There is no doubt that this campaign season is already off to a very partisan and negative start. Add that to congressional approval ratings and trust in government being at historical lows.
What does this equal?
Time for a real change in the way government functions and an end to the divisive attitude on Capitol Hill. The good thing is a grassroots movement is already happening.
No Labels is a group whose message is simple…”Not Left. Not Right. Forward.” They have offered a 2012 Make Congress Work plan, which consists of twelve simple and straightforward proposals to break gridlock, promote constructive discussion, and reduce polarization in Congress.
Nearly 500,000 citizens have already supported the plan at NoLabels.Org and the first measure of the plan “No Budget, No Pay” is set for a United States Senate Hearing on March 7, 2012 in front of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. Its been over 1000 days since Congress passed a budget resolution!
The “No Budget, No Pay” solution is the only one of the twelve proposals that requires new legislation and its premise is simple, If Congress fails in its paramount responsibility to enact a federal budget, they wouldn’t get paid and if they are late they won’t get back pay. The bill already has bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and has been endorsed by Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.
Read the rest of… Jason Grill: Time for a Change on Capitol Hill
It does bring him closer to the nomination, due in no small part to his uncanny good fortune. Let’s review.
The woman who rose meteorically to take the Iowa straw poll collapsed upon the entrance of a governor who offered the veneer of tea party rhetoric as strident as hers, but had the backing of mega-donors from the state with more Republican money than any other outside California.
That governor, who was thought to be his leading conservative opponent, turned out to have spent about as much time preparing for the campaign as my students spend preparing for pop quizzes.
When the governor’s lack of preparation became obvious, he was replaced briefly as the national frontrunner by a former pizza executive who made the governor look like Thomas Jefferson.
When the pizza exec showed himself to be completely unfamiliar with some of the most basic facts of foreign policy, and an impressively lecherous fellow to boot, a new frontrunner emerged, one whose national favorable ratings were lower than Nixon’s during impeachment. This man had a record of personal behavior that John Edwards might have been ashamed of combined with an unmatched proclivity to self-destruct, and he proceeded to do so in short order.
The former senator who rose in Iowa at the last moment to replace him as frontrunner had raised less than $1M at the time of his ascent, and lacked any semblance of national campaign infrastructure.
But to Romney’s great good fortune, the man less popular than an impeached Nixon regained enough momentum in the ensuing weeks to ensure that the previous man could not build on his Iowa victory – a victory which was, to Romney’s even greater good fortune, not made official until weeks later, dramatically reducing its impact.
I challenge even the most imaginative journalist or satirist in the nation to conjure another scenario by which the anti-Romney majority could have been so improbably failed to unite.
In some alternate universe, President Obama follows up on his reform of healthcare and financial regulations by pivoting to an overhaul of public education in the United States. Instead of spending 2011 on the predictable, partisan ground of raising upper income taxes while growth is weak, Obama might have spent the year making a case that a vibrant economy demands a skilled, advanced workforce and that our outdated method of educating our children is inadequate to the challenge.
Alas, that is not the reality we live in. Obama’s signature plan of incentivizing states to embrace their own reforms, The Race to The Top, is being nibbled to irrelevance; rather than spending political capital to revamp No Child Left Behind, the administration is following the easy course of killing it softly with waivers; charter schools have gone two straight State of the Union addresses without being mentioned; and if the president believes that the stratification in the quality of our schools from one zip code to another is a major contributor to income inequality, he has scarcely said so.
Had Obama adopted education reform as an agenda item, he would have profited from the Republican inertia on the subject. Whether it was Rick Perry on the days he remembered his pledge to abolish the Department of Education, or Newt Gingrich promising to downsize the department to a clipping service for inventorying data, or Mitt Romney trotting out old rhetoric about “local control”, the GOP presidential field has been one long yawn on the notion of education as a public priority.
It’s a bipartisan omission that signifies the power of each party’s political base. For Obama, bold action on educational accountability seems to be a casualty of a post debt-ceiling reelection strategy that is base reinforcement all the time. On the right, denigrating the public sector is easier work than laying out a foundation to make its elements, including education, more productive.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: Obama’s Education Downfall
Race has played an underlying role in most national elections since former President Martin Van Buren ran on the Free-Soil ticket in 1848, splitting Democratic candidate Lewis Cass’s vote in New York State and helping facilitate the victory of pro-states rights Whig General Zachary Taylor.
The role of race receded briefly in the post-Reconstruction era, as the Democratic Party snubbed blacks and the Republicans essentially ignored them for decades, in the wake of the Compromise of 1877.
FDR had an interest in suppressing Democratic divisions on race throughout the 1930s in order to push his New Deal agenda. But race came roaring back in the 1940s, as Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats split from incumbent Democrat Harry Truman in 1948 to form a third (actually, fourth) party that year. Since then, racial issues have been salient in nearly every election.
In 1960, JFK’s call to Coretta Scott King helped him win approximately two-thirds of the black vote, despite that fact that there was no real difference between his position and Nixon’s on civil rights. In 1964, civil rights was perhaps the primary issue cleavage, as Goldwater was staunchly opposed to the 1964 CRA pushed by LBJ, and consequently carried only his home state + the Deep South. In 1968 and 1972, Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was premised on the white backlash against the civil rights movement. In 1980, Reagan went to Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1963, to kick off his 1980 general election bid and proclaimed that “the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in this year’s Republican Party platform.” In 1988, Wille Horton became a household name. In 1992, Clinton successfully walked the racial tightrope: he signaled that he would not be co-opted by Jesse Jackson and, by proxy, the party’s African-American base by dissing Jackson via Sister Souljah at the Rainbow Coalition convention, but reassured blacks that he would “mend, not end” affirmative action. In 2000, Bush deftly alluded to race in his bid for suburban women (and perhaps a sprinkling of blacks) by decrying the “soft bigotry of low expectations that plagued urban schools. And in 2008…well, you know.
Read the rest of… Jeff Smith: Race Has Always Been An Election Issue
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Feb 7, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET
While the RP has recently been stirring the pot with pieces on highly controversial issues such as legalizing marijuana, expanded gaming, and Tim Tebow, he now addresses an idea that should have nearly-universal support: Cutting Congressional pay when they fail to pass a budget. Read this except from his piece today in The Huffington Post:
A thousand days.
In our gazelle-paced, über-networked society, so many remarkable, epochal events have taken place during the last thousand days:
Both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street emerged as powerful rebuttals to the status quo in American politics…
The Arab Spring ushered in a domino effect that toppled vicious dictators across the Middle East…
A handful of European democracies teetered on the brink of collapse, while world powers rushed to preserve the global economy…
And most significant of all…Two Kardahsian weddings were followed by one Kardashian divorce.
But one critical thing has not occured:
It’s been more than one thousand days since the U.S. Congress passed a budget resolution.
And in the meantime, the congressional appropriations process – the means by which all federal spending is authorized and allocated – has simply broken down. During the current fiscal year, only 3 of the 12 regular appropriations bills have been passed.
Sound like a lot of inside the Beltway jargon?
Here’s what it means:
When Congress acts without a budget, it essentially is spending taxpayer money without first evaluating and prioritizing its services. A budget, in essence, is a blueprint that allows us as a nation to make deliberate decisions on how to allocate our scarce resources. Without one, taxpayers are forced to pick up the tab for the waste and inefficiencies.
When Congress fails to pass spending bills on time, it relies instead on temporary spending measures. In the past fiscal year, there were eight such temporary “continuing resolutions.” This start-and-stop spending process causes havoc for federal agencies that provide for our national defense, transportation financing, education support, environmental protection, and product and food safety. Government is forced to operate in a fog of financial uncertainty, resulting sometimes in delays of critical national services.
But guess who’s been paid right on time, like a Swiss clock, during this entire thousand day period?
No need for a spoiler alert: It’s just too delicious an irony…the U.S. Congress.
Click here to read the entire piece, “No Budget? No Pay!” at The Huffington Post.
So obviously a lot can happen between now and November.
War with Iran, European collapse, cat breading craze leads to chronic bread shortages, etc etc.
But first of all, what’s the fun of talking about politics if you aren’t willing to make wild predictions based on insufficient data?
Second, I thought about citing swing state data showing the President in a stronger position and talking about the many paths he has to victory but really, just consider the choice between this guy and this guy. There’s really no comparison.
A few reactions to the many good insights on this thread:
Because the participants on this thread are all people who love the lore of politics, and are embarrasingly steeped in its historical trivia, we all tend too much toward analogy: so all of us, myself included, strain to determine whether this year is 1980 (enough political instability that Reagan’s liabilities, much greater than they seem now, didn’t matter) or 1972 or 1984 (vulnerable incumbent ends up winning big because of internecine strife in the other camp, and because big events (Vietnam winds down, Nixon goes to China in 72,) (a roaring economic recovery in 84) changed the equation. I’ll venture one way, though, in which this cycle has no comparison: for the first time in memory, the country seems polarized and split so closely that for two years and seven months, an incumbent president’s approval ratings have essentially stayed static, no matter what good or bad news is cluttering his in-box.
This is my first post, and first contribution to The Recovering Politician. I believe having run for office and taking the time to step back and examine our experiences, gives us a unique and significant insight into how politics really works. Thank you for allowing me to be part of this with all of you.
On to the debate!
As a Democrat, I can’t say I would mind if a drawn-out primary helped our party in the general election. Yet objectively, I do see potential advantages for the GOP. The Obama campaign might be happy about this right now, but they would be committing political malpractice if they don’t anticipate possible advantages for the GOP, and prepare for them. So here are some points to consider:
Read the rest of… The RPs Debate the GOP Mudfest: Jimmy Dahroug Rebuts
Ron Granieri is correct that I’m a passionate Marxist, but he’s got the wrong Marx brother. I prefer Groucho. (Karl’s the mute with the curly hair, right?)
Speaking of farcical comedy, with his shocking Romney endorsement, have we seen the last of Donald Trump’s involvement in Campaign 2012? OK, just kidding.
But seriously folks…I hesitate to respond to Ron Granieri’s latest piece because frankly I don’t understand his big words, French references and elite, ivory-tower sophistry. (or is it sapphistry?) I am, after all, just an ordinary, unfrozen caveman lawyer.
Read the rest of… The RPs Debate the GOP Mudfest: The RP Responds
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Feb 6, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
The difference between liberals and conservatives….
My son found out recently that Sony Bono was a Republican member of Congress and wanted to to know more about him and his prior career.
I’m showing him the clip at the bottom of this post which I think demonstrates beautifully the core distinction between conservatives and liberals—a national obsession that, to me, seems blown out of proportion and even arbitrary.
Basically, if you boil down all the differences between to the two political types, liberals are slightly superior in the areas of fashion sense and rhythm (see Cher).
Conservatives, by contrast, are slightly more task oriented and better at getting elected to Congress. (See Sonny).
That’s really about it.
Oh, and liberals and conservatives tend to marry each other.
And when the try, can even make a pretty catchy duet.
There is no doubt that this campaign season is already off to a very partisan and negative start. Add that to congressional approval ratings and trust in government being at historical lows.
Nearly 500,000 citizens have already supported the plan at NoLabels.Org and the first measure of the plan “No Budget, No Pay” is set for a United States Senate Hearing on March 7, 2012 in front of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. Its been over 1000 days since Congress passed a budget resolution!
It does bring him closer to the nomination, due in no small part to his uncanny good fortune. Let’s review.
