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Tag: republican presidential primaries
As Democrats Line Up To Debate, The GOP Is Regressing

As Democrats Line Up To Debate, The GOP Is Regressing

It was pretty startling, actually, viewing the lineup for the first debate of Democratic presidential hopefuls in April 2007 on a stage in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Among them were the usual suspects — Sens. Chris Dodd, John Edwards, and Joe Biden. And then, there were surprises — Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

This is different, I thought. Whatever happens next, this looks like America, an America I had rarely experienced except in the aspirational promises of its founding documents, with the few exceptions of pioneers such as Shirley Chisholm or Jesse Jackson, when it came to choosing presidents.

When I covered the second Republican debate in May of that year, in Columbia, South Carolina, distinguishing between the candidates was a little tougher at first glance.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Sens. John McCain were familiar faces, for sure. But with all the white guys in dark suits and red or blue ties, I admit I needed a cheat sheet to figure out if it was Reps. Tom Tancredo or Duncan Hunter doing the talking. (I do remember McCain, the only person on stage who had been tortured, being the only prospective candidate who spoke out against torture of terrorist suspects. It’s doubtful I will hear similar sentiments from the current Republican standard-bearer.)

It’s 2019, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.

On the Democratic side, in a debate slate so crowded it will take two nights next week to accommodate almost everyone, there is diversity — of age, race, gender and point of view, with different candidates choosing different issues to tackle as a priority, from climate change to voting rights.

On the Republican side stands one man. Yes, he has a challenge from former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, an anti-Trump Republican vainly and gently trying to wrestle support from the besotted GOP base. But make no mistake, it is Trump’s GOP.

In truth, when Trump occupied that crowded debate stage of Republican hopefuls in the 2016 campaign, he grabbed the spotlight with insult and bile and might as well have been all alone up there. Former corporate CEO Carly Fiorina, who tried to break up the boy’s club, hardly made a dent and was instead the target of sexist jabs from the president-to-be.

In the president’s official re-election announcement this week, he made clear that for the GOP, 2020 is 2016 on steroids. At his kickoff rally in Orlando, Florida, Trump recycled his greatest hits — talking tough on immigration, painting Democrats as not just opponents but evil threats, and dismissing any criticism of him as unfair and un-American. Though she has left competitive political life, Trump can’t quit Clinton, mentioned more than anyone he might face at the ballot box next November.

If anything, since 2008, the GOP has been regressing. Any effort at outreach to minorities is half-hearted at best, with Trump’s passion saved for the hurt he promises to unleash, such as mass deportations sure to split families and leave citizen children parentless. He calls for investigating and jailing opponents, even as former members of his team — think Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and a host of others — face charges or prison time.

Whatever one thinks of reparations for American descendants of enslaved human beings, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s wish to shut down merely discussing the legacy of systemic injustice as “something that happened 150 years ago,” as he said, willfully ignores the history of entrenched-in-law discrimination and mistreatment of those descendants. He advertises his own dismissive contempt for those seeking truth and reconciliation.

The fact that the hearings began on Juneteenth, marking the day news of emancipation came belatedly to Texas, may or may not have escaped McConnell’s notice.

The ever-cynical McConnell used the fact of Obama’s two terms as proof that racism is nonexistent, knowing he did everything in his power — and what incredible power he had and has — to truncate Obama’s presidency, to thwart it, capping it off with denying a hearing on Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland.

Trump this week took the time to double down on his belief that the exonerated Central Park Five were guilty, in spite of coerced confessions and DNA evidence that cleared them and left the real rapist and murderer free to continue his crime spree. As videos continue to prove police misconduct in interactions with minority men, women and children, Trump’s position is clearly case closed on considering race-based injustice in his America.

Trump as candidate and symbol is the Republican Party’s position on diversity, and it isn’t pretty.

Still, the onstage rainbow coalition — the inclusion of Sens. Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, along with Julián Castro, Andrew Yang and others — may hide Democrats’ own nostalgia for the past.

Despite the fact that the party’s last White House occupant, and a two-term one at that, was an African-American named Barack Hussein Obama, with a beloved first lady who still sells out arenas at the drop of a hat, there is a rush, if current polls are to be believed, to crown Joe Biden, seen as the most electable by his supporters and the candidate himself, his past unsuccessful runs notwithstanding.

Part of the reason is, of course, the lessons of 2016. Trump, by force of his own attention-grabbing personality, was able to change the rules of the game. When a President Obama is followed by an inexperienced white guy with three wives (though not at the same time) and a host of broken contracts and bankruptcies in his past, coasting into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. on a raft of racist and sexist statements that only strengthen his appeal, it’s pretty clear that my mom’s counsel that a black person has to be twice as good to get half as far so I better keep my nose to the grindstone still holds.

Before the first Democratic debate, it’s difficult to predict the big moments, the gaffes, the surprises. But comparing the stages of 2007 and 2019 proves that when it comes to politics, it’s tough for a not-so-old country to change its habits. All it took was Donald Trump, and the attitudes he did not cause but enabled, for so many Americans to doubt the progress we thought we made.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.

Rick Perry is a Master of Right-Wing Populism; But Can He Go National?

Whether Rick Perry will jump in the Republican presidential primaries is still not certain, but it looks increasingly likely, and if he does, the colorful three-term Texas governor will have to play up his experience and assure voters that he’s more than a charismatic rabble-rouser with a knack for stating extreme positions.

“I think he’s going to run,” said Mark McKinnon, the Texas-based Republican political strategist who carefully crafted the image of George W. Bush and steered his two successful presidential campaigns. “He’ll be formidable, particularly among social conservatives and the Tea Party set. I think he and Michele Bachmann will slug it out in Iowa and probably South Carolina.”

He would step into a race dominated at the moment by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who has rankled conservatives recently by taking relatively moderate stances such as acknowledging the reality of global warming and refusing to sign an aggressive pro-life pledge, despite his opposition to abortion rights.

No one will worry about Perry’s conservative bona fides. “I am a firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect, and I believe it should be presented in schools alongside the theories of evolution,” he said last year. He’s also on record favoring the option for states to opt out of Social Security, and told a gathering of Evangelical Hispanics recently that Obama’s healthcare law made abortion a “U.S. foreign export.”

“He looks like a poster boy that could unite the social right and the economic right of the party,” said Bruce Buchanan, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in presidential politics. “He could catch fire.”

Perry’s path to the nomination would be comparable to that of Ronald Reagan, who many political observers wrote off as a lightweight extremist until he started racking up votes in the 1976 primaries. He conceded that fight to incumbent President Gerald Ford before capturing his party’s hearts and minds completely in 1980. Republicans still swoon at the very mention of his name.

“Many people in the field are describing Perry as Reaganesque,” said Rick Wilson, a veteran GOP consultant. “He’s got that happy warrior, big engaging personality, and all these things in the minds of Republican primary voters that say: this may be a guy we can fall in love with. This is a guy with charisma and poise, and a clear limited government philosophy.”

Wilson pointed to Perry’s claim that Texas accounts for half of the recent job growth in America as a “devastating message to Barack Obama,” and a great track record to run on, even though reporters are already picking apart his numbers.

“For me as a strategist, that is a home run for what voters are looking for right now. They want someone who can say, “I created jobs.””

Much like Bush before him, Perry will face questions about how much of Texas’ job growth–Perry calls it the “Texas miracle”–is the result of his actions, as the state constitution imparts relatively little power on the executive, dispersing responsibility to a litany of elected officials in Austin.

“Certainly, if you’re a regular working stiff in Texas, the miracle is a really a joke. His job growth record is not as good as George W. Bush’s and not any better than Ann Richards,” said Jim Hightower, the radio commentator and former Texas agriculture commissioner who was unseated by Perry in 1990.

The only thing unique about Perry’s economic record, Hightower claimed, is that “in his 10 years Texas has created more minimum wage jobs than all other states combined.”

In addition to proving he has the substance behind his rhetoric, Perry will have to find a way to continue to warm Tea Party hearts without alienating the moderates who disapprove of the movement and reject draconian cuts to social programs like the ones Perry has instituted to balance the budget in his state. Part of that may be shifting from pretentious provocateur–Perry publicly flirted with secession at a Tea Party rally in 2009–to more of a dog-whistler, as Bush successfully did with Evangelicals, slipping Biblical references into speeches that only those paying close attention would notice.

But if Perry does mean to be president, this is surely his best shot.

“He was way ahead of the Tea Party stuff. He brings to the table, right now, a set of attributes that are bound to be attractive not only to Republican voters but to party leadership. He can appeal to the very conservative grassroots, but at the same time the business community is gonna be comfortable with him,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Political Project at UT-Austin.

As the debt ceiling fight sends ripples through financial markets, however, roping in the business community could be a problem: In last fall’s gubernatorial contest, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a George W. Bush ally, challenged Perry in the primary, stacking her retinue with former presidential advisers and a large swath of big-money donors. Of course, Perry eventually won with ease.

“Perry has been systematically underestimated for the duration of his statewide career in politics,” Henson pointed out. “He’s left the political road littered with defeated opponents who underestimated him.”

And like any good conservative politician, Perry is a master of right-wing populism, turning factual errors or outrageous remarks into positives by lampooning the “elites” in the media who take notice. Right now, he’s clashing with the White House over the impending execution of Mexican national Humberto Leal — the White House wants to delay and let him get in touch with a Mexican lawyer so they can set a good precedent for Americans arrested in other countries. Perry, of course, will not consider anything resembling a sign of weakness.

“Every time the media and Perry’s opponents have seized on something and thought it would make him look ridiculous, he’s used it to strengthen his standing with the base,” Henson remarked.

But Hightower is skeptical Perry will be able to stand up to the increased scrutiny that inevitably comes with a presidential bid:

“I can’t imagine how he’s going to cope with the kind of inquiry that national media people are going to make into his ineptness.”

Millionaire Romney Gets Money Boost From Super PAC

Mitt Romney is already leading the pack by a long-shot when it comes to fundraising in the Republican presidential primaries. It looks like he’s getting some extra help, too, just in case.

 

A group of prominent Mitt Romney backers has quietly launched a “super PAC” to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money in support of his bid for the White House, according to organizers and others involved in the effort.

Restore Our Future PAC, spearheaded by several prominent GOP strategists, is the latest in an expanding list of new groups that have formed to take advantage of court rulings allowing corporations, unions and tycoons to spend millions of dollars on elections without restrictions.

Romney, who donated millions of his personal fortune to his failed 2007/08 campaign and raised $10 million in a single day in mid May, continues to solidify his front-runner status and seems intent on drowning out his rivals with his financial edge. The U.S. Supreme Court, with Citizens United and other campaign finance rulings, is doing its part to ensure the 2012 presidential election is defined by unlimited donations to candidates, and Romney is surely grateful for it. [The Washington Post]