas, Ted Cruz.
“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.’ ”Look, I get that this is "reality-based thinking" and involves math, which Republicans hate, but that doesn't make it wrong. Ted Cruz has been a statewide political figure for the better part of a decade. I'm pretty sure that he knows the lay of the land better than some jackoff blogger or glorified deejay.
Arizona will be a swing-state in 2016, and Texas will go that way no later than 2024. Bet on it.
But the best overall analysis from an elected official so far comes from Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal.
“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything,” Jindal told POLITICO in a 45-minute telephone interview.
“We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys."
He was just as blunt on how the GOP should speak to voters, criticizing his party for offending and speaking down to much of the electorate.
“It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that,” Jindal said. “It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”
Calling on the GOP to be “the party of ideas, details and intelligent solutions,” the Louisianan urged the party to “stop reducing everything to mindless slogans, tag lines, 30-second ads that all begin to sound the same. “
He added: “Simply being the anti-Obama party didn’t work. You can’t beat something with nothing. The reality is we have to be a party of solutions and not just bumper-sticker slogans but real detailed policy solutions.”That's key. Going back to 1980, the GOP has relied almost exclusively on bumper-sticker policies that even Reagan wound up walking away from. And Republicans have lied to themselves about that for thirty years now.
That was fine when the Democrats didn't have a reliable map to work with, or when Ross Perot fucked with their dreams. But the Democrats very much do have a workable map now. If you take away anything from last Tuesday, it should be that. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Virginia stays blue and North Carolina tilts back. Obama carried Cuban-Americans last week, giving the Democrats what looks to be a durable coalition in Florida. And Colorado legalized pot. They didn't decriminalize it or allowed for medical marijuana, they legalized pot. So I think that state can be safely put in the blue column for foreseeable future.
The canard of gay marriage never passing a popular vote was also demolished in no less than three states last week. If the Supreme Court doesn't step in first, I predict that'll happen in more - and redder - states. When the gay marriage trend started a decade ago, and the world didn't immediately end, more and more people have accepted it. I don't see how you turn back the clock on that.
Very nearly half of the states have now decriminalized cannabis in one way or another and 50% of the people support outright legalization. Nine states have legalized same-sex marriage and New Jersey, Rhode Island and California recognize gay marriages from states that allow for it. Well over 50% of Americans now support it. Three states, including deep red Montana, allow assisted suicide.
America isn't just getting younger and darker, it's becoming more libertarian. Last week, in state after state, voters proved that they wanted the government out of their lives as the GOP was campaigning on rape babies. I'm sure that's not the campaign Mitt Romney wanted, but it's the campaign Tea Party insurgents Todd Aiken and Richard Mourdock gave him. A party that campaigned against health care mandates used its majorities in multiple state legislatures to pass, or attempt to pass, mandates for trans-vaginal ultrasounds, which are medically and scientifically useless and serve only to treat competent adults like children. They railed against birth control whenever they could, which was settled law in 1965, for Christ's sake!
The Hezbollah (Party of God) ideology of the Republican party is being rejected more rapidly than even I thought possible. This might seem incredibly counter-intuitive, but I think that the American people actually did vote for a smaller government last Tuesday. But they voted for a smaller government in terms of their lives, as opposed to the very narrow interests that the GOP represents.
Even when two years of polling showed that a majority of Republican voters thought it was time for the Bush tax cuts to expire (at least) on the high-end earners, the party ignored them and powered on to its own destruction.
Over the next few years, I think you'll hear smart Republicans (to the extent that there are any left) stop referring to the rich as "job creators," which is the kind of Frank Luntz focus-group driven nonsense (see also, "death tax") that has driven America into bankruptcy. The GOP has been ideologically married to tax cuts without qualification since at least 1996, and they've only won the popular vote once since then. And, ironically, that was the one presidential term when taxes weren't cut. I think we can safely say, as a political matter, that America is officially on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve.
For way too long, the Republican party has been rooting against the Enlightenment and for what I lovingly call the Triumph of Ignorance. The days of the party branding itself against smart may finally be over, although I'm still reluctant to actually predict it. But it's become clear that they can no longer run around the country saying "We're all gonna die, and here's our bumper-sticker solution to everything!"
Look, I'm not suggesting that the GOP is going to die tomorrow. Gerrymandering has ensured a significant presence for them at least in the House through 2022. But I think we've just seen the last presidential election where they can appeal solely to superstitious and hateful old white men and expect to win.
The Senate's even worse. The Democrats were defending more seats than they had since LBJ was in the White House, and the GOP should've easily been able able to pick up at least five of them. Ideally, they could've won seven or eight. Instead, they suffered a net loss of two.
The fact is that they're getting killed not just on social issues, but on economic ones. They're getting murdered on the idea that they're competent managers of anything. Say what you will about "country club Republicans," but at least they knew how to run things. The Jacobins of the GOP are incapable of doing even that. Bush branded them as the party of Iraq and Katrina, and McCain and Romney were too afraid of their own idiot right to push back against it.
Mitt Romney bought into Erick Erickson's insipid, whiny and limp-dicked "47%" meme without understanding that the real welfare cases are the deepest red states, who are heavily subsidized through Washington by economic basket-cases like California and Illinois, who pay more in taxes than they get back. And pardon me for thinking that Erickson's supposed failure to make a proper living on national TV, radio and as a published author and prominent blogger is anybody's fault but his own. If he wants to take that up with anybody, it should be his fucking agent.
I've said for years that it would have been very hard for President Obama to lose this election. On the other hand, his victory marks only the second time in U.S history that there have been three consecutive two-term presidents, the first being Jefferson through Monroe (1801-'25.) As I write this, there's no reason to believe that Obama won't be succeeded by another Democrat, likely Joe Biden.
The GOP has now lost four Senate elections in a row, 2006-'12. Even after gerrymandering made them seemingly invulnerable in the House, they might have lost as many as eight seats there, to say nothing of the national popular vote for that body.
Those people are in a world of fucking hurt, not just demographically, but geographically. The more I think about it, the harder it is to envision an electoral map that carries them into the 2030s unless they seriously think about reforming themselves in deeply profound ways. Just two weeks ago, Republicans were saying that a vote for the Libertarians was wasted. The reverse could very probably be true in twenty years.
Limbaugh, Erickson and every other dickhead blogger out there aren't just haughty beyond words, they also know shit about history. They really don't seem to know that the Republican party was created only because the Whigs collapsed. And they don't seem to understand that another party can grow out their ashes.
Old fat men are always just a coronary away from being dead men* and the same principle of natural selection applies to political movements.
But please keep on being what even Bobby Jindal calls "The Party of Stupid." It amuses me and there are few things I love writing about more.
Artwork lovingly stolen from Esquire.
Editor's Note: Oddly enough, Erick Erickson is five and half years younger than I am. But my steady diet of pills. powders and amber liquids have granted me not only a beautiful swimmer's body, but eternal life! The idea of that disgusts me beyond words, but it is what it is.
Editor's Note the Second: One of you good people put this post on Reddit, which led to my biggest all-time traffic day of ever! And it was on a weekend.
Looka this.
(click to embiggen)
I haven't been overly diligent about checking my stats after I fucked up my template and killed Sitemeter, along with my links. But Blogger has had me averaging about 1,400 pageviews a day. In the week of the election, I went up to about 2.200.
The Romney polling post? Nearly 68,000 in a single day. And it went higher as the night went on. Just two of my election posts last week accounted for about a fifth of the total pageviews this blog has had since February of 2009. I don't know about you, but I'm impressed with me over that.
The post in question garnered two comments here. As of right now, there are 111 at the Reddit thread.
I want you teenagers to keep that up. I don't host ads and I don't beg my readers for money, but Daddy has an ego to feed. Knowing that 68.000 people a day can read my drivel goes a long way in doing that.
My favourite Reddit comment comes from Podunk14, who said "This blog needs more swear words before I would be able to consider it a credible source of information."
All I can say, Podunk14, is that I'll try. I'll try with all of my black little motherfucking heart!
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