Most Sensible Thing I Read All Day

From a certain Michael Thomas Brown, unknown to me, commenting at Bruce Bartlett's Facebook page:

The people I know who call themselves libertarian aren't any different than other conservatives, to me. I think they call themselves that so that they can criticize Democrats, but when Republicans screw up, they can just say, "hey, don't blame me, I'm a libertarian."

 Fn,:  I savor the fact that Ron Paul walked away with 41 percent of the vote in America's bureaucratic bedroom.

David Brooks' Blind Faith

The David Brooks column that everyone is clucking about today—on the Republican tantrum over the debt limit--strikes me as an odd mixture of principle and pragmatism, with a soupçon of blind faith. Principle, insofar as he sees that the GOP “has separated itself from normal governance, the normal rules of evidence and the ancient habits of our nation.” Pragmatism, insofar as he cautions them that their strategy won't work. And blind faith insofar as they don't really —ignoring, I suspect, the hard core of GOP radicals who understand perfectly well that they risk bringing down the very fabric of responsible government and just don't have a problem with that. Brooks says that proponents of the GOP strategy “somehow believe” that we can retain the fabric of governance with their apocalyptic program. Maybe some Republicans, but some, I suspect—the architects—I suspect believe nothing of the sort: rather, they simply do not give a damn whether the fabric of government persists or not as long as they get to keep their money.

[Who, exactly? Oh, I'm not certain. Grover Norquist, probably. Dick Armey. Dick Cheney, Phil Gramm, others whose indifference to ordinary governance is deep-seated and long-lasting. I could be wrong in any individual case here, and if any individual case wants to speak up and endorse Brooks' belated conversation to sanity, they're welcome to do so.]

Trumpism

Ed Kilgore nails it:

The Republican establishment has perceived that [the candidacy of Donald] Trump will drag the entire Republican field into a world where they cannot be taken seriously by general election voters—and launched an all-out effort to tar him. But the truth is that their effort may be a lost cause, for reasons that are intrinsic to the success of Trump’s consumer-focused approach: This year, GOP voters’ hunger for radicalism is so great that it can be filled by essentially anybody. Kill off Trump’s candidacy and the demand will remain, leaving an opening for yet another demagogic charlatan to take his place. ... [L]ast Friday, Public Policy Polling released a survey that showed Trump not only running ahead of the entire 2012 field, but registering numbers higher than such prior leaders as Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. That caused the Republican Powers That Be to stop dismissing him and launch the kind of sustained attack that is said to have succeeded in fatally damaging Sarah Palin’s credibility as a potential presidential candidate. During the last few days Karl Rove, George Will, and the Club for Growth have all trashed Trump very aggressively

But a closer look at the PPP findings should reveal the weakness of this elite strategy. What they show is not a desire to support the faux tycoon per se, but a raging right-wing, anti-establishment fever that has only gotten stronger in recent months. Ending or mortally wounding a Trump candidacy would only address its symptoms, rather than curing a condition in which voters will follow whichever candidate is willing to outdo his or her opponents at wingnuttery. 

 Link.  In fact, this streak of explosive anger has been there all along, goes straight back to (at least) the Wobblies.   It's been obscured in recent years, partly by Ronald Reagan who seemed to promise so much (but in fact, gave not very much).  Ross Perot had a bit of the flavor, but populism in Perot was always  varnished over by a strain of inspired wonkery.  Before that we did have George Wallace, but with Wallace, the stench of racism was so apparent that we tend to overlook the strain of beyond-racism lower-middle-class rage.  Before Wallace, for the real thing you pretty much have to go back to Huey Long.

Maybe we need to take instruction from our friends, the cheese-eating surrender monkeys.  For a long time they've had Jean Marie Le Pen and before him, Pierre Poujade.  Indeed, it's probably not far off the mark to say that Le Pen's main contribution to French public life is that he made Nicolas Sarkozy look normal.  

Poltics is Paradoxical

Why is it that the most likable of the Republican contenders is also perhaps the winner of the loony sweepstakes (though the competition is stiff)?  And the one who may be halfway competent to the job--the inventor of Obamacare--gives me the creeps?  Alternate puzzle--why is it somebody so clean makes me so want to take a bath?

Update: Looks like I've got an ally. 

A President's Day Question II: Remember Coolidge?

I've always counted Calvin Coolidge among my favorite presidents--not so much for his presidency as for what he seems to have been as a person: modest, funny, self-deprecating.  And the man who said:

“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time”

In the form of a question, does anyone remember the Boston Police Strike?   And does anybody ever hold a Coolidge Day Dinner?  Apparently not: per Google, zero hits (until now, of course).

H/T to these guys, who beat me to it.  

A President's Day Question: Is the Republican Party Dumping Lincoln?

Critics of the New Republicans have become habituated to expressing shock and scorn at how the norms of the usurpers betray the principles of Abraham Lincoln, their supposed founder.

It's a worthwhile gimmick; of course there have always those--high density around the country club at Memphis--who can explain to you why the Great Emancipator was really the Great Criminal.  The point is that they've pretty much transplanted themselves from the old South Bourbonocracy to the New South Bourbonocracy of New Gingrich, Jim DeMint and whoever.  It's a tectonic shift: I can remember showing up as a carpetbagger in Louisville in 1960 to find (I was surprised) that blacks who voted (there were a few) almost inevitably cast their ballots for the GOP.  On further inquiry, I could see that they were perfectly rational.  Not only were they dancing with the fellahs that brung 'em, but they were recognizing that (then) new-age northern Republicans were genuinely a more creative, forward-looking--and, clearly, less racist--then their older, tireder Democratic competitors.

Boy, that was a long time ago, huh?  You've got to admire how, in the interim, the new, forward-looking elites of the once-new Republican interlopers have learned to make their peace with the old, backward-looking elites of the Confederacy.   And I'm beginning to wonder--is the whole Lincoln thingy a sign of the change?  As to their betrayal of their founding principles, could it be that the Republicans aren't even embarrassed any more?

I'm not sure, and I don't know how to do a definitive test, but I suppose one rule-of-thumb gauge would be the incidence of that great icon of Republican solidarity--the Lincoln Day dinner.  In my time, these dinners were part of the Republican glue (just as Jefferson-Jackson day dinners were for Democrats).  And guess what--apparently they are fading away.  Here's a brief Wiki summary, with a money quote from South Carolina Lindsey Graham: "We don’t do Lincoln Day Dinners in South Carolina. It’s nothing personal, but it takes a while to get over things."    I Google-searched "Lincoln Day dinner" within the past year and came up with 102,000 hits.  "Reagan Day Dinner" gets you 34,900.  "Lincoln Reagan dinner" gets you 12,600.  Now this:

Lincoln, rarely considered a capitalist icon,did more for strong and able ownership than any president in U.S. history, perhaps more than any leader in world history.  He sold millions of acre of land held by a neglectful government, transferring ownership into the hands of new owners who would make a garden in the wilderness.  He transferred ownership of millions of men from masters who abused their own property back to the men themselves, the best owners of all.

That's Andrew Redleaf in Panic (2110), one of the most sophisticated items I've read in years on the actual workings of a free market, and absolutely top-notch on the evils of crony capitalism. 

Republican Fault Lines

Ir'as fun to watch the emerging  cracks in the Republican monolith as the torrent of rhetoric slams into the realities of power.  Some of these new anomalies are the result of crude pandering: the fight over "earmarks," for example, was never more than a side show, and you just knew from the start that even the most ardent anti-earmarker would get religion once his own ox got gored.  Others are more dramatic: my head is still spinning at how fast Eric Cantor and others jumped in bed with the big banks to resist any all efforts to inhibit banker predation.  A new one on my radar is an emerging conflict over what to do about Fannie and Freddie.  Of course the standard line is that we'd best be done with them as the work of Satan.  But don't try that on the real-estate-home-builder lobby who love the idea of a soft and comfy Federal support cushion under their flagging and hazardous enterprise.

I suppose it is on a slightly different vector, but I'd like to authorize a special shout-out  for Bush II Shock-and-Awe and the campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East.  Evidently nobody explained the ground rules to  Dick Cheney who is pushing back against President Obama on Egypt, calling ensconced, 32-year dictator Hosni Mubarak a "good friend and ally."  I feel his pain: it's been obvious from day one that the spectacle of "democracy in the Middle East" ought to scare the daylights of anyone who feels that the role of the Middle East is to serve as an appanage maintained to further American  energy policy.

I still don't know quite what to do about this business about allowing states to go bankrupt: some voices in Congress seemed eager to speak out for it, but they are clearly meeting resistance from the bond market, not to mention a lot of state governors, including their own (note also an especially insightful piece by E.J. McMahon, pointing out that the state budget problem is really not those dreaded union compensation costs, but current mandates like Medicare Medicaid).  I'm tempted to think state bankruptcy might be just one more cockamanie idea from Newt Gingrich, to be forgotten once his allies remember how so many of his ideas are, well, cockamanie.

Mother of Mercy, Is This the End of Mico?

Ever ready with a cultural reference, deposed Republican National Chairman Michael Steele says he knows how Caesar felt.  But this is the man who confused War and Peace with Tale of Two Cities.  Could he be thinking of Little Caesar, as memorialized by Edward G. Robinson?  Or maybe he's just sending out for pizza?

Zut Alors, M. Steele!

Somehow I'm just now catching up with the story of how Republican world-class embarrassment National Chairman Michael Steele said his favorite book was War and Peace and then rattled off the first sentence of Tale of Two Cities--"it was the best of  times, it was the worst of times."

I'm inclined to cut the guy some slack here. W&P does, let's admit it, have one of the most off-putting openers of any major novel.  I mean, how much can you do with:

Well, prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than possessions, estates of the Bounaparte family.

So the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation.  No, wait: that's the footnote version.  The real text is:

"Eh bien, mon prince, Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des estates, de la famille Buonaparte.

Got it?  Even though this is a translation, P/V want to make it clear to their readers that Tolstoi's Russian aristos all speak in the tongue of cheese-eating surrender monkeys.  Perhaps a more suitably Republican choice would have been

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

..thereby uniting hostility to the estate tax and support for the Defense of Marriage Act together in a single sentence.  Or, seeing as how his main goal is to keep his job, he might have settled for:

Call me, Ishmael.  But just as long as  you call me for dinner.

Michael?  It's Ishmael on line two.
 

Kentucky: The Last Republican Revolution

Watching the returns roll in for Rand Paul tonight, I remember being a witness to the last Kentucky Republican Revolution, 49 years ago when a coalition of upstarts disestablished an old Bourbon-urban machine that had dominated Louisville since the bottom of the Great Depression. William O. Cowger, who got himself elected mayor, was born in Nebraska. He was smooth and nonconfrontational in the style of his profession: he was a mortgage-broker, back when a "mortgage broker" was a guy who imported eastern capital to the hinterlands. His partner Marlow Cook, who became chief county administrator, was from upstate New York. His campaign papers said he was a lawyer, but he was nearer to being a career politician.

Cowger could be almost too cute at times--we used to say that when Cowger said "frankly and honestly, Jack, I'm going to tell you the truth," then you knew he was lying. But he also had just a wisp of a smile as if to suggest he didn't want to take any of it too seriously. Cook was more active and engaging, more hands on, funnier.

In truth the Louisville Democrats weren't nearly as awful as many of their Southern counterparts: they had generated Wilson Wyatt, who helped create the Americans for Democratic Action, and a quirky but innovative mayor named Charlie Farnsley who governed with imagination and wit. But they'd gotten old and gone stale and retreated to their traditionalist roots. What Cowger and Cook brought was fresh energy, an openness to innovation. And in particular, they didn't give a hoot about race. Which is to say that they weren't precisely abolitionists, but that race simply wasn't an issue for them and they wanted to bat the race issue out of the way so they could apply their energies to other issues that looked more promising. Louisville had plenty of racial turmoil during the 60s but they would have had a lot more without the Republicans' attitude of benign neglect. Anecdote: Cowger once told me he thought the super markets were damn fools for not hiring black clerks; didn't they realize that these people were their customers?

They were both under 40 at their election; Cowger succeeded a decent but clueless establishment voice who was old for his age at 73. It says something about Cook's predecessor that I can't even remember his name (and Wiki is no help).

Cowger was barred by law from succeeding himself; he went on to a couple of terms in Congress and then died early. Cook won a second term as county administrator by a two-to-one margin and then moved on to a single term in the Senate; he was defeated there by another establishment Democrat.

Cook's most conspicuous legacy may be that he, in a grand gesture of anti-libertarianism, engineered the purchase of the steamboat Belle of Louisville from the public purse; the City of Louisville still owns it and runs it as an excursion vessel. His most meaningful contribution is that he gave a start to another who went on to be a Republican US Senator. That would be Mitch McConnell, who got his hands slapped when his chosen candidate lost out to Rand Paul tonight.

Cook lived long and prospered as a Washington lawyer; from retirement he resurfaced in 2004 to endorse John Kerry over George Bush:

For me, as a Republican, I feel that when my party gives me a dangerous leader who flouts the truth, takes the country into an undeclared war and then adds a war on terrorism to it without debate by the Congress, we have a duty to rid ourselves of those who are taking our country on a perilous ride in the wrong direction.

So far as I know, Cook is still alive (he'd be 84). Wonder what he thinks of the Tea Party.

Must Read of the Day: Circular Firing Squad, with Strobe Lighting

Fascinating Charles Homans piece about Trotskyite liquidationist tendencies on the right. Yes, I know it is a stale topic, but somehow I had missed "Culture11" a righty answer to "Slate," with the surprise hook of some dazzling snark:

Culture11’s in-house writers also had a gift for whacking their own partisans, with varying degrees of constructive criticism and snark. "Filmmaker Jean Luc Godard famously declared that, to do his job, all he needed was ‘a girl and a gun,’" [Arts Editor Peter] Suderman wrote on the occasion of Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running mate, alongside a photo of the Alaska governor posing with a stuffed grizzly bear. "On his hunt for a Vice President, John McCain apparently came to the same conclusion." A month after the election, when even respectable right-leaning publications were expending ink and pixels on the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Culture11 offered up a mischievous list of the "Top 11 Fringe Right Arguments Against Barack Obama Becoming President" (Number two: "He’s not really black." Number one: "He’s black."). [James] Poulos, the political editor, wrote about Democratic and Republican dynasties with equal acidity: the Clintons were "wily, and probably deathless, political opponents, with an arsenal of depleted-uranium loyalists"; Bush was "a man who thinks in grand words made up of few letters." When Palin, at the apex of her popularity, held a campaign rally in Virginia, he stopped by and was perturbed by what he saw. "In place of a detailed contrast between the GOP’s shortcomings and failures and the real change that’s promised," he wrote, "the McCain campaign seems content with zingers and chants. Those things are fine and natural ornaments for the election-year tree—but they do require a tree."

Update: A brief search of my archives shows that League of Ordinary Gentlemen knew all about Culture11; I just wasn't paying attention. And here's an Atlantic piece about a new Poulos enterprise.

Mike Huckabee Gets It

You'd think I'd get over it but for some reason I continue to marvel at that alliance of seeming opposites that we observe in the union of the libertarian and the authoritarion wings of the the Republican party. Sure all parties harbor strange unions, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But I think there is something more to it than that. Self-professed libertarians seem genuinely not to observe any inconsistency when they howl for freedom while cheerfully sticking their nose into the lives and under the blankets of others. The best comparison I can find is to recall the ease with which Confederate slaveholders or Polish aristocrats used to beat their breasts in the good cause while standing on the face of others.

This cognitive non-dissonance was in full flower at last weekend's CPAC convention, where Ron Paul walked away with the balloon. Oddly, one person who does get it is Mike Huckabee. You could say it's just sour grapes from a man who scarcely ever gets out of single digits at the CPAC convention or elsewhere. But here's Huckabee saying "CPAC has becoming increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years." Exactly so, and amazing how rare this voice is. Ironic also to see it coming from a rather nice man who fronts for such an unpleasant doctrine, criticizing a much less appealing human whose platform on the whole makes a lot more sense.

Tom Schaller Gets it Partly Right

Tom Schaller at the formidable Five Thirty Eight serves up a whuppin' plate of clear-sighted wisdom on tea-baggers, although I don't think he gets it quite right:

Five months ago in this space, I speculated that this new conservative movement is fueled to a significant degree by a lot of ginned up former Ron Paul supporters. I mentioned and quoted at length from Dana Goldstein's fanstastic reporting that connected the Tea Party movement to residual Ron Paulites. When is the national media going to finally make these connections?

Instead, the kooky, historically revisionist, apocalyptic ideas of Glenn Beck and Ron Paul are treated with equivalency to those of the majority Democratic Party in Washington and--here's the key point--these movement activists and their ideas are often discussed without much mention of their connections to Beck or Paul. Beck earns his share of attention, granted. But there is almost no recognition whatsoever of the true origins of this conservative backlash. The movement is instead covered as if it is the somehow the byproduct and wind in the sails of national Republicans like Michael Steele, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, when in fact it is operating wholly independently of any or all of them. And remember that these are people who, as Nate pointed out earlier this month, believe that the president is a socialist Muslim interloper born in Africa; who, as I suspect, somehow think that earmark and tort reform will solve our deficit problems; and who, as we saw today, cheer without any sense of internal contradiction as Beck boasts about educating himself for "free" at a public library system paid for by the very taxes he complains about.

But go try to find much in the way of reporting on how closely connected these two movements are. Or how disconnected these people are from political reality. You won't find much. Because the media wants to provide competitive balance to its narrative, reporting to date has either willfully disconnected the Tea Party movement from the Ron Paul presidential campaign or it simply has not noticed.

There's great merit in all that. But take a second look at the critical sentence:

The movement is instead covered as if it is the somehow the byproduct and wind in the sails of national Republicans like Michael Steele, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, when in fact it is operating wholly independently of any or all of them.

Let's grant that the tea-partiers probably scare the daylights out of John Boehner just as they scare the daylight out of any sensible citizen. Still, the "leadership" (if you can call it that) hasn't the slightest disposition to disown the beast: they are merely scrambling to relearn the ancient game of which-way-are-my-people-going-so-I-can-run-out-in-front-and-lead-them. Distasteful as they may find all this poisoned looniness, they know it's the only party they've got at they've got to find some way to bronco no matter how much it bucks.

And as to the "lot of ginned up former Ron Paul supporters." Well, yes, they won the straw poll, but with a fairly weak plurality and a lot of booing. Politico reports that only 2,935 (of approximately 10,000) attendees actually voted. If a 74-year-old loose cannon can't get more than 10 percent of the aggregate potential vote, I'd say he's more of an accident than a contender.

I would, however, like to know just what the booers have against him. I mean, I know what have against him, and what any sensible Republican might have against him, but neither of these datapoints is particularly relevant to the current inquiry. What, exactly, is the beef?

Grass-Roots Rage: Another Voice

Andrew Sullivan gives the megaphone to a remarkably articulate voice:

The past year has been a very difficult one for me, personally and professionally. I've been up a lot more than I've been down, and I've been angry and frustrated with life, as we all are at times. But I can't remember the last time I felt such overwhelming rage toward a group of people as I have felt toward the Republican Party and the conservative movement since President Obama's election....

And now some low-rent hairdo, whose sole claim to fame is posing naked for some ladies' magazine way back when, may happily destroy whatever chance this country has at moving in a more just, humane, and morally and fiscally responsible direction.

As you stated, the Republican Party of this new century is shot through with nihilists. Unabashed nihilists. But what leaves me shaking with anger damn near every day since President Obama's inauguration is the pure smugness and nonchalance of their nihilism.

Palin, McConnell, DeMint, Boehner, Cantor, Rubio, Scott Brown and the rest of the Ailes- and Limbaugh-warped GOP: Would you trust any one of these goons to greet you at Wal-Mart, much less govern our country? The question answers itself. ...

That's just an excerpt; you can read the whole thing here. I have to admit I agree with about all of this, even though (by good luck more than good planning) my own situation isn't anywhere near as bollwackers as his.

But let that pass. The thing that puzzles Democrats is: why doesn't everyone feel that way? Why aren't all the voters willing--as they clearly are not--to dump the same spew of venom on the authors of their misfortune and--more apposite--the ones so determined not to offer any salvation or even relief?

Well of course if I knew, I wouldn't be here: I'd be out advising campaigns somewhere (so thank heavens that I don't know; at least I'm saved from that fate). I do offer a tentative and partial suggestion, though: our old friend Dr. Freud's cousin Schaden. They like to see 'em squirm. Put differently, they really don't think much more of the Republicans than our correspondent thinks. Truth is, in their rare moments of candor, they'll tell you that of course Sarah Palin isn't fit to govern a class picnic nor John Boehner a fourth-rate mortuary. But it is the Democrats who are inside the piñata for the moment. If you beat them hard enough some goodies might tumble out, but suppose not: at least you get to listen to them squeal. Damn, uppity, patronizing college girls and funny-looking tan guys. They never bother to stick their heads up around here until election time and now they want to tell us how to solve our problems! Hah! As far as we can see, our problems are not going away, but at least we have the momentary diversion of screaming holy hellfire at the fancy dancies who say they'd like to help.

My suspicion is that when if the Republicans do get back in, they'll find that their friends "the people" are not as good-natured and docile as they must seem for the moment to be. But meanwhile, it is the other guy who is the problem and the target.

Oh, as an afterthought: it might be nice if just once in a while somebody, somewhere in the Democratic apparatus gave them at least a little evidence that they were wrong, I saw Bill Clinton today, tromping around in the Haitian mud. It was shameless, look-at-me grandstanding, of course, but what grandstanding! Couldn't somebody on the White House team just for a moment show that they really do conceptualize the current crisis as something more than an academic exercise in fiscal management. Then, just possibly, the glacier might start to crack and you might begin to see the rage of Sully's letter-writer just a bit more often than sometimes.

Afterthought: By the way, I must have missed something. Which low-rent hairdo was it who posed naked for a ladies' magazine?

Obama and the Costs of Centrism

  "Come, let us reason together," said Lyndon Johnson (quoting, I believe, the prophet Isaiah). And so he did, although when Lyndon Johnson reasoned, you could usually hear the crushing of a few bones.

Barack Obama didn't use the Johnson phrase, but he did make it clear that he wanted to be the conciliatory President, the the centrist, the man willing to work with his worst enemy.

I suspect Obama himself is surprised and dismayed at how utterly he has failed in his campaign for centrist cooperation. I feel for him, but I for whatever it may be worth, I offer an insight. That is--obviously the Republicans have decided they have to destroy this guy, just as they tried so hard to destroy Bill Clinton. Since Obama doesn't seem to have a zipper problem, they have to look for something else.

Under this light, it is perhaps natural that they would plunge in for the kill so directly on what he seems to value most: his desire for a kind of post-partisanship. Perhaps this helps to show his weakness; perhaps it pulls the keystone out of a grand architecture. Or perhaps they are doing it because trying to destroy Democrats is just fun (I love the smoke of filibusters in the morning!).

But whatever the particular goal, perhaps a primary reason for the stonewall strategy ihe wants cooperation so much. It's an unprovable counterfactual, but could it be tht things might have gone better--even more collegially--if he had simply stuck his thumb in their eye?

[There might also be a larger strategical insight here, and if true, I hope it's not too late. Specifically, one thing you do as a good negotiator is to offer something you really don't care about very much as if you cared about it absolutely. Then you let your enemies wear themselves out fighting aginst something for which you really don't give a damn. I really don't think that was what Obama was doing with the collegiality ploy, but I kind of wish it had been.]

Short Memories: Republicans and Civil Rights

There's a curious case of memory loss that seems to be afflicting both left and right this morning over the history of civil rights legislation. Link, (link). Start with Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina:

Just as we were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the '60s without very much help from our colleagues across the aisle," said Fox. "They love to engage in revisionist history.

Shift now to Democratic Rep. Dennis Cardoza of North Carolina California:

Today, what I’m hearing on the floor really takes the cake. The gentlelady from North Carolina, in her statement just now, indicated that the Republican GOP had passed the Civil Rights Act legislation with almost no help from the Democrats. I can’t believe my ears. It was the Kennedy and Johnson administration where we passed that Great Society legislation. It was over the objections of people like Jesse Helms from the gentlewoman’s state that we passed that civil rights legislation. John Lewis…

In response, Republicans gleefully jumped on the fact that Cardoza was wrong about Jesse Helms: he wasn't even in the Senate until 1972.

But on the larger issue--comments are still pouring in and I won't pretend to be keeping up with them; still, the fact is that Foxx actually had a kind of a point here. What she was really talking about the Civil Rights of 1957, which was passed on the initiative of the Eisenhower Administration, over the dead-body opposition of the Senate Democratic leadership--and only after the Democrats had so gutted it as to leave it largely meaningless.

How fast memories fade: recall that the pre-1960 Democratic party was a monstrous two-headed beast with liberal (sometimes radical) union members, blacks and intellectuals on one side and reactionary So;uthern whites on the other. It was the Republicans who still carried a progressive tradition on civil rights, going back to the founding of the party at the beginning of the Civil War.

Eisenhower himself, as many have observed, wasn't deeply hostile to blacks, but he just didn't get it:the real motivation came from the "northeast" wing of the party, notably Attorney General Herbert Brownell. Leading the Senate opposition was Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. As others have remarked, this created thre ironic mirroring in which the forces in fazvor of enhanced civil rights were led by a man who had no particular taste to it, while the opposition came from one southerner whose attitude towards racial minorities was one of genuine compassion.

When he signed the Civil Rights Act, Johnson famously said he figured he'd delivered the south to the Republicans for a long time to come. That was the year Rep. Foxx turned 21.

Update: I am catching offline flac for having saddled Lyndon Johnson with the onus of "leading the Senate opposition." The point is made that Johnson was in fact the person who jammed the bill through. ITechnically correct, but am unrepentant. I don't doubt the sincerity of Johnson's compassion for blacks. But he had two choices: one, let the bill fail, at the behest of the old bulls who still dominated the august body (e.g., Johnson's personal mentor, Richard Russell of Georgia). And two, strip it naked and deprive of all nourishment and push it forth into a hostile world. Johnson knew he couldn't make his bones as a Presidential candidate in 1960 without a civil rights scalp in his belt. So he chose the path of betrayal.

I am, at the end of the day, something of the Johnson fan. He certainly is the most interesting president of my lifetime (or perhaps a close second, behind Richard Nixon). But there is no point in obscuring how many grandmothers he had to pitch under how many speeding locomotives to get where he wanted to be.

Disconnect

Percentage of Americans who self-identify as conservative: 40 (link).

Percentage of Americans who self-identify as Republican: 20 (link).

"And They Fought and They Fit And They Scratched and They Bit..."

Circular firing quad watch--first, Dick Cheney:

CHENEY: Well, if I had to choose — in terms of being a Republican — I’d go with Rush Limbaugh, I think. My take on it was that Colin had already left the party. I disdn’t know he was still a Republican. [...]

SCHIEFFER: And you said you’d take Rush Limbaugh over Colin Powell?

CHENEY: I would. Politically.

Then Gary Becker:

I believe that the best way to restore the consistency and attractiveness of the conservative movement is for modern conservatism to return to its roots of skepticism toward governmental actions. This involves confidence in the capacity of individuals to make decisions not only in their own interests, but also usually in the interests of society at large. Such a shift in attitudes would require more flexible approaches toward hot button issues like gays in the military, gay marriage, abortions, cell stem research, and toward many other issues of this type. It will not be easy for the Republican Party to emerge from the doldrums if it cannot embrace such a consistently skeptical view of government.

Next, Mike Huckabee:

"Throw the social conservatives the pro-life, pro-family people overboard and the Republican party will be as irrelevant as the Whigs," he said in reference to the American political party that largely disbanded in the mid 1800s.

"They'll basically be a party of gray-haired old men sitting around the country club puffing cigars, sipping brandy and wondering whatever happened to the country. That will be the end of the party," he said in the interview published Thursday.

And finally, something everybody can rally 'round, from Fred Barnes:

Improving the party's image is a worthy cause, but it isn't what Republicans ought to be emphasizing right now. They have a more important mission: to be the party of no.

The Big Tent

Let's see, how can we expand the Republican platform beyond the mere support of torture? Oh, I've got it--let's come out against empathy.

Who Called it "The Democrat Party?"

Swifty asks: who first called it "The Democrat Party?" He suggests maybe Joe Martin, Republican Speaker of the House But apparently it's earlier:

... Newt Gingrich did a lot to encourage the use of “Democrat Party” as a not-so-subtle form of denigration, but the practice began well before he arrived on the scene. During the Truman-Dewey presidential election campaign in 1946, for example, B. Carroll Reece, who was then chairman of the Republican National Committee, used the adjective “Democrat” as a weapon. (Truman, in turn, suggested calling the GOP the Publican Party, a reference to the tax collectors of the New Testament.)

So the use of the term “Democrat Party” is quite an old trick. In fact, researchers have found references from as far back as 1855, though at that time the term may have been inoffensive and not intended to show disrespect. The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg has cited negative references from the early 20th century, but he says the practice didn’t become “a Republican tic” until mid-century.

Source: Grammarphobia, though without any citation to sources.