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myxomat0s1s · 25 days

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Schoolhouse Rankings: Part 2

The 11 Where It Starts To Get Good

Symbol key: ⭐"big one" most popular song of the season 🟩highest ranking song of the season 🟥lowest ranking song of the season ⚡seizure warning! prevalent flashing lights 👍i have an interesting fact to share ✖multiplication rock 🇺🇲america 🖥computer💲money 🖋grammar 🧪science

38. 🇺🇲I'm Gonna Send Your Vote to College👍

The 30th anniversary special of Schoolhouse Rock! And it's... alright. Like, I'm not a huge fan, and I can honestly see why it's so commonly put in people's bottom fives. It's a bit tough to pinpoint why it's so middle-of-the-road, but when I think about it, that's because everything's off. The instrumental is good, but the rest is shaky. Jack Sheldon's delivery is stilted and at times offbeat, and you can tell in his voice he's aging. I forgot to mention it in Presidential Minute, and it was especially bad in that song. The animation is also pretty stiff sometimes. The biggest flaw in this song, though, is there's too much going on. There's so many sound effects and prominent characters and random shit going on that it's really muddled. I hear that complaint all the time with Busy Prepositions(more on that later), but I think it's worse here because no one and nothing is really introduced, everything sort of just meanders in a well-meaning but clumsy way. That's not to say this short is devoid of good qualities, though; I find Boothy endearing as fuck. Like, besides Scooter and Mr. Chips, he's the first leading guy I actually really vibe with. I would get him confused with Bill all the time when I was little, which is weird because they're very dissimilar in a lot of aspects, but I knew what was going on as a kid because I liked him then too. He also has a couple of really smoothly animated moments, such as when he pulls the screen back like a curtain with his little hook. I will say, it really does drum up hype for the 30th anniversary, becaue it's big and overwhelming and bloated. Grandiose and indulgent, maybe a little too much so, but still. My last comment is that this song was the only one of the entire series that taught me literally nothing as a kid. It's not like I straight up didn't remember it like Tax Man Max, but I watched it several times and had no damn idea what the electoral college was afterwards. I don't know if that's just because it's a tough concept to explain to children, or if it really did fail to educate, or if I was just a stupid child, but even nowadays I think how they explain it is a little confusing. It really get swept up in the clutteredness of the rest of the song. A whirlwind, for sure.

-Fun fact! This is the only song in Schoolhouse Rock to consistently go over the three minute limit. All Scooter Computer episodes are three minutes minus their intros, and Three Is A Magic Number and My Hero, Zero, while initially being more than three minutes, were cut down due to false information and time constraints respectively. Since this episode wasn't aired on TV, it was able to go over three minutes.

37. 🖋Lolly Lolly Lolly Get Your Adverbs🟥

Very quaint setting, and I enjoy the premise. The adverbs store makes for some elaborate visuals despite the limited color palette. I also enjoy the little interludes between verses where the owners film their TV commercials, very cute. A classic in these aspects, but oh god the chipmunk vocals… I initially didn’t find them too annoying, but they wear horribly quickly. Don’t even care how packed and fun the lyrics are because I just dislike the vocals so damn much. The characters also aren’t too compelling, which holds it back further because I honestly don’t care much for the Lolly family. Finally, I’ve heard lots of people praise the instrumental, but I don’t quite get it, as it’s sort of just the standard Schoolh

-Lowest placement in Grammar Rock

36. 🖋A Noun Is a Person, Place, or Thing

I heard someone describe this song as "harmless" once, and yeah, that's a good way of summing it up. It's definitely one of the most generic Schoolhouse Rock songs. It does not instill much emotion, but it's definitely not bad! In fact, I think this is where the songs start truly getting good. It's pretty breezy and blows by quick. There's some cool instruments used, like when you can hear kazoo in the Mrs. Jones verse, or a flute in the ferry verse. It's dynamic enough to be praised, but not so dymanic that it's truly standout. Animation is simple, but not great or bad. The characters are okay. Those are both middle of the road. I will say, this is one of Lynn Ahren's best deliveries. I'm not a big fan of most of her songs, or at least most of her deliveries, but I like this more relaxed one from her. She's not pushing herself too hard, and that's good for a song like this. That's really it, it's good, but not great enough to stand out from the crowd.

35. 🧪A Victim of Gravity 🟥👍

This song would probably be higher up if I was a fan of the doo-wop style it goes for. It really does sound nice, don't get me wrong, but this is probably the only song very heavily skewed based on preference. Your mileage may vary. It's a pretty fun animation though! Like, really, I don't have much on this song besides that the greaser guy is fun and the rest is not for me.

-Fun fact! This is the only Schoolhouse Rock song to be primarily sung by a preexisting band- Performed by The Tokens -Lowest placement in Science Rock

34. 💲Walkin' On Wall Street

Another entry from newcomer Money Rock, Walkin’ On Wall Street has a few attributes that are nice, but don’t do too much to set it apart from the crowd. The most obvious thing is the artstyle; I love how experimental they got with the SHR art style in this season, and this is one of the more radical changes that goes over pretty darn well. I like Lester and Leroy, they’rw a fun duo, and the newsboy is fun although mor as iconic as Fireworks’ newsboy. The instrumental is nice and jazzy, and that’s about the end of my praise. Dave Frishburg has a distinct voice when he wants to. In his other song, $7.50 Once a Week, he’s got a nice Bostonian accent that makes the way he stretches his words more interesting, but he supresses not just that, but also a lot of his range. He doesn’t have much of one in his other appearances, but $7.50 had a lot more variety in his tones. Same with instrumentals. Not to compare too much, but it never changes a lot and it’s a little boring when lots of other songs from Money Rock have better style. The style points from the animation are big helps, but it falls a little short sonically, and since that’s what I’m mostly basing this on, this song places lower.

-Lowest placement for Dave Frishburg

33. 🇺🇲The Shot Heard Round the World

I have a love-hate relationship with this song, as in I both love and hate everything it does. Bob Dorough's voice is stern and aggressive at points, which is great for the feel it's going for and the subject, but it makes for some really bland deliveries. The animation is a fun twist on the Schoolhouse Rock style, and I like how the people look, but a lot of really stiff, stilted moments. The instrumental is consistently strong, but there's not enough fluctuation. I'm really hot and cold on this song. On a good day you could see this around the mid twenties, and on a bad day this could be in the bottom ten. I dunno, ask me tomorrow and my ranking will probably change.

32. 🧪The Greatest Show on Earth/The Weather Show ⚡👍

The episode that was almost lost... A.K.A. essentially the precursor for Tax Man Max. It's definitely a more developed version of that Broadway feel, not in style, but actually format. It's divided into a three-act structure, which is a pretty endearing way to structure it. I'm a fan. As for sound, though, it's nothing special really. Instrumental is alright, but I'm not a big fan of Bob Kaliban's voice. Not that it's bad, it's just not great like Dorough's or Sheldon's, or even interesting like Patrick Donovan's or Dave Frishburg's beyond the I'm gonna assume British accent he's got. But the character he's attached to??? So fun. I love the little broadway guy, he's so bouncy and goofy and great... I often see Greatest Show on Earth ranked way down with Tax Man Max, usually right next to it, and a common reason between the two is that no one likes the Weather Show guy or Max. That's one of the only aspects I find consistently stellar between the two. Weather Show guy is so awesome. The ladies he performs with kind of look like fish, though. Not a fan of how they're stylized, but the singers attached to them are serviceable. There's specific sections I really like about this song- the opening and closing segments sandwiching the acts come to mind, but the rest is just okay. Coloring is also pretty good here! It keeps up the respectable trait of Science Rock that is a lack of plain white backgrounds, which I'm glad for. Comparing the various aspects of this song is like a rollercoaster: Lots of highs and lows, but unlike a rollercoaster it's not super exciting.

-Fun fact! This song was pulled from airing during a copyright dispute with the Ringling Bros. over the phrase "The Greatest Show on Earth," a term trademarked for their circus. The episode remained unaired from then until it was changed to remove any mention of the phrase, including the title, which was changed to merely "The Weather Show." I personally listened to the original version for this ranking, though there isn't much difference.

31. 🖋Unpack Your Adjectives

This is a far more chipper tune than Figure Eight, which initially may seem like a negative when you read the feedback I had on Blossom Dearie's ghostly, creepy doll-esque delivery, but she works just as well as a cheery little girl on her way back from a camping trip. Yeah, the premise here is pretty cute, big fan of Molly the camper and her little turtle guy. Love their little camping adventure and how it ties into the way they label everything with adjective signs. I think adjectives, despite them literally being describing words, thus conveying things such as physical traits that'd make the animation easier, are one of the hardest parts of speech to make an entire song around. You can make it, but making it compelling is the thing. Giving a little bite-sized story along with the facts. And this definitely held 4-year-old me's attention. The flute really shines in the instrumental, which is really cool because this song has a strong lightweight feel that goes very well with everything else. And the animation is colored in the watercolor style Elbow Room had, but taken up a notch further; It looks like whiteboard markers at some point. The simple, airy colors finish off this very consistent, overall good song. Cute, but as much praise as I've given it, it's not great, and definitely not my favorite. Dearie's deliveries still aren't as great as they are in Figure Eight, and a few sections such as the section on comparisons fall a little short of the podium. I also would have liked a little more color, as the white patches make the coloring look half-finished.

-Highest placement for Blossom Dearie

30. 🧪Do the Circulation

Great song, don’t get me wrong, but you have to be in the mood for it. This is another touchy one for me, because everything ties into the premise super well. Which is great! I love that it truly embraces the creativity! It's going for a dance craze type thing, hence the title, and it's exactly what you think when you hear it. I'm shocked that the women singing, Joshie Armstead, Mary Sue Berry, and Maeretha Stewart, weren't already performing together before this, because they have great synergy. There's a few times where they harmonize and it doesn't sound great, but for the most part they're pretty great. The song keeps its pace very well, like by the halfway point it barely feels like a minute has passed. Characters are mostly cool too! Though overall the animation is a little plain. It's sort of like A Victim of Gravity, where I'm overall just not the world's biggest fan of this sort of style. There's days where it'll hit hard and I'll listen a couple times, and days where I don't wanna be anywhere near it, so I think near the middle of the list is where I'd average it.

29. 💲Where the Money Goes

The artstyle of this short falls somewhere in the middle of the more faithful Money Rocks and the experimental ones, where it definitely keeps the spirit of old Schoolhouse Rock, but it features a choppier framerate with thinner lineart and chunky shadows/highlights. I'm a fan of it, and I love the dad and his little tuba kid, Red(as confirmed in a design sheet shown off on the DVD!). They're such a fun duo, and the ending where Red can't even fit into the bus with the tuba did get me to chuckle. Since this is about family finances, it takes place in a more domestic setting, but it doesn't utilize that in a particularly outstanding way like, for example, The Tale of Mr. Morton. Rather than focus on details, the backgrounds are simple gradients, which is a little disappointing since this came out after that short. They don't really run away with the subject either, which totally makes sense and isn't really their fault as it's a pretty grounded concept, but it's not very replayable because of that. A good showing from Money rock, but there's better coming up.

28. 🧪Electricity, Electricity ⚡👍

Holy crap is this song a bombshell. This is top 15, possibly top 10 sonically. Zachary Sanders has a hell of a voice, and he doesn’t flex it too much here, but there’s a few little vocal flairs here and there that are so endearing. The delivery of “Turn that generator by any means” still has me closing my eyes and humming contentedly. The recurring utterance of “Electricity, eeee-lec-tri-city!” every ten or so seconds never gets boring no matter how repetitive it is, and it’s such an earworm that no matter how little I used to think about the show, something as simple as flicking on a lightswitch would make the melody buzz around in my head for a bit. It’s sticky in a really stellar way. The instrumental is bouncy and really helps carry things along, and it’s not my fave but a few stray guitar strums keep my ears open. The music does a bangup job of carrying this thing, which is good, because the animation really brings it down… It isn’t too special at first. The main overalls guy and the sheep are cute and kinda funny sometimes, but they aren’t my fave characters. The fatal flaw of this short, however, is the rapid flashing of “ELECTRICITY” onscreen every time the word is said. It isn’t small like in Telegraph Line, or short like Tax Man Max or The Check’s In the Mail, but it takes up the entire screen and can last upwards of four seconds at a time. If you aren’t epileptic, you’ll probably have a headache by the end of it. I know I get one sometimes. I was scared of this short as a kid because of the flashing lights. The fact that maybe a third of this animation is just “ELECTRICITY” in yellow and black flashing at my sensetive little blue eyes is not sliding. Killer short with a killer flaw.

-Fun fact! This song is why I have the epilepsy/eyestrain warning symbol. It was sort of just a booby prize for this song, as the flashing lights were so common and large, the Disney+ version slows down the lights. This happens in most others with the lightning bolt emoji next to them, but those are lesser instances; The slowed lights make the Disney+ version of this song actively worse, as parts are slowed in a way that leaves some animation sequences incomplete. -Lowest placement for Zachary Sanders

#schoolhouse rock #review #had to split the middle into 2 parts cuz ugh writing this took a longass time #mind your p's and queue's

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evilelitest2 · 4 years

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('history as fandom' anon here) Sorry but I wasn't talking about the confederates, I was talking about people that actually DID do good things and people refuse to accept them as complex, like the idiot discourse about how Gandhi=Satan or the legacy of the Founding Fathers being worthless because they kept slaves(despite the fact they created a democratic constitution that endures to this day, despite the american right's best efforts to destroy it)

Ah ok. Then yes, I agree with you, though with a caveat, I think that a lot of this a well intended response to the over glorification of these historical figures as semi gods. Like lets take Winston Churchill, in most Anglo-American histories, the man is basically the protagonist of World War II, the heroic dogged stubborn defender of Democracy who spent most of his life being misunderstood only to become the greatest Prime Minister the UK had ever seen and defeating the Nazis. When you look at his larger career, there is a LOT of things to dislike about him, including being complicit in a mass famine that killed between 2-5 million people, being super racist, an advocate of colonialism, and being responsible for a lot of the problems Africa is dealing with today. His second stint as Prime Minister is actually pretty disastrous world wide and in many ways we are still dealing with the consequences of it today. Or how the Founding Fathers are basically so deified that we don’t want to remove their actively bad ideas, like the Electoral College. So in many ways I get the desire to want to push back against this propaganda version of these figures that present them as inherently correct.

That being said, still not very useful to make them just villains because history is more complicated than that. George Washington was a slave owner, and we need to stop worshiping him as the Father of the nation, but we should also acknowledge that he was one of the very few military commanders who willingly stepped down from power after holding the presidency and allowing a democracy to survive. Washington could have possibly destroyed the US if he had wanted too, but he deserves a lot of respect for not doing so.

Gandhi is sometimes presented as literally the most good human being in the world which is just...not true if you look at his opinions on women or Africans, and there is a lot to critique about his role as a leader of India. but he played a major part in decolonization, he managed to successfully run a nonviolent movement and critically, was an indian national leader who opposed Hindu Nationalism, which looking at the current goverment of India, I can appreciate (Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu Nationalist, whose organization is currently the dominate party of India).

Winston Churchill, as I mentioned earlier, was a pretty shitty imperialist all around and we really need to talk about his record in his second stint as prime minister, but I do appreciate that despite being a conservative, he fought against fascism, which also gets points from me.

I think a lot of the rejection of historical heroes (by which I mean the people actually viewed as Heroes not the fucking Confederates) often comes off as reverse hero worship, like people are feeling betrayed that people they looked up to turned out to be flaws and this is sort of a reversal, rather than seeming them as having flaws and good qualities, its making them into villains which is equally useless.

People are inherently flawed and you can’t really understanding them according to basic moral binaries, because that will inevitably turn on your own beliefs as well

Like Malcom X was a great man in many ways, but he was also an antisemitic nationalist and conspiracy theorist, at least until the end of his life. Marx was an antisemite (despite being ethnically jewish) and didn’t treat his maid very well. Everybody was a bastard, which just happens

#ask EvilElitest #History #Moral Binary

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cincinnatusvirtue · 5 years

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Presidential Profile: Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) 30th US President.

Pre-Presidency (1872-1923):

-Calvin Coolidge was born John Calvin Coolidge Jr. on July 4th, 1872. Making him the only President to date born on the 4th of July.

-Coolidge was born in Plymouth Notch, Vermont to John Sr. and Virginia Coolidge (Moor). He had one younger sister Abigail Grace. His father was a farmer, general store owner and holder of several public offices and civil service positions, including justice of the peace, tax collector and member of the Vermont State House of Representatives and Vermont State Senate. His mother was the daughter of a Plymouth Notch farmer.

-Coolidge went by his middle name his entire life to differentiate him from his father.

-His ancestry was primarily of English descent going far back to Colonial era New England and the English Puritans who settled there. His great great grandfather, also named John Coolidge was a veteran and officer in Patriot Army during the American Revolution

-Many of Coolidge’s ancestors served as civil servants and politicians throughout Vermont’s history including his paternal grandfather.

- His mother died of tuberculosis in 1885 when Coolidge was age 13. His sister died of appendicitis 5 years later when Coolidge was 18. His father would remarry in 1891 and live until the year 1926 dying at age 80, still living in the same homestead the rest of his life.

-Coolidge attended Amherst College in Massachusetts. He graduated cum laude, was a member of the debate team and was greatly influenced by a philosophy teacher named Charles Edward Garman who would mentor Coolidge and help shape his later political philosophy. Summed up by Coolidge as follows:

“There is a standard of righteousness that might does not make right, that the end does not justify the means, and that expediency as a working principle is bound to fail. The only hope of perfecting human relationships is in accordance with the law of service under which men are not so solicitous about what they shall get as they are about what they shall give. Yet people are entitled to the rewards of their industry. What they earn is theirs, no matter how small or how great. But the possession of property carries the obligation to use it in a larger service.”

-Coolidge then moved to Northampton, Massachusetts to become a lawyer. He avoided law school and as was common in the 19th century, apprenticed at a law firm and “read” the law. He was admitted to the state bar in 1897, the following year he opened his own small law firm. He focused on commercial law and often sought to settle out of court. He quickly developed a reputation in the area as a hard working, attentive and honest attorney. He represented banks and many other local businesses.

-In 1903, he met his future wife, Grace Anna Goodhue who worked as a teacher for the deaf. They married two years later in 1905 despite his mother in law’s initial dislike of him. They would go on to have two sons John (1906-2000) and Calvin Jr. (1908-1924). Years later Coolidge summed up his relationship with his wife as follows:

“"For almost a quarter of a century she has borne with my infirmities and I have rejoiced in her graces".

-Coolidge was a member of the Republican Party which dominated New England and most Northern states in the US at the time. He began to run for local offices in Northampton. Serving on City Council, and as City Solicitor before he returned to his law practice. He also ran for school board but lost, this would be the only political defeat in his career.

-Later he served in the Massachusetts State House of Representatives before returning to Northampton and becoming Mayor. As mayor some signature accomplishments included giving teachers a raise, lowering the city’s government debt and even lowering local taxes. These final two achievements would become pattern obsessions of Coolidge all throughout his career.

-He later became a State Senator in Massachusetts, returning to Boston once more. This time he became noteworthy for his support of women’s suffrage and perhaps most notably for his 1914 speech to the state senate, called Have Faith in Massachusetts. He argued another cornerstone of his conservative philosophy:

“Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. Don't hurry to legislate. Give the administration a chance to catch up with legislation.”

-Coolidge was elected to Lieutenant Governor along with new elected Governor Samuel McCall in 1915. At the time the Governorship was elected for one year terms. He and McCall were reelected in 1916 and 1917. In 1918 McCall declined a fourth term and this allowed Coolidge to run and win the Governorship of Massachusetts in 1918.

-1919 was a turning point in Coolidge’ career. In Boston, many members of the police force were planning on forming a union due to working conditions and low pay. Many of the members of the police force were former war veterans who had recently returned from World War I. In response to the plan to form a union, Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis refused and said no union could be tolerated for the police force. In August, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) gave a charter to the Boston Police Union. Curtis gave an ultimatum, the leaders of the union would be suspended from their positions unless they agreed to dissolve the union by a deadline of September 4th. The Mayor of Boston convinced Curtis to extend that deadline to allow negotiations to continue. The police union leaders were then suspended on September 8th. The next day, 3/4ths of Boston policemen went on strike in solidarity with the union leaders suspension. There was break outs of violence, looting and lawlessness throughout the city due to the lack of a sufficient police force. The Boston Mayor, Andrew Peters was worried firefighters would strike next out of sympathy. Coolidge himself was sympathetic, to Commissioner Curtis’s position. Curtis was dismissed by Peters who felt it necessary due to what he saw as Curtis mishandling the situation with heavy handedness. Coolidge as Governor then called up units of the Massachusetts National Guard to serve as a temporary police force. The military largely secured the city and ended the lawlessness. Coolidge also restored Curtis to the position of Police Commissioner and took personal control over the National Guard as police force. Curtis then announced all striking police officers were fired and that new ones were to be hired, a position which Coolidge accepted as necessary. Coolidge received a telegraph from AFL leader, Samuel Gompers who advised that it was Curtis’s fault for the strike and the lawlessness because he would not accept the worker’s rights and grievances. Coolidge famously responded publicly to Gompers:

"Your assertion that the Commissioner was wrong cannot justify the wrong of leaving the city unguarded. That furnished the opportunity; the criminal element furnished the action. There is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, any time."

-The striking police force was indeed replaced by 1,500 newer officers who in the end did receive somewhat better pay and working conditions. The period of the strike lead to the deaths of 9 people in the city due to lawlessness. The National Guard also killed 8 rioters as well. The strike was a setback for the labor movement across the country. The failure of the strike resulted in AFL avoided involvement with police unions for nearly two decades.

-Coolidge became an overnight hero of the American public who was largely unsupportive of the strike. In part, because America’s political climate involved the Red Scare of 1919 at the time, with the backdrop of World War I and the rise of communism in Russia, many Americans worried that labor unions and leftist radicals were potentially communist agents who sought to overthrow the American republic and establish something along the lines of the emerging USSR. Coolidge was praised as a hero of conservatism for his decisive executive action in calling up the National Guard to restore order, his support for Curtis and the establishment of a new police force and for his unwavering belief that while the police might have legitimate grievances, their job and oath as public servants required a sense of duty to the public safety beyond their pay.

-Coolidge as a result became a national household name, he was reelected in 1919 and was later mentioned as a contender for Vice President of the United States on the Republican ticket in 1920. He was nominated at the party convention that year and paired with running mate for the President, Warren G. Harding a US Senator from Ohio. They were opposed by the Democratic Party nominees , for President James Cox, Governor of Ohio and for Vice President, the future US President, then Assistant Secretary to the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harding and Coolidge ran on a “return to normalcy” campaign. Which in its ethos sought to restore America’s political climate in the wake of World War I, the Progressive era, labor strikes and general atmosphere of political radicalism to a more moderate and conservative tone. One that supported capitalism and deregulated economics. Harding and Coolidge won in a landslide election capturing 60 percent of the popular vote, carrying 37 states total and capturing 404 electoral college votes to Cox and Roosevelt’s 127.

-Harding and Coolidge were inaugurated as President and Vice President respectively on March 4, 1921. They succeeded Woodrow Wilson and his administration, Wilson for his part had suffered a serious stroke in 1919 that left him in ill health and had prevented his goal of running for a third term as President. Harding’s election was a repudiation of Wilson’s international leanings with a greater focus on domestic issues away from the foreign policy of WWI.

-As Vice President, Coolidge was as many Vice Presidents prior to him not a holder of many official duties aside from presiding over the US Senate. Unlike his predecessors though, he was invited to Cabinet meetings, becoming the first Vice President to ever receive this invite from their President. Most of his time was spent giving speeches around the country and attending parties in Washington DC. It was during this time, the Coolidge’s legacy as a quiet and stern man was born. He was nicknamed “Silent Cal” for his economics with words and his known disdain of formal dinner parties. When asked why he showed up if hated them so much he replied matter of fact “Got to eat somewhere.” His wife Grace, proved to be much more social and outgoing, balancing out Coolidge’s more taciturn personality. The most famous story from this time was possibly pure invention but may have summed up Coolidge’s reputation best of all. At a dinner party, a female guest sitting next to Coolidge supposedly informed him that they made a bet that they could get him to say more than three words supposedly Coolidge said once again matter of fact “You lose.” Coolidge for his part was always shy from his childhood on. He also considered that politicians should speak very little in general and that the words they use carry great political weight, he was a firm believer in the principle of choose your words wisely.

-In August 1923, Coolidge and his family went to visit his father back at his childhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Meanwhile, President Harding was on a speaking tour out on the west coast. On August 2nd, Harding died unexpectedly from congestive heart failure in San Francisco, having experienced worsening symptoms in the days preceding his death. Coolidge had to be informed of Harding death and his own subsequent accession to the Presidency. Coolidge’ s father’s farm had no phone or electricity. They were informed by messenger in the middle of the night. Coolidge got dressed, prayed and then was sworn in as 30th President of the United States in the family parlor by kerosene light around 3am by his own father who was a notary public and justice of the peace. He then went back to bed.

-Coolidge returned to Washington DC by train the next day. He immediately had a second swearing in of the Presidential oath by having a federal judge from the Supreme Court District of Washington DC administer the oath to him. The goal of the second swearing in was to prevent any doubt about whether the first was invalid because his father was a state level official and not a federal one.

Presidency (1923-1929)

-Coolidge at first kept Harding’s entire Cabinet in their roles, a believer in the retention of all Cabinet members until one was elected in their own right. He sought to carry out Harding’s domestically oriented goals if by putting his own spin on them. At the time, Harding was a very popular President but his Cabinet has earned a scandalized reputation due to involvement in the Teapot Dome Scandal which involved bribery. Coolidge was called to fire some in the Cabinet on the need to punish those presumed guilty. Coolidge ever the believer in law and order, refused to the do so and expected each man would be tried by evidence first and if found guilty would be removed or if not would be acquitted in his eyes. Coolidge earned praise for his belief in the Constitutional right to be tried when accused of a crime. Those Cabinet members who were uncooperative with the congressional investigations however would be removed since Coolidge saw these investigations as effectively the trial period for each accused Cabinet member.

-Coolidge in 1923 became the first sitting President to give a speech broadcast on radio. Despite his reputation as “Silent Cal” and being a man of few words, Coolidge became the first President to utilize the modern inventions of radio, and movie cameras to communicate with the American public. He also gave more personal press conferences than any US President in history. Coolidge became well liked by the media for the access he granted them and in turn he was well aware of the potential communicative power the new mediums of radio and motion pictures had for the Presidency and in pushing his agenda.

- Coolidge did sign the Immigration Act of 1924 that placed restrictions on immigration from parts of Southern and Eastern Europe. His added a signing statement expressing his reluctance and displeasure to sign the bill because of what he saw as its implicit racism towards Asian, namely Japanese immigration. Coolidge was personally friendly with immigrants and believed immigration was important and vital, however he believed America should be able to regulate immigration and should place some controls on the amount of immigrants coming into the country. Coolidge thought immigration proceeded best when slowed down which allowed time for the country to absorb regulated waves of immigration and allow them to assimilate. The slowing down and conservative approach to all things in government was in line with Coolidge’s nature.

-Coolidge also signed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, this granted US citizenship to all Native Americans living on reservations henceforth. It remains in effect to this day.

-On racial issues in general, Coolidge was praised in most quarters for his opposition to racism across the board. He was described as being devoid of all racial prejudice. He saw immigration to the US as important, spoke of the importance of immigration and assimilation to US cultural values. He also spoke to immigrants and American citizens alike to drop their racial prejudice and hatreds. He also asked the Congress to pass anti-lynching laws at the federal level. In his first State of the Union address, he spoke favorably of African-Americans, stated their rights were as important as any others and should be publicly and privately defended. He also thanked African-Americans in several speeches over the years for their contributions to America and advances in education while acknowledging they continued to face discrimination. Coolidge personally disliked the Ku Klux Klan and is not known to have appointed any Klansmen to a federal position.

-In foreign policy Coolidge was somewhat removed in comparison to his domestic agenda. The 1920′s was a time of isolationism in American politics. He did oversee the initial enforcement of the Washington Naval Treaty which sought to deescalate a naval arms race with other nations, namely Japan. He was largely a non-interventionist in outlook. He did not oppose the League of Nations but did not actively seek to enact American membership in it either. Coolidge also helped normalize relations with Mexico which had soured with the Revolution there in previous years which also saw border conflicts with the US, his new Ambassador was successful in helping smooth over relations. He also pushed the Dawes Plan which lent economic support to Germany in the form of partial reparation relief post World War I. This move actually briefly boosted Germany’s post war economy which had suffered for years and slightly helped smooth relations with Germany in a way that neither France nor Britain sought to do. Coolidge refused to recognize the USSR officially as a nation. He also continued the prior administration's policy of US troops occupying Nicaragua due to the political instability there, though he would withdraw and reinstall them there after the return of instability. Hoping to curb the perception of America being imperialist in Latin America, Coolidge made his only international Presidential visit to Havana, Cuba to attend the Sixth International Conference of American States in 1928. Coolidge stated these nations should be treated as equals to the US in terms of foreign relations. He became the last sitting US President to visit Cuba until President Barack Obama did in 2016.

-Coolidge’s main focus was the United States economy. He sought to achieve his signature goals of budget and tax reduction. Coolidge was personally very frugal and economical. He reduced the size of White House domestic staff and never owned a home in Northampton Massachusetts, preferring to rent and live modestly on a modest income. During his tenure as President, each summer he and First Lady Grace Coolidge would send their sons to work to earn their own pay and learn the value of labor. Coolidge’s most essential Cabinet member was a holdover from the Harding days, US Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon. Mellon and Coolidge both shared a belief that government should not intervene in the economy and that deregulation of business was ideal to stimulate the American economy. In a precursor to the supply-side economics or Reaganomics of the 1980′s, called “scientific taxation” Coolidge and Mellon proposed and passed the Revenue Acts of 1924, ‘26 and ‘28. All of these reduced income tax totally by 24%. By 1927 only the top 2% of income earners in America paid federal income taxes. The other component of Mellon and Coolidge’s plan was reduction of the overall size of government. In very much a libertarian mode of thinking, Coolidge deregulated business and his appointees to regulatory committees often were nominal and not very active. Coolidge would be meet weekly with advisors on how to save on federal spending prior to each Cabinet meeting. These advisors kept Coolidge informed on all department budgets and allowed him to better comprehend the needs of each department without giving preferential treatment to one department’ s budget over the other, this allowed for a consistency in his treatment of Cabinet members. Throughout Coolidge’s tenure, federal spending remained essentially flat. This in turn retired a fourth of the federal government's debt in total by the end of his tenure.

-Coolidge’s tenure was part of the Roaring 20′s, businesses were booming and the business deregulation mentality he presented and epitomized yielded real results for the length of his tenure as the economy steadily grew and improved. Coolidge growing up in economical circumstances was philosophically inclined to believe in a more laissez-faire form of capitalism. He strongly believed as a matter of morality government had little to no place in interfering with business and controlling how people spent their money. Economic freedom for citizens and businesses were for Coolidge the best expression of political freedom. He believed in private property and the notion that people should be able to spend their hard earned dollars as they saw fit rather than through government. In turn this would propel the economy and by most measures for his tenure this seemed to be the case. Additionally, his keeping of federal spending flat along with retiring debt and tax cuts actually saw new levels of government revenues as well, two thirds coming from the highest income earners. He summed up the ethos of the times with the following:

“It is probable that a press which maintains an intimate touch with the business currents of the nation is likely to be more reliable than it would be if it were a stranger to these influences. After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”

-As Governor of Massachusetts, Coolidge actually supported a number of measures from the Progressive era, seemingly at odds with his federal deregulation as President. As governor he passed or supported laws opposing child labor, in favor of wages and hours controls, economics controls and improved safety regulations. His opposition to regulation as President not only stemmed from his overall economic moral philosophy but his belief in federalism. Regulation in the 1920′s was largely seen as a state and local matter for laws and not a federal one and it was largely perceived by Coolidge to be a matter of principle not to regulate from the federal level as it was essentially unconstitutional in his eyes beyond Congress’s ability to regulate interstate trade.

-Coolidge was criticized by some for not supporting strong enough measures for Farm Subsidies. He again opposed bills on this for moral reasons, believing government should be in the business of providing subsidies to businesses, Coolidge believed in an almost total hands off approach. Almost no breaks or handouts whatsoever and no overzealous regulation, everything was to be moderated in the wake of the Progressive era. He also faced criticism for his handing of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, federal disaster relief was limited under Coolidge and he did not visit the disaster areas not for a lack of caring but a genuine belief that it would appear as political grandstanding and wouldn’t practically provide much help. Coolidge was consistent in keeping a low profile and as always choosing his words and appearances as he saw it wisely. In 1928, Congress and Coolidge signed a compromise bill to provide relief funding to those affected by the disaster, Coolidge signed it privately not wishing to appear publicly advocating a position he saw as interference in the lives of the American citizen. Again, believing Americans to be most resilient on their own, providing citizens great freedom also in Coolidge’s mind meant bearing great personal responsibility.

-Coolidge finished out the last year and half of Harding’s term in late 1923 and all of 1924 into 1925. He ran for his own election in 1924, was personally very popular with everyday Americans after his handling of the economy and his restoring confidence in the moral integrity of the White House after the Teapot Dome Scandal had hurt Harding’s once popular reputation.

-1924 however saw a turning point in Coolidge’s personal life. That summer his sons were home from school at the White House, while playing tennis one day his younger son, Calvin Jr. developed a blister and became gravely ill very fast. Coolidge and his wife Grace did what they could to console the child who feared for his life. Nonetheless, Calvin Jr. died days later, the result of septicemia. Coolidge apparently in an effort to calm his son in his final days, reportedly got on his own hands and knees to find a small rabbit in the White House garden and present it to his son as a gift since Calvin Jr. and the whole Coolidge family had a love of animals. Coolidge remarked that he tried what he could reassure his son but he that he had failed. For the rest of his life, Coolidge sank into a deep depression, many people around him reported a personality change of distractedness, anger and sadness. His interest in the Presidency is seen to have died with him. Coolidge was elected in a very subdued campaign that November out of respectful mourning for the Coolidges. Coolidge won 55% of the popular vote and 382 electoral college votes. carrying 35 states.

-As mentioned the Coolidge family loved animals and to this day had the largest overall collection of animals any Presidential family had in US history. They had among other animals a variety of cats, dogs, birds, raccoons, briefly a black bear, a pygmy hippo and two lions cubs gifted from South Africa, Coolidge named the cubs Tax Reduction and Budget Bureau after his favorite political focus.

-In 1928, Coolidge decided not to run for second full term on his own. He felt his time in Washington was accomplished enough and he looked to finally retire after 30 years of political involvement. Also, he was still dealing with the depression of his son’s death, mentioning repeatedly that he held himself responsible for his son’s demise. He blamed his political ambitions as leading to the circumstances which caused his son to get a blister and fatal infection at the White House. in almost religious overtones, Coolidge saw it as a form of divine punishment for a life of politics. His announcement not to seek another term was even a secret from his wife. His Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928, inaugurated on March 4, 1929.

Post-Presidency/Legacy (1929-1933):

-Several months after Coolidge’s departure the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 took place the Great Depression of the next decade or so began. Coolidge has received some blame for the Great Depression due to his laissez faire economics and lack of regulation. To this day the causes of the Great Depression are controversial and debated, Coolidge also has supporters who state he couldn’t have known it would have happened nor was he in a position of power to regulate the economy since the federal government had little to do with the stock market which was seen as a state matter in those days. His supporters also place blame on Herbert Hoover’s regulartory measures in the months leading up to the crash. Either way Coolidge’s role in this tarnished his reputation for many years among historians who tend to rank him in the lower half of US Presidents overall. Though modern libertarians, and fiscal conservatives and capitalist supporters tend to praise Coolidge’s time in office.

-Coolidge moved back to Northampton and ended up earning money providing syndicated newspaper columns and publishing an autobiography. He also served as a trustee on various boards and earned monies from these various streams of revenue. Coolidge also donated earnings to his wife Grace’s favorite charity, the school for the deaf which she taught when they first married. It was his way of paying her back for giving up her own career to raise a family and support his political career. In 1932, he supported Herbert Hoover for reelection out of party loyalty rather than personal admiration for Hoover, whom he saw as often providing him bad advice during his own Presidency. Hoover was defeated by FDR nonetheless and the era of New Deal had begun.

-Coolidge died aged 60 in January 1933 from coronary thrombosis.

-Coolidge was honored with posthumous appearances on postage stamps, additionally he was the only President to appear on US coinage in their lifetime during their Presidency. Appearing on the 150th anniversary edition of Declaration of Independence, half-dollar coin with George Washington’s likeness.

-Ronald Reagan cited Coolidge as an influence and during the Reagan era a reassessment of Coolidge as a person and politician was very popular. Overall, Coolidge still is ranked as average to below average in general but his esteem is largely influenced by the political ideology of those reviewing him.

#usa #potus #us history #roaring 20s #great depression #calvin coolidge #vermont #capitalism #libertarianism #massachusetts #conservatism

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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Why Do Republicans Stick With Trump

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-stick-with-trump/

Why Do Republicans Stick With Trump

Trump Slams ‘wayward’ Republicans For Capitol Riot Vote

Why Do Republicans Continue to Stick Up for Trump?

US Capitol riots

Former US president Donald Trump blasted “wayward Republicans” after lawmakers made a rare bipartisan push to investigate the Capitol riot.

With the support of 35 Republicans, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted 252-175 to look into the events of 6 January.

Party leaders had urged Republicans to oppose the bill, with Mr Trump labelling it a “Democrat trap”.

The bill appears to lack the Republican support it needs to pass in the Senate.

It seeks to create an independent inquiry modelled on the commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The legislation establishes a 10-member body, evenly split between the two main parties, that would make recommendations by the end of the year on how to prevent any repeat of the Capitol invasion.

Trump supporters stormed Congress on 6 January in a failed bid to thwart certification of President Joe Biden’s victory in November’s election.

Wednesday’s vote was seen as a loyalty test to the former president for members of his party.

All 10 of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in the days after the Capitol riot for incitement of insurrection were among the 35 who voted for the commission.

In a statement after the vote, Mr Trump hit out at the “wayward” Republican group, saying, “they just can’t help themselves”.

“Sometimes there are consequences to being ineffective and weak,” Mr Trump added.

Why Its Become More Difficult To Break With The National Party

Many members of Congress used to have local reputations independent of their parties, presenting themselves as fighters for local interests and dollars in Washington. Even if most voters hated Congress, they still liked their own representatives and senators.

But the long-term trends are nationalization and polarization . Voters learn less about their own legislators and more about the president, in part due to decreasing reliance on local news. As a result, fewer voters split their tickets, voting for one partys candidate for president and the others for Senate or the House.

Democrats have faced the same problem in trying to distinguish themselves from their party. Voters recognized the independent streak of West Virginias Joe Manchin and Montanas Jon Tester in the 2018 midterms, but Missouris Claire McCaskill, North Dakotas Heidi Heitkamp and Indianas Joe Donnelly werent able to overcome the Republican lean of their states. Manchin went so far as to appear in ads showing him shooting at policies he disliked and proclaiming for me, its all about West Virginia. He won a state that Hillary Clinton lost by more than 42 points.

More members are running scared in the primaries, political scientist Sarah Treul told me. Even if theyre actually not having quality challengers emerging, theyre afraid of it happening. And I think a lot of them are spending time trying to figure out how can ward off one of those challengers from even coming to the table.

Trumpism Without Trump Could Be Tough To Pull Off

No one knows yet what role Trump will play in future Republican politics. His recent attack on McConnell suggests he at least wants to continue to punish Republicans he sees as disloyal. The possibility Trump could run again will make politics awkward for Republicans eager to claim his mantle for their own presidential ambitions.

The prospect of Trumpism without Trump has enticed conservatives and worried liberals ever since the Trump phenomenon began. Republicans have learned to rail against globalism and the deep state. They are unlikely to return to comprehensive immigration reform any time soon.

Trump has breathed new life into old conservative staples such as law and order and the perils of socialism. But Trumps relationship with his supporters goes far beyond his political positions, or even the grievances and emotions he harnessed.

Trumps appeal was based on the perception that he had unique gifts that no politician ever had. He cultivated a media image that made him synonymous, however incorrectly, with business success. His tireless verbal output, whether through Twitter or at endless rallies, created an alternative reality for his followers. Many saw him as chosen by God.

That kind of charismatic magic will be extremely difficult for any career politician to recapture. Republicans may discover that Trumpism is not a political movement but a business model, a model only ever designed for one benefactor.

Also Check: Republican Vs Democrat Indictments

Trump Sends A Message To Senate Republicans Ahead Of His Trial

The ex-president could seek vengeance on GOP senators if they break with him on impeachment and vote to convict.

01/25/2021 09:14 PM EST

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A top political aide to former President Donald Trump spent the weekend quietly reassuring Republican senators that the former president has no plans to start a third party and instead will keep his imprint on the GOP.

The message from Brian Jack, Trumps former political director at the White House, is the latest sign that Republicans considering an impeachment conviction will do so knowing that Trump may come after them in upcoming primaries if they vote to convict him for incitement of insurrection.

Jack did not mention impeachment in his calls. But he wanted the word to get around that Trump is still a Republican and for many, still the leader of his party.

The president wanted me to know, as well as a handful of others, that the president is a Republican, he is not starting a third party and that anything he would do politically in the future would be as a Republican, recounted Sen. Kevin Cramer . The Republican Party is still overwhelmingly supportive of this president.

On Monday evening, Trumps second impeachment trial began unfolding and Republicans started deliberating in earnest over how, or even whether, to defend the president.

By KYLE CHENEY and JOSH GERSTEIN

No, I dont, said Braun.

By BETSY WOODRUFF SWAN

But she added that something more vivid is on many senators minds.

Can Trumpism Become A Winning Strategy Again

For years, but especially since Mr. Bidens victory, the transformation of the Republican Party into what Ms. Cheney called an anti-democratic Trump cult of personality has fueled predictions of its imminentcollapse. But there are more than a few reasons to think Trumpism could once again carry the party to victory and remain in power for a long time.

A realignment in the electorate: Even as the G.O.P.s politics of racial grievance became more overt under Mr. Trump it was birtherism that catapulted his political career, as the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie reminded readers in January the American electorate has become less polarized around racial lines. At the same time, it has become more polarized by educational attainment. According to David Shor, the head of data science at OpenLabs, support for Democrats increased from 2016 by seven percentage points among white college graduates in the 2020 election but fell by one to two points among African-Americans, roughly five points among Asian-Americans and by eight to nine points among Hispanic Americans.

Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at . Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.

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Why Did Black Voters Flee The Republican Party In The 1960s

That strategy proved crucial for Nixon. He carried South Carolina , plus Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. It turned out to be enough, even though five other Southern states’ electoral votes went to George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama who ran that year as the nominee of the American Independent Party.

Nixon worried about another Wallace bid costing him Southern states again in 1972, and he worked hard to maneuver Wallace in another direction. In the end, Wallace sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1972 . Nixon swept the South that year en route to winning 49 states overall.

The wilderness after Watergate

After such a resounding reelection, it seemed unimaginable that Nixon or his party could be in political trouble so soon after his second inauguration. But a 1972 burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee , was traced to Nixon’s campaign. His efforts to cover up that connection were then exposed, leading to impeachment proceedings. When audio tapes of his conspiratorial meetings with aides were made public, he resigned and was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.

Republicans once again found themselves in the wilderness. Midterm elections arrived right after the resignation and pardon. Republicans nationwide paid the price, with the party losing seats in Congress it had held for generations.

Another Southern-bred comeback

Why Republicans Stick With Trump

188 Comments By Bobby Jindal

Bobby Jindal The Wall Street Journal

Biography

With each new controversy, Donald Trumps opponents plead with Republicans to denounce him. Hasnt Mr. Trump broken from GOP orthodoxy on free trade, immigration and entitlement reform? Not to mention the personal scandals and the never-ending tweets. Why do Republican leaders hesitate to rebuke him?

A shallow answer is politics: Sens. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker both tangled with Mr. Trump, and it turned out to be political suicide. But to get a deeper answer, its instructive to examine what Mr. Trump hasnt done. Since the campaign, Mr. Trump has abandoned many of his previous positions and embraced traditional conservative views.

Spending and taxes. During the election, Mr. Trump promised a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. Some Republicans feared his first initiative on taking office would be a pork-laden spending package reminiscent of Barack Obamas stimulus bill. They also worried he would cut a deal with Democrats to raise taxes. I am willing to pay more, Mr. Trump said in May 2016. And do you know what? The wealthy are willing to pay more. Instead, the reverse happened: Theres no infrastructure plan in sight, except for the border wall, and Mr. Trump signed a sweeping bill to reduce personal and corporate taxes.

Mr. Jindal served as governor of Louisiana, 2008-16, and was a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

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The Deafening Silence Of Republicans

President Donald Trump shakes hands with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., center, before the start of a meeting with House and Senate Leadership in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, June 6, 2017.

This is what GOP lawmakers who think Trump went too far or doesnt deserve to be president are up against. If they grow a spine and rebuke him, they will lose their seats in their districts next election. So far, just distancing themselves or making vague excuses is enough for most. Some even have to voice full-throated support or be primaried by a wide-eyed zealot foaming at the mouth about Antifa super-soldiers building extermination camps for Christians, expending hundreds of thousands of dollars from a campaign chest to repel an attack on their right flank.

Some, of course, are just Trumps who can form a coherent sentence and with six fewer bankruptcies from which their dads had to bail them out while ruthlessly chewing them out in front of other family members and important business partners. Like their voters, they also feel ecstatic that a fellow narcissistic bigot is in charge, and are ready and willing to make things harder on their more moderate and less enthusiastic colleagues.

Why So Many Republicans Cling To Trump

Why Is Donald Trumps Grip So Strong On The GOP? | TODAY

Ben Shapiro got part of it right. A toxic mix of status anxiety, persecution fears, and echoes of the Civil War helps explain why they follow Trump into the abyss.

On September 17, 1862, over 10,000 Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or went missing in a single day at the Battle of Antietam. Very few of them came from slave-owning families, so why did they agree to give their lives in defense of human bondage?

I was reminded of this question when I noticed that Politico Playbook had recruited conservative celebrity and author Ben Shapiro;to explain why the vast majority of House Republicans voted not to impeach President Trump on Wednesday for sending a murderous mob after them on January 6. Politico was slammed by liberals for opening its best-known section to a conservative whos been charged with being bigoted and intolerant. But Shapiros explanation of the rallying around Trump during his final days wasnt totally off base. He was on to something about how Republicans see the world.

With Trump leaving office within a week, defending his incitement of an insurrection doesnt seem to be in the long-term self-interest of Republican officeholders.;But the Civil War example helps explain why people sometimes do very self-destructive things out of spite or insecurity.

White supremacy was such a consensus view at the time that Lincoln felt compelled to defend it.

Like the rebels at Antietam, no one wants to die for nothing.

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Recommended Reading: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

The Republican Doomsday Cult

Artwork By Rantt Media Production Designer Madison Anderson

With that in mind, we can explore a truly bizarre dynamic thats been unfolding before our eyes. Since the John Birch Society kidnapped the heart of American conservatism, theyve managed to turn it into a doomsday cult which preaches that any deviation from their orthodoxy will be the end of America and therefore the world as we know it. To keep voters in line and tens of millions in cash from the party rank and file, it unleashed what could only be described as a tsunami of conspiracy theories and fake news to support them.

To be a Republican today is to wholeheartedly believe that youve been losing the battle against nefarious forces for the last half-century and if you dont fight back, or should your party not win absolute control at every level of government, the Reptoid Illuminati MS-13 Antifa Sharia Jew World Order will come to your house, rip your face off, and steal your grandchildren to sell as sex slaves in basements of pizzerias. And whereas a charismatic cult leader would know full well that this is a ruse to keep his followers pliant no matter what he does to them, Trump believes the same exact things.

SIGN THIS PETITION TO CALL FOR GUN VIOLENCE TO BE TREATED LIKE AN EPIDEMIC;

‘combative Tribal Angry’: Newt Gingrich Set The Stage For Trump Journalist Says

All these factors combined to produce a windfall for Republicans all over the country in the midterms of 1994, but it was a watershed election in the South. For more than a century after Reconstruction, Democrats had held a majority of the governorships and of the Senate and House seats in the South. Even as the region became accustomed to voting Republican for president, this pattern had held at the statewide and congressional levels.

But in November 1994, in a single day, the majority of Southern governorships, Senate seats and House seats shifted to the Republicans. That majority has held ever since, with more legislative seats and local offices shifting to the GOP as well. The South is now the home base of the Republican Party.

The 2020 aftermath

No wonder that in contesting the results in six swing states he lost, Trump seems to have worked hardest on Georgia. If he had won there, he still would have lost the Electoral College decisively. But as the third most populous Southern state, and the only Southern state to change its choice from 2016, it clearly held special significance.

Read Also: How Many Democrats And Republicans In The Senate

As Gop Sticks With Trump Grassroots Energy On The Right Has Gone Missing

WASHINGTON Tax Day 2009 was the start of the Tea Party protests against Barack Obamas agenda.

But as we approach April 15, 2021 even with the tax-filing deadline extended to May 17 its become noticeable just how quiet the conservative grassroots have been during President Bidens first three months in office.

Part of it is due to the fact that Biden has never been the lightning rod for the right that Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and even AOC are.

But another part is the 2020 defeated candidate who decided to stick around: Donald Trump.

‘he’s On His Own’: Some Republicans Begin To Flee From Trump

NEW YORK President Donald Trump’s steadfast grip on Republicans in Washington is beginning to crumble, leaving him more politically isolated than at any other point in his turbulent administration.

After riling up a crowd that later staged a violent siege of the U.S. Capitol, Trump appears to have lost some of his strongest allies, including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. Two Cabinet members and at least a half dozen aides have resigned. A handful of congressional Republicans are openly considering whether to join a renewed push for impeachment.

One GOP senator who has split with Trump in the past called on him to resign and questioned whether she would stay in the party.

I want him out, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told The Anchorage Daily News. “He has caused enough damage.

The insurrection on the heels of a bruising election loss in Georgia accomplished what other low points in Trump’s presidency did not: force Republicans to fundamentally reassess their relationship with a leader who has long abandoned tradition and decorum. The result could reshape the party, threatening the influence that Trump craves while creating a divide between those in Washington and activists in swaths of the country where the president is especially popular.

President-elect Joe Biden isn’t putting his weight behind the effort yet, suggesting there’s not enough time between now and his Jan. 20 inauguration to pursue impeachment or any other constitutional remedy.

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statetalks · 3 years

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Why Do Republicans Hate Ted Cruz

But Cruz And His Conservative Stances Stirred Up Debate Upon His Arrival In Washington Several Months After His Appointment He Was Famously Called Wacko Bird By The Late Sen John Mccain

youtube

In March 2013, McCain called Cruz and other Republicans “wacko birds” whose beliefs are not “reflective of the views of the majority of Republicans,” according to The Huffington Post

Cruz embraced the name and even keeps a black baseball cap with a picture of Daffy Duck next to the words “WACKO BIRD” in his Senate office, according to GQ Magazine.

When He Was In His Early Teens Cruz’s Parents Enrolled Him In An After

“So we’d meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for a couple of hours each night, and study the Constitution, read the Federalist Papers, read the Anti-Federalist Papers, read the debates on ratification, and so on,” Cruz told the New Yorker of the time. “And we memorized a shortened mnemonic version of the Constitution.”

Texas Is Freezing But The Roast Of Ted Cruz Is On

Nobody likes Ted Cruz. This is conventional wisdom in Washington. While not technically true his family members like him, presumably, and his approval rating among Texas Republicans last month was 76 percent it feels essentially true. Maybe its the exhausting smarm, the squirrelly ambition, the hollow theatrics. Maybe its how he tried to block relief aid after Hurricane Sandy, or how he helped to shut down the government in 2013. The Victorian facial hair hasnt helped; it lends an incongruous quality of statesmanship to a man viewed by his colleagues as a pest.

Lucifer in the flesh, Republican John A. Boehner, the former speaker of the House, called him in 2016.

If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham said in 2016.

Said Democrat Al Franken in 2017, when he was still in the Senate: I probably like Ted Cruz more than most of my colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz.

Nobody likes Ted Cruz. This was the place that Ted Cruz was starting from earlier this week. Then he went to Cancun. He went to Cancun, where it is mostly sunny and in the low 80s, while many of his ice-blasted constituents were without heating and plumbing, watching their ceilings collapse, huddling in warming centers, defecating in buckets, and generally not packing for a few days on the Yucatán Peninsula.

Not good, Cruz tweeted early Tuesday evening about the shutdown of his state. Stay safe!

Latest From Politics & Policy

Part of the reason for this is the Bush campaign early on decided they would have to defeat Richards with a series of issues. If they engaged in a personality contest, Richards would win.

Cruz and his campaign have allowed his challenge from Democrat Beto ORourke to turn into a personality contest. ORourke often is compared to a member of the Kennedy family of Massachusetts, and substantial portions of his campaign financing have come from out of state, about $2.5 million from California and New York combined. On the other hand, Cruz gets compared to Grandpa from the old TV show The Munsters. Cruz is pedantic and presents himself with a hard-core, knee-jerk conservatism that has a certitude that is irritating to those who do not agree with him completely.

ORourke appears on the talk shows of Ellen DeGeneres and is scheduled to appear with Stephen Colbert. Cruz is on Fox News. One of those is like a fun confectionary. The other is boiled spinach.

At a rally Saturday in Katy, Cruz fired up his crowd by telling them Democrats are angry and ready to show up at the polls.

Ted Cruz Tried To Slam The Mlb Over Cleveland Mascot Change

Meaghan Ellis

Sen. Ted Cruz was one of many Republican lawmakers who expressed faux outrage over the Major League Baseball announcement of Cleveland’s new mascot. On Friday, July 23, Cruz took to Twitter with a quick post sharing his reaction to the Cleveland Indians being renamed the Cleveland Guardians.

The Texas lawmaker tweeted, “Why does MLB hate Indians?”

Why does MLB hate Indians? https://t.co/0kQDMbDBsW Ted Cruz

It certainly did not take long for Twitter users to step up to the plate. With their responses, they hit a home run with relentless insults leveled toward the Republican lawmaker. One Twitter user wrote, “Wait, I thought businesses were free to make their own decisions free of government meddling.”

Another Twitter user challenged Cruz with a question about the blatant disregard for indigenous people. That person wrote, “Really Ted? Is disliking native Americans what this name change is about? You’re incredibly disingenuous.”

Opinion:just How Unpopular Is Ted Cruz

White House press secretary Jen Psaki had this exchange at her Thursday briefing:

Q: Just wondering if the president has any reaction to these reports that say Senator Ted Cruz flew to Cancun amid this giant winter storm in his home state of Texas?MS. PSAKI: Well, I dont have any updates on the exact location of Senator Ted Cruz, nor does anyone at the White House. But our focus is on working directly with leadership in Texas and the surrounding states on addressing the winter storm and the crisis at hand the many people across the state who are without power, without the resources they need. And we expect that would be the focus of anyone in the state or surrounding states who was elected to represent them. But I dont have any update on his whereabouts.

Due to the winter weather in D.C., the briefing was by phone, so we could not see if Psaki allowed herself a grin after twisting the knife. Cruz had abandoned his state, hurriedly booked a return flight from Mexico and blamed his kids for the trip the sort of political ineptitude one would expect of a small-town mayor, not one of the most nakedly ambitious Republicans in the Senate .

Ted Cruz Is So Easy To Hate That Loathing Him Has Become A Form Of Political Poetry

Indeed indeed, I cannot tell, / Though I ponder on it well, / Which were easier to state, / All my love or all my hate. Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau, it seems, never met Ted Cruz, a man so blissfully easy to hate that loathing for him has become a form of political poetry: wacko-bird, abrasive, arrogant, and creepy are some of the kindest adjectives that have been thrown his way. Cruz has alienated about everyone hes ever encountered in life: high school and college classmates, bosses, law professors, Supreme Court clerks, and especially his Republican colleagues in the Senate. Some detest Cruz the politician because of his grandstanding, but most dislike Cruz the person. In that respect, hes really not your average politicianafter all, most people hate politicians. But everyone hates Ted Cruz.

Ted’s style was sneering, smirking, condescending, jabbing his finger in your facea naked desire to humiliate an opponent. No kindness, no empathy, no attempt to reach common ground.Ted Cruz is a disaster on illegal immigration.I dont think he could get elected. And, even if he was able to govern without blowing up the world, could we look at a guy who resembles a cable game show host for four years? He has that awful plastered-down hair and everything.An incredibly bright guy who’s an arrogant jerk who basically everybody ends up hating.Listen, you can pick a lot of names out. I’ll let you choose them.

Cruz’s Father Rafael Was Born And Raised In Cuba As A Teenager He Was Part Of The Anti

He gained political asylum four years after his arrival and became a citizen in 2005.

Rafael’s childhood story often provided inspirational fire to Cruz’s speeches, interviews, and debate performances later in life.

But while witnesses have confirmed that Rafael was beaten by Batista special agents, former comrades and friends disputed some other descriptions of his role in the Cuban resistance.

In a 2015 New York Times article, Leonor Arestuche, a student leader in the 1950s, said that Rafel was a “ojalateros,” or wishful thinker.

She said the term was used for “people wishing and praying that Batista would fall but not doing much to act on it,” according to the Times.

Rafael eventually went on to become a minister and called himself Pastor Cruz. While he’s not affiliated with any church, he became a sought-out speaker and Tea Party celebrity.

Cruz’s Account Of The Debt Limit Battle Is Really One

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Several objections can be raised to Cruz’s account here. For instance, a debt ceiling hike doesn’t lead to “trillions of dollars” in new spending, as he implies it merely allows debt to be issued to cover spending that has already been approved by Congress in other legislation.

But most incredibly of all, Cruz manages to narrate this entire story without even once mentioning an absolutely crucial piece of context about why his Senate colleagues might have been so reluctant to follow his lead. Namely, that this dramatic confrontation occurred just four months after the federal government shutdown of fall 2013 a political disaster for the Republican Party that Cruz and the hard-line negotiating tactics he demanded had directly caused.

During that fight, of course, Cruz and his hard-line allies in the House refused to agree to any government funding bill that also funded Obamacare. This led to a 16-day shutdown of the federal government for which Republicans were widely blamed. Their poll numbers plummeted, and they soon wisely caved to avoid damaging their electoral prospects further.

In this context, Senate Republicans’ reluctance to follow Cruz’s advice makes a whole lot more sense. The very tactics he was arguing for had just been discredited in the most high-profile way possible. GOP leaders thought stoking another similar fight and, this time, risking a default on the nation’s debt would fail disastrously and cause great damage to their party.

Ted Cruz Shunned In The Senate Plays Unpopularity To His Advantage

Dec. 17, 2015

WASHINGTON It is the hate that dare not speak its name.

Since his arrival in 2013, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, has managed to alienate, exasperate and generally agitate the plurality of his 99 colleagues in the Senate. In a highly partisan, hypercompetitive legislative body where solipsism is nearly a creed, Mr. Cruz stands out for his widely held reputation for putting Ted first.

I dont think hes been effective, said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the partys nominee for president in 2008. I think thats pretty obvious. Shutting down the government? How did that work out?

Mr. Cruz is so unpopular that at one point not a single Republican senator would support his demand for a roll-call vote, known as a sufficient second, leaving Mr. Cruz standing on the Senate floor like a man with bird flu, everyone scattering to avoid him.

In his presidential campaign, Mr. Cruz uses his role as an outsider as a source of strength. It shouldnt surprise anyone that the Washington establishment is against the candidacy of Ted Cruz, said Rick Tyler, a spokesman for Mr. Cruzs presidential campaign. We are not looking for the approval of the Washington cartel.

Yet many Republicans are loath to criticize him on the record, largely for two reasons: They do not want to help him, and do not want him to hurt them.

Everyone Else At Princeton

Fighting words: Per the Daily Beast, Several fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like abrasive,intense,strident,crank, and arrogant. Four independently offered the word creepy.’

People might think Craig is exaggerating. Hes not. I met Ted freshman week and loathed him within the hour.

Geoff January 20, 2016

The beef: Its tough to pinpoint any one cause, but Cruz made female students uncomfortable by frequently walking to their end of the floor in his freshman dorm, wearing only a paisley bathrobe. When he announced his bid for president of the schools debate society, the other members had a secret meeting to pick an anyone-but-Cruz candidate. The eventual winner later that my one qualification for the office was that I was not Ted Cruz.

Texas Senator Has Changed Course So Many Times It Is Hard To Keep Track Writes Andrew Buncombe

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There was a time, not so very long ago, when Ted Cruz pitched himself as the model of integrity, the very antithesis of the likes of Donald Trump.

Campaigning for the Republican Partys nomination in 2015 and 2016, he was an early favourite of many conservatives and pro-constitution Republicans.

He had enough support among evangelicals to bag Iowa, the very first state in the primary process, and to earn a brief word of congratulations from Trump, before Trump resorted to form and accused the Texas senator of stealing the race.

Later, as the race thinned and Cruz found himself fighting against Trump for his political life, he famously accused him of being a pathological liar, as the Republican frontrunner insulted the senators wife, and claimed his father was somehow involved in the assassination of John K Kennedy.

He is proud of being a serial philanderer, hissed Cruz. He describes his own battles with venereal diseases as his own personal Vietnam.

Trump then went on to win the Indiana primary, and Cruz dropped out of the race. Such was the bad blood, that Lyin Ted did not endorse Trump at that summers Republican convention, waiting until September before finally offering his support.

Since then, like a mountain stream in flood, Ted Cruz, 50, has changed course several times.

The purpose of the objection was to protect the integrity of our election, he told KTRK-TV

Mccain Isn’t The Only One Who Had Scathing Words For The Senator Former Speaker Of The House John Boehner Once Described Cruz As Lucifer In The Flesh And Sen Lindsey Graham Once Said: If You Killed Ted Cruz On The Floor Of The Senate And The Trial Was In The Senate Nobody Would Convict You

Jason Johnson September 25, 2013

In the best-known part of the speech, he read Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” as a bedtime story to his two young daughters watching in Houston. Heidi suggested he read the book.

In his speech, he repeated an analogy between the “oppression” of Obamacare and the oppression that his father, Rafael, faced as a young man in Cuba.

Cruz’s infamous speech was one of the longest Senate performances ever, stopping after 21 hours 19 minutes.

Donald Trump Or Ted Cruz Republicans Argue Over Who Is Greater Threat

Jan. 21, 2016

WASHINGTON With Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz battling for the Republican nomination, two powerful factions of their party are now clashing over the question: Which man is more dangerous?

Conservative intellectuals have become convinced that Mr. Trump, with his message of nationalist-infused populism, poses a dire threat to conservatism, and released a manifesto online Thursday night to try to stop him.

However, the cadre of Republican lobbyists, operatives and elected officials based in Washington is much more unnerved by Mr. Cruz, a go-it-alone, hard-right crusader who campaigns against the political establishment and could curtail their influence and access, building his own Republican machine to essentially replace them.

The division illuminates much about modern Republicanism and the surprising bedfellows brought about when an emerging political force begins to imperil entrenched power.

The Republicans who dominate the right-leaning magazines, journals and political groups can live with Mr. Cruz, believing that his nomination would leave the party divided, but manageably so, extending a longstanding intramural debate over pragmatism versus purity that has been waged since the days of Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. They say Mr. Trump, on the other hand, poses the most serious peril to the conservative movement since the 1950s-era far-right John Birch Society.

Ted Cruz Threatens To Burn John Boehners Book Over Criticisms

Former Republican House speaker called the Texas senator Lucifer in the flesh

Review: John Boehners lament for pre-Trump Republicans

Republican senator Ted Cruz has responded to fiery criticism from John Boehner with a tactic beloved of authoritarian regimes: threatening to burn his book.

Boehner, a Republican congressman from Ohio for 24 years and House speaker from 2011 to 2015, published his book On the House this week. It contains strong criticism of political figures from Donald Trump to Barack Obama but hits Cruz especially hard.

The senator who drove a government shutdown in 2013 is Lucifer in the flesh, Boehner has said.

On the page, he writes: There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.

The book also contains a memorable sign-off: PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourself.

But Cruz, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and may well do so again in 2024, is nothing if not a bomb-thrower himself, as well as a nimble opportunist.

But I didnt finish it off just yet, it added. Instead, the Texas senator announced a 72-hour drive to raise $250,000, in which donors would get to VOTE on whether we machine gun the book, take a chainsaw to it or burn the book to light cigars!

But it could also be pointed out that Cruzs attempt to stoke outrage and dollars might only succeed in bringing Boehners book to wider attention.

Texass Junior Senator Has Never Much Cared For Being Liked Which Has Left Him Vulnerable In The Face Of Public Outrage

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Having jetted off to Cancun as his state faced its worst winter disaster in decades, Senator Ted Cruz returned with his tail between his legs and was met with fury from all sides. The famously divisive and aggressive senator may not be up for re-election until 2024, but there are signs that he may finally have gone too far.

Along with the expected protests at the airport and barrage of furious tweets, he faced the ire of his states largest newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, whose editorial board fired off a merciless editorial calling for his resignation. As Texans froze, Ted Cruz got a ticket to paradise, the paper wrote. Paradise can have him.

Whether or not Mr Cruz actually resigns over the ill-advised holiday which he has called a mistake it will stain his reputation forever. But then again, his reputation has been poor for years. In fact, he is famously one of the most disliked people in Congress, and not just by the other party.

First elected to his seat in 2012 as an anti-establishment Tea Party candidate, Mr Cruz entered Congress as a populist right-wing belligerent who commanded a base of angry, hardline voters. He quickly established a reputation in Washington as an opponent of compromise, bipartisanship and pragmatism and unlike some conservative blowhards, he put his money where his mouth was.

Early Life And Family

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Rafael Edward Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, at Foothills Medical Centre in , , Canada, to Eleanor Elizabeth Wilson and Rafael Cruz. Eleanor Wilson was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She is of three-quarters and one-quarter descent, and earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s.

Cruz’s father was born and raised in Cuba, the son of a Canary Islander who immigrated to as child. As a teenager in the 1950s, he was beaten by agents of Fulgencio Batista for opposing the Batista regime. He left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin and obtained political asylum in the United States after his four-year student visa expired. He earned Canadian citizenship in 1973 and became a United States citizen in 2005.

At the time of his birth, Ted Cruz’s parents had lived in Calgary for three years and were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil . Cruz has said that he is the son of “two mathematicians/computer programmers.” In 1974, Cruz’s father left the family and moved to Texas. Later that year, Cruz’s parents reconciled and relocated the family to Houston. They divorced in 1997. Cruz has two older half-sisters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz, from his father’s first marriage. Miriam died in 2011.

Cruz began going by Ted at age 13.

Government Shutdown Of 2013

Ted Cruz’s Obamacare filibuster

Cruz had a leading role in the October 2013 government shutdown. Cruz gave a 21-hour Senate speech in an effort to hold up a federal budget bill and thereby defund the Affordable Care Act. Cruz persuaded the House of Representatives and House SpeakerJohn Boehner to include an ACA defunding provision in the bill. In the U.S. Senate, former Majority Leader Harry Reid blocked the attempt because only 18 Republican Senators supported the filibuster. During the filibuster he read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. To supporters, the move “signaled the depth of Cruz’s commitment to rein in government”. This move was extremely popular among Cruz supporters, with Rick Manning of Americans for Limited Government naming Cruz “2013 Person of the Year” in an op-ed in The Hill, primarily for his filibuster against the Affordable Care Act. Cruz was also named “2013 Man of the Year” by conservative publications , and The American Spectator, “2013 Conservative of the Year” by , and “2013 Statesman of the Year” by the Republican Party of Sarasota County, Florida. He was a finalist for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2013. To critics, including some Republican colleagues such as Senator Lindsey Graham, the move was ineffective.

Cruz has consistently denied any involvement in the 2013 government shutdown, even though he cast several votes to prolong it and was blamed by many within his own party for prompting it.

Ted Cruz Leaves Mexico Amid Winter Emergency In Texas

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas flew home from a vacation to Mexico after receiving heavy criticism for leaving the state while millions have struggled with a lack of electricity and water after a brutal winter storm.

Keep working to get the grid reopened, to get power restored, get water back on. A lot of Texans are hurting, and this crisis is frustrating. Its frustrating for millions of Texans, it shouldnt happen.

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On Monday, Senator Ted Cruz urged his constituents to stay home, warning that winter weather beating down on Texas could be deadly. On Tuesday, he offered a shrug emoji and pronounced the situation not good. Then, on Wednesday, he decamped for a Ritz-Carlton resort in sun-drenched Cancún, escaping with his family from their freezing house.

And on Thursday, many Americans who had been battered by a deadly winter storm, on top of a nearly yearlong pandemic, finally found a reason to come together and lift their voices in a united chorus of rage.

FlyinTed, a homage to Donald J. Trumps Lyin Ted nickname, began trending on Twitter. TMZ, the celebrity website, published photographs showing a Patagonia-fleece-clad Mr. Cruz waiting for his flight, hanging out in the United Club lounge and reading his phone from a seat in economy plus. The Texas Monthly, which bills itself as the national magazine of Texas, offered a list of curses to mutter against Mr. Cruz.

For others in his home state, there was little to guess about the incident.

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-hate-ted-cruz/

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khalilhumam · 4 years

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This is not your grandfather’s vice presidency

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/this-is-not-your-grandfathers-vice-presidency/

This is not your grandfather’s vice presidency

By Elaine Kamarck The selection of Senator Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s running mate has made history. The obvious reason is that she is the first woman of color to be chosen to run on a national ticket. Even as recently as a generation or two ago, that was unimaginable. The less obvious reason is that her choice confirms a remarkable transformation in the vice presidency. If she and Biden are elected, Harris, like the four vice presidents who preceded her, stands to become a player of consequence in a Biden administration—a first among equals. What Harris’s portfolio will be remains to be seen. I suspect that in the first year of a Biden administration Biden himself will have to spend a lot of time repairing our broken relationships in the world—especially with our allies—an international role he spent a career preparing for. But simultaneously he will also have to pursue an extensive domestic program to deal with racial justice and economic inequality, not to mention fixing a broken immigration system—a set of issues Harris has spent a career fighting for.

Whatever her role turns out to be, we can safely predict that Harris will continue to define the modern vice presidency.

Whatever her role turns out to be, we can safely predict that Harris will continue to define the modern vice presidency. In my e-book “Picking the Vice President” I point out that throughout much of American history your grandfather’s vice presidents were understudies, disliked or even despised by the presidents they served. They were used by political parties, derided by journalists, and ridiculed by the public. The job of vice president has been so peripheral that VPs themselves have even made fun of the office. That’s because from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the last decade of the twentieth century, most vice presidents were chosen to “balance” the ticket. The balance in question could be geographic—a northern presidential candidate like John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts picking a southerner like Lyndon B. Johnson—or it could be ideological and/or geographic—Senator Bob Dole picking conservative Congressman Jack Kemp to woo the tax-cutting, supply-side faction of the Republican Party. Inherent in the concept of “balance” was the fact that the president and vice president usually did not see eye-to-eye on issues. The result was that vice presidents were often relegated to trivial tasks and banished to the outer rings of power. The most dramatic example of being out of the loop is the fact that Vice President Harry Truman did not know of the top-secret work to build the atom bomb until President Franklin Roosevelt died and he became president. But President Bill Clinton changed the model when he chose Al Gore, a fellow baby boomer and a southerner from the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party, to be his running mate. Since then all successful presidential candidates have abandoned the attempt to balance their ticket and instead looked for someone who could help them govern. The choice of Harris falls firmly in the modern mold, which is not surprising since Biden’s own vice presidency did as well. Biden was not chosen to deliver a state or a region—he was from Delaware, a safe Democratic state with only 3 electoral college votes. Biden doesn’t need Harris to deliver California, one of the most reliably Democratic and anti-Trump states in the country. Nor was Biden chosen for ideological balance—his long record placed him firmly on the center left of the Democratic Party right along with Barack Obama. Harris, too, fits comfortably on the center left, eschewing Medicare for all, a favorite of the far left, in the middle of her campaign as she realized the myriad difficulties with it. So if elected, Biden can be expected to form a partnership with Harris—as Obama did with Biden, as President Trump has done with Vice President Pence, as President Bush did with Vice President Cheney and as President Clinton did with Vice President Al Gore. In each of these teams, going back now almost 30 years, vice presidents were in the middle of the action. Unlike the fictional Selina Meyer, from the TV show VEEP, Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump did call their VPs. They also delegated substantial power to them and treated vice-presidential projects as presidential projects. Clinton gave Gore substantial portfolios, from managing the relationship with Russia to the environment, technology and reinventing government. Under Bush, Cheney managed the tax bill and then the response to 9/11—he was such a major player that many assumed he was actually in charge for much of the first term. Obama gave Biden the job of managing the huge amounts of money that went out in the response to the Great Recession. And Trump has put Pence in charge of the coronavirus task force. Harris brings the excitement of a historic choice to the Biden ticket but in the long run Biden is betting that she can help him govern, as he helped Obama. What Biden knows is that the job of the president is too big for any one person; in the White House, as in life, a trusted partner is a great asset.

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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New story in Politics from Time: Revenge of the Never Trumpers: Meet the Republican Dissidents Fighting to Push Donald Trump Out of Office

Jack Spielman has been a Republican his whole life. But over the past four years, he has come to two realizations.

Increasingly upset by President Donald Trump’s “appalling” behavior, his cozy relationships with dictators and the ballooning national debt, Spielman says his first epiphany was that he couldn’t cast a ballot for Trump again. But for the retired Army cybersecurity engineer, the final straw was the President’s retaliation against impeachment witness Lieut. Colonel Alexander Vindman, who retired in July after Trump fired him from the National Security Council in February. Spielman decided he had to do more than just vote for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden; he had to persuade others to do the same. So Spielman filmed a video for a group called Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT), explaining his views. “I want to do some part,” Spielman tells TIME, “to try to correct the wrong that I did in voting for this man.”

RVAT, which launched in May, is among a growing number of Republicanled groups dedicated to making Trump a one-term President. Since December, longtime GOP operatives and officials have formed at least five political committees designed to urge disaffected conservatives to vote for Biden. The best known of these groups, the Lincoln Project, has since forming late last year gained national attention for its slick advertisements trolling the President. Right Side PAC, led by the former chair of the Ohio Republican Party, launched in late June; a few days after that, more than 200 alumni of George W. Bush’s Administration banded together to form an organization called 43 Alumni for Biden. There’s also the Bravery Project, led by former GOP Congressman and erstwhile Trump primary challenger Joe Walsh. And plans are in the works for a group of former national-security officials from Republican administrations to endorse Biden this summer.

Since 2015, pockets of the party have bemoaned Trump’s Twitter antics, his divisive rhetoric and key elements of his platform, from the Muslim travel ban to his trade tariffs to his family-separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. But with the President’s approval rating in the party consistently around 90%, and GOP lawmakers terrified to cross him, the so-called Never Trump faction has proven largely powerless, with a negligible impact on federal policy.

Now, in the final stretch of the President’s term, the Never Trumpers could finally have their revenge. Four years ago, Trump won the Electoral College by some 77,000 votes scattered across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. If even a small slice of disillusioned Trump voters or right-leaning independents defect to Biden in November, it could be enough to kick Trump out of office. “They are the constituency that can swing this election,” says Sarah Longwell, a longtime Republican operative and founder of RVAT.

This constituency now appears more willing to vote for Biden than they were six months ago, in no small part because of Trump’s faltering response to the corona-virus, which has killed more than 140,000 Americans and ravaged the economy. Between March and June, according to a Pew Research poll, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters dropped seven percentage points, to 78%. A June 25 New York Times/Siena College survey found that Biden has a 35-point lead over Trump among voters in battleground states who supported a third-party candidate in 2016. “Any small percentage of voters who no longer support him could be critical in closely matched swing states,” says Republican pollster Whit Ayres.

It’s too early to gauge how effective the raft of Never Trump groups will be. They’re dismissed by many Republicans as self-serving opportunists profiting off the polarization Trump has exacerbated. Trump also remains hugely popular among Republicans. “President Trump is the leader of a united Republican Party where he has earned 94% of Republican votes during the primaries–something any former President of any party could only dream of,” says campaign spokes-woman Erin Perrine.

Even if the Never Trump activists are able to help oust the President, it’s unclear what will become of a party that’s vastly different from the one they came up in. Trump has transformed today’s GOP into a cult of personality rooted in economic nationalism and racial division. And while the small anti-Trump faction wants to return to the conservative ideology that reigned for decades before Trump, many Republicans believe Trump has changed the party forever.

Sitting in front of a packed book-case, Rick Wilson looked surprised as he peered over hornrimmed spectacles at an overflowing screen: “There’s 10,000 people on here,” the onetime Republican operative marveled of the Zoom audience assembled for the Lincoln Project’s first town hall on July 9.

Grant Lancaster—AM New YorkThe Lincoln Project’s ads criticizing the President’s performance have helped it raise nearly $20 million

Wilson formed the Lincoln Project in December, along with lawyer George Conway, the husband of Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, and veteran political strategists Steve Schmidt and John Weaver, among others. The Republican stalwarts had grown disgusted with the President’s behavior and their party’s acquiescence to it. The launch met little fanfare, but in the months since, the group has demonstrated a knack for quickly producing memorable videos and advertisements that get under Trump’s skin. In early May, with the unemployment rate soaring toward 15%, the group released an ad dubbed “Mourning in America,” a play on the upbeat Ronald Reagan classic, which depicted the woes of sick and unemployed Americans under Trump’s leadership. “If we have another four years like this,” the ad’s narrator intones as dead patients are wheeled out of hospitals on stretchers, “will there even be an America?” The President took notice. “Their so-called Lincoln Project is a disgrace to Honest Abe!” Trump tweeted. “I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, Moonface, but it must have been really bad.”

Irritating the President is part of the point. “It’s not trolling if you get a fish in the line,” says Reed Galen, a veteran of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns and one of the project’s co-founders. “We kept dropping a hook in the water, and eventually the President bit.” The attention has been a boon to the group’s finances. The Lincoln Project raised nearly $17 million between April 1 and June 30.

If the Lincoln Project tries to needle the President, other groups in the Never Trump ecosystem have found complementary roles. Instead of using polished editing and ominous music to make a splash online, RVAT has gathered more than 400 testimonials from disheartened Republicans like Spielman. “I did only vote for Donald Trump because I couldn’t believe someone who acted as goofy as he did on TV actually meant it,” Monica, a self-described evangelical Christian from Texas, says in one video. “Since that time, I have been riddled with guilt.”

Longwell, RVAT’s founder, believes hearing from people like Monica will show waffling conservatives that they’re not alone in their dislike of the President, and encourage them to break away. “The thing that people trusted wasn’t elites, it wasn’t Republican elites, it certainly wasn’t the media,” Longwell says of her focus-group research. “But they did trust people like them.” The group says it plans to showcase those voices in an eight-figure ad campaign in five swing states before Election Day.

RVAT identified recalcitrant Republicans through email lists Longwell had built at Defending Democracy Together, its parent organization. Founded in 2019, Defending Democracy Together created online petitions whose signatories often offered clues of their disillusionment with Trump. Petitions supporting Vindman and thanking Utah Senator Mitt Romney for voting to convict Trump of abuse of power during the impeachment trial proved especially fruitful in finding former Trump supporters, according to Tim Miller, RVAT’s political director and a veteran Republican communications strategist.

To test new video messages, Longwell held a Zoom focus group on July 15 with seven Florida voters and allowed TIME to watch. Each participant voted for Trump in 2016 but was now dissatisfied with his leadership. Several mentioned his handling of COVID-19 in the meeting, noting Florida’s dramatic spike in cases. Long-well showed the group a few of RVAT’s testimonials. “It resonates with me,” one woman who works in the travel industry in Orlando said. “It does make me feel less alone.” But while three people on the call said they’d likely vote for Biden, two said they were unsure and two said they would still vote for Trump again. “I don’t think there’s any hope for him,” the Orlando woman said. “But I don’t see Biden doing a good job either.”

Matt Borges of Right Side PAC recognizes that Republican voters’ uncertainty about Biden needs to be addressed. As the former chair of the Ohio Republican Party watched Never Trump groups roll out advertisements, he worried there was too much focus on why Trump was bad and not enough on why Biden was a good alternative. “We need these people who know they are not [going to] vote for Trump but are not sold on Joe Biden to hear some messaging from fellow Republicans that says, ‘No, it’s O.K. to vote for this guy,'” says Borges, a lifelong Republican who disavowed Trump three years ago. In an unrelated development, Borges was arrested on July 21 for allegedly participating in a $60 million bribery scheme involving top political officials that the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio decried as the biggest money-laundering effort in the state’s history.

In June, Borges teamed up with former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci to form Right Side PAC, which plans to spend up to $7 million targeting these voters through mailings, digital ads and phone banks. Their first focus is Michigan, where Borges commissioned a pollster to conduct research on Republican voters in swing districts. After spending more than a week in the field, the pollster delivered the results to Borges and Scaramucci on a Zoom call, which TIME observed. Support for Trump among Republican voters in Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District had dropped from 80% in January to 67%, the pollster said. The district had swung for Trump in 2016, then voted for a Democratic Congresswoman, Elissa Slotkin, two years later. Voters who ranked the coronavirus as their top concern were seen as more likely to break for Biden. While the group had planned to target all white Republican women over the age of 50 in Michigan, the pollster said the data suggested those over 65 were immovable in their support for Trump. These insights, Borges says, will form the basis of Right Side PAC’s “final sale” to voters on Biden’s behalf.

As the presidential race heads into its final months, another group of Republicans aims to help Biden in a different way. A group of more than 70 former national-security officials from GOP administrations, led by John Bellinger, the senior National Security Council and State Department lawyer under George W. Bush, and Ken Wainstein, Bush’s Homeland Security Adviser, plans to endorse Biden and publish a mission statement describing the damage they say Trump has done to America’s national security and global reputation. They will also fund-raise for the former Vice President and do media appearances in battleground states when the group launches later this summer. Some of the same people wrote an open letter denouncing Trump in 2016. But, says Wainstein, “our effort this time is going to have some staying power throughout the campaign.”

How much impact these groups will ultimately have on voters remains unclear. As they try to unseat an incumbent with a massive war chest, their first hurdle is money. Right Side PAC raised just over $124,000 in the first two weeks, disclosure filings show. The bulk of that haul came from one person, New York venture capitalist Peter Kellner, a long-time Republican donor who began giving to Democrats in 2018 and who has forked over the maximum amount to Biden’s campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The group’s prospects were also clouded by Borges’ July 21 arrest. Borges did not respond to requests for comment.

43 Alumni for Biden, the group of former George W. Bush officials, announced its formation on July 1, which means it doesn’t have to file disclosure reports until October; had it announced a day earlier, it would have had to publicize its finances in mid-July. A member of the group declined to provide specific figures but said it had received contributions from more than 500 individuals. The Bravery Project officially launches July 23, and a representative declined to provide any fundraising figures.

Longwell tells TIME that RVAT has raised $13 million this year. As a 501(c)4, or political nonprofit, the group does not need to disclose its donors or exact figures. But the number she provides puts the group on par with the Lincoln Project, whose biggest donors are primarily prominent Democrats. While disclosure filings show that nearly half of the Lincoln Project’s donations were “unitemized” or under $200, it raked in $1 million from billionaire hedge-fund manager Stephen Mandel and $100,000 apiece from business mogul David Geffen and Joshua Bekenstein, the co-chairman of Bain Capital.

This influx of cash has enabled the Lincoln Project to ramp up advertisements against vulnerable Republican Senators like Susan Collins of Maine, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Steve Daines of Montana. “We made it very clear that this is not just about Trump but Trumpism and its enablers,” says Galen. “The Republican Senators we have held to account are the President’s greatest enablers.”

The strategy of going after Senators has provoked the ire of many Republicans, who say the group is prioritizing profit over party. “It’s purely grifting and making a name for themselves. It’s not based on principle at all,” says Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist who worked for Jeb Bush’s and Romney’s presidential campaigns. The Lincoln Project, he says, “is essentially meant for raising money off the resistance and lining their own pockets.”

The group’s finances have also raised some eyebrows among government watchdogs. Two consulting firms, one run by Galen and another by co-founder Ron Steslow, received nearly a quarter of the $8.6 million the group spent between January and July. While other committees use similar methods, it is “not at all standard,” says Sheila Krumholz, executive director at the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. “It raises red flags about whether the operation is taking advantage of a situation where donors are giving to what they think is supporting one effort, but there are other patterns at play.”

Krumholz notes that the Lincoln Project does not publicly disclose all of the vendors who have done work for them, which suggests they are funneling money to organizations that then hire subcontractors. This method is not unheard-of, but the lack of transparency makes it difficult to discern who is ultimately profiting. “The public doesn’t know the extent to which Lincoln Project operatives may be profiting, or if they’re profiting at all,” Krumholz says. When asked about the group’s finances, Galen says, “We abide by all reporting requirements laid down by the FEC. No one at the Lincoln Project is buying a Ferrari.”

For now, the Never Trump Republicans say they aren’t looking beyond November. “We’re all in a grand alliance to beat a very big threat,” says Miller of RVAT. “We’ll see how the chips fall after.” But regardless of the election’s outcome, Miller and his cohorts face challenges ahead. They will either be failed rebels, cast out by a party taken over by its two-term President, or facing down a Biden Administration, which would bring unwelcome liberal policies and perhaps Supreme Court vacancies.

If Biden wins, Trumpism won’t disappear with Trump. The President’s rapid rise revealed the extent to which many of the ideological pillars of modern conservatism–its zeal for unfettered free markets, its devotion to deficit reduction, its attachment to global alliances, its faith in a muscular foreign policy–were out of step with actual Republican voters. Many of the ambitious lawmakers rising in the party, like Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, have seen in Trump’s political success an example to emulate. The next generation of Republican leaders may try to replicate his policies without the self-defeating behavior.

It’s led many to wonder whether traditional conservatives will have a home in the GOP after Trump is gone. “There is a growing feeling that we need to burn the whole house down to purify the party of Trump enablers in the Congress,” says a former White House official in George W. Bush’s Administration. Some see the prospect of a rupture, with disaffected Republicans cleaving off and either forming a new party or making a tenuous peace with the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. “There’s a very real possibility … that the party will split,” says Richard Burt, former ambassador to Germany under President Reagan.

The modern Republican Party was always an uneasy alliance in some ways, with fiscal conservatives, religious conservatives and neoconservatives jostling for influence, and a white working-class base voting for policies that often favored the wealthy. Steven Teles, co-author of Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites, envisions a Republican Party in which Trumpism dominates but the dissenters make up a vocal resistance faction. “I don’t think anyone is going to have control of the Republican Party the way we’ve seen in the past,” he says.

The irony of the Never Trumper activists is that while they are encouraging Republicans to vote Democratic for the first time in their lives, that is bringing some Republicans back into the party by creating a community of the disaffected. Spielman, the retired Army cybersecurity engineer, had become so disenchanted with Trump that he turned his back on the party altogether, voting for Democrats in Michigan’s 2020 primaries. But the Never Trump groups are “giving me hope that there are still some people out there with some decency that want to go back and save the party,” Spielman says. “It’s allowed me to come back and say, Yeah, I’m a Republican. I’m not leaving the party, but I want to fight for what’s right for the party.”

With reporting by Leslie Dickstein, Mariah Espada, and Josh Rosenberg

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#IFTTT #Blogger

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thekingsnecktie-blog · 6 years

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Oh, How Our Standards Have Fallen

My Facebook friend Cecilia Di Trastevere recently posted this photo. It’s funny, but also deeply sad—and instructive.

Remember 2016, when so many people—large segments of the press and punditocracy very much included—were saying of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, “Ah, they’re both really bad.” Do you remember that? Because I do.

I think the last two years have made it resoundingly clear how utterly untrue and dishonest that was. Even if one didn’t care for Hillary (and full disclosure, I was a fervent supporter) the false equivalence was absurd. Now we are suffering the results.

These days, that mode of thought is so shockingly dated that it might as well be Spanish cartographers warning Columbus that he was going to sail off the edge of the earth. Even people who thought Donald Trump would be a bad president didn’t think he’d be this bad. On the contrary: especially among conservatives and right wingers who loathed Hillary (and yet weren’t that bothered by Donald), the mantra was that he would BECOME presidential. That he would “pivot.” He was supposed to pivot during the primaries, then after he secured the nomination, then after he took office….

Yet he never did.

It took a long time for some folks to admit that he wasn’t ever going to pivot, or become presidential, or drop the incendiary demagogic rhetoric, because all those things were simply beyond his ken. He is what he is, and that’s all he would ever be.

And what he is is a troglodyte.

One may dislike Hillary Clinton or her policy positions, or both, or think Donald Trump—for all his faults—is better equipped to carry out the kind of policy agenda that conservatives desire. (I’ll leave out those who admire Donald Trump personally because this discussion is confined to people in their right minds.)

But after watching him in office for two years, even Republicans who support the agenda that Trump is carrying out on their behalf—tax cuts, deregulation, and all that rot—cannot possibly contend that this man isn’t a willfully ignorant cretin, however useful he has been to them.

(Again leaving out the Kool-Aid drunk, criminally insane, and neo-fascist white supremacists, which I realize excuses the majority of the GOP.)

We know that even the Republican leadership in Congress privately ridicules him, alternating with wee-hours-of-the-night handwringing over the damage he is doing to the country, if only when he hurts the GOP’s own “brand” with self-inflicted wounds like the unconscionable 35-day federal shutdown…..not to mention the bodyblows he has delivered to the rule of law, respect for a free press, and the credibility of the intelligence community, just to name a few. (Their culpability in the Faustian bargain they have made is a topic for another day. Suffice it to say that there is a looming housing shortage in the Ninth Circle of Hell.) For those few Republicans with a shred of principle or conscience—admittedly, a group that could meet in a broom closet—Trump continues to be a deeply worrying threat to the very foundations of American democracy and the place of the United States on the world stage.

For the rest of us, he is something even worse: a man so manifestly unfit to govern; so proudly stupid; so malignantly narcissistic; so lacking in simple human empathy; so pathologically dishonest, unjustifiably arrogant, borderline mentally defective, corrupt, incompetent, racist, and petty that it beggars the imagination. (And those are his good points.) Not surprisingly, he is presiding over a kakistocracy even worse than the worst predictions from the most pessimistic observers when he pulled out an unlikely Electoral College win with some help from guys in furry hats in November 2016.

And that “rest of us” now comprises a resounding 63% of the country who disapprove of the job Trump is doing in office. And that statistic fails to capture the depth of the unhappiness. That isn’t garden variety “disapproval” of presidencies past. It’s not people sneering at Carter putting solar panels on the White House roof, or criticizing Reagan’s showdown with air traffic controllers. It’s to-the-marrow outrage and panic.

You do still hear a few Republican deadenders defensively argue that “Hillary would have been even worse.” But with all due respect, no one with detectable brainwave activity can seriously make that claim, not even diehard conservatives. One senses that, when they say that, with arms crossed like angry toddlers, even they know it’s risible. But they cling to it nonetheless because, frankly, they got nothing else. They have bought into this travesty, foisted it on the rest of us, and now have no other option than to double down, or else admit their colossal mistake and prostate themselves in abject repentance. (Not a move typically in the right wing quiver.)

From caging babies to robbing the poor to give to the rich to handing the Kremlin top secret information in public view to gleefully accelerating the ecological demise of the entire planet to reducing the federal government to a shambles in an effort to build a magical wall, at every turn Trump has been even more jawdroppingly bad than we imagined he would be.

So we’ve now gone from “Clinton is no better than Trump” to “Any functioning adult would be better than Trump.”

But a lot of people already realized that in 2016.

#misogyny #feminism trump politics

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obvious-labyrinth-blog · 8 years

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Part 3: Trump’s Other Wall

Trump has been president for less than a month so we don’t have quite the same amount of information to go on as we did with Bush and Obama. Because his presidency is in its infancy, there isn’t much to look at besides his cabinet (as far as this series is concerned), but that’s okay because the entire point of this 3 part series (part 1, part 2a, part 2b) has been to eventually lead up to this moment! Now we have the tools to understand what’s happening in the Senate and the historical context of the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration, which means we’re ready to look at present-day events to see if Trump really is facing “unpresidented” obstruction.

The Claims:

“But the most notable difference already has taken place: it is once again patriotic to obstruct the workings of government! Parliamentarians unite!” - op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Democratic senators plan to aggressively target eight of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees in the coming weeks and are pushing to stretch their confirmation votes into March — an unprecedented break with Senate tradition.” - Washington Post

“Senate Democrats Obstruct President Trump’s Nominees” - (terrifyingly) The White House

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait?

There is one thing that is actually true - it is taking Trump longer than usual to assemble his cabinet, for a newly elected president [1, 2]. Currently, it’s taking an average of 16 days for his nominees to move from their committee meetings to the Senate floor, which is indeed longer than the 7 days it took for Bush’s first cabinet or the 11 days it took for Obama’s first cabinet [1].

But there are some things that are different about Trump and his cabinet nominees that neither Bush nor Obama faced:

1) Did He Really Win?

Trump didn’t win the popular vote - he only received 45.96% of the votes, compared to Clinton’s 48% [3, 4]. He did win the Electoral College, but why the Electoral College is (considered by some to be) an antiquated hold-over of a bygone era is a post for another time [3, 4].

There has been one other president in recent history that has won via the Electoral College but lost the popular vote: George W. Bush; he received 47.87% of the votes, while Gore received 48.38% [3]. There have only been 5 presidents in the history of the United States that lost the popular vote, including Bush and Trump [3].

Bush lost the popular vote by a margin of 0.51% and Trump lost by a margin of 2.04%, which doesn’t seem like a huge deal but that small percentage represents millions of people [3, 4].

2) The Apprentice Has a Higher Approval Rating Than the President*

*I have never watched the Apprentice in my life and I have no idea if this is factual

Trump has the lowest approval rating for a new president since at least Eisenhower [5]. Bush, even after not winning the popular vote, held an approval rating of 59% in February 2001, while Obama’s initial approval rating was 64%. Trump has hovered in the 40s, with an average of 44% [5].

I’m not a pollster or avid fan of polling to begin with (you can ask my friends and they will happily tell you that I vocally declare my dislike for polls pretty much every time they are mentioned), but there is evidence that approval ratings do matter for presidents and legislative success [6, 7].

3) The Clumsy Cabinet

I won’t mince words here: Trump’s cabinet nominees are almost universally unqualified for the positions they have been tapped for. If you’ve read the news or been on any social media site since Trump’s inauguration, you have likely heard that his cabinet is full of billionaires that might have business conflicts, people that have minimal government experience and people that don’t have the expertise necessary to run the department they’ve been nominated for but that’s not what I’m going to talk about because many of those things can apparently be contested regardless of how much evidence one presents.

Instead, I’ll put forth that many of his cabinet nominees are unqualified simply because they, their businesses, or their statements stand in direct opposition to the goals of the department they are hopeful to direct.

Environmental Protection Agency, mission statement: “to protect human health and the environment.”

Scott Pruitt, EPA Administrator (awaiting Senate floor) • The EPA accomplishes their mission by developing and enforcing regulations, giving grants, studying environmental issues, and educating people about the environment [8]. Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee to head the EPA and current Attorney General in Oklahoma, has sued the EPA 14 times [9, 10, 11]. Many of these lawsuits are being fought over perceived overreach by the EPA, with the complainants believing that the EPA has acted outside of its authority [10, 12]. Also, many of the complainants in these lawsuits are companies that have donated to Pruitt directly and would be forced to make potentially costly changes to waste disposal methods or renovations to facilities if EPA regulations were enforced [9, 10, 13]. When asked, Pruitt has not explicitly stated that he would recuse himself from any currently pending litigation, even if appointed as head of the EPA, instead saying he would follow the recommendations of his ethics committee [11]. Pruitt, while not an out-and-out climate change denier, has also said that “the degree and extent of human impact and what should be done about [climate change] are subject to continuing debate and dialogue” [10, 11, 12]. Addressing and reducing the effects of climate change are one of the EPA’s primary goals [31].

Department of Education, mission statement: “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”

Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education (has been confirmed) • Betsy DeVos, Education Secretary confirmee, is a well-established champion of tax credits for parents to send their children to private/religious schools and charter schools, publicly-funded but privately-operated schools that can make impactful changes in communities, but can also lack oversight, decrease performance and drain funding from already struggling districts, but she hasn’t been a vocal advocate for public education [14, 15]. She was asked during her committee hearing if she could commit to not working to privatize public schools or cutting public education funding and she refused to give the requested yes or no answer, providing a vague non-answer instead [14]. She has also stated that she would support Trump if he were to repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act and she has made statements that it should up to individual states how they choose to comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a federal law (which isn’t, you know, how that works)[14]. While it may be important for parents to have access to choices regarding their child’s education, an Education Secretary that doesn’t seem interested in advocating for public education as strongly as she has lobbied for privatized education is likely at odds with department goals [14, 15, 16].

Department of Labor, mission statement: “To foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights.”

Andy Puzder, Secretary of Labor nominee (awaiting committee meeting) • Andy Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants (Carl’s Jr. and Hardees) and Secretary of Labor nominee, is critical of minimum wage increases and has a history of opposition to overtime rules and paid-leave policies, as well [9, 17, 19]. He is supportive of increased automation in the fast food industry, which is frequently cited as a threat to actual humans in the labor force [17, 18]. CKE has been the target of lawsuits alleging underpayment and has had to make back payments to employees [17, 19, 20]. Puzder has a history of undermining or explicitly working against the core values of the Labor Department, especially “promot[ing]... the welfare of the wage earner”,”improv[ing] working conditions,” and “assur[ing] work-related benefits and rights” [9, 17, 20, 21].

Department of State, mission statement: “The Department's mission is to shape and sustain a peaceful, prosperous, just, and democratic world and foster conditions for stability and progress for the benefit of the American people and people everywhere. This mission is shared with the USAID, ensuring we have a common path forward in partnership as we invest in the shared security and prosperity that will ultimately better prepare us for the challenges of tomorrow.”

Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State (has been confirmed) • Tillerson, confirmed Secretary of State, has a history of being critical of US sanctions against Russia when they stood in the way of deals brokered between Russia and the company he was CEO of before becoming Secretary of State - ExxonMobil [9, 22]. Tillerson also has an “unusually copacetic relationship with Vladimir Putin” [9]. And yes, I do mean the same Russia that is under investigation for possibly interfering in our election. The same Russia accused of war crimes in Syria by the UN. It may be difficult to tell from the mission statement alone, but the State Department oversees the international relations of the United States and also represents the United States at the UN [24]. To that end, I also mean the same Russia that is making the situation in Syria worse, resulting in a flood of Syrian refugees seeking asylum - indeed the same Syrian refugees the State Department has been trying to help (Trump’s Travel Ban notwithstanding)[9, 23, 25].

Other Nominees • Ben Carson, Department of Housing and Urban Development nominee, has had to walk back from statements he has made in the past regarding public assistance programs and fair housing initiatives, statements that were at odds with one of HUD’s primary goals - to provide quality rental homes and oversee public housing assistance programs [26, 27, 28].

And I realize that this one won’t win me any favors from Trump supporters or critics of the ACA, but Tom Price, Secretary of Health and Human Services nominees, has been a vocal opponent of the Affordable Care Act [9, 29]. HHS’s mission statement is “to enhance and protect the health and well-being of all Americans” and I would argue that stripping the access to health insurance that millions of Americans have through the Affordable Care Act is directly at odds with that mission statement (but if you’re not sold by that argument (I don’t blame you, but I had to try) his sweetheart deals may give you pause)[9, 29, 30].

And my personal favorite, Rick Perry, Department of Energy nominee, once advocated for the very same department he has now been tapped to lead to be eliminated (or he would have, if he could have remembered it)[32].

4) It’s the Principle of the Thing

Even if most of Trump’s cabinet members were not directly opposed to the goals of the departments they may one day one run, there have still been huge ethical hurdles for some candidates… mostly that they had hearings scheduled before the OGE had finished their ethics investigations [33, 34, 35]. The Office of Government Ethics is responsible for the investigations that prevent and resolve conflicts of interest, and with so many of Trump’s nominees being executives and philanthropists-cum-lobbyists, there are quite a lot of conflicts of interest, meaning an ethics investigation is highly important [33, 36].

The Unprecedented Obstruction?

As we’ve looked at with both the Bush and Obama administrations, maybe Senate Democrat’s BAD! obstruction isn’t actually all that novel. And maybe the obstruction is warranted.

Trump has a historically low approval rating and millions of people contest his win of the presidency and those millions of people are upset, which means that Democratic and Republican senators alike are receiving calls, letters, and faxes at an exhausting rate, asking them to either hold these unqualified nominees to task (or, for Republicans, at least reconsider casting their vote in favor) [38, 39, 40]. The boycotting and delaying of committee hearings has been done before, too - by Republicans. The debates and extended time on the floor has been a tactic used by both parties in recent presidencies, as previous posts have well covered. And Trump has a long way to go before he hits the average number of days it took to confirm Obama’s second cabinet (34 days)(and Obama’s approval ratings during the beginning of his second term are much closer to Trump’s approval ratings now)[1, 41].

Democratic senators throwing a wrench into the system may actually just be them doing their job. And Republican Senators calling for Senate Dems to ease up and just let cabinet nominees through may not actually be doing their’s, especially if there are ethical concerns or conflicts of interest that still need to be divested.

Oh, and those two fun vocabulary words from my last post?

kleptocracy (n, klep·toc·ra·cy) - government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed

kakistocracy (n, kak·is·toc·ra·cy) - government by the worst people

Navigation: Part 1 - Part 2a - Part 2b - Part 3 (this!)

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Yx1i6xEgAZCKg2-moEnqv5lO_9gKg3XqnVcminrll6E/edit#gid=0

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/20/donald-trump-will-start-his-presidency-with-the-smallest-confirmed-cabinet-in-decades/?utm_term=.a9b9d5fa2c25

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elections_in_which_the_winner_lost_the_popular_vote

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/president

[5] http://www.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx

[6] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-won-despite-being-unpopular-so-can-he-govern-that-way/

[7] https://hbr.org/2017/02/trumps-low-approval-numbers-matter-heres-why

[8] https://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/our-mission-and-what-we-do

[9] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/trumps-appointees-conflicts-of-interest-a-crib-sheet/512711/

[10] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/12/07/trump-names-scott-pruitt-oklahoma-attorney-general-suing-epa-on-climate-change-to-head-the-epa/?utm_term=.a9d177ee3402

[11] http://www.npr.org/2017/01/18/510472412/epa-nominee-scott-pruitt-acknowledges-existence-of-climate-change

[12] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/07/trump-scott-pruitt-environmental-protection-agency

[13] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/14/us/scott-pruitt-trump-epa-pick.html?_r=1&mtrref=www.theatlantic.com&gwh=9EA39F71D3681CE53B9387328E4BB687&gwt=pay

[14] http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/betsy-devos-education-public-schools-233720

[15] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/us/politics/betsy-devos-trumps-education-pick-has-steered-money-from-public-schools.html

[16] https://www2.ed.gov/about/landing.jhtml

[17] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/us/politics/andrew-puzder-labor-secretary-trump.html

[18] http://www.businessinsider.com/self-service-kiosks-are-replacing-workers-2016-5

[19] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/andrew-puzder-donald-trumps-labor-secretary-pick/

[20] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/president-trumps-missing-labor-secretary/515655/

[21] https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/mission

[22] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jan/12/rex-tillerson/tillerson-misleads-russian-sanctions-opposition/

[23] https://www.state.gov/s/d/rm/index.htm#mission

[24] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_State

[25] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11856922/Russia-refuses-to-help-Syrian-refugees.html

[26] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/ben-carsons-hud-housing-nominee-hearing.html

[27] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-carson-hud-20170112-story.html

[28] https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/about/mission

[29] http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/tom-price-health-secretary-confirmation-hearing-233796

[30] https://www.hhs.gov/about/

[31] https://www.epa.gov/climatechange/what-epa-doing-about-climate-change

[32] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-perry-20161213-story.html

[33] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ethics-official-warns-against-confirmations-before-reviews-are-complete/2017/01/07/e85a97ee-d348-11e6-9cb0-54ab630851e8_story.html?utm_term=.d2ad4925e7d6

[34] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/08/trump-cabinet-nominees-ethics-review-conflict-of-interest

[35] http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/313175-ethics-office-accuses-gop-of-rushing-trump-cabinet-confirmations

[36] https://www.oge.gov/web/oge.nsf/Mission%20and%20Responsibilities

[37] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/us/politics/republicans-block-vote-on-nominee-to-lead-epa.html

[38] http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/betsy-devos-confirmation-senate-phone-lines-234216

[39] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/is-betsy-devos-going-down/515346/

[40] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/more-than-1100-law-school-professors-nationwide-oppose-sessionss-nomination-as-attorney-general/2017/01/03/dbf55750-d1cc-11e6-a783-cd3fa950f2fd_story.html?utm_term=.3c4f7dae6502

[41] http://www.gallup.com/poll/116479/barack-obama-presidential-job-approval.aspx

#obstruction #republican #democrat #senate #trump #epa #education #labor #ethics

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honeybeelily · 8 years

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A question was asked....

....of me over the weekend. I have no idea in what way the comment was meant as it was via lovely Facebook but it has been bothering me. I did not reply back. I have not said anything still. However I have spent a great deal thinking about this small, insignificant comment.

“Has anyone told you the election is over.”

I was awake watching the results on November 8th. I was there with fellow Americans, the nation, and the world watching the results unfold with bated breath. I was one of the 65,800,000+ Americans that was devastated by the results, unable to catch my breath.

Yes, I know the election is over.

I was angry. I was disappointed. I was disgusted. A man who had no problem saying "I'm automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything." was elected of the free world.

To be fair, Hillary wasn’t my original candidate either. Yet we aligned on many different topics the most. The longer Cheeto ran, the more I desired her to win for I felt she stood more for democracy than he did. But that didn’t matter, did it? Even though she was the more popular candidate she still lost the election.

After a while, politically I went quiet. I retreated from the news and social media to digest the loss as much as I could. To focus on the things I could directly control like the safety of my staff against hate and abuse. Yet even that came under scrutiny. “Then just move.” Yes, because I can just pack up and move to some magical place that racism, hate, bigotry, sexism, misogyny, and ignorance doesn’t exist. Like I don’t have responsibilities and obligations that I can just drop and move. You know, a husband and career.

I shed tears when I heard the electoral college voted Cheeto into office. Again I was angry but I tried to keep quiet. “Give him a chance.” I thought. “Maybe it was all a show and he will actually do right by America. Maybe I was wrong.” I hoped and prayed more than I ever have in my entire life. After a very long and painful 2016, I prayed that 2017 would be kinder, wiser, and more loving than any year before.

Then January 20th, 2017 happened.

The day I gave up any form of faith as I watched how Melanie show clear signs of abuse. Something I am unfortunately intimately familiar with. The day I watched the first President I had ever voted for leave the oval office for the final time. The day I felt that everything negative about humanity had won. The day we became the most divided.

Within 24 hours my greatest fears for this nation were confirmed. Our President accused that millions voted illegally for Hillary even though there is zero proof to support this (Actually, some woman did illegally vote, for him). Betsy DeVos was announced as the choice for Education Secretary. You seriously think this woman deserves to head education? We are already struggling with educating our young and we want to condemn them further? I remember public school and there are far worse school’s than mine.

Executive action to repeal the ACA which will end up restricting health insurance to millions of people from the man that wants to reinstate “Pre Existing Conditions” back into play. This would effect my family just like the millions around the country. Oh, don’t forget there is no replacement plan on the table last I heard.

However the bad news didn’t stop there, did it? Scott Pruitt to head the EPA. Climate change removed from the White House Website while scientists are being silenced about it (You know, national parks setting up alternate twitter accounts to continue to inform people of science facts.) Not to mention the other multiple federal agencies ordered not to speak to the press. Instead we are getting “Alternate Facts” which are utter bullshit.

He pledged to sign FADA, a legalized form of discrimation against the LGBTQ community. The ban on Green Card & Visa holders from 7 middle east countries and detaining them from their families and responsibilities for “The Security Of The Nation” while conveniently leaving out Saudi Arabia where he has a business and, where one could argue, many terrorists can come from too. It also supports discriminating against a person’s faith. Don’t forget the Muslim register that could go into effect. *Cough* Like the persecution of Jews *Cough*

The Senate wanting to strip away a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and the health care associated with it. Pushing the Pro-Life agenda without having any plan in place to support the children you are forcing us to have. And don’t you dare give me the bullshit about keeping my legs closed when there are studies showing that sexual activity builds a closer and healthier relationship with your spouse. Or the long term environmental effects each life has. You know, the fact this planet cannot sustain life if we continue down the path we are currently on.

Keystone XL & Dakota Access pipelines are going forward again. Cheeto and cabinet members still using their personal electronics for government duties and responsibilities. Wasn’t that what you were all upset about with Hillary? #Thefuckingwall. Not only is this one of the dumbest things he wants to implement, it does not foster any good will with other countries which we really need. I would rather spend my tax dollars on education, infrastructure, health, and science.

I’m sure I’m missing several other key pieces of information but I think you get the idea. If you voted for Cheeto, for whatever reason, I do not hate, dislike, or unlove you. I respect you used your American privilege to vote for who you thought was right. I will not attack, torment, or be prejudice of you. But I do not have to respect him as many of you did not respect Obama. I will not say his name, he has not earned it in my book. Yes, I know the election is over. But did you know…

In the words of Agent Carter “..Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides something WRONG is something RIGHT. This nation was founded on the one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or consequences…..When the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world. ‘No, YOU move.’ “

I will not stand quietly by as people’s rights are taken away out of fear. I will not quietly stand as a dictator tries to silence the people, which violates our most sacred amendment, the first amendment. I will not stand by as our rights are attempted to be taken away by a proven Nazi (Bannon). I will not stand for injustice, racism, hate, bigotry, sexism, misogyny, and ignorance. I will not fear.

I will march. I will call my representative. I will read and educate myself. I will have discussions. I will advocate for every man, woman, child regardless of the color of their skin or the choice of religious faith. I will stand for your right to your opinion even if they are on the opposite sides. I will be peaceful in my protest but I will also refuse to move. Let me be the first to say that I’m sure I don’t have all the facts. I’m sure there is more to everything than we will ever know. I’m sure more information will continue to come out and we will all have to navigate the waters of journalism and decide what is truth nor will we all agree. But I will fight for you, myself, friends, family, strangers, and mostly importantly our future.

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, When we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, But it is not this day.

An hour of woes and shattered shields, When the age of men comes crashing down, But it is not this day…..this day we fight.” -Aragorn

Yes, I know the election if over. But do you know the #Resistance is revived?

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lorajackson · 4 years

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CNN Buries Its Own Poll Results on Trump’s Favorability. Guess Why.

Well, that’s interesting, I thought, as I noted that the RealClearPolitics homepage stated that President Trump was tied for his all-time high in CNN polling. Then I went over to the CNN homepage for confirmation. Guess what I found?The main story was about a church that lost 44 parishioners to COVID-19. The second-most prominent story told us that “Grocery Prices Are Soaring” (which is true if you think that a 2.6 percent increase in April should be called “soaring”), the third-most-prominent item told us, “Doctors treating coronavirus patients are seeing odd and frightening syndromes.” Running down the rail on the right we were given such important developments as “Man refusing to wear a mask breaks arm of Target employee,” “CNN Investigates: He’s willing to get Covid-19 to speed up vaccine efforts,” “Five surfers die after huge layer of sea foam hampers rescue” and “How coronavirus spread from one member to 87% of the singers at a choir practice.”Only after all of this stuff did we learn that CNN has a new poll out, under the headline, “CNN Poll: Biden tops Trump nationwide, but battlegrounds tilt Trump.” Polls are expensive, news organizations tend to hype them breathlessly to generate headlines in rival media outlets, Wednesday was (obviously) a slow news day, and politics is one of CNN’s core topics. Yet CNN seemed oddly unenthused about its own poll. And the story to which the homepage linked doesn’t mention that Trump had never scored higher in a CNN poll. True, there are lots of noisy data in the piece, most of which cut against Trump. But on the other hand the single most surprising and hence most newsworthy detail of the poll was that Trump holds a seven-point lead over Biden in the battleground states. The CNN story doesn’t even tell us what that figure is — seven points seems like a pretty big number — and downplays its own finding by noting, “Given the small sample size in that subset of voters, it is difficult to determine with certainty whether the movement is significant or a fluke of random sampling.”The headline of a different CNN news story about the same poll carries the headline, “CNN Poll: Negative ratings for government handling of coronavirus persist” over a picture of Trump looking downcast. This story, unlike the other one, mentions (but not till the fourth paragraph) that Trump’s approval rating of 45 percent “now matches his high point in CNN polling dating back to the start of his term.”I don’t want to spin this poll as great news for President Trump — he has a 55 percent disapproval rating, and only 36 percent think he’s a trustworthy source of information about the crisis — but the story of the 21st century has been persistently low faith in presidents, government, Congress, and the direction of the country. President Obama had an approval rating of about 48 percent at this point in May of 2012, on his way to being reelected by a wide margin. Joe Biden has an approval rating of only 45 percent, as against 46 percent disapproval, and that’s with Biden mostly shielded from public view. Biden’s penchant for gaffes largely escape notice when his public appearances mainly consist of reading from a Teleprompter in his basement, whereas Trump’s gaffes make headlines. Biden bears no responsibility for all the things that have gone wrong, whereas Trump not only gets heaped with blame, but the pressure of managing a crisis spurs him on to more gaffes. Trump probably doesn’t need to win a plurality of voters to win a majority of Electoral College votes. And being disliked by a majority didn’t stop him before: The day he was elected president, he had a 37.5 percent approval rating, according to the RealClearPolitics poll of polls.Biden does appear to be the favorite at the moment; he is, after all, leading in nationwide polls by an average of 4.5 percent, according to RealClearPolitics. He appears to have carved out a substantial lead among older voters, whom Trump has to thank for his win in 2016. Yet betting markets still rate Trump a big favorite. After three and a quarter years of the media talking themselves into believing the “walls are closing in,” “the noose is tightening,” and “the endgame has begun,” the voters don’t seem to be confirming that Trump is toast. On the contrary, they have substantially more positive views about Trump than they did when they elected him president. And Biden can’t hide in that basement forever.

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

At this point in the Democratic primary, none of the moderate alternatives to Sen. Bernie Sanders has risen above the rest. Sanders has emerged from the first three voting contests as the race’s progressive front-runner, and voters who think Sanders is too liberal are still left with several choices.

It might seem like “moderate” voters could consolidate behind one alternative to thwart Sanders’s path to the nomination. That’s possible, but one thing it assumes is that voters understand politics in ideological terms. And many don’t — political scientists have long found that most of the public does not fit into neat ideological boxes.

Rather, people often hold conflicting opinions on policy issues. Fundamentally, many don’t think of politics as a battle between the left and the right. For instance, a voter could be pro-choice on the question of abortion and in favor of Obamacare, while also against increased gun control and raising taxes. Another voter might identify as a moderate and independent, even if they agree with Democrats on most policy issues. What’s more, either one of these two hypothetical voters could vote for President Trump simply because the economy is doing well, regardless of their other political beliefs.

There is some evidence that Americans are becoming more ideologically divided, but there is still a pretty big gap between rank-and-file voters and elected officials and party leaders. Where voters do match the views of their party leaders, it is often because some people are changing their views on issues like race and gender to better match their party leaders.

We can’t use ideology, by itself, to perfectly predict which candidates voters will rally behind as the field winnows. Which is why even if one moderate alternative were to emerge to Sanders, it doesn’t necessarily mean that candidate would benefit — Sanders could gain, too.

Ideology-driven politics is slowly on the rise

Until recently, ideology played a limited role in American public opinion because the parties themselves were not that distinguishable on matters of ideology. In 1956, Americans could identify the party nominees’ positions on an issue and had a position on it themselves only 31 percent of the time. But by 2012 that number had risen to 77 percent. Likewise, the percentage of Americans that said they saw important differences between the parties rose, from 50 percent in 1952 to 83 percent in 2016.

So Americans are becoming more ideologically aware and as such, recognize differences between the two parties. As a result, more Americans know where to place themselves on a left to right scale when asked.

One long-running method for evaluating how ideologically sophisticated voters are is to look at how Americans discuss the parties and candidates when asked about what they like and dislike about each side. Historically this has shown few Americans use ideology or policy positions in describing their views. But political scientist Martin Wattenberg recently found that the percentage of voters who explain their choices with ideological concepts and labels — such as “liberal” and “conservative” — is on the rise, up from 25 percent in 1972 to 35 percent in 2012. He found an even larger jump in the number of voters who mentioned a few specific policy issues, such as being pro-choice or favoring tax increases as a way to justify whom they support, up from 3 percent in 1972 to 13 percent in 2012. Combined, nearly half of American voters now give reasons for their voting choices based on ideology or policy.

Wattenberg told me that voters used to voice generically positive views of their party, rather than talk about its positions or ideology. You might hear “the president brought us jobs” or “he’s a Democrat and so am I,” but you’d rarely ever hear the terms liberal or conservative or a list of the parties’ platform positions as a way to describe their views of their party.

As for what’s driving more Americans to think more like ideologues, Wattenberg points partially to increased education levels. The most educated voters have long been the most likely to think about politics in ideological terms and hold consistent policy opinions, and now there are more of them — in 1980, only 17 percent of Americans over the age of 24 had completed four years of college or more; by 2018, it was 35 percent.

But not all scholars are convinced that Americans are becoming more ideologically sophisticated. Political scientists Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe found that most people still have opinions that do not track as consistently conservative or liberal and many still call themselves moderates or independents. For example, while most Democrats agree with mainly liberal policy positions, many Democrats overall still identify as moderates (even a few as conservatives). Meanwhile, Republicans might agree on ideological labels more than Democrats, but that doesn’t mean they hold more consistent policy positions.

In fact, one other possible explanation for what we’re seeing in the rise of ideology-driven politics is not that Americans are actually becoming more ideological; instead, they’re just more likely to repeat what political candidates and officials say. For example, Republican voters might now use the word “socialist” more often as an insult, but that does not mean they associate the term with its historical connotation or contemporary policy positions.

Ideology could matter in 2020, but we could be thinking about it wrong, too

On the one hand, voters’ increased ideological sophistication could enable the emergence of a more left-wing Democratic nominee in 2020, like Sanders. There is some evidence that his ideological language affected his voters in 2016, too. In Wattenberg’s data, Sanders’s supporters used language like “progressive” and “socialist” to describe their political views a lot more than other Democrats.

On the other hand, this kind of appeal may resonate with only a minority of the Democratic Party. After all, Sanders and Clinton voters did not differ much on their policy views, even though they were divided on whether they conceptualized politics in ideological terms. But with many voters caring more about picking a candidate who can defeat Trump than a candidate who agrees with them on the issues, it’s hard to know whether a candidate’s ideological appeal will help them wield a competitive edge in 2020.

Then again, there’s no reason Sanders can’t win the primary with a mix of ideological and not-so-ideological voters. Because even though Sanders does very well among very liberal voters, that doesn’t mean that his appeal is limited to them. Many voters see Sanders as electable, and he polls pretty well in head-to-head polls against Trump. And others might like Sanders’s consistency and authenticity, even if they don’t always agree with him. Take Sanders’s message of fighting against corruption and socioeconomic inequality. It is a pretty popular idea, and one that Democratic nominees have run on previously.

However, this doesn’t apply just to Sanders. The more moderate candidates will also need to widen their appeal beyond ideology. The race has now shifted to states with more diverse electorates, and many of the Democrats who do not think about their candidate preferences in ideological terms are nonwhite. Just as Sanders needs to recruit more than his ideological revolutionaries to build a majority, the more moderate candidates cannot succeed by merely saying Sanders is too far to the left. They, too, will need to make non-ideological appeals.

Of course, once the general-election race begins, running an ideological campaign could be a risk because it could leave out less ideological swing voters, but Democrats, including Sanders, have an effective alternative. Traditionally, Democrats have run campaigns that emphasize the groups that their party intends to help, including women, minorities, the poor, and especially the middle class. Whoever the nominee, “Who’s on your side?” may remain Democrats’ most popular message, appealing to both ideological and not-so-ideological voters.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Matt Grossmann

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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Why Do Republicans Hate Ted Cruz

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-hate-ted-cruz/

Why Do Republicans Hate Ted Cruz

But Cruz And His Conservative Stances Stirred Up Debate Upon His Arrival In Washington Several Months After His Appointment He Was Famously Called Wacko Bird By The Late Sen John Mccain

In March 2013, McCain called Cruz and other Republicans “wacko birds” whose beliefs are not “reflective of the views of the majority of Republicans,” according to The Huffington Post

Cruz embraced the name and even keeps a black baseball cap with a picture of Daffy Duck next to the words “WACKO BIRD” in his Senate office, according to GQ Magazine.

When He Was In His Early Teens Cruz’s Parents Enrolled Him In An After

Texas Is Freezing But The Roast Of Ted Cruz Is On

Lucifer in the flesh, Republican John A. Boehner, the former speaker of the House, called him in 2016.

If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham said in 2016.

Said Democrat Al Franken in 2017, when he was still in the Senate: I probably like Ted Cruz more than most of my colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz.

Not good, Cruz tweeted early Tuesday evening about the shutdown of his state. Stay safe!

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Part of the reason for this is the Bush campaign early on decided they would have to defeat Richards with a series of issues. If they engaged in a personality contest, Richards would win.

ORourke appears on the talk shows of Ellen DeGeneres and is scheduled to appear with Stephen Colbert. Cruz is on Fox News. One of those is like a fun confectionary. The other is boiled spinach.

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