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House of Shame: Congress Republicans are steering clear of Bush as they struggle to hold their seats in midterm polls |
Current rating: 0 |
by Sidney Blumenthal
(No verified email address) |
29 Jun 2006
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The White House had hoped that the killing of the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would reverse Bush's slide in popularity. Indeed there was a slight bump upward of several points. But this is a classic epiphenomenon that has already started to wither. From the vantage point of Capitol Hill, Bush's evanescent Zarqawi "recovery" has failed to cast any glow on to Republican prospects. Enforcing party discipline for a purely political Congressional vote last week endorsing Bush's policy, such as it is, in Iraq has barely quelled panic. As Bush briefly nudged up from the low to mid-30s, Republican candidates fell further behind. For Republicans, Bush has become cement shoes. |
President Bush's effectiveness as a domestic president is ending not with a bang but a whimper. Five months before the midterm elections, congressional Republicans fear that association with him may alienate their constituencies and result in loss of the House of Representatives. They hold the House by only 15 seats, and suddenly even previously safe districts are at risk. Just a month ago Bush delivered a televised address on immigration, urging Congress to provide for eventual citizenship for the more than 12 million illegal immigrants in the country (the pro-business position). He convinced the Senate, but the House refused to budge from its punitive position to criminalise any assistance to them.
The White House had hoped that the killing of the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would reverse Bush's slide in popularity. Indeed there was a slight bump upward of several points. But this is a classic epiphenomenon that has already started to wither. From the vantage point of Capitol Hill, Bush's evanescent Zarqawi "recovery" has failed to cast any glow on to Republican prospects. Enforcing party discipline for a purely political Congressional vote last week endorsing Bush's policy, such as it is, in Iraq has barely quelled panic. As Bush briefly nudged up from the low to mid-30s, Republican candidates fell further behind. For Republicans, Bush has become cement shoes.
Two recent near-death experiences have desperately frightened Republicans. In a June 6 byelection to fill the seat of the corrupt and imprisoned congressman Randy Cunningham in suburban San Diego, one of the safest Republican districts in the country, the Republican narrowly held on only through demagogic appeals against immigrants. In Utah, in an even safer Republican district, the state party denied endorsement to Chris Cannon because he had made the mistake of supporting Bush's plan. On Tuesday Cannon edged out a primary challenge from an anti-immigrant activist who insisted he was battling "Satan".
Southern Republicans picked this moment to stall the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, enacted after a century of African-American disfranchisement in the south. Their ringleader, Congressman Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, is also the sponsor of bills that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in the House and Senate as well an amendment to the constitution to justify these sort of displays.
In the Senate, on Tuesday, Republicans staged a day-long debate on a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. The Republican Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, proclaimed nothing less than a "crisis": "Enemies of American freedom abroad are well aware of the ideals emblemised by the American flag." The measure failed by one vote to attain the necessary two-thirds majority.
So far this year there have been four incidents of flag burning - the evildoers have not been al-Qaida suspects but the usual rowdy smalltown teenagers.
While the Senate was consumed debating the flag-burning amendment, the Republican Senate candidate in Minnesota was removing every mention and likeness of Bush from his campaign literature and advertising. As the Republican cultural warriors march into the midterm elections, they are unfurling nativism and jingoism as their banners, and some are even raising the shadow of Jim Crow. The unpopular conservative president is the emblem they seek to hide. But only by suffering slights from Republicans can Bush hope to escape a Congress led by Democrats that would cast sunlight on his remarkably secretive and unaccountable administration.
Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of "The Clinton Wars."
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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GOP Elites Are All About Money |
by Paul C. Campos
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
29 Jun 2006
|
Anyone who wants to understand how politics actually works in this country should consider two apparently unrelated issues: gay marriage and the estate tax.
It isn't much of an exaggeration to say that the activist core of the Republican Party defines itself by opposition to gay marriage. The party's base is dedicated to the idea that much of our culture is godless and decadent, and that to legalize gay marriage would be a big step toward making the United States indistinguishable from Sodom and Gomorrah.
As for the Democrats, for the past 75 years the party's message to its faithful has been that government by Republicans means government by and for the rich, and that without the organized resistance of the Democratic Party, America's robber barons and corporate overlords will steal everything that isn't nailed down.
Thus nothing could symbolize everything that Democrats are supposed to oppose better than an attempt to eliminate a tax that's paid only by multi-millionaires.
How then can one explain the apparent paradox that these two initiatives are achieving political success? Despite the fact that Republicans control the government, federal attempts to block the drive to legalize gay marriage are failing badly.
And even though eliminating the estate tax will transfer wealth from more than 99 percent of the populace to a tiny slice of the richest Americans, the attempts to do so seem certain to largely or wholly succeed, eventually.
The explanation for these paradoxical outcomes is that, while the respective bases of the Republican and Democratic parties remain committed to certain traditional principles, the elites of both parties actually have much more in common with each other than they do with the vast majority of Americans.
The bait and switch the Republican elites pull on their culturally conservative base has become an election year tradition. Time and again, voters are promised rollbacks on what they see as the epidemic of cultural decadence represented by abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, and pornography. Yet, what these voters end up getting are tax cuts and economic deregulation.
In regard to the issues cultural conservatives care most about, putting Republicans in control of the federal government has been a complete failure. After a generation of gradually increasing Republican power, America still has some of the world's most liberal abortion laws, affirmative action is fully institutionalized, pornography is far more easily available than ever before, and now marriage itself is under assault from what conservatives consider radical cultural forces.
What's less commonly noted is that a similar thing has happened on the left of the political spectrum. Democratic politicians, who are supposed to be devoted to the interests of ordinary working people, have put up very little resistance to the destruction of the labor movement, gigantic tax cuts for the rich, and various other initiatives that have greatly increased the gap between the elites and everybody else.
What the Republican elites really care about is making sure that as much money as possible flows into their bank accounts. To placate their base, they're willing to make sympathetic noises about issues like abortion and gay marriage, but when push comes to shove they either don't care very much about those issues, or, in many cases, they themselves hold liberal views on such matters.
Conversely, what the Democratic elites really care about are cultural issues. They may cluck their tongues about the destruction of another labor union, but what they're actually willing to fight for are things like liberal abortion laws and gay marriage. And, truth be told, they don't find big tax cuts for the rich that distasteful, for reasons which are obvious when one considers that they come from the same economic class as their Republican counterparts.
Hence we'll soon be a nation in which the rich gay married couples will pay no estate taxes.
Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado.
© 2006 Daily Camera and Boulder Publishing, LLC
http://www.dailycamera.com/ |
