A Win Either Way

Since November 7th - or at the latest, November 8th - it's looked almost like a rush for the exits by the under-50 GOP crowd. The appearance, at least, is that moderate conservatism is tentatively poking its head back out from the shadows where it's been hiding since sometime during the second Bush administration. Voices of inclusion in the form of Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, and Kelly Ayotte are moving hard and fast to distance their party from the ultra-divisive 2012 campaign, as George P. Bush, who by all accounts will not be one to pander exclusively to the angry, white Right, begins stretching out for his first run for public office.

Could this be a younger, ethnically-diverse faction of Republicans vying to wrest control of the party from the sneering, Randian plutocrats who just crashed and burned so spectacularly with the entire world looking on? One can certainly hope so, and that they mean business. If it is true, and they have their way, the GOP could be on the verge of a major makeover, and it's one that the Left can give itself a share of credit for by virtue of the swift kick in the ass it delivered a little over a week ago. 

If only as a thought experiment, let's go with this for a minute. Let's assume that Karl Rove will now be put out to pasture, and the hard, Tea Party Right will become marginalized (stop laughing, I said this was a thought experiment). No matter what happens, Republicans will still be Republicans. We’re still going to fight over things like marginal tax rates, government regulation, and the ongoing fight against terrorism, and you can count on it getting nasty at times. But as we put pen to paper and list the changes we might be looking at, it becomes clear that the Left will have won a great deal more just than the White House. It will have conquered wide swaths of territory in the war of ideas.

By their own comments, these newly-minted moderates sound willing to let up on the DREAM Act (or some approximation of it) and marriage equality; mend fences with African-Americans; turn down the volume on its assault on women’s reproductive rights and opposition to equal pay for equal work, and mute its opposition to affordable healthcare and higher education.

If all of that is true, then the electorate will have succeeded in pulling the Republican Party back into the mainstream - where both parties belong if all we get is two to choose from - and the Democrats can rightly claim that as their victory, since the message they ran against in this cycle was one of such vitriolic opposition to their own. Of course, if this emergent, moderate branch of the GOP is crushed or silenced by the recalcitrant elements of the party, and the status quo as personified by Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Eric Cantor is maintained, then the Democrats can likely look forward to further victories at the polls. In other words, they win either way.

So much for thought experiments. Whatever is or is not going to happen, it's going to take time, and we have more immediate distractions to keep us entertained. How long will the secessionist Texas Tantrum go on before it cries itself out and falls asleep? Which will it be, Mr. Nugent, jail or death? And Mr. Obama, now that the other guys are out of the way, we'd like to have a chat with you about Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and the Drug War. But in the end, if the end result of the 2012 election is a return to sanity by the Republican Party, then that will be a victory for us all.

Sandra Fluke Was No Fluke (or, Great Moments in Political Judo)

Post-election post mortems continue to roll this week, as steady and as numerous as waves on the beach. Mostly from the pundit class and the losing side, we’re given one reason after another for what was to many the wholly unexpected reelection of Barack Obama to the presidency.

Boiling the arguments down to their base elements, the crystal that’s left rattling in the bottom of the pan is math. Sane budget math and demographic vectors for the left, and zero-sum “free stuff” for the right. As a fully-disclosed, unabashed member of the Center Left, I tend to believe the former set of arguments. The Obama juggernaut pushed its message of sensible math to an electorate that was calculated and motivated to a degree that has never before been achieved in the electoral process, and the results are not up for debate.

What’s been missed in all of the post-game wrap-up, however, was a game-changing maneuver that was not about math at all, but rather, about judo. Judo, you’ll recall, is the art of defeating an opponent in combat by using his energy and momentum against him, and early in the campaign, while the travelling horror show that was the Republican primaries was still crisscrossing the country, the Obama administration seized an opportunity to employ a deft maneuver that sent the Right reeling and flailing, all the way to November.

A quick review of the “free stuff” that the Right now laments as bringing about their downfall fails to reveal much actual free stuff: A path to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants? Hard for one writer sitting in a New York City mid-rise to quantify, but the first thing that comes to mind is an expanded tax base for the Federal government as more documented workers add their payroll taxes to the revenue stream. Education? Affordable, but not free. Healthcare? Again, affordable, but not free. The only free thing that can be readily identified in the list of Republican complaints is mandatory free birth control for women.

As a lefty who looks forward to the day when single-payer coverage becomes a reality, I have no objection to free birth control. But even I had to stop and do a double-take when the administration announced its birth control policy under Obamacare. Free contraception? Why not free Tums to start with? Why something as inflammatory as birth control, and how did a staunchly Catholic institution like Georgetown University become the first battleground selected for the inevitable fight over it?

For maybe five minutes, perhaps as many as 10, I thought the administration had made a major blunder, providing its enemies with a stockpile of munitions to use against it. Then, however, the light bulb flickered on above my head. Team Obama knew exactly what it was doing.

As the Sandra Fluke saga unfolded, the howls of protest burst forth as one might have expected,  an explosion of pent-up hostility as an institution so deeply rooted in Catholic dogma as Georgetown was told abruptly to set aside one of Catholicism’s most deeply-held tenets - that contraception is a mortal sin - and actually fund it for their female employees. Within days, the administration had backed away from its demand that Catholic institutions cover the cost of something they find so repugnant, and announced that the government would instead pick those costs up themselves. The damage, however, had already been done. Not to the administration, mind you, but to the right-wing cause.

The entry of the Sandra Fluke affair into the national conversation was the equivalent of whacking the hornets’ nest with a baseball bat, or the first explosion in a string of shaped charges that would collapse the bridge that Team Romney had hoped to build.

Every anti-choice, evangelical pastor or candidate for office came screaming out of the woodwork, and stayed out. Rush Limbaugh barreled predictably into the fray with cries of “slut”, and Rick Santorum said, with mics open and cameras running, that contraception was “not OK”. The arguments being made about contraception, free or otherwise, had nothing to do with economics of the policy, and everything to do with either religious doctrine, or simple non-sectarian slut-shaming.

The die was cast, and now Mitt Romney – then trailing in the polls, but knowing as well as anyone that he was the nominee-in-waiting – was forced to choose between repudiating the spittle-infused hate rhetoric spraying from the far right of his party, or take the high road and use the uproar as his own Sista Soulja moment.

Whatever we didn't know about Mitt Romney from beginning to end of the 2012 campaign, we knew one thing for certain: He wanted to be president, and would say anything to anyone on any topic to get there. It was a noxious wind that blew through the primary season, one that the charitable side of my own nature would like to believe that even Romney, in his deepest reflections, found repugnant, but he was fixated on his goal, and he’d worked too hard toward it already to set a new course. So, while not hoisting all sails and catching the full force of the tempest like Santorum and Newt Gingrich, he didn't navigate out of it, either, and was carried along on the periphery of the storm.

Meanwhile, I imagine Team Obama sitting back with folded arms to watch their handiwork unfold… and smiling.

From the Fluke affair onward, the election was, irretrievably, not simply about the economy anymore. The evangelical far right had been unleashed once again, and there was no forcing the genie back in the bottle. Self-proclaimed, small-government conservatives were flushed out as favoring government intrusion directly into the bodies of American women, and their hard incursions against women’s liberty were met with an equally-powerful backlash, all the way from compulsory transvaginal ultrasounds to the Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock debacles toward the end of the campaign.

With the Romney campaign’s refusal to fully repudiate Akin and Mourdock entirely, rather than simply distance himself from their comments about rape, the Republican Party was rightfully smeared with the far right’s filth, permanently blunting, along with Romney’s own obfuscations and secretiveness, the impact of the GOP message of its definition of fiscal responsibility, and the rest is, as they say, history, the final tally of women voters telling the tale.

As historians parse this election, in which the first African-American president was elected to a second term – a historically significant event in its own right – despite a sluggish economy and a high rate of unemployment, they’ll do well to note that the first significant turn of this election was not the first debate, not Superstorm Sandy, nor was it Santa Claus handing out free… something… to poor people, but a brilliantly-executed piece of political judo.

UPDATE: In fishing for links to this piece, I've come across some evidence that some on the right knew they were being punked. What a frustrating feeling that must have been to watch helplessly as it played out...