politics Archives - Rogue Columnist

Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

Ground zero II

Carl Muecke illustration

In Phoenix this past weekend, Trump said, "If I lost the election, I could handle it pretty easily. But when they steal it from you and rig it, that’s not easy, and we have to fight!"

The location and big-lie language are no random coincidence. For the past several months the Republican-controlled state Senate has been conducting an "audit" of Maricopa County ballots. The goal is to show the presidential election was stolen here from Trump (When Fox "News" called Arizona for Biden, something approved by Rupert Murdoch himself, Trump exploded).

The "stolen election" and the January 6th insurrection to prevent the results from being certified by Congress, is a national Republican narrative. But, as with climate change, Arizona is ground zero.

The deeper consequence of the "audit" is to kneecap Arizona from turning purple or blue. It sets a blueprint by which any future election that goes Democratic can be challenged and even reversed. No wonder Republicans from other states have been watching closely and trying to install their own "audits."

It's not the only way Republicans are working to ensure they maintain power, whatever the changing demographics and politics of the nation.

Jon Talton July 26, 202134

Politics: National

‘The white working class’

After the stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton, progressive mandarins are calling for a complete rebuilding of the Democratic Party. Here, for example, is Robert Reich's eight-step program. Unlike the Republicans after defeat, who double down on their ideological convictions and nihilistic congressional maneuvers, it may well happen. And it may be for the good. I don't know.

One thing I doubt is that the Democrats can win back the vaunted white working class. Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who is challenging Nancy Pelosi for House Minority Leader, said, “We need to speak to their economic interests, that we get it, that we understand, that we talk about those things and we try to fight hard for those things.”

Well, how? President Obama saved General Motors, including the Lordstown, Ohio, assembly. Yet that county supported Trump over Clinton by six points. Obamacare provided more health insurance for whites than for blacks and Hispanics combined. Yet exit polls show whites voted 58 percent for Trump vs. 37 percent for Clinton, who had detailed policy proposals to help working Americans. As you can see from the map above, the Rust Belt states that went for Trump have plenty of counties that were doing well. The same thing with the hard-red South. (Although, as I wrote in the Seattle Times, blue states are the economic superstars for reasons that most red states shun).

Perspective is important. Hillary Clinton has won a larger majority of the popular vote than any candidate in modern history who did not also win the Electoral College. We vote by states, but even here it was a near-run thing. Trump won Michigan's 16 electoral votes by two-tenths of a percentage point (how'd that protest vote work out for you?). In the end, she couldn't get the low-single-digit additional points in key states that Obama had previously won.

Jon Talton November 28, 201663

Politics: National

Hillary’s moment?

Imagine how social media, cable "news," and talk radio in a misinformed nation would have portrayed some candidates in the past.

A failed one-term congressman, wishy-washy on his party's most important moral issue, no executive experience, too homely for television — and despite the media campaign to make him out as a simple, honest frontiersman, in reality he was a highly successful lawyer for the nation's most powerful industry. His own law partner noted, "his ambition was a little engine that knew no rest." You know him as Abraham Lincoln.

An elitist intellectual, hotheaded, jingoist warmonger, impetuous and too young to be even vice president. Otherwise known as Theodore Roosevelt. The white privilege dandy who concealed his crushing disability and constant pain, running on a balanced-budget promise but in reality holding no fixed ideology and depending on a coalition that included Southern segregationists. That was TR's cousin, Franklin Roosevelt.

On the other hand, there was "the great engineer," a self-made man, the rightly lionized savior of refugees in World War I — the only man who came out of the Paris peace conference of 1919 with his reputation enhanced, according to John Maynard Keynes. This progressive and pragmatic man seemed ideally cut for his time. Yet Herbert Hoover as president was overwhelmed by catastrophe.

You see how it goes. How the digital age distorts. How contingency and crisis reveal character. Now, with the republic facing its greatest danger since the eve of the Civil War, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton steps forward to claim the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

Jon Talton July 25, 2016126

Politics: National

1964

Twenty years before the "San Francisco Democrats" were reviled with such devastating gusto by Jeane Kirkpatrick, there were the San Francisco Republicans. The Grand Old Party held its 1964 national convention in the cavernous Cow Palace that July. The nominee was Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. While Barry was no [real-estate developer], the party's path to Cleveland arguably began in San Francisco 52 years ago.

The Republican Party then was still a mass American political party, with conservatives, centrists, and liberals. As the Party of Lincoln, it retained the remnant of decades of support by African-Americans. In 1960, Richard Nixon, with a strong civil rights record and the initial backing of Daddy King, neglected to call Martin Luther King Jr. in jail (John F. Kennedy did), a blunder that some scholars have said cost him the presidency. Even so, Republicans, including conservatives from the Midwest, had been essential to enacting the 1964 Civil Rights Act and, a year later, the Voting Rights Act. Without them, Lyndon Johnson would never have been able to overpower the segregationist Southern wing of his own party.

But Goldwater and his supporters staged a revolution in the run-up to the convention, with conservatives capturing the party machinery for the first time since the 1930s. These were not conservatives such as Ohio Rep. William McCullough, a key leader in passage of the Civil Rights Act. Instead, their lineage went back to the reaction against the New Deal, Sen. Joe McCarthy, and "the paranoid style in American politics," a term coined by the political scientist Richard J. Hofstadter in his famous 1964 essay.

It had received little traction with Republican presidential candidates Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, or even anti-communist Dick Nixon. But thanks to William F. Buckley's National Review (founded in 1955) and Goldwater's 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, ghostwritten by Brent Bozell, the movement had received new life. It was conservatism 2.0. Behind its appeal were more than anti-communism, a call for low taxes and smaller government, and the perennial claim of Democratic foreign-policy weakness. A special magnet for many disaffected white voters was the right's opposition to the civil rights gains of the era.

Jon Talton July 18, 201665

Politics: National

Trump and the GOP

It's rich that star columnist George "Chickenlips" Will has left the Republican Party because of the likely nomination of Donald Trump. He told the Federalist Society on Friday that he would change his registration to unaffiliated because the party that would have such a standard-bearer "is not my party." In a later interview, he said, "Make sure he loses. Grit (your) teeth for four years and win the White House."

I usually decline to extend [the real-estate developer's] brand by calling him by name, but here I am making an exception for clarity and economy of writing.

Beyond the unseemliness of a working journalist being registered as anything but an independent, Will's statement and even its forum tell us much — but not as he intended.

Columnists such as Will and the vast right-wing infrastructure that includes the Federalist Society (its specialty is the law and courts) have spent decades creating this moment. Decades of seeding the politics of racial antipathy through the Southern Strategy. Decades of teaching Americans to hate their government and be misinformed about its essential place in our society, history, and economy. Decades of creating devils (Hillary!) — and, yes, the left is capable of this, but doesn't have the reach of right-wing media. Decades of pushing policies that defunded schools, ruined our infrastructure, destroyed the middle class. All this was funded by a dark conspiracy of billionaires intent on repealing everything from the New Deal through the Nixon administration.

And this was mere prelude to the actions of the Republican Party in the Obama years. Even before Barack Obama was sworn in, we saw the frightening Nuremberg-lite rallies ginned up by Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Things got so bad that an embarrassed John McCain was forced to contradict an old bat who kept saying Obama was a Muslim terrorist. Palin led the party's final exodus from knowledge ("elitism!"), history, common sense. George Will didn't disown any of this; none of it offended his bow-tied Tory sensibility.

Then seven-and-a-half years of scorched-earth policy, where the GOP Congress regularly held the nation's economy and government hostage, even threatening default. Even minor appointments by the president were held up for years. The GOP-controlled House voted at least 60 times to repeal Obamacare, offering no alternative for uninsured Americans. Mr. Obama faced the unprecedented situation where his nominee to the Supreme Court could not even get a hearing. The party bigs and their puppetmasters helped fund the creation of the Tea Party — giving voice to an eager cohort of angry whites — ensuring a GOP so extreme that today Ronald Reagan couldn't win a Republican school-board primary. Not a peep from George Will. He was out to the ballgame.

Jon Talton June 27, 201651

Politics: National

Confederacy of dunces

So we're agreed that the Confederate battle flag is an outrage and no small contributor to…what happened again?

Oh, yes, the monstrous act of domestic terrorism that resulted in nine martyrs at one of the nation's most historic, and consequential, African-American churches.

Sorry to offend, but from my Twitter and Facebook feeds, heavily populated by liberals ("progressives"), I might think the chief problem is the Confederate battle flag. The reality is more troubling.

The two elections of Barack Obama to the White House brought out something momentously ugly in parts of America. The radical right has proved more dangerous than jihadists, but the Southern Poverty Law Center focused on the "lone wolf" phenomenon of both in a prescient April report.

Beyond the assassins are the effective racist dog whistles that have sounded for the past six years, especially on talk radio and Fox "News." As recently as this year, a poll showed 34 percent of Republicans think it is "likely" Mr. Obama is not a U.S. citizen. This polarization has also been paid for by the wealthy oligarchs and corporate "persons."

I hesitate to say that the GOP and the tea party have the blood of Charleston on their hands. But even in the aftermath of the attack, Republican officials couldn't state the obvious: This was a deliberate attack on black people by a white racist.

Jon Talton June 22, 201549

Politics: National

Still Nixon to kick around

I was listening to a Fresh Air podcast the other day when the guest said that President Richard Nixon, elected as a conservative Republican, declared a federal "war on cancer" in 1971 with seed money of $100 million for research ($580 million in today's dollars). It started the trajectory that now has cancer-research funding at $4.8 billion.

That snippet reminded me that Nixon also created the Environmental Protection Agency and enthusiastically signed the Clear Air Act. He supported the Clean Water Act but vetoed the version Congress sent him based on cost (the veto was overridden). The similarly groundbreaking Marine Mammal Protection Act — also supported by Nixon and it became law in 1972.

These things happened not because Nixon was the prisoner of a Democratic majority in Congress — the Democrats were often divided and in those days Republicans had liberals, centrists and conservatives — but because he believed in them or thought they made good politics. He also largely funded LBJ's Great Society, albeit some cloaked in the rhetoric of his "New Federalism."

Nixon was no tax cutter. Instead, he instituted revenue sharing with states and cities, putting federal funds behind his conservative principle that they could use the money more efficiently. He proposed a federal health-care program that foreshadowed in many ways Obamacare, as well as a form of guaranteed income for all. Amtrak saved passenger trains, albeit imperfectly, on Nixon's watch.

For decades, Richard Nixon has been the devil to the left. But the left isn't politically relevant anymore (Jerry Ford Republicanism is what passes for "the left" in today's broken political spectrum). What's more consequential is that Nixon is now the devil to the right, which is more powerful than ever. So in the public square today, we are relitigating not Watergate but the domestic achievements of Tricky Dick.

Jon Talton March 30, 201550

Politics: National

Solemn obligations

Here is how the pension "issue" is usually framed.

For the major corporations that still offer pensions, they are a drag on earnings growth. In the public sector, they are making every city into Detroit or Stockton, Calif., paving the road to bankruptcy.

Very large numbers are thrown around, often without context, sometimes outright fabrications. This column is not about the numbers. As a nation, we spend too much time under green eyeshades. Numbers, "just business," economics are supposed to provide definitive answers.

Of course it depends on whose numbers are used (liars figure) and there's a reason that the dismal science was once called political economy. Even at its most rigorous, economics is a brawl — and like the sums we are supposed to accept as gospel, the inputs matter (garbage in, garbage out). People are living longer! Well, not by much, it varies greatly among ethnic groups, and the ones that do live long tend to be very wealthy. Etc.

Nevertheless, a majority of the white working class — which is a majority of the electorate — believes that union thugs are bankrupting their cities and states by demanding that pensions be paid to takers on the public payroll. Republican politicians and judges are burnishing their popularity and "seriousness" by working to destroy the pension system.

In certain situations and moments, many of those thugs and takers are called police officers, firefighters, and teachers. Heroes.

Jon Talton February 27, 201579

Politics: National

Labels

Labels in political discourse are incendiary and misleading. They are useful shorthand and inevitable. Yet today they are more challenging than ever.

Let me take a couple of examples. To label someone a racist, anti-semite, sexist, or homophobe immediately disqualifies their arguments. Some people undeniably fit those labels. Others may say something racist but they still deserve to be heard in the public square, offering positions that are more textured that the simple label would imply.

Another is the tart "limousine liberal." This was coined in the 1970s to identify, say, a liberal lawmaker who supported busing while sending his children to private schools. In other words, he was a hypocrite. This term resonated especially with the white working class, many of whom would become Reagan Democrats.

Lately on this blog we have had a debate on the admissibility of the term "sociopath." While we can argue over the precise clinical definition and the care needed to apply it to individuals, I think it's fair game.

Look at the behavior of the banksters, certain businessmen, and politicians, and they fit the bill. This is especially so in their contempt for the commons, for the public interest, and the things we do together as a civilization. Indeed, many of them not only have contempt for these things but they deny they exist at all, outside the fever dreams of bleeding-heart liberals.

Jon Talton February 18, 201545

Politics: National

Democrats are stupid

When Barack Obama was elected president, the nation was facing its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. For all its flaws — a too-small-stimulus, lack of enough relief for average mortgage holders, etc. — Obama, with the help of Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve, averted a second Great Depression.

When Obama took office, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent on its way to 10 percent. Last month it was 5.8 percent…

…The federal deficit was $1.4 trillion or almost 10 percent of gross domestic product. Now it’s about $483 billion or 3.3 percent of GDP. The deficit has fallen faster than any time since the end of World War II…

…America's GDP was $14.4 trillion. In the third quarter of this year it had risen $17.5 trillion, despite the headwinds of a slow recovery. It is the best performance among advanced nations…

…Corporate profits after taxes were about $1 trillion in January 2009. In the second quarter of this year, the most recent data available, they hit a record $1.84 trillion…

…The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 7,949 the day he took office. Today it is above 17,652…

…And the Affordable Care Act extended health insurance to millions of Americans, and would have included millions more if not for the cruel obstruction of Republican governors.

In the hands of Ronald Reagan's ad men, this would have been Morning in America. For Democrats this election, it was something from which to run (hat tip to Emil's comment in the previous post). They deserved the destruction that befell them.

Jon Talton November 13, 201455

Politics: National

What next?

The Republican wave last Tuesday is truly stunning, as this New York Times map shows.

I was talking to a friend — smart, college-educated, a former-Republican-turned-progressive — who recalled the great hope she had when Barack Obama was elected. "But we've been losing ever since."

Her answer is to go off the grid. Keep subscribing to newspapers to help support them, but not read them. No more politics on the Internet. No more Rachel Maddow, however smart she is. What's the point?

She already doesn't own a car and uses transit and trains wherever possible. Shops locally and has a tiny carbon footprint with a downtown condo. She will continue to vote in every election, for Democrats (progressive where possible), for every transit, parks and school funding initiative.

But she's done with living so close to the heartache of constant defeat, of the nation's astounding retrograde move. Where one of our two great political parties doesn't even believe in science. Sorry, legalized pot and same-sex marriage aren't enough.

Jon Talton November 10, 201462

Politics: National

National suicide…really?

[UPDATE] The answer is yes. Join the open thread on the comments to discuss the election results.

Are you really going to do it, America? Give control of the Senate to The Party That Wrecked America?

If the polls are to be believed, the answer is "yes." It is true that polling undercounts Democratic votes. But the indications are not good. Consider that in Colorado, incumbent Gov. John Hickenlooper is trailing a full bore Krackpot who claims the IUD is an abortion device.

Andrew Sullivan wrote an interesting post on the midterms. Among his comments:

Republican candidates have made this election about (President Obama), while most Democrats (as is their wont) are running fast away; the GOP itself remains, however, also deeply unpopular; wrong-direction numbers are at a high. No great policy debate has defined these races, and when such issues have risen – such as illegal immigration or the ACA – they tend to be virulent reactions to existing law or proposed changes, rather than a constructive, positive agenda. I see no triumph for conservative or liberal ideas here, no positive coalition forming, no set of policies that will be vindicated by this election.

Jon Talton October 30, 201475

Politics: National

The same-sex marriage moment

What does same-sex marriage mean? This is not a rhetorical question. Nor am I trolling. So stay with me and please provide your thoughts in the comments section.

As I write, a majority of states recognize same-sex marriage and the federal courts keep striking down bans. On a personal level, the meaning is profound. Being able to marry whom you want. To be at his or her side in the hospital and have legal rights of spouses. It is also arguably the biggest civil-rights victory since 1965.

And yet, the same-sex marriage moment is happening as most of the country, geographically at least, is becoming not merely more conservative but rabidly reactionary.

The assault on women's reproductive rights is unlike anything seen since the dark age before the advent of the pill.

Republican governors and legislatures, which control a majority of the states, are engaged in an ongoing effort to suppress the vote.

And the last time I checked, the GOP has a 66 percent chance of taking control of the Senate in November. If so, our halting regress toward national suicide will get a tremendous boost.

Jon Talton October 13, 201467

Phoenix Politics: National

Who is this ‘maverick’ I keep hearing about?

Every time I hear the media say Sen. John McCain "of Arizona" it makes me crazy. McCain has done as little for Arizona as possible and it shows. The state is Mississippi in the Southwest, an Appalachia with golf courses, the epicenter of a brewing socio-environmental calamity. It is a place frighteningly behind in the competitive world of the 21st century, however much it provides a haven for a certain kind of rich person and, until recently, for real-estate players. Arizona was never anything but a national political platform for McCain.

If McCain had been governor, his apathy would be an especially tempting target. Even so, as a senator he has done as little as possible in education, research, transportation, health care, the environment…the list goes on and on. Most days one wondered if Arizona even had senators representing it, rather than trying to be national political figures.

Jon Talton February 2, 20082