Will the GOP Get the Message in Kansas?

Many of us are hoping that the GOP will get a much needed message in Kansas with the re-election defeat of Gov. Sam Brownback and Senator Pat Roberts (as well as other GOP elected officials).  Based on the Congressional GOP's economic agenda recently reviewed in a post on this blog, even if Kansas goes blue, one has to question whether or not the message will be received.  After all, part of being a Republican nowadays is to reject objective reality in every form and to blindly cling to ideology and one's Bible. A piece in The Daily Beast asks whether or not the GOP will get the message that its 30+ year old policies simply do not work.  Here are excerpts:

For many political observers, the question about Kansas these days is no longer, “What’s the matter?” so much as, “What the fuck?”

There was the unexpectedly close GOP Senate primary—three-term incumbent Pat Roberts wound up winning by 7 points—and the forced retirement of the Democratic Senate candidate; there’s the fact that Gov. Sam Brownback, whose average margin of victory in state-wide races is 23 points, is now fighting for his political life. Tom Frank made the state famous for illustrating how its citizens elected conservative candidates whose actual policies went against the voters’ economic self-interest; after one term of Brownback’s “Tea Party experiment,” Kansas voters seem to have enlightened their self-interest and want to undo the extremism that Brownback both promised and delivered. The question remains as to whether their Republican candidates will ever wise up to the same conclusion.

There’s no doubt that Brownback’s radically conservative economic policies failed. Schools closed, the deficit ballooned, highways crumbled, jobs disappeared—I imagine ruby slippers were hocked. That failure has the reddest state in the nation blushing blue.

Citing the state’s fiscal woes, moderate and not-so-moderate Republicans have flocked to Brownback’s opponent, Paul Davis, who trails by just 0.6 points. On the Senate front, independent candidate Greg Orman, who will likely caucus with the Democrats, is reaping the benefits of that Tea Party-weighted primary. “Traditional Republicans for Common Sense,” made up of 70 Republican moderates who served in the Kansas legislature, endorsed Orman and he is favored by independent voters by a margin of 30 points.

In the face of this, both Brownback and Roberts have chosen not to battle for the wide swath of Kansas voters who identify as moderate Republicans (47 percent, versus 38 percent “conservative Republicans”), but to move further to the right.

[O]ne has to wonder not just if the Republican leadership is shooting itself in the foot, but why it is. Is it misplaced, or at least short-sighted, cynicism, which might have them believe that their old white guy coalition (if you can call it that) will sustain them a few more cycles? (At least long enough to pass voting restrictions?) Or is it a form of psychosomatic blindness, a function of such deeply held, incorrect perceptions, that the party leaders literally cannot imagine the need to change their tactics, much less their policies?

In other words, are we dealing with cynics or zealots?  Obviously, one hopes for the former. Cynics respond to defeat, for one thing. Cynics and opportunists look at polls. Cynics are the lifeblood of representative democracy. Cynics will do anything to save their own skin, even change their minds.

Sadly, I suspect we are dealing with zealots who cannot grasp the reality that the nation is changing and pushing the same failed agenda is not the route to victory.   As for Brownback, he seems to think that attending every anti-gay rally is his ticket to reelection.

The Establishment's Failure to Recognize the Insanity of the GOP

As we get closer and closer to financial meltdown in the coming week, there's lots of blame to go around, but most of it boils down to the failure of the so-called "Establishment" to realize that the far right in the Republican Party is no longer a faction in touch with reality or, in some instances such as Michele Bachmann and her most radical brethren , even sane. Hence why some say the stock market hasn't dropped more sharply. Everyone assumes at some point rationality will prevail. The problem is that with the far right of the Republican Party and the equally toxic GOP base, we are dealing with crazy people and religious fanatics. In their own way, they are just as crazy and fanatical as the Islamic terrorists that they so love to condemn and hold up as a never ending bogey man. The irony is that they are about to do more damage to the nation than the terrorists came close to achieving on 9/11. Here are highlights from a piece in The New Republic that looks at the build up to the potential coming financial apocalypse:
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[T]hey're [Wall Street] relatively calm because they simply cannot bring themselves to believe that we're not, in the end, going to raise the ceiling. It's too outlandish that we would, through the collective action of our congressmen, suddenly and for no apparent reason shoot ourselves in the head.
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The basic problem here is that Wall Street has massively underestimated the loony determination of the Republican right. McArdle's description reminded me of Ellis, the financial hot shot in "Die Hard" who thinks he can deal with the terrorists the way he deals with corporate takeovers in his regular work
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The failure to understand the crisis we were entering was widely shared among centrist types. When Republicans first proposed tying a debt ceiling hike to a measure to reduce the deficit, President Obama instead proposed a traditional, clean debt ceiling hike. He found this position politically untenable for many reasons, one of them being that deficit scolds insisted that using the debt ceiling to force a fiscal adjustment was a terrific idea, and that connecting the deficit debate to a potentially cataclysmic financial event was the mark of seriousness.
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The main problem is that the Republican Party does not actually care very much about the deficit. It cares about, in order: Low taxes for high-income earners; reducing social spending, especially for the poor; protecting the defense budget; and low deficits. The Obama administration and many Democrats actually do care about the deficit and are willing to sacrifice their priorities in order to achieve it, a desire that was on full display during the health care reform debate. Republicans care about deficit reduction only to the extent that it can be undertaken without impeding upon other, higher priorities. Primarily "deficit reduction" is a framing device for their opposition to social spending, as opposed to a genuine belief that revenue and outlays ought to bear some relationship to each other.
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Increasing the political leverage of the Republican Party made a Grand Bargain less, not more, likely. Moreover, the deficit hawks who represent the center of Washington establishment thought badly underestimated the danger entailed by tying high stakes negotiations involving the Republican Party to a cataclysmic event. Happy visions of Bob Dole and Tip O'Neill danced in their heads, oblivious to the reality of what they were facing.
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The only way to understand and deal with today's Republican Party is to treat it and its membership as deranged and unpredictable as Islamic jihadists who are willing to engage in suicide bombings. Rational thought and a concern for the well being of the nation are nowhere on the GOP radar screen any longer.

South Carolina: Will Economics Trump Religious Extremism?

I have written many times about the increasing correlation between a state's social conservatism -translate: religious extremism and social/cultural backwardness - and declining economic development and prosperity. South Carolina is a perfect example of this phenomenon where the extremism and intolerance of the states large numbers of far right evangelical Christians don't exactly make the state a welcoming prospect for progressive and cutting edge businesses. To the extent the state attracts jobs, it often lower paying lower skills jobs like those at Amazon’s new distribution center in Lexington County outside of Columbia. The end result is that South Carolina has one of the nation's highest unemployment rates - something that to some extent is self-inflicted in my view. Now, with the GOP primaries in the offing, GOP voters are faced with having to decide whether they will continue their Bible beating or start focusing instead on economic issues. The Washington Post looks at this coming intra-party conflict. Here are highlights (the image above is from the Post as well):
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The South Carolina Republican primary has accurately predicted the GOP presidential nominee for the past three decades, often in campaigns that revolved around guns, God and gays.
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But with South Carolina saddled with a 10 percent unemployment rate — one of the highest in the nation — the struggling economy is upending the priorities of many so-called values voters, forcing GOP candidates to rewrite their campaign playbooks.
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South Carolina’s pivotal role could be enhanced in 2012 because the state is suffering economic woes that both Iowa, with its 6 percent jobless rate, and New Hampshire, where unemployment is 4.8 percent, have managed to avoid.
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These days, the GOP candidates swinging through the state are playing up their economic credentials to appeal to such voters. Former Utah governor and ambassador Jon Huntsman was in South Carolina recently, telling voters about his business experience with his family’s chemical company.
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Meanwhile, all of the GOP candidates, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who served as a Pennsylvania senator, have promoted their conservative stances on social issues. . . . . “The Republican morality issues are still important, but they are not nearly as important as the economy,” said Chris Drummond, a GOP consultant in South Carolina.
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Like Romney, Huntsman is a Mormon. But with the state battling double-digit unemployment, some say the religious issue does not resonate as it might have in the past. “With 19 percent unemployment in Marion County, do you think I care where you go to church?” Christmas asked. Vacant tobacco warehouses and abandoned textile mills dot the landscape in Marion County, providing reminders of the area’s once-vibrant economy.
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The economic predicament in Marion County, where unemployment was high long before the recession hit, is similar in much of northeastern South Carolina, a region struggling with high unemployment, an undereducated workforce and an uncertain future.
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“This is a conservative area, a conservative state,” said Eric Fry, a high school teacher who chairs Marion County’s Republican Party. “I know people don’t want to compromise their beliefs, but with the economic situation being what it is, I know they want answers there as well.”

Shades of the Great Depression

As if the Chimperator has not already done enough to earn himself the title "Worse President Ever." he now seems to be mindlessly acting along the same lines as Herbert Hoover as the USA fell into the great depression. The Chimperator has shown himself time and time again to be utterly oblivious to objective reality in addition to being utterly ignorant of history. If he'd studied the history of Iraq for instance, we'd have likely never have invaded back in 2003. Harold Meyerson has a column in today's Washington Post that shows how the Chimperator continues to screw over the country. The dangers of having a cretin in the White House are enormous - not that the Sarah Palin loving Kool-Aid drinkers will ever figure this out. From what I am seeing in the residential and commercial real estate market - i.e., segments of the economy that largely power everything else - things are still continuing to worsen. Here are some column highlights:

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George W. Bush . . . his handling of our plunging economy is Hooverian in both its substance and inadequacy. Herbert Hoover, we should recall, had a program for dealing with the Depression. It consisted of lending to banks but opposing fiscal stimulus or direct aid to individuals. Which is why Hank Paulson's frenzied endeavors to prop up the banking sector and Bush's dogged resistance to assisting anybody else amount to pure neo-Hooverism.

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Having done his bit to bail out the banks, however, Hoover rested. He opposed provisions that would have enabled homeowners to hang on to their homes. As breadlines lengthened, he vetoed a bill appropriating funds for public works on the grounds that it was inflationary and contained pork-barrel spending. Bankers would be saved; everyone else was effectively damned.
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Sound familiar? The Bush administration's approach to today's meltdown is to direct all its energies and largess to lending institutions. There is, as yet, no program to help floundering homeowners renegotiate the terms of their mortgages. The president is opposed to further stimulus programs, even though private-sector investment in the United States has all but ceased.

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It's becoming increasingly clear, however, that while saving the banks may limit further calamities, it doesn't really save anybody else. Even with government-guaranteed lines of credit, financial institutions are refusing to lend money. With the banks effectively on strike, an economic recovery, if there is to be one, must begin with the government injecting funds to those parts of the economy that need it most: infrastructure development, state and local governments, an alternative-energy sector. These are all programs to which Bush is firmly opposed.

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In a sense, Bush's inactivity is even less excusable than Hoover's. Unlike Hoover, Bush could learn from the successes of New Deal and World War II-era programs to revive the economy. . . . Bush, drawing on no known body of economic thought, remains opposed. (So does Republican House leader John Boehner, who seems determined to elevate stupidity to a party principle.) And with each passing day, the economic hole out of which we will have to climb grows deeper.

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So where's the outrage? Why aren't demonstrators besieging the White House? . . . Bush . . . misled us into a nearly endless war of choice to disarm a threat that never really existed. He let a great American city drown. And now he stands by while the economic security of tens of millions of Americans is vanishing.