Lone Star Rumblings: So Goes the Party

Top to bottom, the GOP in Texas seems to be foundering in a sea of disillusionment and infighting. Not just nationally, but in the Lone Star State as well, the Republican flock that gave rise to the Bush dynasty seems to have lost its faith.

The State of the Electorate

If a recent poll from Hill Research Consultants, entitled “Beyond Bush: Texas Republicans in an Obama Era,” is to be believed, Texas voters suffer from “Bush fatigue,” believe that the GOP is “arrogant, racist, corrupt, and unwelcoming” when compared to its Democrat counterparts. A generic R vs. D gubernatorial ballot gives Democrats a clear advantage at both the state representative and gubernatorial levels.

Generic Ballot Preferences	Republicans	Democrats
Governor	31%	44%
State Representative	31%	45%

Other points of interest note that “multiple deceased Democrats handily beat still living Republican office-holders in favorability,” and “Republicans are also failing to connect with younger voters and the Hispanic community.” Considering the state of Texas is growing younger and more Hispanic by the day, the Texas GOP seems to be on the wrong side of demographic trends.

So goes the opinion of the electorate in Texas, once the bread and butter of the Republican Party. They seem disillusioned and wavering in their support of the GOP and its direction. Hill, et al., warn that what happened in Colorado, a decidedly red state in 2000 whose governor, both chambers of the legislature, and both U.S. senators are now all Democratic, could happen in Texas. “The time to ring the alarm bell, if necessary, is now,” declares Hill.

Finally, it must be noted that the poll referenced in detail above was taken November 15-17^th, right on the heels of the general election. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that the voters surveyed were encircled by the “Obama halo,” a feel-good sentiment that seemed to wash over much of the country, proud of itself for electing its first African-American president. In general, polls taken in the weeks immediately after an election are not as reliable. Many moderate voters often have a confirmation bias toward the winning candidate or party. However, with that said, the Texas GOP should ignore the results of this poll at their own peril.

Gubernatorial and Senatorial Implications

With the laity in such disarray, it’s no surprise that the Republican Party leadership is struggling to maintain order within its own ranks. Two key Texas Republicans are looking vulnerable, and not necessarily just from Democratic vectors.

Sitting Governor Rick Perry, who won reelection in 2006 with only 39.3% of the vote, announced in April his intention to run again in 2010. Texas does not place limits on reelecting its governor, but a third term would be unprecedented and apparently not necessarily welcomed by some of the Republican elite.

On December 4^th,Kay Bailey Hutchison, the senior U.S. Senator from Texas, filed paperwork with the Texas Ethics Commission to form an exploratory committee for the office of governor. The filing was not revelatory, as she’s been dodgy for months about directly answering the “would she or wouldn’t she run” question, and noises were even made about her running against Perry in 2006 and 2002. What was surprising was the speed with which the two camps traded barbs after her filing.

Hutchison initially remarked that there’s “too much bitterness, too much anger, too little trust, too little consensus and too much infighting” in Austin. Mark Miner, a Perry spokesman, replied “Kay Bailout has been talking about running for governor and passing legislation for years, and neither has ever happened.”

It will be an interesting gubernatorial primary in 2010, indeed.

Other Political Rumblings

Hutchison’s U.S. Senate seat does not come up for re-election until 2012. Should she vacate the Senate before then (she doesn’t have to in order to run for state office), the governor has the power to appoint a replacement. The word around the campfire is that sitting Lt. Governor,David Dewhurst, would be at the top of Perry’s short list.

Third behind the governor and lieutenant governor in power, the Speaker of the Texas House is elected at the beginning of each new congressional session, the next one beginning January 13, 2009. Rep. Tom Craddick, R-Midland, whose leadership style has been likened to that of Vlad the Impaler, has held the Speakership since 2003.

He has caused controversy and consternation among both Democrats and Republicans by his heavy-handed use, some would say abuse, of the powers given him as speaker by the Texas Constitution. Not only has he refused to recognize representatives motioning for house rules changes that may challenge his power, he has even refused to allow direct votes to remove him from power brought before the House by half a dozen of his fellow Republicans at the end of the last session. He thought it would set a bad precedent.  Those who have challenged him from his own party have found themselves being passed over for desirable positions that their seniority may have given them dibs on.

No less than eleven representatives, seven of which are from his own party, will challenge Craddick for the Speakership for the next legislative session. On Friday, December 12^th, Rep. Dan Gattis, R-Georgetown, filed a constitutional proposition that would allow the removal of a speaker in mid-session with the approval of 100 of the 150 representatives. Obviously, Craddick is not a popular guy, even among his own people.

Overall Lone Star Outlook

With a core constituency that no longer seems to trust its leadership or the direction the party is taking, the GOP in Texas is a rudderless mess. Its captains can’t decide who should be at the helm, and Texas Democrats are eagerly waiting in the wings to stage a mutiny the scale of which would be rivaled only by the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” In 2010, it looks like they’ll have their chance.

The End of Conservatism As We Know It?

As the days pass, the news gets better and better for progressives. Republican pundit Bill Kristol had to publicly contradict himself about the efficacy of the McCain campaign strategy he once pushed for. McCain and Palin are in disagreement about whether they should create pitchfork-wielding mobs or not. Sarah Palin, an independent investigation concluded, had abused her authority as governor. That bailout bill had to pass without any debate even though it gave the Treasury unlimited power to do anything it wanted and had no oversight and no guarantees. But that doesn’t matter because any legislation is good legislation right now, and if we don’t pass this thing then the Earth will crash into the sun! Remember that one? And how, once it passed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has continued to tank, now roughly a mere 25% lower than it was a month ago?

Oh, crap. And Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

It’s not a great time to be a conservative. The party that has run the country — first the executive branch, then the legislative branch, then both — for the last twenty-eight years (with only two years completely on the outside) is on the outs. The Republican Party, once the object of admiration by even the most liberal admen for its unified, coherent image, is publicly fighting with itself over what tactics to use next.

Extreme conservatism is on the way out. Eight years of extreme conservatism has turned the United States into a shell of its former self. That stuff’s poison!

Consider that unilateral militarism has proven to be, not a force of good, but a force of confusion, corruption, and destruction. Supply-side economics has made the poor poorer, the rich richer, and the middle class smaller. The United States is no longer regarded diplomatically; a ludicrously botched war has made us the laughingstock of the international community — when, that is, that laughter isn’t interrupted by contempt. Health care costs are rising, but the response of conservatives is to let the very same market that permitted those costs to double in eight years continue as is. In fact, McCain even wants more deregulation of health care.

But that’s just a start. You get the point. As a theory of governance, extreme conservatism should never work with government, anyway. In fact, many extreme conservatives never believed the government should be there in the first place. It’s hard to do your best at a job that you don’t think should even exist. The best-case scenario would be that the government gets dismantled, everything becomes privatized, and everyone goes home to the consulting firms they started in order to get lucrative government contracts. Grover Norquist would like to drown the government in a bathtub, but not drown it so much that it can no longer sign checks.

The nation is at a crossroads, except this crossroads is over a river of liquid-hot magma. Which direction will you choose? Liberalism? Or conservatism? Make it fast because your shoes are melting, and you can’t afford to buy new ones. If this election goes the way it looks like it might go, with Obama and the Democrats handily defeating the Republicans, extreme conservatism will have to pack its bags and redefine itself in a more moderate form.

The fact that the southern vote might be in question is proof enough that something’s going on, here.

Extreme conservatism — and with it, the mantra that The Market is a powerful force to be feared and obeyed — has failed to deliver on its promises for every American. True, it has enriched a few, but that has too often been at the expense of the poor or the American taxpayer. Apologists of the completely unchecked Wild West Market want to privatize the gains, but socialize the losses. This is why we are now paying $700 billion, on the outside, for a few firms to enrich themselves tremendously. We went through this before, remember? In 2001, with Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco. We put those guys away because they found new and interesting ways to purchase a $15,000 umbrella stand and then leave taxpayers with the bill once it all came crumbling down.

It’s not just people with investments who stand to win with more regulation and less reliance on The Market to police itself. Consider the 47 million Americans without health care–conservatism could continue living out the rest of its days unencumbered in the knowledge that people might be dying of curable ailments, if only they had enough money to afford them.

The people who claimed to know best are now unable to solve the problems plaguing our democracy. The Bill Kristols of the world, championing the cause of William F. Buckley, are powerless to help us get out of Iraq, fix our economic problems, and repair our world image. All they offer, to quote Joe Biden, is “more of the same.” Because it’s that same that has hurt us for so long. After a person has been punched in the face for eight years, it’s easy to find a cause for that person’s headaches. President Bush’s stock response of “trust me, I know what I’m doing” is now obviously a facade.

A weary nation realizes that the policies of the past eight years are no longer sufficient to solve the problems caused by the policies of the past eight years. Too little, too late? Perhaps, but better than not at all.

My Conditions for Voting Republican

I’ve been stewing over the last several days about this election season. Who can blame me? Political feelings are at their height with the two conventions so close together, and so people from all sides of the political continuum find this to be a very convenient time to throw their opinions into the public forum. I’ve wanted to do it in a more complete manner than by simply typing in heated status updates on Facebook, but haven’t entirely known what to say until now. I suppose this bit of writing is a first attempt at expressing my political expectations and reactions so far for this season.

In the end I decided on a sort of list of ‘demands,’ things that the Republican Party would have to do or work towards if they wanted to gain the vote of a slightly left-of-center independent voter such as myself. Here they are, in no particular order:

-Ditch the Rove: There is no one, and I mean no one, in the Republican machine whom I despise more (even including Cheney and Bush) than Karl Rove. The man must be absolutely soulless to have come up with the Republican election scheme of divide and conquer, watering down a complex world of issues and concerns, and slandering your political opponents through a mix of 3rd party “swift boaters” and sleazy push-polling tactics. Seriously, I see the man or hear his voice and I feel a mix of nausea and rage all wrapped up together. I understand that there are other masterminds and think-tanks involved in Bush’s otherwise unexplainable hold on power over the last eight years, but Rove is the most vocal and the most visible. If McCain had told Rove ‘thanks, but no thanks’ from the very beginning of his campaign, I would have had a great deal more respect for him, but as it happens, McCain has involved Rove in his campaign, I don’t know in what exact capacity, but he’s behind the scenes somewhere. I will not vote for a Republican, even at the state level, until that jerk-off is publicly shunned by the party leadership.

- Drop the “I’m-so-white-it-hurts” smack talk: Did Palin say anything about the issues in her VP acceptance speech? Or did she just walk up to the podium, give a shout out to her sisters in the AK, form gang symbols with her hands and challenge Harry Reid to an all-out rumble with John McCain? This is another tactic widely used by Republicans in recent years: when you realize that you either have no new platform or your platform is so extreme that it will scare off the majority of American moderates, just talk trash about the other party and hope that no one notices that you said nothing about the actual issues. Sarah Palin did just that at the convention. I know that there have been accusations from the Republican side (and even from people like Jon Stewart) that people are only following Obama because he is promising change and hope and a place on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, but that is not at all why I have supported him from the beginning. I supported him because he was more concerned with talking about the issues as if we were in this together. Imagine that. Americans of all creeds and races sharing many of the same problems. Could it be because, despite our ideological differences, we might share a common humanity and country? Why don’t we drop the smack talk, Obama says, and focus on our approaches and solutions to the issues? What a fresh idea!

- Rupture with the Rapturists: I understand that religion, faith and morals will always have a place in the public forum. There are ideals that many of us hold very close to our hearts and consider the foundations of our lives. I have a problem, though, when religious leaders realize how much power they can potentially exercise from the political podium rather than from the pulpit. I strongly disagree with the recent practice of Republicans going before religious leaders (and only conservative religious leaders at that) to accept their blessing from that leader. It reminds me just a wee-bit too much of the Holy Roman emperors going before the Pope to have him bless their kingship. Let me reintroduce a neglected idea: a person can be a very capable leader and public administrator without holding to religiously orthodox views, or any religious view for that matter. Even John Paul II was not fond of the Republican Party’s policies, a mood shared by the current pontiff, facts that many conservative American Catholics tend to conveniently ignore. It’s one thing when religious leaders and institutions try to voice their concerns in the public forum of American politics. They have every right to do so, so long as they frame their arguments as the concerns of their particular group. When I’m told by those leaders that I’ll rot in Hell for voting for a candidate who happens to be pro-choice with an otherwise amazing platform, I tend to shy away from them. I’m an adult, and I have the right and the ability to form moral judgments for myself. Don’t try to guilt me into voting for your Republican candidate by threatening my soul with eternal damnation.

- Stop Rudy from talking about 9/11: Seriously, Rudy, shut your mouth. You were rightfully popular for your immediate response to said national tragedy in the days and weeks following, not to mention for your record against crime in New York City, but quit framing the entire political discussion in terms of “I’m the hero of 9/11, so if you vote for the other guys, you’ll find a 737 barreling into your city’s office buildings.” Your party does not hold a monopoly on the willingness and ability to exercise military resources to protect this country. I believe that Joe Biden and his years of foreign affairs experience is just one of many other potential examples to demonstrate that Democrats know a thing or two about national security. What fear mongering and baiting we’re hearing when Bush implies that the other party will leave you for dead to the terrorists, or will let the terrorists win! For those of you who argue that the Republicans have a stronger record on national security and the use of military force, and that they were simply arguing that they would be the more experienced party for handling security issues, I have just one question. Why didn’t the Republicans just say that, rather that insinuating that a vote for the other guys was a vote for defeat? The first involves cool and calm dialogue, the second fear and powerlessness. It’s obvious that they were trying to scare people into the GOP camp.

- Stop parading minorities and women around on the platform to get votes: From the moment I saw that McCain selected a woman to be his vice presidential pick, I suspected that it was raw, political pandering for the votes of former Hillary supporters. It reminds me of how Bush selected people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice for his administration, two highly-qualified public servants to be sure, but also people who were conservative enough to have very little in common with most of the African-Americans whom they were breaking ground for. I know that some critics wondered if Bush had selected them mostly to make his administration and party look more progressive and diverse. Palin strikes me as more of the same. It’s like they thought that the progressive women who had sincerely hoped that Hillary would shatter the glass ceiling would vote for McCain to get back at the “patriarchal” Obama-Biden ticket. Does McCain expect those same, progressive women to review Palin’s beliefs on contraceptives and gun control and not be paralyzed with fear? Yes, Palin has experience as a governor and mayor. She’s not, admittedly, completely green. But I really believe that her selection by McCain was more about her reproductive organs and hard-hitting hockey mom rhetoric rather than anything that she has previously accomplished. Yet another Republican minority member or member of the historically-excluded gender using their power to go against what most of their confederates believe in. Nice going.

Last, but certainly not the least:

- Kick the Neo-cons to the curb, baby: These people, the neo-conservatives, are not in the mold of Reagan. They are not like Ike was, and they are not your traditional, fiscal conservatives. They are frightening, frightening people whose political motivation lies in the apparent humiliation of the American military during the Vietnam War, and they would love nothing more than to pay the world back (except for Britain, of course) for that loss of power that we experienced. And how do they plan to do this? One, by turning the world into an American commercial and quasi-military empire. In this way, they are no better than Vladimir Putin and his recent nationalistic expeditions into Georgia, and Putin has wasted no time in pointing out the hypocrisy of us chastising Russia for invading a sovereign nation when we did the same with Iraq. Two, they believe that stronger executive power will absolve the office of the Presidency of the embarrassment it suffered during Watergate. If only the judicial and legislative branches of government would bow down obediently before the president and his cabinet, they argue, the loss of faith in the office of the Presidency that happened when Bill Clinton was gettin’ his piece would never have happened. This means, of course, that the two branches which are designed to introduce our ideas for legislation and to protect and define our rights by law are being subordinated by the branch which can, according to neo-conservative theory, do whatever the hell it wants, so long as there are signing statements and war powers to fall back on. They’re not interested in your well-being. In fact, they have a distaste for your intelligence and your criticism of the executive office. In their model, as well, only the biggest businesses are vital to the success and well-being of the American dynamo. Without big money and investments to trickle down to the middle and working classes, America is hopeless and worthless (and that includes you, the average, middle-class American voter who was too stupid not to invest money in the stock market to make yourself independently wealthy). They are not Christian in practice, even if they sometimes promote that image for their policies. They are cold-hearted, aggressive and extremely ambitious. We should be terribly afraid of them and angry with them. They tend to destroy everything grass-roots and diverse about this nation. And they were behind the scenes of most of the Republicans in the primary, including McCain. If you think that McCain will bring change, think again. The cancer that made Bush’s presidency such a disaster has spread to the McCain camp. Don’t think that he won’t be influenced by them.

So there you have it, my demands, my manifesto, so to speak. These days, I feel as if I am defining myself by what I hate in the Republican Party rather than what I admire in the Democratic one. Many people reading this would probably think that I am a die-hard Democrat. That’s not true. They don’t fully speak for me. I am an anti-Republican by virtue of the things listed above, and in this two party system of ours, what other alternative do I have when I turn away from the current stench of the GOP? You tell me.

GOP to Push Lieberman

GOP Senators to push to make Lieberman party switch official. Democrats claim they will resolve the issue after the election.

Palin-A Pick to Excite the Base

More evidence that Palin was chosen to excite the religious base. She apparently is tight with the “Jews for Jesus” folks as well.