Year: 2012

Republican Party Diagnosis Sounds Terminal

Buck Banks

We Republicans cherish the free market. So now might be the right time to start listening to it. Our party has lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections… It’s time for the GOP to face the hard truth, no matter how painful. The Republican brand is dying, many of our strategists are incompetent, and we still design campaigns to prevail in the America of 25 years ago…. Identifying the problem is easy. The Republican challenge is not about better voter-turnout software; it is about policy. We repel Latinos, the fastest-growing voter group in the country, with our nativist opposition to immigration reform that offers a path to citizenship. We repel younger voters, who are much more secular than their parents, with our opposition to same-sex marriage and our scolding tone on social issues. And we have lost much of our once solid connection to the middle class on kitchen-table economic issues.

— Mike Murphy, writing in TIME’s “Swampland” blog.

GQ Names Romney As One of Its Least Influential People of 2012

Jon Ponder

Was anyone inspired by Mitt Romney? Did anyone vote enthusiastically for Mitt Romney? Of course not. Voting for Romney is like hooking up with the last single person at the bar at 4 a.m. The only successful thing he did this year was embody every black stand-up comedian’s impression of a white person. Thank God the election’s over. No more endless photos of Mitt staring winsomely off-camera with that attempted smile on his face. No more glaring campaign mishaps week after week after week. No more labored media efforts to make him look like anything other than Sheldon Adelson’s pampered money Dumpster. Good-bye, Mitt. I hope you enjoy the rest of your life quietly ensconced at Lake Winnipesaukee, blissfully ignorant of the plight of anyone who doesn’t have $300 million squirreled away in the Bahamas.

– GQ Magazine, The Least Influential People of 2012

Poll: Raising Tax Rates on High Incomes Backed by Solid Majorities

Jon Ponder

Washington Post:

Sixty percent of all Americans back higher taxes on higher incomes in the new Post-ABC data. Earlier this month, an identical 60 percent of voters in the presidential election said income taxes should be raised on income over $250,000, according to the national exit poll.

In the new poll, 73 percent of Democrats support such tax hikes, including a majority, 57 percent, who do so “strongly.” Among political independents, 63 percent back an increase, while 59 percent of Republicans oppose such a move.

Other proposed solutions to shrinking the debt are far less popular with the public. Only 44 percent support new limitations on the deductions people can claim on their federal income taxes — a proposal that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney put forward during his unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign.

Rick ‘America’s Pastor’ Warren Compares Being Gay to Punching Someone in the Nose, Adultery and Arsenic

Jon Ponder

Warren
Pres. Obama’s favorite bigot, megachurch hatemonger Rick Warren, who once boasted about his ties to Martin Ssempa, a leader in the “kill the gays” movement in Uganda, has stepped in it again:

RICK WARREN: Here’s what we know about life. I have all kinds of natural feelings in my life and it doesn’t necessarily mean that I should act on every feeling. Sometimes I get angry and I feel like punching a guy in the nose. It doesn’t mean I act on it. Sometimes I feel attracted to women who are not my wife. I don’t act on it. Just because I have a feeling doesn’t make it right. Not everything natural is good for me. Arsenic is natural.

You know what else is “natural,” Pastor Rick? Stupidity. Some people are just born that way.

After Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, he stunned his gay supporters by giving Warren a prominent speaking role at his inauguration. Just weeks before the event, Warren betrayed+ his true colors in an interview when he compared gay marriage to incest and pedophilia. In December 2009, after his relationship with Ssempa and Uganda’s kill-the-gays were exposed, Warren denied they had ever existed.

House GOP Is Squandering Its Chance to Prove They’re Not Petty, Malicious Rogues

Jon Ponder

Republicans have another chance to demonstrate that they’re Americans first and petty, malicious rogues second, and naturally they’re squandering that chance. The manifest fanaticism of Republicans on everything from prudent fiscal measures as confiscatory socialism to Rhodes-scholar ambassadors as treasonous nincompoops to accessible healthcare as Big Brother tyranny are merely the more prominent symptoms of a party gone hopelessly mad. Really. They’ve reached a point of political psychosis.

– P.M. Carpenter

Millennial Voters May Usher in New Era of Liberalism

Buck Banks

How doomed are conservatives? Pretty doomed, if you look carefully at the Pew Research Survey’s close analysis of the youth vote in the 2012 elections. The Republicans’ long-term dilemma has generally been framed in racial terms, but it’s mainly a generational one. The youngest generation of voters contains a much smaller proportion of white voters than previous generations, and those whites in that generation vote Republican by a much smaller margin than their elders. What’s more, younger voters supported President Obama during the last two election cycles for reasons that seem to go beyond the usual reasons — social issues like gay marriage and feminism, immigration policy, or Obama’s personal appeal — and suggest a deeper attachment to liberalism. The proclivities of younger voters may actually portend a full-scale sea change in American politics.

— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine.