Big Tent Revue

The Problem With Dog Whistle Racism

Dennis Sanders — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:51:29 +0000

Commentators Juan Williams and Jeffrey Goldberg have come out with articles on what they see as “dog whistle” racism among the GOP nominees. Here’s what Williams said in his column:

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

And here’s what Goldberg says:

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them something because they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.

Judging by these claims, all of which have actually been put forward recently, here is a modest prediction: This presidential election will be one of the most race- soaked in recent history. It is already more race-soaked than the 2008 election, which, of course, marked the first time that a black man became a major-party candidate.

On a side note, I think it’s a bit odd for Williams to be talking about dog whistles when he was basically given his walking papers from NPR when many people wrongly construed some remarks on Muslims as being Islamaphobic.

The problem with dog whistle racism is that its hard to prove and rest more on the eye of the beholder than it does on any objective face. Does talking about food stamps or the Constitution mean that one is hostile to African Americans? Maybe, but unless we do some real digging, we don’t know. It’s one thing to castigate someone who is making on obvious racial slur, which was the case at a recent rally for Newt Gingrich where some folks responded with chants of “Kenya!” when the former Speaker said that he wanted to send the President back home.

Was Gingrich being racist when he was talking about dependancy on food stamps and other social programs? I don’t know. On the one hand, his words could be taken more as critique of current African American politics and social programs, but then again it could be a way to slam blacks. But unless folks really dig at what’s behind the words they are just words in my view.

This doesn’t mean that Republicans haven’t engaged in race-baiting; it just means, that we shouldn’t automatically go there because a GOP politician talks about welfare or having African American teens work. People need to use their grey matter before just jumping to “racist.”

Which brings me to the finally point. Being labeled a bigot or racist is probably the strongest charge one can give to someone. It means that someone visibly hates a part of humanity just because they exist. I think more and more that we need to reserve the word for the worst of the worst, instead of throwing around like it’s candy or something. Racism is nothing that should be taken lightly and I think the dog whistle charge does just that.

Why Is Jon Huntsman Losing?

Dennis Sanders — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:19:51 +0000

I’ve never made it a secret that I really like Jon Huntsman for the GOP Presidential Nomination. I like the former Utah governor’s record as a solid Republican that had more moderate to liberal social opinions. He seemed to court a lot of love from a number of moderate and liberal pundits, but when it came to actually campaigning for President, he’s been at near the bottom of opinion polls.

Why is that?

Back in November, Ross Douthat tried to answer that question and came up with the following which is pretty plausible:

Huntsman has none of Romney’s health care baggage, and unlike the
former Massachusetts governor, he didn’t spend the last decade
flip-flopping on gun rights, immigration and abortion. Meanwhile, on
many of the highest-profile issues of the primary season (the individual
mandate, Paul Ryan’s House budget, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), he has
arguably been more consistently conservative than Gingrich.

At the
same time, because Huntsman is perceived as less partisan than his
rivals, he has better general election prospects. The gears and tumblers
of my colleague Nate Silver’s predictive models
give Huntsman a 55 percent chance of knocking off the incumbent even if
the economy grows at a robust 4 percent, compared to Romney’s 40
percent.

In theory, then, Huntsman seems like he could occupy the
sweet spot that Gingrich claims to have all to himself. In practice,
though, his campaign to date has been an unmitigated disaster.

This
isn’t for want of substance. On issues ranging from foreign affairs to
financial reform, Huntsman’s proposals have been an honorable exception
to the pattern of gimmickry and timidity that has characterized the
Republican field’s policy forays.

But his salesmanship has been
staggeringly inept. Huntsman’s campaign was always destined to be
hobbled by the two years he spent as President Obama’s ambassador to
China. But he compounded the handicap by introducing himself to the
Republican electorate with a series of symbolic jabs at the party’s
base.

He picked high-profile fights on two hot-button issues — evolution
and global warming — that were completely irrelevant to his candidacy’s
rationale. He let his campaign manager define his candidacy as a fight
to save the Republican Party from a “bunch of cranks.” And he embraced his identity as the media’s favorite Republican by letting the liberal journalist Jacob Weisberg write a fawning profile for Vogue.

This
was political malpractice at its worst. Voters don’t necessarily need
to like a candidate to vote for him, but they need to think that he
likes them. Imagine a contender for the Democratic nomination
introducing himself to liberal voters by attacking Planned Parenthood,
distancing himself from “left-wing nutjobs” and giving a series of
interviews on Fox News, and you have the flavor of how Huntsman’s
opening act was perceived on the right. The substance mattered less than
the symbolism, which screamed: I want your vote, but I don’t
particularly care to be associated with your stupidities.

There was a time in my life I would have been upset at such a statement. I would have totally disagreed with the analysis. Now? Not so much. The thing is, if you’re going to run as a Republican, you have to respect the base of the party. No one should expect to get very far in the GOP selection process if you call those who you’re going to vote for cranks. Douthat is correct that people don’t need to like a candidate, but they need to know that the candidate likes them. While people on either side of Mitt Romney see him as a flip-flopper who tries to please the base, the fact of the matter is if he wanted to be considered a candidate he was going to have to tailor his views to the GOP electorate.

Of course, if moderates were more involved on the party level, then candidates like Romney wouldn’t have to give up their views on gay rights and abortion in order to be considered in the GOP.

But I think this all goes back to how the base is treated. I don’t think one has to give their more moderate social views to be considered for President, but you need to bring the focus on issues like jobs and not give Christmas presents to pundits by calling folks who might vote for you crazy. It’s crazy to think you can do that and get votes in the current primary system.

Of course, I may be totally wrong after today. That would be nice.

Yes, I’m Still Alive

Dennis Sanders — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 05:57:15 +0000

Sorry about not publishing for a while. I took a break from political blogging. There are some changes afoot for this blog, so stay tuned.

The Next Big Thing

Dennis Sanders — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 05:53:37 +0000

A few years ago, I somehow stumbled into an argument. A man who identified as an independent was arguing with me about the Bush Administration and about his not liking then presidential candidate John McCain. I kept telling him McCain wasn’t Bush and that a McCain presidency was not going to be Bush, part 3. He kept on talking about everything that had gone wrong over the years; the Iraq War, torture and a whole mess of other issues.

After a while, I started to realize this guy wasn’t an independent by any stretch of the imagination. I finally told him that if he was upset at the Republicans and didn’t want to vote for them, that there is candidate and party that he can vote for.

I guess I wasn’t interested in playing this game with the gentleman. For better or for worse, he had chosen who he was going to vote for and I wasn’t willing to play the charade.

Every so often, there is a some writer talking about the growing number of political independents, or folks that decline to state a party. Some of these writers conclude this is a big movement that could change everything in the coming years here in America. It was the next big thing.

But the thing is, as many times as I’ve heard how independents are ready to break out and become a major force in some way, nothing ever really happens. There’s no major candidate or third party or anything that seems to make independents a major force in politics. Last summer Alan Abramowitz wrote that maybe independents may just not really be independents:

There they go again. The presidential campaign season is barely under way but already pundits and pollsters are making misleading claims about independent voters and the role they play in presidential elections. Here are some of the things you’ve probably read or heard in recent weeks:

Independents make up the largest segment of the American electorate.

Independent voters are up for grabs in 2012.

Whichever party wins a majority of the independent vote will almost certainly win the presidency.

These beliefs about the crucial role of independent voters in presidential elections have become the conventional wisdom among the Washington commentariat, reinforced by groups like “No Labels” and “Third Way” that try to promote centrist solutions to the nation’s problems. Recently, the Pew Research Center provided additional support for this theory with a report claiming that independents constitute a rapidly growing and diverse group of voters who swing dramatically back and forth from election to election.

It sounds convincing, but when it comes to media commentary about independent voters, you shouldn’t believe everything you read or hear.

It’s true that independents are a diverse group. But that’s mostly because the large majority of independents are independents in name only. Research by political scientists on the American electorate has consistently found that the large majority of self-identified independents are “closet partisans” who think and vote much like other partisans. Independent Democrats and independent Republicans have little in common. Moreover, independents with no party preference have a lower rate of turnout than those who lean toward a party and typically make up less than 10% of the electorate.

Now, there have been articles knocking the independent voter, as long as there have been articles about the rise of independents. But I think that Abramowitz’s take is more in line with what I’ve been seeing over the years; that people who claim they are political independents are really closet partisans.

If there really was this third force out there it would at some point coalesce into a real political movement with real positions on issues that would probably differ from the two major parties. The movement then would become a third party or be co-opted by the other two parties. But no such movement has ever taken shape. I know there are structural issues that might keep third parties from rising, but even in states that have allowed third parties to take shape the third force is hardly a factor.

What I’ve noticed over time is that most of the people who claim to be independent choose one of the two major parties at some point. They may never say it out loud, but in their words and speech it’s pretty clear which party they like or dislike more.

Solomon Kleinsmith recently commented that it might be best for David Frum to give up on changing the GOP and become and independent. It won’t surprise me if Frum ends up leaving GOP, but if he declares himself an independent, I would bet that what would remain unspoken would be that he had chosen the other side, the Democrats and not some kind of third way. He may never say that out loud, but it will be present in his speech.

As the song goes, we all have to serve somebody.

David Frum’s Big Mistake

Dennis Sanders — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:17:38 +0000

I recently lauded David Frum for his latest assessment on the state of the GOP, but I think he made a big booboo in a column for the Canadian newspaper, the National Journal. Frum said that he thought the two best GOP presidential candidates were either former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman or former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. He then ends the article with this:

The Washington, D.C., primary is set for April 3. I’ll probably cast a vote that day for Huntsman, if only to show support for a brave and independent-minded candidate — and in hope that a strong Huntsman showing will be interpreted as a call for a more modern and inclusive Republican party.

If Mitt Romney emerges as the ultimate nominee, I’ll place my hope that the Romney who enters the Oval Office will be the innovative, solutions-oriented Romney 1.0 — and not the placate-every-GOP-interest-group Romney 3.0 we’ve seen on the 2011 campaign trail.

Any other nominee would gravely test my commitment to the political party I’ve supported since I entered the United States as a college student in the fall of 1978.

There are so many things wrong with this passage. First and foremost it tends to contradict what he wrote in his New Yorker piece, about fighting for the future of the party. The closing words of that essay was centered on hope and on a cause worth fighting for. This passage sounds like a whiny kid that will jump if he doesn’t get his way.

The other problem is that it paints moderates as hypocrites. We ask conservatives to be more tolerant and accepting, but if things don’t go our way, well we take our blocks and go home. I’m not saying that if say, Rick Perry got the nod, that moderates should just supporting him, but there are ways of not agreeing. If your goal is to make the party more moderate and to persuade others to see your point, you don’t do it by proclaiming you aren’t going to support the party if candidate X is chosen.

Finally, issuing threats aren’t going to get you very far. There are a lot of folks on the right who are okay with Frum leaving the GOP and really don’t care. Moderates tend to think that if we threaten we will leave the party, that someone somewhere will freak out and plead for us to come back. Newsflash: no one cares.

Like Frum, I support both candidates and I agree with his frustration concerning the other presidential candidates. But this isn’t the way to do it. I think this column pretty much undid all the smart commentary from his New Yorker article.

Remember James Joyner

Dennis Sanders — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:08:58 +0000

If you are a religious person, please keep James Joyner in your prayers. If not, just keep him in your thoughts. Joyner reported today that his wife, Kimberly, died in her sleep. She was 41.

I’ve followed Joyner’s blog for a few years now and have enjoyed it. He was able to write a short, but moving tribute to his partner in life:

We met in August 2004 and were married on October 8, 2005. She had just turned 35 and I was a few weeks shy of 40 but neither of us had been married before. We shared religious and political worldviews but very different personalities. She was extroverted, sunny, and patient to my introverted, grumpy, and antsy. I almost certainly got the better of that bargain.

Kim was my partner, helpmate, and confidante. Her passing leaves a gaping hole in my life.

It’s sad to hear of this.

A New Hope

Dennis Sanders — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:40:31 +0000

David Frum has probably written his best article about the current state of the GOP like, ever. There have been a thousand articles written about what’s wrong with the GOP with a number written by Republicans. After a while, they start to blur and get uninteresting.

What’s the different about Frum’s is that he writes it in someway as a love letter, or a lost love. He’s pleading for his love to mend her ways and come back to him, but not before saying how she has hurt him.

I think what makes this article engaging is found in it’s final paragraphs. Frum urges moderates in the party who have become silent over the years to start to speak up and work for change:

I refuse to believe that I am the only Republican who feels this way. If CNN’s most recent polling is correct, only half of us sympathize with the tea party. However, moderate-minded people dislike conflict—and thus tend to lose to people who relish conflict. The most extreme voices in the GOP now denounce everybody else as Republicans in Name Only. But who elected them as the GOP’s membership committee? What have they done to deserve such an inheritance? In the mid-sixties, when the party split spectacularly between Ripon Republicans, who embraced the civil-rights movement, and Goldwater Republicans, who opposed it, civil-rights Republicans like Michigan governor George Romney spoke forcefully for their point of view. Today, Republicans discomfited by political and media extremism bite their tongues. But if they don’t speak up, they’ll be whipsawed into a choice between an Obama administration that wants to build a permanently bigger government and a conservative movement content with permanently outraged opposition.

The problem here is that moderates have either given up the fight or have allowed themselves to think that if the GOP loses an election or two, they will moderate out of sheer will. I have been one of those people. But what if things are different this time? What if losing an election makes the far right more powerful and not less? David Brooks wonders as much.

Unlike Brooks, I don’t think a third force (or third party) is going to come in a change things. I think most of the third party/independent/centrist movement is based more on some kind of romanticism than it is on creating something to answer the times we are living in.

Which means that at the end of the day we are left with the two imperfect parties we began with. I think that if we want something better than the GOP we have, it will be up to those who think the GOP is worth fighting for to get active.

Losing Our Way

Dennis Sanders — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 04:51:58 +0000

The GOP has had a comforting theory that they employ after a losing election. The story goes like this: the Republican Party has lost its way. It went to Washington to change things and ended up being changed by Washington. We need to get back on the right track (which usually means adhering more firmly to conservative orthodoxy).

As Ramesh Ponnuru notes, the myth might be comforting, but it isn’t true:

“We lost our way” was the cliche that expressed the Republican theory. “I believe we did not just lose our majority, we lost our way,” said Congressman Mike Pence, of Indiana, as he ran to replace the House Republican leadership after the 2006 elections. “In recent years, our majority voted to expand the federal government’s role in education by nearly 100 percent, created the largest new entitlement in 40 years, and pursued spending policies that created record deficits, national debt and rampant earmark spending.”

So widespread did this view become that the Republican leadership itself embraced it. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy — high-ranking House Republicans all — wrote in a 2009 op-ed, “By the fall of 2006, it had become abundantly clear that Republicans had severely lost our way.” Among other mistakes, “we had significantly increased federal spending.” Speaker John Boehner has said the same thing: “Republicans lost our way on fiscal responsibility.”

For decades, conservatives have been trying to pull the Republican Party rightward and root out first liberals and then moderates. But that impulse grew stronger in the aftermath of the political defeats in the late years of George W. Bush’s administration, because conservatives believed that ideological impurity, especially on spending, had caused those losses.

But there’s little evidence that big government was the reason, or even an important reason, for Republican defeats at the end of the Bush years. Take the top item on the list of conservative charges against Bush, his expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs. That idea was overwhelmingly popular, including among self-described conservatives whom pollsters contacted. It’s hard to believe that Bush would have won Florida in 2000 without promising to match the Democrats on the issue, or that he would have won Ohio in 2004 without having made good on the promise. He won both states by small margins, and through them the Electoral College.

Republicans were more popular in Bush’s first term, when they were expanding entitlements, than in his second term, when they were trying to reform one (Social Security). For most of the second term, they exercised more spending restraint than they had done in the first term — and again, there was no evidence it helped them politically.

Ponnuru notes that if the party truly “lost its way” then there would have been a drop in conservatives voting Republican. That hasn’t happened, but the GOP has lost among independents. What has caused the Republicans to lost votes is not being fiscally irresponsible, but not dealing with things such as wage stagnation.

The talk of wage stagnation is real and conservatives like Ponnuru and David Frum have been good in talking about this. There are a few things that come to mind though. First, conservatives have generally not been good about talking about something like wage stagnation. It’s not because conservatives are heartless thugs; it’s that generally, this has been considered an issue that leads to more, not less, government. In short, it seems like a “liberal issue.” Conservatives are more comfortable talking about the budget and cutting taxes because that’s part of the conservative DNA. The trick for conservatives is to come up with ways that might raise wages without creating yet another permanent government constituency. I think it can be done, but it needs Republicans, especially Republican candidates, that can think outside the box.

The second thing is that the “we lost our way” myth tends to bring forth crappy candidates for office. As Ponnuru notes, last year the GOP has a few chances to pick up some easy seats in the Senate that could have led to a majority. Instead, Republican primary voters passed up those shoe-ins for candidates that definitely not ready for prime-time. We are seeing the same thing now in the GOP primary. From Michelle Bachmann to Rick Perry to Herman Cain, we see candidates that might adhere to conservative orthodoxy, but crumble shortly after their coming out parties.

The “we lost our way” myth is a comforting one, but it won’t help the party build a long-lasting majority. As long as they take the easy path of trying to please the base instead of creating a GOP that can include independents, they won’t get the majority. That’s a harder road, but the payoff is so much better.

More From the Soap Opera that is Washington

Dennis Sanders — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:55:47 +0000

It looks like the GOP is finally breaking its “no tax increase” stand. They are offering some revenue enhancements in the latest round of budget talks. The Democratic response seems to be one big yawn.The Washington Post has the specifics:

The offer proposed to hit the panel’s $1.2 trillion target — and to save $1.5 trillion through 2021, counting reduced interest payments on the national debt — by cutting $700 billion in spending and raising about $600 billion in new revenue.The spending cuts would include $240 billion from agency budgets, about $275 billion from federal health programs and about $150 billion from using a less-generous measure of inflation in federal formulas, including the annual cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security, according to people with knowledge of the plan.

The new revenue would be split between outright tax increases and other forms of government income, including higher fees for an array of federal services, asset sales and higher Medicare premiums for well-off seniors — provisions that are more typically counted not as revenue but as income that helps to reduce spending.

The proposal included about $300 billion in actual tax increases, marking the first time Republicans offered to acquiesce to that key Democratic demand. The offer envisions a tax code rewrite that would lower rates for everyone while raising overall tax collections by $250 billion, mainly by limiting the value of itemized deductions such as write-offs for home mortgage interest.

In addition, the Republicans would raise about $40 billion by applying the new inflation index to the tax code, a move that would push people more rapidly into higher tax brackets.

Senior Republican aides described the proposal as a “significant concession” on taxes. But the tax increases would be offset by permanently extending the George W. Bush-era tax cuts past their 2012 expiration date, a move that would increase deficits by about $4 trillion over the next decade. In the past, Democrats have demanded at least $1 trillion in fresh revenue in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts.

Is this a perfect plan? Probably not. But it is a big step for the GOP to talk about raising revenue even if they want to keep the Bush tax cuts. The GOP has made some significant steps forward, not brave steps but important steps nevertheless.

Maybe sanity can come back to Washington after all.

Will Raising Taxes Make a Difference?

Dennis Sanders — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 03:42:51 +0000

The debate over the last few days and weeks in the wake of Occupy Wall Street has been around income inequality. For the Occupy folk the solution is simple: raise taxes on the wealthy and the middle class and poor will have opportunities they don’t have now:

The idea that government raising taxes on the wealthy won’t matter because that money will be used for programs that benefit the “relatively poor young” —a.k.a Social Security — is self-refuting. I’m not even sure how to respond to it, honestly, it’s so steeped in wing-nut and impenetrable to anyone who doesn’t find Tucker Carlson a font of wisdom. But in any event, if government has more money to spend on Pell Grants, public schools, police, firefighters, public land reclamation — in other words, “politically favored groups,” that often are comprised of human beings — this all quite obviously will have an impact on inequality. Safer neighborhoods and better schools means young people with a better chance to get into prestigious colleges and universities; Pell Grants mean that those very same kids can get into those schools without amassing utterly unmanageable and self-destructive levels of debt. They can then go and get jobs, make money, live the dream and so on.

This is what people are talking about when they say equality of opportunity, and it’s what people are talking about when they say inequality. There tends to be an attempt among ideologues to portray taxation and opportunity as somehow disconnected, as if people who want to raise taxes on the rich don’t particularly care about what’s subsequently done with that money. By holding onto this bizarre piece of analysis, not only does one get to pretend they’re in favor of equality of opportunity and simply against taxation; but the generic and brain-dead nonsense about liberalism being an ideology of envy becomes less patently useless, too. It’s hard for me to imagine that many people are actually silly enough to sincerely believe that I think Clinton-era tax rates would be a good idea because I hate everyone who makes over $200,000 — but I can guess how useful a tool for rationalization and self-righteousness this grade school-level psychoanalysis must be.

A few days ago, Ross Douthat refuted the notion that raising taxes would somehow heal the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us:

From the drum circles of Zuccotti Park to the hustings of Barack Obama’s re-election push, a suddenly invigorated liberalism thinks that it has the answer to this angst: a renewed demand for higher taxes on America’s richest 1 percent. And if all you care about is reducing measured income inequality, then the Occupy Wall Streeters and their Democratic admirers have it right. Tax millionaires sufficiently and you’ll end up with a more equal society. The tallest poppies will be trimmed, and some of their income will find its way to someone’s else pocket.

But true social mobility and broadly shared prosperity are not so easily achieved. Remember that those tax dollars, once collected, would not be disbursed with perfect effectiveness to the most deserving members of the American middle class. Instead, they would be used to buy a little more time for our failing public institutions — postponing a reckoning with unsustainable pension commitments, delaying necessary reforms in our entitlement system and propping up an educational sector whose results don’t match the costs.

More spending in these areas won’t necessarily buy us more mobility. The public-sector workplace has become a kind of artificial Eden, whose fortunate inhabitants enjoy solid pay and 1950s-style job security and retirement benefits, all of it paid for by their less-fortunate private-sector peers. Some on the left have convinced themselves that this “success” can lay the foundation for a broader middle-class revival. But if a bloated public sector were the blueprint for a thriving middle-class society, then the whole world would be beating a path to Greece’s door.

It’s no surprise to anyone that I would tend to favor Douthat’s understanding of the issue. I would differ by saying that raising taxes could help alleviate some of the problems of inequality, but not necessarily. Just because we raise taxes, doesn’t mean that some kid is going to get a free ride to Harvard. As Douthat notes extra revenue could also go to things like shoring up public sector pensions, or papering over Social Security, things that don’t help ease the wealth gap.

Does this mean we shouldn’t raise taxes on the wealthy? No, but we shouldn’t think that raising taxes is going to easily solve our problems, either.