When The Right Fell For Ronnie

Last week marked the 50th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech, which he gave on prime-time television in late October 1964 in support of Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Jeff Shesol takes us back to that pivotal speech, which made Reagan a darling of the conservative movement:

“I don’t have but one speech,” Martin Luther King, Jr., once said. “I don’t have but one message as I journey around this country.” Few of King’s contemporaries took this notion to heart more fully than Ronald Reagan.

Beginning in 1954, when Reagan became, in effect, the in-house motivational speaker for General Electric, he delivered, many hundreds of times, what was known as “The Speech.” From plant to plant, from one year to the next, Reagan honed his script, reshuffled his note cards, and updated his anecdotes, but his theme—the threat of an encroaching, expanding government—did not vary. It was less a speech than a sermon, as Reagan himself understood—a malediction against the evils of income taxes, federal spending, central planning, godless Communism, and government controls on commerce and freedom. “We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness,” Reagan said. If there is such a thing as a feel-good jeremiad, Reagan invented it. … The Speech—rechristened, for that occasion, as “A Time for Choosing”—helped to define the G.O.P. and conservative politics for more than a generation.

Watch the whole speech here.

The State Of The Race In Kansas

Last night a reader wrote from the Sunflower State about being “beaten to a pulp … on my phone”:

Hey Andrew & Co., I don’t know if you’re getting any traffic/messages on this, but the robocalls here in Kansas are incessant, demoralizing, and one-sided … at least if my experience, and the experiences of my friends and colleagues, are any sort of indicator. I have used my mobile device to record four calls today – to my office phone. I work at a state university here in Kansas. Pat Roberts has decided to beat people into submission. Here’s Newt Gingrich, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz [embedded above], and Dr. Milton Wolf (he was the biggest threat to Roberts during the primaries and was exposed for sharing autopsy photos on his Facebook account and blog … and making jokes about them).

Again, this is ONE WORK DAY … so far.

My message light has been blinking all morning, which means there are messages from the weekend and Friday night. I’m sure I have more. I averaged about one or two per evening last week, just before Halloween. Tim Huelskamp’s wife called one evening. I think that’s the only state candidate I’ve heard from – all the other calls have been stumping for Pat Roberts.

I can’t wait for Wednesday morning.

Join the club. Update from a reader with some crucial perspective:

I’ve worked on two Congressional campaigns and managed a state legislative campaign.

Every campaign manager with any sense knows robocalls have no effect whatsoever. This has been known, and proven over and over, for at least 10 years. Money quote:

Don Green, a political science professor at Yale, subjected robo-calls to 12 randomized experiments for his 2004 book “Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout.” The results, he says, were revealing. “These calls never raise voter turnout. They have no mobilization effect, and no persuasion effect either. What matters is whether they change the probability of voting, and robo-calls have proven they do not.”

Never. Raise. Turnout. No Persuasion Effect. Ever. Any campaign sending out even one robocall is wasting its money and hurting its own cause.

Previous reader dispatches from Massachusetts, South Dakota, and Texas.

The Best Of The Dish Today

First up, this:

Next up, a reader sends this image:

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And writes:

The ad in the attached screenshot popped up on the BBC site. My subconscious just assumed it was you all. Took a couple minutes before the reality registered.

And what exactly about a saving of $420 reminded you of us?

Anyways (big sigh), today we entered the final, depressing, brutal day of the midterms in a brutally polarized polity. Some thoughts: what it means for 2016 (not much); how the fear factor may be decisive; why Ted Cruz could spoil the GOP’s after-party; and how the one thing that really hangs in the balance is the composition of the judiciary in Obama’s last two years.

Plus: those moderate Syrian rebels? They just capitulated to al Qaeda. As Obama suspected they would (and McCain didn’t). And just in case the news was not completely dispiriting, remind yourself that we have probably passed the point of no return on climate change.

My personal favorite of today’s posts: another fascinating, colorful reader thread on cat-calling.

The most popular post of the day was The Significance Of A Smile; followed by New Feminism; Old Moralism.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 26 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including the new “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here.

See you in the morning.

We Might Be Over Ebola, But Ebola Isn’t Over

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Eric Posner offers the above chart as evidence that the furore over Ebola is dying down. But risk-communication experts Jody Lanard and Peter Sandman fear that Americans underestimate the still-serious risk of the outbreak reaching pandemic proportions in the developing world:

The two of us are far less worried about sparks landing in Chicago or London than in Mumbai or Karachi. We wish Dallas had served as a teachable moment for what may be looming elsewhere in the world, instead of inspiring knee-jerk over-reassurance theater about our domestic ability to extinguish whatever Ebola sparks come our way. We are glad that Dallas at least led to improvements in CDC guidelines for personal protective equipment and contact tracing, and belatedly jump-started front-line medical and community planning and training. But it doesn’t seem to have sparked the broader concern that is so vitally needed.

Americans are having a failure of imagination – failing to imagine that the most serious Ebola threat to our country is not in Dallas, not in our country, not even on our borders. It is on the borders of other countries that lack our ability to extinguish sparks.

Maryn McKenna seconds that:

Being someone who has a professional specialty of covering epidemics (HIV, the anthrax attacks, SARS, H5N1, H1N1, lots of smaller outbreaks), I reluctantly have to conclude: Lanard and Sandman are not being alarmist here.

Imagine that Ebola cannot be contained; think back to the events of this weekend; and then imagine that reaction multiplied thousands of times. It isn’t a big leap to the suspicion, disruption and expense that will then be triggered in response to any travelers from the region. From there, it isn’t much of a further leap to closed borders, curbs on international movement, disruption in global trade, cuts in productivity, even civil unrest and the opportunities that unrest offers to extremist movements. None of that is far-fetched, if Ebola is not controlled.

Michele Barry reflects on the systemic failures that allowed the outbreak to spiral out of control. From her perspective, “the solution to this Ebola crisis is not drugs, mass quarantine, vaccines, or even airdrops of personal protective gear”:

The real reasons this outbreak has turned into an epidemic are weak health systems and lack of workforce; any real solution needs to address these structural issues. When one physician or nurse is caring for forty to fifty patients, mistakes happen. WHO’s legally binding International Health Regulations (2005) requires wealthier countries to mobilize financial and technical support to help contain an outbreak such as Ebola, for which the Director General has called an international public health emergency.

Yet workforce scale-up has been disturbingly slow. NGOs like Médicins Sans Frontières were not equipped to deal with Ebola, and have been overwhelmed by the outbreak. Workforce volunteers for these NGOs have been slow to mobilize and fearful US hospitals have set up barriers by insisting that their employees taking unpaid leave or vacation time and then return to mandatory 21-day quarantines, often without pay.

But the governor of New York, for his part, has pledged to compensate any lost pay. Perhaps the federal government should step in with actual financial incentives – cash money – to encourage health workers still on the fence to head to West Africa.

Faces Of The Day

Screen Shot 2014-11-03 at 7.19.49 PMA presidential photo-bombing in Arkansas, captured by a Redditor via a phone. Money quote: “She didn’t want to be there. It was really cold outside for what we’re used to and this was after the event.” The former president was in Arkansas, vacuuming up the crowds as usual.

(H/T Pixable | Photo via bronayur/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)

“The Internet’s Ultimate Content Cannibal”

That’s how Marcus Wohlsen imagines the Facebook of the future, in light of David Carr’s revelations about the company’s recent overtures to publishers. Carr elaborates:

The social network has been eager to help publishers do a better job of servicing readers in the News Feed, including improving their approach to mobile in a variety of ways. One possibility it mentioned was for publishers to simply send pages to Facebook that would live inside the social network’s mobile app and be hosted by its servers; that way, they would load quickly with ads that Facebook sells. The revenue would be shared.

That kind of wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers, both traditional and digital insurgents alike. If Facebook’s mobile app hosted publishers’ pages, the relationship with customers, most of the data about what they did and the reading experience would all belong to the platform. Media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns.

I, for one, welcome our new Internet overlords. (Just kidding). Wohlsen looks at the big picture:

Publishers likely will balk at ceding so much control to Facebook. But in the end, they may not have much choice. The arrangement might sound like a partnership at first, but it could end up like Amazon and the book industry. Book publishers may hate dealing with Amazon and resent its influence over their sales. But the last thing they would do is pull their books from Amazon. Thanks to its outsized leverage, Facebook’s ability to dictate terms to online publishers could wind up much the same.

Robert Montenegro considers the implications:

Now that Facebook has mastered mobile ad revenue while other sites have struggled, there may soon come a time where much of the content you access via Facebook will all be hosted on Facebook. We’re already seeing Mark Zuckerberg’s push to include more content within the site itself. The relatively new trending topics feature is an example, as well as how the mythical algorithm favors on-site content such as Facebook-hosted videos over those hosted by competitors such as YouTube, which is owned by Google. If only a few popular sites decide to give in to Facebook’s offer, Zuckerberg could ignite a major ad revenue war.

A Poem For Monday

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Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

From poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets, I learned that Amy Lowell from the grand Massachusetts family, whose brother Abbott Lawrence, would become president of Harvard College from 1909-1933, “secluded herself in the 7,000 book library” of her family’s estate in Brookline to study literature at the age of seventeen. She enjoyed early success, publishing in The Atlantic Monthly and other journals, and became a key figure in the Imagist movement spearheaded by Ezra Pound. She was also for many years a central figure at the Poetry Society of America in New York, the nation’s oldest organization devoted to the art.

“The Pike” by Amy Lowell:

In the brown water,
Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine,
Liquid and cool in the shade of the reeds,
A pike dozed.
Lost among the shadows of stems
He lay unnoticed.
Suddenly he flicked his tail,
And a green-and-copper brightness
Ran under the water.

Out from under the reeds
Came the olive-green light,
And orange flashed up
Through the sun-thickened water.
So the fish passed across the pool,
Green and copper,
A darkness and a gleam,
And the blurred reflections of the willows on the opposite bank
Received it.

(From Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology © 2014 by Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press. Photo by Flickr user katdaned)

The Other Ukraine Votes

Close on the heels of a parliamentary election that handed a decisive victory to pro-Europe parties, separatist rebels held elections of their own this weekend in the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk:

Election organizers declared that rebel leaders Alexander Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky won sizable majorities in Donetsk and Luhansk respectively, reports Radio Free Europe. Both men have led rebel groups in the fight against the Ukrainian government in Kiev. But the elections have been controversial from the start, with Kiev and Western powers calling them a violation of a peace agreement drawn up in Minsk, Belarus, in early September. Under the Minsk agreement, Kiev would enact legislation that would grant Donetsk and Luhansk considerable autonomy, but under the auspices of Ukrainian law. Sunday’s elections do not comply with Ukrainian law, Kiev argues, and are therefore illegal.

Russia, predictably, endorsed the elections as legitimate today. Bershidsky notes just what a farce they were:

In Donetsk and Luhansk, people bring submachine guns to restaurants and polling stations alike. Since the rebels did not have access to electoral rolls, it was laughably easy to register as a voter. One woman apparently filled in the requisite questionnaires for a cow, putting down “Ear Tag MOO-123321, issued on 01.01.1998 by shepherd Semyon Ivanovich,” as identifying document, and received a number allowing her to cast a vote online. When the OSCE refused to observe the elections, a group calling itself the Association (or Agency, to hear its different members talk) for Security and Cooperation in Europe popped up conveniently and gave a press conference in Donetsk, praising the votes. The delegation consisted of far-right politicians from Austria, Belgium, Italy, France and several eastern European nations, as well as two Greek Stalinists.

But Linda Kinstler isn’t laughing:

The rebels, of course, claim that the elections were entirely legal under the provisions of the Minsk agreement. “It was said there [in the Minsk protocol] that we have the right to hold our own elections. The date was not specified,” Zakharchenko said on Sunday, RIA Novosti reports. It is abundantly evident that the Ukrainians had no plan for how exactly “early local elections in accordance with the Law of Ukraine” could possibly be held in rebel territory, just like it is also painfully clear that the government has no plan for how that territory will ever be re-integrated into the rest of the country.

Glenn Kates worries that the vote will embolden the separatists to escalate their conflict with Kiev:

Large swaths of separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine both blame Kyiv for the violence and hope their votes will bring stability to the region. But for the self-proclaimed separatist leadership and their backers in Moscow these two thoughts may paradoxically be a signal to continue fighting. Ukraine is unlikely to restore pension payments or energy provisions, which were cut off in the summer. Meanwhile, separatists will now have to back up the claims that they can govern without Kyiv by providing some of the resources that have been so sorely lacking. If claiming territories is seen as a way to do so and they believe any violence will be blamed on Kyiv, fighting, in a purely political sense, may not have a downside.

Sebastian Smith weighs Kiev’s options for dealing with the separatists at this point. As he sees it, the government can either choose to write off the breakaway regions and let them be Russia’s problem, or wage a costly war to restore control over them. Neither option is terribly palatable to Ukrainians:

Not many Ukrainians are ready for all-out war, says Glib Vyshlinsky, deputy director of GfK Ukraine marketing company in Kiev. “If you’re talking about fighting, with thousands of casualties being lost in order to win back these regions, then there is not support. Ukrainians are not such an imperial people as Russians and consensus will be against this,” he said. …

A GfK poll in September showed that 31 percent support a “bad peace,” including giving up some territory to Russia. Fifty four percent were for fighting on. One concrete sign that Ukraine’s government is preparing to sever at least some ties with the east is the suggestion from top ranking officials in recent days that gas supplies may be ended to rebel territories — which would turn to Russia for help. “Those announcements are trial balloons to test Russia,” said Taras Berezovets, head of Berta Communications in Kiev. “Russia doesn’t want to have to pay for Donbass.”

Florida’s Pot Polarization

Michael Ames fears Florida’s medical marijuana measure will fail tomorrow:

Florida was supposed to change the way the South thinks about medical marijuana. In late July, a full 88 percent of the state supported legalizing medical cannabis, and in early October 67 percent supported Amendment 2 specifically.* Instead, that wide margin has all but disappeared, and rather than join the 23 other states with similar laws on the books, the amendment appears to be bleeding support by the hour.

The governor’s race has hurt the amendment’s prospects:

Since it launched, Florida Republicans have suspected that [Amendment 2 backer John] Morgan’s campaign is actually an effort to pump voter turnout in an off-year election and help Crist eke out a win against incumbent Gov. Rick Scott.

Morgan denies he’s playing politics, telling the Tampa Tribune that he’s “not as smart or devious as they think I am.” And yet, when he hired a campaign manager, he picked Ben Pollara, an operative who describes himself as “one of the premier Democratic fundraisers in Florida.” Pollara served on President Obama’s 2012 National Finance Committee, was the state finance director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, and has represented Democrats including Sen. Bill Nelson, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

“It has not been a bipartisan campaign,” says Pollara. “The opposition has been run entirely by Republican operatives and funded by Republican mega-donors.”

Ben Jacobs hears much the same:

Morgan has long been a power player in Florida politics and is closely tied to Crist, the former Republican governor now running as a Democrat to lead the state again. Despite Morgan’s deep pockets and political clout, the medical marijuana initiative, which was once considered a shoo-in to become law, looks increasingly less likely to pass the 60 percent threshold.

The problem, according to some Morgan detractors, is that the vote has been less a referendum on cannabis and more a referendum on Morgan, who is funding the ballot measure.

Christopher Ingraham is unsure what will happen:

Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has poured $5 million of his own money into the opposition campaign, fueling it almost single-handedly. On the other hand supporters have raised about $8 million, roughly half of it from attorney John Morgan. While the fate of the other marijuana initiatives rests largely in the hands of young voters, Florida’s seniors may be the lynchpin here. Given the volatility of the polls it’s very difficult to predict how things will play out, but the 60 percent supermajority requirement represents a high bar for supporters of the measure.

Jon Walker looks at the latest polls:

The worst result is from the Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9/UF Graham Center poll. It found 46 percent of likely voters planning to vote for Amendment 2 and 43 percent planning to vote against it.

The PPP poll found the measure will win majority support but below the threshold. Their final poll had the ballot measure getting 53 percent of likely voters and 41 percent planning to vote against it. The remaining 6 percent is undecided. Even if all the undecided in this poll decided to vote for it the measure would still come up just short of 60 percent.

The best final poll was from the Florida Chamber of Commerce Political Institute poll, but even that found the measure with 55 percent support to 40 percent opposed. Again just short of the very high threshold needed.

Lose Some, Win Some

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No, this is not a story from the Onion: a monument to Steve Jobs in St Petersburg has been taken down in the wake of Tim Cook’s acknowledgment that he is gay. That’s how psychotic Russia’s state-sanctioned homophobia is:

Citing the need to abide by a law combating “gay propaganda,” the companies called ZEFS [who built the monument] said in a statement on Monday that the memorial had been removed on Friday — the day after Apple CEO Tim Cook penned a piece about being gay. “In Russia, gay propaganda and other sexual perversions among minors are prohibited by law,” ZEFS said, noting that the memorial had been “in an area of direct access for young students and scholars … After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was taken down to abide to the Russian federal law protecting children from information promoting denial of traditional family values,” ZEFS statement said.

Meanwhile, in the US, a thaw between some gay Christians and the Southern Baptists is detectable. At a recent SBC conference, a small group from both sides actually had a conversation in person:

“What’s significant is not the content of the meetings, but that there were meetings at all,” said Justin Lee, executive director of The Gay Christian Network. “It allowed us to humanize one another and form relationships.” Mr. Walker and more than a dozen Southern Baptists and gay-rights advocates gathered in a suite to have a conversation. The meeting “exceeded both sides’ expectations as far as cheerfulness, friendliness and authenticity of the conversation,” Walker said. “There’s greater respect all around. We disagreed, but we disagreed very well.” The personal meetings “help defy caricature,” he added.

Pete Wehner also points to a friendly meeting between SBC macher Al Mohler and the wonderful Matthew Vines. Put this together with the unprecedented outreach to gay Catholics by Pope Francis and there’s real reason to hope.