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Monday, November 3, 2008
Rove says it won’t even be close
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Karl Rove has posted his last pre-election electoral prediction:
“The final Rove & Co. electoral map of the 2008 election cycle points to a 338-200 Barack Obama electoral vote victory over John McCain tomorrow, the largest electoral margin since 1996.”
And as we all know, Karl has THE math.
Also, A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: I’m not sure about this, so if you know better please correct me, but aren’t the liquor stores closed tomorrow? You know, for the mourners and celebrants both?
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Palin the last ‘culture warrior’?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Peter Beinart, writing in The Washington Post, argues that Sarah Palin represents the last dying gasp of the culture wars that have dominated American politics for a generation:
“It’s no coincidence that Palin’s popularity has plummeted as the financial crisis has taken center stage. From her championing of small-town America to her efforts to link Barack Obama to former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, Palin is treading a path well-worn by Republicans in recent decades. She’s depicting the campaign as a struggle between the culturally familiar and the culturally threatening, the culturally traditional and the culturally exotic. But Obama has dismissed those attacks as irrelevant, and the public, focused nervously on the economic collapse, has largely tuned them out.
Palin’s attacks are also failing because of generational change. The long-running, internecine baby boomer cultural feud just isn’t that relevant to Americans who came of age after the civil rights, gay rights and feminist revolutions. Even many younger evangelicals are broadening their agendas beyond abortion, stem cells, school prayer and gay marriage. And just as younger Protestants found JFK less threatening than their parents had found Al Smith, younger whites — even in bright-red states — don’t view the prospect of a black president with great alarm.”
I hope Beinart’s right, but the culture wars have dominated so much of my adult life that it’s hard to believe they can recede. As Beinart points out, though, such wars have come and gone before in America’s past, generally fading when more important concerns rise to the top.
In that light, Gallup’s last three-day tracking poll of likely voters puts the margin nationally at 11 points:
PRINCETON, NJ — The final Gallup 2008 pre-election poll — based on Oct. 31-Nov. 2 Gallup Poll Daily tracking — shows Barack Obama with a 53% to 42% advantage over John McCain among likely voters. When undecided voters are allocated proportionately to the two candidates to better approximate the actual vote, the estimate becomes 55% for Obama to 44% for McCain.
Other polls put the margin at five or six, and my own best guess is that the final margin will be around seven, which is very large. But if the final margin is indeed double digits, then I’m with Beinart: The old politics are dead.
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Long live the King (of the Hill)!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It was a sad weekend at the Bookman household with the announcement that “King of the Hill” is being canceled. It wasn’t for everybody, but those folks just cracked me up everytime I saw the show. Bill, Hank, Boomhauer, Dale — they were like friends of mine, or people I grew up with.
In fact, a couple of them WERE friends of mine, as my daughters like to remind me:
“I think Dale looks and acts just like Wallace, Dad.”
“Yeah, and Olson is so like Boomhauer!”
RIP, Hank.
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Let me reiterate the policy…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
…. posted Sunday for those who weren’t reading the blog over the weekend (what, you had better things to do?!?!):
“I’m sick and tired of this endless personal abuse you people throw at each other, and I’m drawing the line.
No more name-calling, no more personal abuse… It’s not going to continue like this.”
That’s as clear as I can make it, and I’d also like to honestly thank you folks for trying to adhere to it. The atmosphere is notably improved, and I do appreciate it.
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GOP high-water mark: March 21, 2005
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If you walk a bit along Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, you’ll come to a place that historians describe as the high water mark of the Confederacy.
Right there, at that spot on July 3, 1863, a massive Confederate assault known as Pickett’s Charge broke against Union lines and then was forced to withdraw. From that point on, the once-bright fortunes of the Confederacy declined into defeat.
Another defeat — although of somewhat less historic significance — looms Tuesday for the modern Republican Party. In the Senate, Republicans may fall below the 40 votes needed to filibuster. In the House, they may lose 20 seats or more. And unless the polls are mistaken, the GOP’s grip on the presidency will end as well.
Conceivably, a defeat of that size could exile Republicans from power for a decade or even a generation, particularly given the party’s poor reputation among younger voters. If so, when future historians go looking for the high water mark of the Republican Party, the moment when its power in this era peaked and then began to decline, I’d suggest the date March 21, 2005.
Back then, a majority of Americans still thought favorably of President Bush, who had won re-election just a few months earlier. Republicans had taken control of the Senate in the ‘04 election, picking up four seats. Karl Rove’s dream of a permanent Republican majority seemed quite plausible.
But then, perhaps a little giddy with power, party leaders did something extraordinarily stupid. Egged on by their masters in talk radio and the Christian Right, they called Congress back for an extraordinary emergency session. Their purpose was not some great matter of state. Instead, they passed legislation demanding that the federal courts intervene in the tragic case of Terri Schiavo. On March 21, that bill was signed into law by President Bush, who had hurried back to Washington from his Texas ranch for just that purpose.
As far as impact, that law had almost none. But symbolically its impact was enormous. That was the moment, I believe, that the vast majority of the American people began to suspect that the Republicans had lost their collective mind. Voters who usually go about their daily lives without paying much attention to the politicians in Washington were transfixed by the case, in part because it had little to do with government and everything to do with the literal life-and-death decisions confronted by every human being at some point.
What they saw in Washington was a blatant abuse of government power — ignorance compounded by arrogance. Afterward, in fact, more than 80 percent of Americans said they disagreed with what Congress had done, but Republican leadership was so out of touch that they had actually believed they would reap political benefits by intervening. An internal GOP Senate memo had called the Schiavo case “a great political issue” that would excite “the pro-life base.”
From there, the GOP decline began. A few months later, Hurricane Katrina hit over Labor Day, and the Bush administration’s apathetic, incompetent response shocked the country. In stark contrast to the Schiavo case, the president did not pry himself from his ranch vacation for days after the storm came ashore.
Slowly, voters began to realize that in the eyes of GOP leadership, government was just a useful weapon in the culture wars, not a tool to try to improve the lives of the American people. Many voters who had themselves thought of government in those terms began to question that belief, a process that quickened as the nation’s economic crisis deepened. As a result, they began to seek leaders who took a more serious approach to government, leaders to whom competence was more important than ideology.
The Schiavo case did not in a major sense cause the GOP’s decline, just as Pickett’s Charge did not doom the Confederacy. It’s just that at certain moments, weaknesses that were once hidden become glaringly apparent, and at those moments the tides of history begin to turn.
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