Author: Andrew Sullivan

The Cantor Shocker: Tweet Reax

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/476543773452042240

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/476532552245997569
https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/476542405098078208 https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/476529014446620672

Did Democrats Put Him Over The Top?

A reader writes:

I live in the 7th District in Virginia, and I am a Democrat who voted for David Brat in the open primary. There has been a whisper campaign going on among the Democrats in the district for the last few weeks and it resulted in many Democrats coming out to vote for Brat. We felt especially encouraged after the 7th District committee nominated Jack Trammell to be the Democratic candidate for the seat last Sunday. We now feel we at least have a fair chance at winning it. (By the way, Jack Trammell is a professor at the same small college as Brat, Randolph-Macon.)

Well, not quite the Democrats of Mickey’s dreams, I guess. Update from a reader:

Here’s a theory to support your reader who, though a Democrat, voted for Brat: in 2012, roughly 47,000 people voted in the 7th District Republican primary. This time, roughly 65,000.  Now let’s assume that of those 18,000 new voters, 16,000 were Democrats voting to axe Cantor, then rework the numbers if they hadn’t voted: Cantor would then have had around 29,000+ votes, and Brat would have had around 20,000+.  Which would have worked out to approximately 59% for Cantor, which is where he was at in 2012 and much closer to his internal polling showing him with a lead of 34% among likely REPUBLICAN voters.

I’m thinking time will show that Democrats in his district were fed up with him, and decided to do something about it.

A subsequent Dish update here throws cold water on the theory.

Dick Morris Award Nominee

This time, it goes to a pollster:

A poll conducted late last month for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) shows him with a wide lead over challenger David Brat heading toward next Tuesday’s Republican primary election.

The poll, shared with Post Politics, shows Cantor with a 62 percent to 28 percent lead over Brat, an economics professor running to Cantor’s right. Eleven percent say they are undecided.

The internal survey of 400 likely Republican primary voters was conducted May 27 and 28 by John McLaughlin of McLaughlin & Associates. It carries a margin of error of +/-4.9 percentage points.

The Coulter-Kaus-Drudge-Ingraham Coup

Salon’s Jim Newell this morning noted the weird avalanche of headlines on the Drudge Report:

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And gave us a roll-call of the writers, bloggers, and talk radio hosts who helped gin up the insurrection:

There’s Drudge, of course. And Ann Coulter. And radio/TV personality Laura Ingraham, who recently suggested that the United States should have traded Eric Cantor to the Taliban for Bowe Bergdahl. And the writings and tweets of Mickey Kaus, now of the Daily Caller, have been indistinguishable from those of a Brat staffer in recent months.

Here’s Mickey’s latest post:

Bottom-Up Bipartisanship? Yesterday Dave Brat, the conservative economics professor who is challenging Majority Leader Eric Cantor in today’s primary, sent out what I assume will be his final pitch to voters …

Notes: 1) This is a pitch — against a “low wage agenda” and “crony corporate lobby” — that can appeal to Democrats as well as Republicans. Maybe partisanship will eventually be transcended, not at the top, with David Brooks, Gloria Borger and Jon Huntsman imposing a Beltway consensus they hammer out at an Atlantic panel, but at the bottom, where less sleek figures like Brat, Phyllis Schlafly and Jeff Sessions, can make common cause with Democratic workers who’ve gotten the short end of previous top-down triumphs such as global trade and Reagan’s 1986 amnesty, as well as of ineluctable technological trends like automation. 2) Perhaps not coincidentally, Democrats can vote in the Cantor vs. Brat primary. …

Backfill: See also this earlier Brat release, which expands the potentially bipartisan anti-corporate agenda to “other issues – like spending, debt and insider trading” …

That’s what Brat seems to represent, so far as I’ve been able to glean in the past hour or so. And here’s part of Mickey’s previous post, mocking Cantor for backing “amnesty” for immigrant “kids”:

Little did Cantor know that this exquisitely calibrated stand would prove to be about the most embarrassing position he could take — when the “kids,” often unaccompanied, started surging across the southern border, causing a humanitarian and policy crisis just as he was facing a challenge in Tuesday’s Virginia primary. Even the New York Times couldn’t help but notice that the young illegal migrants said they were motivated, not just by conditions back home in Central America, but also by the prospect that they’d qualify for Cantoresque amnesty. ”Central Americans, [said a Salvadoran immigration official] were left with the sense that the United States had ‘opened its doors’ to women and children.”

Check out how many of his posts for the past two months have been obsessively about the Cantor race.

He won big tonight. Almost as big as Brat.

Cantor Can’t No More

 
So after all the obits for the Tea Party, we get the stunning news that Eric Cantor has been ousted from his Congressional seat by an anti-amnesty professor, touted by Laura Ingraham. This appears to have been a factor:

In an interview just last Friday, Cantor suggested he could work with President Obama to allow a path to citizenship for some children of illegal immigrants already in the country. In the campaign’s final days, Brat criticized Cantor for siding with Obama on the contentious issue.

His district had also been extended recently to include some more conservative areas around suburban Richmond. But this race – which Cantor once won by 79 percent in a primary – wasn’t even close. 56 – 44 is pretty much a landslide.

Here’s a glimpse of Dave Brat, introducing himself at a fundraiser last February. This was his intro:

This is his core pitch:

It doesn’t get more Tea Party than that: debt and amnesty, with a real populist, anti-big-business message. Notice also the anger at the big banks, the loathing of Wall Street, the populist equation of the Republicans and the Democrats, and the appeal to average and middle income “little guys.” Cantor was portrayed as an “insider-trader.” And yet this appealing message from an appealing and effective figure didn’t get much support from national Tea Party groups, as Laura Ingraham is now venting on Fox.

Does this completely end the chance of immigration reform in this Congress? Surely it has. In the next Congress? I’m beginning to suspect so. Does it cement the rightward-still passion of the GOP base? Yep. Does it give it an appealing, populist, insurgent message of change? You bet it does.

Notes On Doubt

In a review of Stephen Budiansky’s new biography of Charles Ives, Jeremy Denk discusses how doubt informed the composer’s work:

Many of Ives’s most important pieces are about blurred or doubtful perception. The beloved song “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” depicts a morning walk in haze and mist, while hearing a hymn from a church across the river. The loss of information, the disintegration of the tune, is essential to the beauty, like the crackle and hiss of old recordings: a failure that connotes authenticity. Toward the end, the river heads to the sea (a gigantic mass of notes) but this climax is followed by a wonderfully quiet afterimage, a remnant of the hymn—an ending that disputes the very idea of ending. Most of Ives’s works end with beautiful but undermining echoes, instead of audience-pleasing affirmation.

Ives turned doubt to artistic insight, but the doubt turned back against him.

He was an unusually insecure pioneer. When he published the “Concord” Sonata, an act of supreme confidence, he also released a companion book (Essays Before a Sonata) as a preemptive defense. It’s hard to imagine Beethoven supplying a program note to his late quartets. Ives also had serious doubts about notation—unfortunate, since that is more or less the foundation of Western music: “After you get an idea written down it’s no good. Why when I see the notes I write down on the page and think of what I wanted it to sound like—why—it’s dead!” Budiansky describes the difficult process when, in the flush of fame, it came time to make a revised edition of the “Concord”:

An eight-year saga…. Ives’s deteriorating eyesight and his endless agonizing…drove the editors at Arrow Press to distraction…. Harrison Kerr at the press told [the pianist John Kirkpatrick, who gave the first full performance] in despair in 1940 that “Mr. Ives had been putting in sharps and flats and taking them out again all summer.”

It is just there—where the classical composer is supposed to “land” his move, to crystallize the work into a masterpiece—that Ives seems most uncertain, most ambivalent. As a result, many of his works deserve asterisks; they retreat away from the final, single form toward a set of possibilities.

The Nature Morte Diet

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Dan Bannino captures celebrity fad diets as classical still life:

With this series my aim was to capture the beauty that lies in this terrible constriction of diets and deprivation, giving them the importance of an old master’s painting. I wanted to make them significant, like classic works of arts that are becoming more and more weighty as they grow older. My aim was to show how this weirdness hasn’t changed even since the 15th century.

The caption for the still life seen above:

Beyoncé Knowles – “Master cleanse diet,” lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper, salt, and laxative herbal tea

See more of his work here and here.

London’s Lay Of The Land

Tyler LeBlanc revisits the last decade of Jack London’s life, noting that the author best known for the literature of roughing it sought out futuristic techniques to cultivate his beloved Beauty Ranch:

[London biographer Earle] Labor says many of the innovations London introduced on his farms – he ended up buying multiple properties in the area as his love of farming grew – were widely respected at the time. He refused to use chemicals or pesticides on his crops, favoring natural fertilizers he stored in large concrete silos – the first concrete silos west of the Mississippi. He adapted crop-terracing techniques he witnessed in Asia and insisted on only purchasing and breeding livestock that were suited for the climate.

Of his innovations, arguably the most impressive was the pig palace, an ultra-sanitary piggery that could house 200 hogs yet be operated by a single person. The palace gave each sow her own “apartment” complete with a sun porch and an outdoor area to exercise. The suites were built around a main feeding structure, while a central valve allowed the sole operator to fill every trough in the building with drinking water.

London wrote that he wanted the piggery to be “the delight of all pig-men in the United States.” While it may not have brought about significant change in the industry – it is said to have cost an astounding $3,000 (equal to $70,000 now) to build — it was one of London’s greatest innovations, and, unfortunately, his last. He died the following year.

How Does America Get Its Citizens Back?

Shane Bauer, who was held hostage by Iran between 2009 and 2011, wants to know what the US government did to secure his release. He filed a lawsuit to find out:

For the two years that I was in prison, I wondered constantly what my government was doing to help us. I still want to know. But my interest in these records is more than personal. Innocent Americans get kidnapped, imprisoned, or held hostage in other countries from time to time. When that happens, our government must take it very seriously. These situations cannot be divorced from politics; they are often extremist reactions to our foreign policy. Currently, Americans are being detained in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Cuba, and other countries.

What does our government do when civilians are held hostage?

Sarah’s, Josh’s, and my family, like others in similar situations, were regularly assured by our leaders—all the way up to the Secretary of State and the President—that they were doing everything they could, but our families were rarely told what that meant. Why is this information so secret, even after the fact? It is important to know how the government deals with such crises. Is there a process by which the government decides whether or not to negotiate with another country or political group? How does it decide which citizens to negotiate for and which not to? Are the reassurances the government gives to grieving families genuine, or intended to appease them? Do branches of government cooperate with each other, or work in isolation?

Watch Shane discuss his capture and captivity in our Ask Anything series. Meanwhile, as if on cue, North Korea appears to have detained another American citizen:

The country’s state-run news agency reported that the man, identified as Jeffrey Edward Fowle, “entered the DPRK as a tourist on April 29 and acted in violation of the DPRK law, contrary to the purpose of tourism during his stay.” A Japanese news outlet, Kyodo, said he was part of a tour group and was held after leaving a bible in his hotel room.