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Thursday, December 4, 2008
Methinks the GOP protests too much….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I can understand Republicans taking solace from Saxby Chambliss’ victory Tuesday. It was an important win for the party, while a loss would have been devastating.
But really — let’s keep the celebration within bounds of reality, shall we?
Mike Duncan, chairman of the Republican National Committee, has other ideas. He writes in Politico that with the Chambliss victory, “Georgians refuted any notion that the ideology of the country has shifted to the left.”
No, they didn’t. At most, they refuted the notion that Georgia had shifted to the left, and I doubt they even did that much. In a state that favored George Bush by 16 points in 2004, four years later an incumbent Republican senator got forced into a runoff by an earnest if uninspiring opponent. Georgia shifted to the left, even if the shift fell well short of a Democratic win.
Duncan goes on to claim that “Notably, Chambliss won in spite of strong support by President-elect Obama and Democrat organizations for Jim Martin. Georgians clearly sent a message that any rhetoric about a liberal mandate is nothing but hot air.”
Hot air? Yeah, there’s some hot air around. But not from the source Duncan claims.
Look at the numbers. In November, Democrats picked up seven Senate seats after picking up six in ‘06. In the House, they picked up 30 seats in ‘06 and picked up at least 20 more in ‘08.
Oh, and they also won the White House.
Given all that, it’s going to take more than a widely predicted runoff victory in Georgia to “sen(d) a message that any rhetoric about a liberal mandate is nothing but hot air.”
Nonetheless, Duncan argues, “Chambliss’ reelection sends a message to all those who believe the Republican Party and its core principles are anything less than strong and competitive.” Personally, I’d say Duncan’s desperation is showing a bit.
In fact, he’s acting like a football player who gets flagged for excessive celebration with his team losing 48-7.
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When did Gingrich turn holy on us?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Michelle Goldberg at The New Republic takes note of something that has perplexed me for a while: Newt Gingrich’s wholesale embrace of the hard-core Religious Right and the issues they think important.
In his heyday back in the ’90s, the thrice-married Gingrich had a respectful but hardly close relationship with the Christian Coalition and similar groups. He was more comfortable being Newt the Science Guy, and he tended to refrain from the gay-bashing that was popular at the time, speaking instead of toleration, not condemnation.
But something changed in the last couple of years, with the ex-speaker now trying to sound holier than James Dobson even as the American mainstream moves the other way.
“Gingrich, after all, likes to imagine himself an innovator. And yet, at a time when he seems to be hoping to take advantage of Republican disarray to return to the political fray, he’s doing it in the most tired way imaginable. There he was on the O’Reilly Factor a couple of weeks ago, warning of “gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us.” Visitors to his website are asked to sign a petition on behalf of an issue surely disturbing the sleep of a crisis-ridden nation — insufficient references to God in the new Capitol Visitor Center….
“One has to wonder — is this really all they’ve got? …. I’d have expected some attempt to modulate the message of perpetual kulturkampf in the wake of the election results, the public disaffection of so many prominent conservative intellectuals and the cascading economic disasters threatening millions of Americans. Perhaps, though, people like Gingrich can’t imagine any other way. And so, with the defeat of Republican moderates rendering the rump GOP more right-wing than ever, he apparently sees a path to power in challenging Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee for leadership of the Elmer Gantry wing of his beaten party. Maybe he’s clueless about the future of Republicanism, but if he’s right about it, it’s hard to see what kind of future Republicanism has.”
Personally, I don’t think Gingrich harbors serious thought of major political office any longer, and for good reason. Even among his own party, he has too much baggage. In a recent poll, 48 percent of Republicans told Gallup they would NOT like to see Gingrich run for president.
Instead, Gingrich is carving himself a nice, profitable niche in the conservative market, hoping to build a base that will keep buying his books and paying his speaking fees. It’s all about the marketing.
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Detroit, Congress playing chicken
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The United Auto Workers union has backed off considerably from its arrogant announcement a few weeks ago that it would accept no further concessions in wages and benefits to save the industry. Management of the Big Three is also a lot more humble these days, with CEOs of Ford and GM saying they are willing to take salaries of $1 a year if necessary to save their companies. They also drove from Detroit to Washington this time instead of flying in their corporate jets.
But the damage may already have been done. According to a new CNN poll:
“Sixty-one percent of those questioned … are dead set against the federal government providing billions of dollars in assistance for the automakers, with 36 percent favoring such a bailout….
In early November, polls indicated that nearly half the public supported federal assistance to the big automakers when this issue first came before Congress.
But evidence in surveys from other organizations suggests that the poor performance by executives from GM, Ford and Chrysler at congressional hearings, and the admission that they had taken private jets to get there, resulted in a steep drop in support for government assistance to automakers.
The new CNN poll indicates that those wounds have yet to heal as the executives return to Capitol Hill for more hearings this week.”
GM has warned that it lacks the capital to last through the end of the month, and Chrysler’s situation isn’t much better. But there don’t seem to be enough votes in Congress at the moment to approve the $38 billion in loans and lines of credit that they seek.
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How to deny victory to terrorists
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Every time terrorists strike, the civilized world vows not to let them win. Yet time after time, we give them exactly the victory they seek.
In the Middle East, Palestinian terrorists have attacked repeatedly in hopes of disrupting peace efforts; time after time, they’ve gotten their way.
In the attacks on Sept. 11, Osama bin Laden made it clear that he was trying to provoke the United States into an overreaction; by invading Iraq, an oil-rich Islamic country that had nothing to do with 9/11, we gave him just what he wanted. Iraq became a great recruiting tool and rallying point for al-Qaida.
So it’s pretty simple: If you want to deny victory to terrorists, you figure out what they’re trying to get you to do. Then you don’t do it.
But given the emotional impact of terrorism, that can be extraordinarily hard, as the people of India know.
The goal of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai last week was not to kill hundreds of victims. “Victims are just the language of war,” as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind of Sept. 11, told his captors.
Muhammad and other terrorists are engaged in “asymmetric warfare,” in which a much weaker party faces a much stronger opponent. Unable to win a head-on struggle, the weaker party tries to provoke its opponent into reacting in anger or fear, an overreaction that weakens it in the eyes of the world, reduces its legitimacy and makes it vulnerable.
To the Mumbai terrorists, those many dead innocents were a means of achieving their goal, which was to undermine relations between Pakistan and India and provoke the two nuclear-armed nations to war. The world is now trying to ensure that rising anger in India — anger that is natural and justified — doesn’t give the murderers what they sought.
Ironically, one of the best lessons about how to respond to terror can be drawn from a seemingly unlikely source, the career of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In his own, very different form of asymmetric warfare, he too tried to provoke his more powerful opponents into an overreaction that would weaken them, with the very important moral difference that King chose to provoke through nonviolence. And as King discovered, some foes are too smart to play along.
In 1962, King was drawn into the struggle to desegregate the town of Albany, Ga. He led protests and marches, trying to provoke local officials into an overreaction that would reverse the power dynamic. But the Albany sheriff, Laurie Pritchett, had studied King’s tactics and refused to give King what he sought. As Pritchett later explained, he met nonviolence with nonviolence.
King would organize mass demonstrations; Pritchett’s deputies would arrest the demonstrators, but they would do so calmly and professionally. King and his lieutenants would get themselves arrested, hoping to become high-profile martyrs; Pritchett would secretly arrange to let them go.
“I’ve been thrown out of a lot of places in my day, but never before have I been thrown out of jail,” King’s assistant, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy Jr., complained after his release.
Through patience, Pritchett denied King the images of brutal repression that could be broadcast worldwide by the media, images that would build sympathy for the underdog. Frustrated, King left Albany with segregation still in place.
But a year later in Birmingham, King met a more cooperative foe in Police Commissioner Bull Connor. When demonstrators marched, Connor responded just as King hoped, with firehoses and nightsticks and police dogs sicced upon children.
The images out of Birmingham of the strong attacking the weak horrified the nation and forced federal intervention. Within days, legal segregation in Birmingham was ended forever. The weak had beaten the strong.
“We were witnessing police violence and brutality Birmingham-style,” as John Lewis put it. “Unfortunately for Bull Connor, so was the rest of the world.”
Military force is a legitimate and necessary tool to defend ourselves and loved ones. When we can find terrorists, we should kill them, and where possible we should deny them sanctuary.
But it is important to remember that the civilized world is far stronger than they are. Whatever power they have is power that we give them through the anger and fear we allow them to provoke.
It’s hard to cite a segregationist sheriff as a role model, but Laurie Pritchett had it figured out.
