FunctionalAmbivalent

Life At the Cool Kids' Table

The New Republic speculates on Michael Steele's thought process -- a dangerous thing to do, for sure. But Christopher Orr has a theory that goes a long way toward explaining Michael Steele's strong support for Norm Coleman's continued thwarting of democracy in Minnesota:

Although plenty of Republicans have suggested that Coleman should keep fighting in the federal courts, none have been as aggressive on the subject as Steele. Now part of that, obviously, is that Steele has a greater tendency than most to utter loudly the first thing that comes into his head. But I can't help but be reminded of a blind nugget that Politico ran two months ago, claiming that the "word on the street" was that "the next RNC chairman will be Norm Coleman, after he loses his recount fight and big donors see Michael Steele’s March numbers." 

Now the Politico item, which was unsourced, could easily be wrong. But someone was at least floating the idea of replacing Steele with Coleman, and Steele knows it. Moreover, the precariousness of Steele's chairmanship is abundantly clear, as he's already lost at least two internal battles in the last few weeks. Encouraging Coleman to continue his pyrrhic legal fight might look to Steele like a pretty good way to keep a potential competitor for his job out of circulation.

This may be one of those too-good-to-be-true things, but it's a reminder of how much politics is like high school.

Heading For Jonestown

I've marveled, the last couple of days, how the crackpot right can muster outrage over such a small thing as the President's choice of mustard. I have, in the past, assumed that similar outbursts were symptoms of insanity. Doug over at Balloon Juice goes meta and clarifies things for me:

if you look at it from the right perspective. Dijongate—along with a great deal of what happens on Glenn Beck—doesn’t make any sense. It isn’t clear to me that it’s even supposed to make sense...I can’t help but feel that the whole texture of wingnuttia is starting to feel different these days. And that more generally, any kind of mythology eventually moves towards forms that cannot be understood on a literal level.

If you look at the overblown reaction of the far right to utterly insignificant "outrages" it becomes clear: these are neither sincere reactions nor empty political posturing. They're much more complicated than that. They're rituals designed to simultaneously bond and reassure a diminishing community of True Believers.

I've assumed that the right would catch on to how nutty it sounds when it accuses President Obama of being, for example, simultaneously fascist and socialist. I've assumed they'd moderate their rhetoric so they didn't sound loony. Now I understand: rationality is not an issue because the point of what they're doing is not to persuade people on the outside to come in, but to reassure those on the inside that they're members in good standing of a viable "movement." In a threatening environment, the best way to do that is to move toward forms that, as Doug says, can not be understood on a literal level.

So, like members of a cult which perceives itself under attack, the far right is talking more and more only to itself, using code words and constructs that are indecipherable to those on the outside. They are, in effect, preparing for the ultimate act of purification, after which they'll be out of our hair for a while.

Death Spiral

According to this poll, only 21% of voters identify themselves as Republicans. That's down from...well, from pretty much whenever you want to measure going back to 1983.

The polling numbers are comprehensively bad for Republicans. On traditional Republican strong points, President Obama is running up big approval ratings: 71% on Iraq, 62% on terrorism in general, 67% on his handling of international affairs, 56% on taxes. In those areas where Republicans have hit Obama hard, they've scored no points. The President gets 61% approval on his slight softening of Cuba policy, and 54% approval for making conciliatory noises toward Iran.

On the other hand, the antic Republican members of Congress are down eight points after becoming a non-stop bitching machine with no real idea what they'd do if they were in charge. (Remember the Republican budget alternative that contained no numbers?) Of those polled, 78% have little or no confidence in the ability of Congressional Republicans to make the right decisions for the country's future.

Conservatives with any sense are declaring themselves independent, leaving the Republican Party a bastion of idea-free, angry radicalism. There's no one left to speak for the party except the far-right fringe; most of what people see and hear of Republicans is, by definition, immoderate and scary. The true believers who remain are disinclined to do anything but remain ideologically pure, even when that purity makes no sense.

The Republican brand, so popular a topic of conversation just a few months ago, has been successfully re-defined: they're a party of unpleasant whiners. One of President Reagan's great strength was his attractive magnanimity; he compromised freely, didn't sweat the small stuff, and retained his geniality while always inching the ball forward. In contrast, today's Republican Party is dug-in and nearly Maoist in their repetition of ideology. They scream bloody murder about anything the President does or says, the volume turned up high no matter how insignificant the complaint. They compromise on nothing and are insistent that the answers to all our problems are more of exactly what people rejected at the polls last fall.

Republicans aren't going to manage any kid of comeback until they calm down and come up with some positive solutions. For now, they're apparently operating under the same assumption as Democrats during the Reagan Administration, that people support the President because they're ignorant dupes. That's a tough message to sell to voters, and until Republicans come up with something better, they're headed nowhere but down.

Almost Effective

This is a conservative advocacy video that is charmingly ridiculous and -- right up until the end -- pretty  effective. The actor playing Thomas Paine does a good job; the specific issue advocacy is clear and energetic. It's a good piece that puts a serious policy platform out in easy to understand terms. And then, as if uncomfortable with it's own success, in the end Mr. Paine says:

But if you decide to do nothing again, then buy a gun. You'll need it.

At some point, doesn't someone on the right have to speak out against the advocacy of violent insurrection?

Message Discipline

On the one hand Republicans want President Obama to stop doing anything but responding to the economic crisis. On the other hand, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch is planning hearings on the BCS football championship.

Another Idea For Republicans: I've Got a Million of Them

Bruce Reed makes a timely case for the line-item veto:

In the past, some congressional leaders have resisted shifting that much power to the executive branch. But both parties and both houses might have something to gain from giving the president a line-item veto. Advocates of fiscal discipline would pick up a powerful new tool. Advocates of increased government investment would benefit from fixing spending blunders with a precision scalpel instead of a blunt instrument.

Three Senators -- McCain, Feingold, and Ryan -- have introduced line-item legislation into Congress. The legislation tries to circumvent previous legislation, ruled unconstitutional, that gave President Clinton the line-item veto. Republicans should get behind the legislation in a big way, and put a Constitutional Amendment on a parallel course, just to be sure.

Republicans, it seems to me, have much to gain from re-introducing the line-item veto as a serious issue. First, there's a really good, substantive case to be made for it. The President currently can only veto whole bills, which opens the door to junk spending not substantial enough to bring larger legislation to a stop.

Second, they'd realize tremendous political advantage. I haven't been able to find any recent polls on the line-item veto, but I'm guessing it would be pretty popular. A bipartisan push on what is generally regarded as a Republican issue would have the effect of backing Democrats into a corner. It would also polish the Republicans' badly tarnished governance bona fides, building the party's good governance cred by proposing a necessary Constitutional empowerment of the President during a Democratic presidency. It would look like a serious structural change in government rather than simply a power grab. And any Republican initiative with the word "serious" in front of it can't help but help the party repair its image.

Finally, there's this: the public seems in a mood to get things done. President Obama's popularity, like President Reagan's, is detached from whether people actually approve of his policies. Congressional approval climbs every time they pass major legislation, even if the public views that legislation dubiously. This is, it appears, a moment of putting our shoulders to the wheel and shoving.

The Republican problem of the moment is that they're arguing about direction when everyone else is pushing. The line-item veto is a chance for them to push, and push hard in what they would consider the right direction. If Republicans really think the line-item veto is a necessary executive tool -- and I think they do -- this could be their opportutnity to prove that they're for something. Let's see if they take it.

In Which I Question the Patriotism of Republicans

FIrst it was religious conservatives wanting to form a new nation in South Carolina, then it was talk show lunatic Glen Beck wanting red states to secede, now it's Kung Fu has-been Chuck Norris wanting to be President of a secessionist Texas:

That need may be a reality sooner than we think. If not me,someone someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star state, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state.

From the East Coast to the "Left Coast," America seems to be moving further and further from its founders' vision and government.

A generation ago, liberals were more loyal to their ideology than they were to the country. Conservatives eviscerated those liberals -- and, by extension, the Democratic Party that tolerated them -- as unpatriotic and anti-American.

What now to say of conservatives -- and, by extension, the Republicans who tolerate them -- whose loyalty to their ideology is so fierce that they advocate the destruction of the United States? A party that openly hopes the President fails and the country is crippled economically so that their ideology might once again reign supreme?

I guess we would have to call the Republican Party unpatriotic and anti-American. It seems, by the standards of the Republican Party itself, we have no other logical choice.

Talking Points of the Weak

Republicans are all over President Obama for trying to do too much, arguing even that a relatively simple Executive Order is just too much. They propose that the President slow down, in particular on his fulfillment of campaign promises that they disagree with. Their argument is that he should focus on the economy. (Focus, ironically, on an agenda Republicans disagree with and are doing everything to thwart.) This train of thought has been picked up by the pundit class, which now wrings it's hands at the thought that President Obama might try to do more than one thing at a time.

Here's the thing: the government has different departments filled with people who need something to do. While we're all focused on the Treasury Department, there are still people over in the Education Department capable of working, and since their expertise is in education, one can hardly imagine moving them over to Treasury during a crisis would pay much of a dividend. There are still people at Health & Human Services, too, capable of thinking about health care.

Do we really think government can only do one thing at a time?

You Don't Need a Weatherman To Know Which Way the Wind Blows

Joe Lieberman, during the campaign:

"You have a choice between one candidate, John McCain, who has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate who has not. Between one candidate who's a talker, and the other candidate who's the leader America needs as our next president."

Joe Lieberman, now that President Obama's approval rating has hit 67%:

"(President Obama has) shown real leadership. Bottom line: I think Barack Obama, president of the United States, is off to a very good start."

Disrupting the Conservative OODA Loop

Fighter pilot John Boyd theorized that it is possible, in combat, to act so fast that an adversary doesn't have time to formulate and execute a response to your actions. An adversary in that circumstance grows disoriented and ineffective. Boyd's construct was something called the OODA Loop -- "OODA" standing for observe, orient, decide and act. Get inside someone's OODA Loop and it renders them disfunctional, since they're reacting to cricumstances that no longer exist. Often as not, flummoxed enemy pilots don't need to be shot down because they simply crash and burn.

I bring this up because I just saw Pat Buchanan on television, complaining that the Obama White House is spending too much time screwing around with Rush Limbaugh and not enough time on serious business. Buchanan, apparently outraged at the playing of politics, was arguing that the President needed to do more.

The President has done a lot in a short time, of course, and does more every day -- absolutely none of which has been to Buchanan's liking. But there Buchanan was, on TV demanding that the President do more of the stuff of which Buchanan disapproves.

This last few weeks has been amazing. We're really watching the self-destruction of a political party, and they have no idea what's going on. Like a disoriented fighter pilot, the Republicans have no idea where the ground is.