Failure to ‘rush' to judgment hurts GOP

On February 29^th Rush Limbaugh trained his heavy artillery on the testimony of Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law student, before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. She had testified in favor of mandated health coverage for contraceptives.  He did so during one of his weekly broadcasts of the Rush Limbaugh Show that airs on the radio.

Mr. Limbaugh called Ms Fluke a slut, a prostitute, and a feminazi.  He defines feminazis as persons for whom the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur.  Mr. Limbaugh also called upon Ms Fluke to videotape her sexual encounters and post them on the Internet.

Since then, Mr. Limbaugh has aired an apology of sorts saying; “I chose the wrong words in my analogy.”  President Obama has called Ms. Fluke and expressed his personal regret over what she has had to endure.  And, given the fact that these events occurred during the run-up to the GOP Super Tuesday primaries, several of the Republicans have also commented.  The front-runner, Mitt Romney, has said, “I won’t weigh in on that particular controversy.”

But what people say, or choose not to say, has consequences.  And in this case the consequences are likely to be far-reaching and profound. 

When Rush speaks many listen.  His broadcast is the highest rated radio program in America.  In November of 2008 a poll by Zogby International found that Rush Limbaugh was the most trusted news personality in the nation.  Mr. Limbaugh’s bombastic persona has catapulted him into a place of prominence, influence, and great wealth.  He attended Southeast Missouri State University for a couple of years, but dropped out.  According to his mother, “he flunked everything.”  But the absence of much formal education has not stood in the way of his ability to amass great wealth.  In 2008 he signed an 8-year contract for his syndicated radio show that was worth $400 million dollars.

And there can be little doubt that Mr. Limbaugh revels in his ability to cast a giant and foreboding shadow over the landscape of the Republican Party.  That shadow has helped convince him that he can do no wrong.  But, of course, like all of us, he has feet of clay just as the Prophet Daniel said of King Nebuchadnezzar.

But in this matter Mr. Limbaugh is small potatoes.  He’s an unrepentant misogynist who will never comprehend the obligations that his privileged position demand of his behavior.  After all, he’s learned that regurgitating hatred inflates his ratings and feeds his cash cow.

But the larger matter here is how the Republican Party has chosen to deal with this matter.  Recall Mr. Romney’s dismissive comment, “I won’t weigh in on that particular controversy.”  What’s he really saying?  He’s saying, given the choice between crossing Rush’s bow and defending Ms. Fluke, he’s with Rush.  His response is morally offensive, disgusting, and politically stupid.  It’s driven by fear that angering Mr. Limbaugh might have deleterious consequences for him as he staggers toward the GOP nomination.  His words provide us with a chilling insight into his character. 

But more than that, his words demonstrate that he is oblivious to the political damage to his quest for the Presidency that he has inflicted upon himself.  All women, and many men too, have been sickened by Mr. Limbaugh’s outburst.  Moreover, most of those women, and men, are going to vote this November.

And you can count on the fact that the Obama Campaign will remind the nation this fall about Mr. Limbaugh’s tirade and Mr. Romney’s cowardice. 

Suburban women are one of the most pivotal voting blocks in the America.  How they vote can be determinative in electoral rich, swing states like Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida.

Since the next crucial primary is in Illinois this coming Tuesday, let’s take a look at the Land of Lincoln. Understanding how Illinois will vote in a Presidential election is straightforward.  The City of Chicago will vote Democratic.  The small towns and farms downstate will vote Republican.  The balance hangs in the “Collar Counties”, Will, Kane, DuPage, McHenry, and Lake, which surround Chicago.

Here you have middle class and affluent families who have traditionally been more Republican, than Democratic.  These voters are overwhelmingly conservative on fiscal and economic issues, yet moderate to liberal on social and cultural issues.  And this bias toward moderation on social issues is especially prevalent among these suburban women.

Once reminded of Mr. Limbaugh’s vitriol and Mr. Romney’s fearful acquiescence to it, they will take their revenge at the polls on November 6^th.  If Mitt Romney becomes the GOP standard bearer, his character flaw will bury him and the GOP next fall.  Stupid is as stupid does.

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For the GOP, it's game over, pal

In 1964 the Republican Party lurched far to the right and nominated Barry Goldwater for President.  Remember his battle cry—A Choice, Not An Echo?  Goldwater carried his home state of Arizona and only five other states in the deep South.  His humiliating defeat reminds us that Presidential elections are won in the middle and lost at the extremes. It's a lesson that zealots at both ends of our political spectrum are incapable of learning.

Although the characters and the plot line are different now, the same sort of self-destructive scenario is unfolding for the Republicans. On Super Tuesday Romney underperformed everywhere.  Whether he can amass enough delegates to win the nomination in the remaining primaries, remains problematic.

We are witnessing the disintegration of the Republican Party. The puzzle pieces of this GOP nightmare include, the Presidency of George W. Bush, the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, and how those forces now threaten the viability of the GOP. 

After eight years of George W. Bush, Barack Obama waltzed into the White House over the scorched-earth policies of Bush and his GOP allies on Capitol Hill.  Together they exuberantly turned their back on traditional Republican values and raced out upon the thin ice of adventurism abroad and fiscal profligacy at home.

Bush and his inner sanctum of Neo-Con, foreign policy advisers created the concept of PREVENTIVE WAR and then attacked the wrong country, Iraq. Iraq was not a player in the 9/11 attack.  It had no significant connection with al-Qaeda. The price that has been paid in blood and treasure for that miscalculation has been incalculable.  Domestically Bush and the GOP coupled a radical policy of tax reductions with a spending spree. In addition, they did not anticipate the bursting of the economic bubble and subsequent economic meltdown that began in 2007.

Blunders of this magnitude do not go unpunished. And in 2008 the electorate rewarded the Democrats with a clean sweep of the levers of power in Washington.  President Obama had campaigned on changing Washington politics.  But he failed to deliver on the promise.  Immediately after taking office his approach to the economic stimulus legislation and health care reform gave new meaning to polarization as the Democrats rammed through their bills with no bipartisan support. The arrogance of one-party rule gave birth to a national uprising—the Tea Party.

In 2010 The Democrats lost control of the House and saw their margin narrowed in the Senate.  Ironically, however, the ascendancy of the Tea Party with its overly simplistic notion that Washington's problems can be fixed by gutting the relatively small discretionary portion of the Federal budget has taken the polarization and poisonous passion of Washington politics to an all new level.

The simplistic and mindless nostrums of the Tea Party are reminiscent of the Republicans of   a half century ago who nominated Barry Goldwater without any inkling of the onrushing debacle. 

The compelling evidence of what's coming now is abundantly obvious in the bizarre battle for the GOP presidential nomination.  The fragility of the nation's economy, unacceptably high unemployment, skyrocketing debt, and Obama's inexperience are more than enough to make him vulnerable.  Yet the Republicans seeking to oust him are a joke.

It comes down to a choice between the front runner, Mitt Romney, who has been running for President since 2007  and still can't connect with average Americans or articulate a specific set of proposals that would deal with the nation's massive problems, or the three remaining willing hostages of the zealots—Santorum, Gingrich and Paul. 

Instead of setting forth proposals to turn the economy around, create jobs, reform the broken tax system, achieve energy independence, reform immigration, and revitalize education, Romney has embarrassed himself statements like:  “Corporations are people too; My wife drives a couple of Cadillacs; and I like to be able to fire people.”  Statements like these would be a blockbuster opening for a Romney monologue on SNL, but on the campaign trail they're devastating.  Romney's strategy of carpet bombing his opponents with negative ads exposes the barrenness of his quest.

Barring some cataclysmic externality between now and November 6^th, the GOP is going nowhere fast. More than three dozen Tea Party freshmen were elected from districts that Obama carried in 2008.  Many of them are about to learn the meaning of Satchel Paige's best aphorism—don't look back, something might be gaining on you. 

If you step outside your front door and listen really, really hard, you can just barely hear what sounds like laughter.  It is laughter, and it's coming from the White House. The once proud and vibrant Republican party is about to hand Obama his second free pass to the Presidency. 

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My readers may also be interested in the following Washington Post Article.

"One super PAC takes aim at incumbents of any party"

THE LUCK OF THE IRISH

The President was in Ireland last May reaffirming his Irish roots. He visited the tiny town of Moneygall in County Offaly.  It had been the home of his great-great-great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney.  Perhaps it’s his Irish heritage that explains the phenomenal luck that has over the past two decades taken him from Chicago to Springfield, to the Senate and now the White House.

His first opportunity to seek elective office came in 1994 when Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer announced she would vacate her seat.

Obama and four others filed for the seat in 1995. But, as luck would have it, one of them withdrew and the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners disqualified the other three. Unopposed for the nomination, Obama won the general election with 82% of the vote in the heavily Black district on the Southside of Chicago.

Although he was twice reelected to the State Senate, Obama’s legislative record in Springfield was meager. Perhaps best remembered is the fact that 129 times he voted “present”, rather than aye or nay on legislation.

The best way to understand his lackluster record as a State Senator is to realize that his real agenda was to seek higher office.  In 1999, not long after taking office as a state senator, he announced his candidacy for the U.S. House seat then held by Bobby Rush.  That effort failed. 

But Obama never lost sight of his goal to move up.  In July of 2002, 21 months before the upcoming Primary election, he launched his bid for the U.S. Senate seat then held by Republican Peter Fitzgerald. 

As luck would have it, in 2004 Fitzgerald chose not to seek reelection.  Obama handily won the Democratic nomination and Jack Ryan won the GOP nomination.  Then Lady Luck struck again. Within three months Ryan withdrew from the race, as a sex scandal overwhelmed him. Three months later the Illinois Republican State Central Committee selected former diplomat Alan Keyes, a carpetbagger from Maryland, as a token replacement.  Obama annihilated him.

Within two years after having been sworn into the U.S. Senate, Obama announced his candidacy for the Presidency.  From then until he won the White House in 2008 he was on the campaign trail. He was a Senator in name only.

However, he needed a lot more luck and he got it.  Few expected that his candidacy was more than a place marker for the future.  After all, Senator Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination seemed inevitable. But Clinton’s hubris and her failure to campaign in the caucus states put her in an unrecoverable position.

Having secured the nomination, Obama then caught the best break of all, running against a Republican party that had destroyed itself over the preceding eight years of the Bush Administration.  The country was fed up with Bush’s war in Iraq and the economic bubble had burst.

His campaign brilliantly promised to change the way Washington works.  That promise was stillborn. The economy, while improving, is still dangerously fragile.  Millions remain unemployed.  His Afghan surge strategy has not worked.  The structural debt that threatens America’s economic future grows worse. We are nowhere on issues like energy independence, immigration reform and tax reform. And remember that during his first two years as President, the Democrats controlled all of the levers of power in Washington.

Previous Administrations facing these kinds of headwinds have been sent packing by the American people.  Think Hoover in 32, Nixon in 60, Ford in 76, Carter in 80, and Bush in 92.

Incredibly, Obama has mastered politics, but has never taken the time to learn how to govern.  Neither the bully pulpit nor Capitol Hill works like a University of Chicago lecture hall. 

So is his house of cards about to crumble?  Perhaps.  But you can’t beat somebody with nobody, and the Republican Party is now racing toward oblivion at light speed.  Obliterated by the voters in 2006 and 2008, the GOP has reinvented itself by charging to the far right. The Tea Party leads this suicidal Charge of the Light Brigade.  Can you imagine what Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan would say about the transmogrification of the GOP?

When the votes are tabulated this November, a jubilant Obama should invite the Tea Party to the White House and thank them.  For them it will be condign punishment.  That’s a task he’s up to.

Two years ago President Obama told Diane Sawyer on ABC World News, “I’d rather be a really good one-term President, than a mediocre two-term President”. The truth is that Barack Obama has never had a good first term.

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