Month: March 2012

"Pay close attention: Palin's rhetoric between now and Tampa will continue to be critical of both Romney and Obama; it will continue to push for a contested primary; and it will continue to signal Palin's willingness to accept the nomination of a brokered convention. Palin knows that Romney will never pack her star power with the base — and that neither Rick Santorum nor Newt Gingrich will either.

In the aftermath of Santorum's sweep of Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday, a brokered GOP convention is a very real possibility.

The Republican Party has become a fractured mosaic of fringe constituencies — from Tea Partiers to evangelical anti-abortion activists, from libertarians who support Ron Paul to white supremacists who despise the fact that there is a black man in the White House. It is an unruly lot. The days of a GOP elite framing the presidential selection process are over. Charisma trumps experience; celebrity trumps substance; and, perhaps most disturbingly, anger trumps reason. Mama grizzlies, especially those who have been wounded, don't go down easy," – Geoffrey Dunn.

Gulp.

Jamelle Bouie explores why African-American politicians so rarely reach higher office. Josh Barro summarizes his argument:

One of the important factors Bouie identifies is that it is hard for black officeholders to jump from the House to higher office, in large part because they tend to represent heavily black, extremely liberal House districts. This leads them to develop voting records that place them far to the left of their states’ political medians. These districts are also disproportionately lower income, meaning that representatives from them do not tend to have the strong fundraising networks needed to support statewide campaigns. These representatives are well-positioned to get re-elected, but are not likely to be successful in statewide races.

Barro recommends no longer "gerrymandering 20- to 40-percent black congressional districts out of existence."

Ladies and gentleman, we have an Yglesias nomination from an unexpected corner:

“One of the ones promoting that [a brokered convention] is Sarah Palin, who has suggested herself as the choice. I think as long as it’s between us girls — I’ve been observing something about her. I don’t think it’s likely to happen. I don’t know what these people are cheering for. As I wrote in a column a few weeks back, who is this dream candidate we’re hoping to get from the convention, because Rick Perry used to be the dream candidate. Can we see them in a debate first? … our party and particularly our movement, the conservative movement, does have more of a problem with con men and charlatans than the Democratic Party,” she said. “I mean, the incentives seem to be set up to allow people — as long as you have a band of a few million fanatical followers, you can make money. The Democrats have managed to figure out how not to do that… The one pledge I support and I think I’m going to draft it up is for all Republican nominees for president — I want them to sign a pledge saying, ‘If I lose the nomination I pledge I will not take a gig with Fox News or write a book,’” – Ann Coulter.

Yep, things are so bad even Coulter is now moving gingerly toward Frum territory. But if anyone helped create the conservative media-industrial rhetorical bomb-throwing complex, it was the drag queen posing as a fascist.

(Photo: Evan Agostini/Getty)

Josh Green recently pointed out that Romney looks like he's trying to run out the clock:

Romney’s stump speech is a collection of platitudes and the strange ritual recitation of the lyrics to “America the Beautiful.” As one of his fundraisers put it to John Heilemann of New York magazine, “I have never seen anything more ridiculous or belittling.” This creates the impression that Romney has nothing to say — or, worse, has chosen not to say anything substantive— and is trying to coast to the nomination. 

That's especially true of his economic "plan" which is currently so vague and so different from his original that it cannot even be scored. There's focus on the debt for you. His tax and defense proposals would explode the debt and deficit, and his Iran war would send the economy into a new depression. And yet he's going to balance the budget!

And, yes, when you see him singing or reciting banalities, you begin to realize, in the wake of all his endless Dr Who-style ideological regenerations, that there really is no there there, no solid person you can react to or understand. This is a campaign about someone who can be changed into anything. Which means to say it is a Seinfeldian campaign about nothing. Molly Ball checks in with party strategists who find the campaign wanting: 

Myopic, insular and overconfident, Team Romney has squandered the candidate's strengths and exacerbated his weaknesses, these critics charge.  They point to specific strategic miscues: the failure to cultivate low-dollar donors; a lack of outreach to the conservative movement and the media generally; and the fateful decision to overlook the Feb. 7 contests in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, where surprise wins for Rick Santorum catapulted him back into contention as Romney's principal challenger. … "I think they're extremely competent at the tactical things. They run a tight ship in terms of the nuts and bolts," said John Weaver, the former strategist to John McCain and Jon Huntsman. "But their messaging is a head-scratcher at times.

(Photoshopped Romney photo via The Blaze)

Sao Paolo, Brazil, 7.49 am

We're firmly into backlash-lash now. But I advise those trashing Alexandra Pelosi's selective bias to check in with Real Time tonight. Meanwhile a Mississippi native writes:

I have three words for all those folks saying how filled the state is with professionals and college grads and worldly types: WHITE CITIZENS COUNCIL.

And as for Faulkner – who was cited in the defense of the state – has that person ever read his books? They are a literary equivalent of Pelosi's film. And as for Welty, has the correspondent never read Miss Welty's "Where is This Voice Coming From?" about the assassination of Medgar Evers published in that bastion of East Coast liberalism The New Yorker?

Miss Welty: "That hot … night when Medgar Evers, the local civil rights leader, was shot down from behind in Jackson, I thought, with overwhelming directness: Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. That is, I ought to have learned by now, from here, what such a man, intent on such a deed, had going on in his mind. I wrote his story — my fiction — in the first person: about that character’s point of view, I felt, through my shock and revolt, I could make no mistake.” It was, she later told me when I was driving her home from her friend Frank Hains's house, the only story she ever wrote out of anger. "I was mad at Mississippi."

These two great literary figures were never afraid to turn their gazes directly at whom they lived among. Why should we?

Another writes:

The question about whether the clips are representative of the state or not is a good one, and one that's always hard to answer. But there is at least one obvious and objective measure we can think about: politics.

Whether or not these people are typical of Mississippians in general, their views are certainly represented plentifully by the state's elected politicians. That's never an exact fit, of course, but I'd feel safe guessing that the number of Mississippi politicians who think they have to represent tolerant, bookstore visiting constituents is far outweighed by the number of their politicians who honestly believe their job is to be accountable to the kind of folks the video captures.

Like it or not, politicians do have to represent the people who vote for them, and while few public figures in the state will be as crude as the folks in the video, I'd trust their public positions and statements to be a good indicator of the fact that these folks aren't far out of the Mississippi mainstream.

Another notes:

To be fair to Ms. Pelosi, the documentary was intended to take a look at why poor people vote for conservatives. As the video notes, Mississippi is both the poorest and most conservative state, so it makes sense both to focus on Mississippi and to focus on its less well-to-do residents.  This wasn't intended to represent all Mississippians.

Another:

I was born and raised in rural Mississippi. Yes, I used to see people like the men in the video all the time – damn near on a daily basis. I'm not excusing them at all, but videos like that are not beneficial for progressive causes.

Picking out the uneducated, toothless, old white men gives the impression that they represent bigotry inMississippi. They are just the face, though. If you want to see the heart of bigotry in Mississippi, you have to go into the fancy country clubs, the prep schools, the fraternities, the churches, the haberdasheries, etc. Well off, well educated, well dressed, well spoken people harbor opinions that wouldn't have been out of place in the 1880s. The language they use ranges from sophisticated and subtle to downright jaw-dropping (usually after a few drinks). If you want to hear the word nigger, don't go snooping around trailer parks and truck stops; just walk by a group of men in seersucker suits at an Ole Miss football game.

Electionate runs down the county-by-county demographics in Illinois. Bottom line:

Perhaps no state is more representative of the national GOP than Illinois. No, it doesn’t include sparsely populated, Paul-friendly western highlands or the Mormons of greater Utah, but it has nearly everything else. The Chicago area is among the wealthiest in the country, while southern Illinois, which is physically and politically closer to Alabama and Mississippi than the Windy City, is dominated by culturally southern, working-class, evangelicals. Compared to Ohio and Michigan, Illinois is slightly less evangelical and more affluent, which points toward a narrow Romney advantage.

And what has been remarkable this year is how demographics have determined the final vote almost perfectly so far. No candidate has shifted his demographic appeal much, and no momentum has moved voters in one candidate's direction for very long. That's why this seems so endless. It's a movie without a plot; it's a themeless pudding.

Comments on video of a baby seeing bubbles for 1st time (via @ezraklein's Wonkbook) are filthy: youtu.be/lYr5UPHPcOY

— NickBaumann (@NickBaumann) March 15, 2012

Dan O'Connor blasts what blog comment sections have become:

It is time, I think, for us to accept that disabling or deleting idiot comments is no more anti-democratic or elitist than refusing to engage with a person harrassing you on the street. Just because everyone is allowed to have their say, it does not follow that the bilge they say is worth listening to. I love the internet. I love social media. And the only way we will save them from themselves is by accepting that, more often than not, comments are rubbish.

Gawker is implementing a new comment system to deal with the problem. Recent Dish on a wildly successful comment section here. We're sticking with posting the best and most informative of your emails. For the Dish, reader input plays a key role in airing debates and discovering facts from readers with deep knowledge of the subjects at hand. There is a way, in other words, to create a web space where readers add and don't detract from the experience.

It's called editing.