Monthly Archives: December 2006

Katrina’s Children

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If indeed the GOP had hoped post-Katrina New Orleans would be whiter (and redder) than pre-Katrina New Orleans, it seems they hoped in vain. Eduardo Porter writes in today’s New York Times that the mostly Latino illegal immigrant community in New Orleans is growing fast.

First came the storm. Then came the workers. Now comes the baby boom.

In the latest twist to the demographic transformation of New Orleans since it was swamped by Hurricane Katrina last year, hundreds of babies are being born to Latino immigrant workers, both legal and illegal, who flocked to the city to toil on its reconstruction.

The throng of babies gurgling in the handful of operational maternity wards here has come as a big surprise — and a financial strain — to this historically black and white city, which before the hurricane had only a small Latino community and virtually no experience of illegal immigration. …

… There has been a small Latino population in New Orleans for several decades, mostly Hondurans who came after Hurricane Mitch battered Central America in 1998. But that population has started to grow.

According to the Louisiana Health and Population Survey, released in November, the number of Latinos living in households in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes has increased by about 10,000 since 2004, to 60,000, even as the total population has fallen by about a quarter, to roughly 625,000.

Last summer, researchers at Tulane University estimated that there were 5,000 to 7,000 illegal Latino workers in Orleans Parish alone, excluding nonworking relatives. But some community workers estimate that tens of thousands have arrived since the storm.

Immigrants can be seen working on roofs, installing Sheetrock and laying tile all over town, from the up-market Lakeview neighborhood in the west to East New Orleans. At the Lowe’s home improvement store in the city’s Bywater neighborhood, clusters of day laborers mill about in the parking lot every morning, waiting for jobs.

A year ago reports came out that the federal contractors the Bush Administration favored with lucrative contracts were recruiting illegals to do the work, and paying them near-slave wages. In the December 18, 2005, Washington Post, Manuel Roig-Franzia wrote,

The come-on was irresistible: Hop in the truck. Go to New Orleans. Make a pile of cash.

Arturo jumped at it. Since that day when he left Houston, more than two months ago, he has slept on the floors of moldy houses, idled endlessly at day-laborer pickup stops and second-guessed himself nearly every minute. …

… Arturo, a dour Mexican from Michoacan who did not want to disclose his last name for fear of deportation, stands at the nexus of the post-Hurricane Katrina labor crisis in New Orleans. A city desperate for workers is filling with desperate workers who either cannot find jobs or whose conditions are so miserable, and whose salaries are so low, that they become discouraged and leave.

Our President keeps telling us these are jobs “our people” won’t do … um, wait a minute, here …

At a New Orleans town hall meeting in Atlanta, displaced black civil rights activist Carl Galmon complained: “They’re bringing in foreign workers from South America, Central America and Mexico, paying them $5 an hour sometimes for 80 hours a week. They are undercutting the American labor force in New Orleans.”…

…For those who find work, conditions can be abominable, with laborers such as Rico Barrios and his wife, Guadalupe Garcia, slashing through the cough-inducing mold on walls in flooded Lakeview with only thin masks to shield their lungs, even though she is pregnant. “It’s hard,” said Barrios, who is from Mexico City, his face glistening with sweat.

This doesn’t have anything to do with jobs “our people” won’t do. It has to do with work “our federal contractors” don’t want to pay for.

David Sirota has a relevant post today at Huffington Post —

… employers are using immigration and temporary visa programs to short circuit the labor market. The rules of supply and demand that corporations tell us we must never mess with are only applicable when those rules help corporations – but when they begin helping ordinary workers, the supply (in this case, of labor) must be artificially rigged to keep wages down.

It isn’t just wages that are affected. In New Orleans, the baby boom among illegals is swamping the hospitals and health care system generally. Of course, the mothers have no money, no health insurance, and they are barred from most government assistance. The few clinics that will provide free prenatal care to illegal immigrants are overloaded. So many mothers get no prenatal care; they don’t see a doctor until they go into labor. Emergency rooms have to take them at that point. After the babies are born the mothers hesitate to ask for assistance for the babies (who are citizens) because the mothers fear being arrested.

After Katrina there was talk about the inequality and poverty the storm had exposed. Even the President, in his famous Jackson Square speech of September 15, 2005, spoke of the “lessons” of Katrina and the problems of poverty —

When communities are rebuilt, they must be even better and stronger than before the storm. Within the Gulf region are some of the most beautiful and historic places in America. As all of us saw on television, there’s also some deep, persistent poverty in this region, as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality. When the streets are rebuilt, there should be many new businesses, including minority-owned businesses, along those streets. When the houses are rebuilt, more families should own, not rent, those houses. When the regional economy revives, local people should be prepared for the jobs being created.

Is it possible that Bush actually believed this when he said it?

I realize there is fault to be found in all levels of government, but — damn, this is just bleeped up.

I’m speed-blogging today during jury recesses, so if the post is incoherent in spots — well, I know you’ll add corrections to the comments.

The Twilight Zone II

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Jonathan Chait begins his Los Angeles Times column this way:

THERE IS a famous “Twilight Zone” episode about a little boy in a small town who has fantastical powers. Through the misuse of his powers, the little boy has ruined the lives of everybody in the town — for instance, teleporting them into a cornfield, or summoning a snowstorm that destroys their crops. Because anyone who thinks an unhappy thought will be banished, the adults around him can do nothing but cheerfully praise his decisions while they try to nudge him in a less destructive direction.

This episode kept popping into my head when I was reading about President Bush and the Baker-Hamilton commission. Bush is the president of the United States, which therefore gives him enormous power, but he is treated by everybody around him as if he were a child.

I’ve been thinking of that same episode. I think a lot of people are thinking about that same episode.

Chait continues,

Consider a story in the latest Time magazine, recounting the efforts — before the commission was approved by Congress — of three supporters to enlist Condoleezza Rice to win the administration’s approval for the panel. Here is how Time reports it:

“As the trio departed, a Rice aide asked one of her suitors not to inform anyone at the Pentagon that chairmen had been chosen and the study group was moving forward. If Rumsfeld was alerted to the study group’s potential impact, the aide said, he would quickly tell Cheney, who could, with a few words, scuttle the whole thing. Rice got through to Bush the next day, arguing that the thing was going to happen anyway, so he might as well get on board. To his credit, the President agreed.”

The article treats this exchange in a matter-of-fact way, but, what it suggests is completely horrifying. Rice apparently believed that Bush would simply follow the advice of whoever he spoke with. Therefore the one factor determining whether Bush would support the commission was whether Cheney or Rice managed to get to him first.

The GOP still has plenty of apparatchiks to appear on the cable television politics talk shows and explain to us solemnly that this president is thinking this or considering that or wants some other thing, blah blah blah, and you know it’s a farce, and I assume they know it’s a farce, yet the GOP propaganda machine continues to play pretend that this president is actually doing the job of president and is not, in effect, spending his days in search of a missing quart of strawberries.

Chait continues,

And now that the Baker-Hamilton report is out, the commissioners are carefully patronizing the commander in chief. As this newspaper reported, “Members of the commission said they were pleased that Bush gave them as much attention as he did, a full hour’s worth. ‘He could have scheduled us for 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for the cameras,’ said former Atty. Gen. Edwin M. Meese III.” Wow, a commission devoted hundreds or thousands of man-hours to addressing the central conundrum of U.S. foreign policy, and the president gave them a whole hour of his time!

Buried near the bottom of Dana Milbank’s account of the meeting —

Leon Panetta counseled Bush to “look at the realities of what’s taking place.” Eagleburger said after the event that when the group met with Bush, “I don’t recall, seriously, that he asked any questions.”

No questions?

For a moment let’s skip over to a Eleanor Clift web commentary at Newsweek. She writes (emphasis added),

It’s a statement of the obvious, but when you have a collection of Washington wise men, plus retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor (perhaps doing penance for her vote that put Bush in the White House during the disputed 2000 race), it’s the equivalent of last rites for Bush’s Iraq policy, along with his presidency. It’s not a plan for victory because that doesn’t exist except in Bush’s fantasy. The recommendations Baker and company offer—of more international engagement and shifting U.S. troops to a backup role to Iraqi forces—may help the administration manage and mask defeat. Even so, that may be hard for Bush to accept. His body language when receiving the report, while polite, was dismissive, thanking the eminences assembled for breakfast at the White House for dropping off a copy.

This president has lost all capacity to lead. Eleven American servicemen died in Iraq on the day Bush was presented the report, which calls the situation there “grave and deteriorating.” Events on the ground threaten to overtake even this grim assessment. And we’re left to analyze Bush’s tender ego and whether he can reverse course on the folly that is killing and maiming countless Iraqis along with U.S. troops.

My only quibble with Clift is that when she says “This president has lost all capacity to lead,” she implies that he had a capacity to lead at some point in the past.

This is from William Douglas and Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers (emphasis added):

Bush said he talked about “the need for a new way forward in Iraq” in his morning session with leaders from both parties and chambers of Congress, “and we talked about the need to work together on this important subject.”

But some Democrats came away unconvinced that major changes were coming.

“I just didn’t feel there today, the president in his words or his demeanor, that he is going to do anything right away to change things drastically,” Senate Majority Leader-elect Harry Reid, D-Nev., said following the Oval Office meeting. “He is tepid in what he talks about doing. Someone has to get the message to this man that there have to be significant changes.”

Instead, Bush began his talk by comparing himself to President Harry S Truman, who launched the Truman Doctrine to fight communism, got bogged down in the Korean War and left office unpopular.

Bush said that “in years to come they realized he was right and then his doctrine became the standard for America,” recalled Senate Majority Whip-elect Richard Durbin, D-Ill. “He’s trying to position himself in history and to justify those who continue to stand by him, saying sometimes if you’re right you’re unpopular, and be prepared for criticism.”

Durbin said he challenged Bush’s analogy, reminding him that Truman had the NATO alliance behind him and negotiated with his enemies at the United Nations. Durbin said that’s what the Iraq Study Group is recommending that Bush do now – work more with allies and negotiate with adversaries on Iraq.

Bush, Durbin said, “reacted very strongly. He got very animated in his response” and emphasized that he is “the commander in chief.”

Let’s see — Bush is not interested enough in the ISG report to ask questions, but don’t you dare tell him he’s not Harry Truman or he goes postal. What does that tell us about this president’s priorities?

Most analysis of the ISG report that I’ve seen says pretty plainly that it gives the President about as much butt covering — a way to exit Iraq without looking like a flipflopper — as he is likely to get. In fact, it’s obvious that the report was crafted more as a political gift to Bush than an actual Best Possible Plan for getting out of Iraq (clearly, it isn’t). I can’t think of any president in American history who has been given such a gift when he’s been in trouble.

As Jonathan Chait explains,

In return for these considerations, the commission generously avoided revisiting the whole question of who got us into this fiasco and how. As the Washington Post put it, “The panel appeared to steer away from language that might inflame the Bush administration.” Of course, “inflame” is a word typically associated with street mobs or other irrational actors. The fact that the president can be “inflamed” is no longer considered surprising enough to merit comment.

If Bush had more smarts than he has narcissism he’d find a way to embrace the ISG report and work with what supporters in Congress he still has. Instead, it’s obvious he’s going to blow it off and continue to do whatever it is he’s doing.

A few days before the midterm elections I predicted that Bush would ignore the ISG report recommendations, whatever they were. I also predicted that Congress and the rest of the nation, including most Republicans, would not be willing to sit on their hands for two years while Bush continues his disastrous “course” in Iraq. Sure enough, John Broder and Robin Toner report in today’s New York Times that the Baker report has revealed a rift in the GOP over Iraq. I expect that, once the new Congress goes to work in January, more and more Republicans are going to be moving away from Bush and toward a plan for withdrawal.

In fact, I won’t be surprised if there’s a bipartisan congressional majority agreement on a withdrawal plan before May 1 (Mission Accomplished Day).

The federal government is facing a constitutional crisis. The original idea behind the separation of powers is that Congress sets war (and other) policy and the President executes it. The Founders worked out a plan for governance that was supposed to prevent any one individual from wielding the power that Bush has assumed. Now it’s up to Congress to take back the powers it rightly has.

And if he resists — impeach the bastard. And his veep, too.

The Honor Roll

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Check out Paul Krugman’s column today, brought to you by Greenpagan. It is brilliant. It begins:

Shortly after U.S. forces marched into Baghdad in 2003, The Weekly Standard published a jeering article titled, “The Cassandra Chronicles: The stupidity of the antiwar doomsayers.” Among those the article mocked was a “war novelist” named James Webb, who is now the senator-elect from Virginia.

The article’s title was more revealing than its authors knew. People forget the nature of Cassandra’s curse: although nobody would believe her, all her prophecies came true. And so it was with those who warned against invading Iraq.

Just for fun I looked up the “Cassandra Chronicles,” which was published 4/21/2003. IT begins(emphasis added),

AREN’T YOU PROUD of us? For most of this past week, as an overwhelmingly successful, lightning-quick Anglo-American military assault liberated Iraq’s capital city, and ordinary Baghdadis poured into the streets to kiss our GIs and stomp on pictures of Saddam Hussein, THE SCRAPBOOK has remained the soul of magnanimity and restraint.

Here in our office there’s this giant archive of newsclips, transcripts, and Internet postings we collected in the months preceding the war, wherein a world community of jackasses confidently predicted that the events lately unfolding on our television screens could not and would not ever take place. And you can imagine the temptation, we’re sure: A lesser SCRAPBOOK would throw open the file boxes and run through the streets with treasures like these, laughing hysterically.

I’m sure there were a few who predicted that U.S. troops could not roll into Baghdad in April 2003. But a “world community”? I doubt it. The truth was (we now know) that, even as the Weekly Standard giggled about the triumph in Baghdad, seasoned military professionals were already worried. I’m reading Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco now, and he quotes a Col. Johnny Brooks (ret.) saying, on the very day that Baghdad fell, “The hard part is yet to come. We can easily win the fight and lose the peace” (p. 134). On that and the next page, Ricks quotes a number of military and intelligence experts who warned after the fall of Baghdad that the war was far from over. It wouldn’t be long before the “victors” who wanted to stay safe were confined to Saddam’s old palace complex in Baghdad — the Green Zone.

The truth is that the real jackassess — the staff of the Weekly Standard — had no idea what we were saying before the war, because they weren’t listening to us.

I remember about that time some cyberstalker sent me photos of the famous toppling of the Saddam statue with a message along the lines of what do you say to THAT, leftie scum? I don’t remember if I answered or not, but I doubt that I did. The fact is that the Saddam statue episode was utterly irrelevant to my objections to the war. And I doubted the cyberstalker had enough brain cells to have understood that.

I do kinda wish I had kept his email address. I could have sent him a photo of the Baker Commission.

Back to Paul Krugman:

At best, they were ignored. A recent article in The Washington Post ruefully conceded that the paper’s account of the debate in the House of Representatives over the resolution authorizing the Iraq war — a resolution opposed by a majority of the Democrats — gave no coverage at all to those antiwar arguments that now seem prescient.

At worst, those who were skeptical about the case for war had their patriotism and/or their sanity questioned. The New Republic now says that it “deeply regrets its early support for this war.” Does it also deeply regret accusing those who opposed rushing into war of “abject pacifism?”

Now, only a few neocon dead-enders still believe that this war was anything but a vast exercise in folly. And those who braved political pressure and ridicule to oppose what Al Gore has rightly called “the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States” deserve some credit.

Unlike The Weekly Standard, which singled out those it thought had been proved wrong, I’d like to offer some praise to those who got it right. Here’s a partial honor roll:

You can read the honor roll at Greenpagan.

I am on a jury now, and spent most of the day listening to testimony. Now — must … have … nap …

Bush to Planet: Bleep Off

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The Guardian reports:

A defiant George Bush today said he and Tony Blair agreed that “victory” in Iraq was important just one day after the Iraq Study Group delivered a withering critique of current policy.

In a joint press conference in Washington, Mr Bush said the recommendations from the Iraq Study Group (ISG) were “worthy of serious recommendation”, but the president sent out a clear signal to his critics that he was still seeking victory.

Which means he’s not even trying to consider the ISG report. Addressing Walter Shapiro’s question — “Will Bush listen to reason?” — the answer appears to be no.

Shapiro writes,

A day after Robert Gates — who left the panel after he was nominated to replace Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon — admitted we were not winning the war, the Iraq Study Group upped the ante by beginning its report with this soon-to-be-famous appraisal, “The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.” But the 10-member bipartisan committee also went out of its way to congratulate its own even-handed fair-mindedness, even as former Wyoming Republican Sen. Alan Simpson railed against what he called “the 100-percenters” — ideological warriors whom he described as people who are “not seekers, they’re seethers.” In an earthy counterpart to the high-minded tenor of the proceedings, Simpson also claimed that these zealots of the left and right “have gas, ulcers, heart-burn and B.O.”

Sounds like a trip to the drugstore is in order. Get the dirty hippies some antacid and deodorant!

The significance of the Iraq Study Group has little to do with its actual recommendations, which Baker admitted were not a “magic formula that will solve the problems of Iraq.” Rather its importance rests entirely with the luster of the former officials on the commission, including two secretaries of state (Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger), a secretary of defense (William Perry), an attorney general (Ed Meese) and its only woman, retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Baker jokingly described them as “a group of has-beens” — but the reality is this is about as blue-ribbon an assemblage as you get in contemporary America aside, perhaps, from the front row at a state funeral.

But it may not be enough to convince Bush to accept the abject failure of his Iraqi adventure — a message the president has not heeded when it was delivered by press reports, retired generals, think-tank studies, opinion polls and the results of the 2006 congressional elections.

Indeed, it appears the blue-ribbon assemblage was so intent on being bipartisan and reasonable and odor-free that it delivered a tub of tasteless, odorless mush. Fred Kaplan writes,

The report of the Iraq Study Group—which Baker co-chaired with Lee Hamilton, that other Wise Man-wannabe—was doomed to fall short of expectations. But who knew it would amount to such an amorphous, equivocal grab bag.

Its outline of a new “diplomatic offensive” is so disjointed that even a willing president would be left puzzled by what precisely to do, and George W. Bush seems far from willing.

Its scheme for a new military strategy contains so many loopholes that a president could cite its language to justify doing anything (or nothing).

And when you’re dealing with an obstinate blockhead who sees only what he wants to see and does only what he wants to do, the last thing you want to give him are loopholes. This was not the time to be reasonable. This was the time to be very, very clear.

John Dickerson says the message Bush needs to hear is in the report — point 1 is “cut the crap” — but you know Bush isn’t getting that message if he’s still flapping around about “victory.”

David Corn writes that the report “was akin to a no-confidence vote in Bush from leading members of the Republican elite.”

But neither Baker, his fellow commissioners, nor the report confront the implications of this charge: whether Bush is capable of absorbing the proposals of the Iraq Study Group or any ideas beyond a stay-the-course strategy. … They note that Iraq is a broken society, riven with sectarian conflict, and that the Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds have reached a violent standoff. In such circumstances, where – and how – can US military power be applied to good end? The commissioners fixate on the training of Iraqi forces, a failed enterprise to date. But they do not advocate withdrawing combat forces until early 2008 and then only “subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground”. What’s the mission for the combat troops until then? Who’s the enemy? Who are they fighting? The commission offers no insight on this crucial front.

The commissioners also do not grapple with the tough matter of when it might become no longer morally defensible to ask an American soldier to die for Bush’s project in Iraq (if that point hasn’t already been reached). At the press conference, Hamilton said, “We believe that the situation in Iraq today is very, very serious. We do not know if it can be turned around. But we think we have an obligation to try.”

The report is imbued with this one-last-chance tone. But who decides when that chance is gone – if it remains? Over the past three years, pundits, politicians and experts have at various times declared that the Bush administration possessed one final opportunity and that the next few months would be crucial. Yet Iraq has not turned around; it only becomes a more hellish place and presents a more vexing dilemma. Baker’s Iraq Study Group, which will now disband, is not willing to say Iraq is lost. But it tells us – between the lines – that the man in charge has created a problem for which there may be no answer. It is hard to imagine Bush adopting the group’s main proposals, since he has previously dismissed them (including withdrawing troops to pressure the Iraqi government and talking to the Iranians and Syrians about Iraq). So it is hard to fathom this report making a last-chance difference, whether or not the recommendations have any merit. It’s far easier to imagine the need for another Iraq Study Group six months down the line.

The only Iraq Study Group that will matter is the one that takes the keys to the war machine out of Bush’s hands and says, enough. It’s over.

Be sure not to miss Jonathan Steele’s analysis of the ISG report. I don’t agree with Steele entirely, but he’s worth listening to.

The first purpose of the commission, Steele says, was to “provide an alibi for the president ahead of last month’s congressional elections.” That didn’t work.

The second purpose was “to co-opt the Democrats behind Bush’s war.” That probably was a purpose, although one might argue most of ’em were already pretty well co-opted. Steele explains,

Now the plan is to get the Democrats locked into agreeing with the main thrust of Bush’s Iraq policy over the next two years, with the aim of preventing it from provoking a major divide during the 2008 campaign for the White House.

The problem with this is that if, in 2008, U.S. troops are still dying in Iraq, then it’s going to provoke a “major divide” somehow or another. The only way to get it not to provoke something is if it goes away, which is not likely if we stick to Bush’s Iraq policy. But here’s the most interesting part:

The third purpose in appointing Baker’s panel is the most extraordinary.

The country’s political elite wants to ignore the American people’s doubts, and build a new consensus behind a strategy of staying in Iraq on an open-ended basis with no exit in sight. “Success depends on unity of the American people at a time of political polarisation … Foreign policy is doomed to failure – as is any action in Iraq – if not supported by broad, sustained consensus,” say Baker and his Democratic co-chair, Lee Hamilton, in their introduction. In other words, if things go wrong, it will be the American people’s fault for not trusting in the wisdom of their leaders.

The Baker panel recognises, as does Bush, that the central plank in US policy in Iraq over the next two years has to be a dramatic reduction in US casualties. At the present rate, it will only be a few days until more Americans will have died in Iraq than in the attacks of 9/11. Adding the US death toll in Afghanistan that point has already been reached.

Bush’s war on terror has killed more Americans than Osama Bin Laden’s terror.

What Baker proposes is essentially a continuation of what Bush is already doing – trying to reduce US deaths by moving troops out of the front line while avoiding any commitment to a full US withdrawal.

This bears watching.

Spencer Ackerman comes closest to the truth, IMO —

Given the specific lineup of the 10 wise men and women serving on the Iraq Study Group, the most conspicuous absence is that of supermodel Heidi Klum. Sure, she has no relevant experience in foreign policy, nor any real knowledge of Iraq — but neither do commissioners Sandra Day O’Connor, Vernon Jordan, Alan Simpson, or Edwin Meese. What Klum does have to offer is a lesson completely lost on the commission, one taught each week on her hit reality show Project Runway: you’re either in, or you’re out. When it comes to Iraq, it’s good advice.

From the commission’s perspective, however, such advice would represent a dangerous breakdown of Washington’s most enlightened foreign-policy tradition — that is to say, bipartisanship.

Yes, we must be tasteful and soothing. And odor-free.

The Iraq Study Group, led by George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, and 9-11 Commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton, made a point from the outset of its work to rule out the outer boundaries of the Iraq debate. Its report refuses to bless the idea of sending new combat forces to Baghdad, the favored solution of hawks like Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman; and it also blanches at what Baker called “precipitous withdrawal,” the position held by many in the Democratic Party, the country as a whole, Iraq, and the world. A safe consensus is what the commission is out for, as reflected by the name for their strategy: “responsible transition.” That’s something that anyone could embrace. (Except, well, George W. Bush.)

I can just see them wind up the day’s august discussions, then retiring to the den for brandy.

The Iraq Study Group congratulates itself for being fair and responsible, all the while smelling of vanilla, with just a hint of lilacs and citrus. And, I predict, all of their work will be for naught. Because nothing will change until someone with some power raises a stink.

The Wages of Sin

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I’m trying to wrap my head about the Iraq Study Group report this morning and hope to post something wonderfully insightful and intelligent — or, at least, something not real stupid — later today. In the meantime —

Harold Meyerson writes in today’s Washington Post about the GOP’s Southern Problem.

You’ve seen the numbers and understand that America is growing steadily less white. You try to push your party, the Grand Old Party, ahead of this curve by taking a tolerant stance on immigration and making common cause with some black churches. Then you go and blow it all in a desperate attempt to turn out your base by demonizing immigrants and running racist ads against Harold Ford. On Election Day, black support for Democrats remains high; Hispanic support for Democrats surges. So what do you do next?

What else? Elect Trent Lott your deputy leader in the Senate. Sure locks in the support of any stray voters who went for Strom in ’48.

Since the midterms, rhetoric coming out of the GOP suggests most of ’em are still determined to follow the Karl Rove strategy of pandering to the lowest, dumbest, and craziest elements of the Right to win in ’08. And I say to those Republican politicians: Please, don’t ever change. You’re most useful to us just as you are.

Anyway, after citing some of the more startling results of the midterm showing that the Rest of Us are getting bluer while the South gets redder, Meyerson writes (emphasis added),

The challenge for Republicans — and for such presidential aspirants as John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney in particular — is how to bridge the widening gap between their Southern base and the rest of the nation. The persistence of Southern exceptionalism is clear in the networks’ exit polls, in which fully half of Southern voters identified themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians, while just one-third of the entire nation’s voters did so. It’s clear from the fact that in a period of broad economic stagnation, the populism of working-class Southern whites, like a record stuck in a groove, remains targeted more against cultural than economic elites.

Indeed, scratch the surface of some of our current hot-button issues and you find age-old regional conflicts. Wal-Mart’s practice, for instance, of offering low wages and no benefits to its employees begins in the rural South, where it’s no deviation from the norm. Only when Wal-Mart expands this practice to the metropolises of the North and West, threatening the living standards of unionized retail workers, does it encounter roadblocks, usually statutory, to its entry into new markets.

Let’s recap recent events. Sidney Blumenthal predicted before the midterms that “[Karl] Rove’s legacy may be to leave Republicans with a regional Southern party whose constrictive conservatism fosters a solid Democratic North.”

The midterms did reveal that the South and Everyone Else seem to be on different wavelengths. Thomas F. Schaller writes,

Though trailing in generic House race exit polls in the South by 8 points, the Democrats won the West by 11 points, the Midwest by five and the Northeast by an incredible 28. Democrats picked up 11 House seats in the Northeast, turning that region into a power base as solidly blue as the South is red. Democrats added 21 seats in state legislatures in Dixie, but that was a disproportionately small percentage of the more than 270 they gained nationwide. They captured new legislative majorities in nine chambers, none of them Southern.

This trend will come as no surprise to anyone who paid close attention to the 2004 election, when the Democrats actually won the non-Southern congressional elections in both chambers despite losing the presidential contest. That’s right: They won. The GOP’s pickups were all in the South, as they grabbed five House seats in Texas thanks to Tom DeLay’s redistricting and five Southern Senate seats thanks to Democratic retirements. Outside the South, the Democrats picked up two House seats. In the Senate, they won two and lost one, adding two new stars, Ken Salazar in Colorado and Barack Obama in Illinois, and losing Tom Daschle of South Dakota. While the Democrats were losing 30 state legislative seats in the South, they were gaining 90 in the rest of the country.

If indeed the blue wave began to build before the 2004 elections, is it remarkable that this trend went completely unnoticed by the political punditocracy? No, it isn’t remarkable at all; we know most of those people are stuck somewhere in 1986. Until weeks before the midterms Washington Insider conventional wisdom said Republicans were just about invincible. Washington Insider conventional wisdom can be stupid.

But if the midterm results did not reveal a brand new phenomenon, but instead show us the continuation of a trend that’s been going on for at least a couple of years, IMO this is evidence that the midterm results are part of a long-term trend and not a short-term blip. This also strengthens the “regional party” prediction. So let us crash rashly ahead.

Here’s something I didn’t know: “The Democratic advantage over Republicans in state legislatures went from 15 seats (3,650 versus 3,635) to 662 seats (3,985 versus 3,323), with gains in every region.”

The only part of the country that remained Republican Red was the deep South. Pretty ironic, considering that 50 years ago, the “solid South” referred to a solid block of Democratic Party voters. Sidney Blumenthal wrote,

The modern Republican rise was first apparent in the midterm elections of 1966, in the wake of early frustrations over Vietnam and racial turmoil after passage of civil rights legislation. The closely fought presidential contest of 1968, whose outcome was hardly inevitable, in which Richard Nixon was elected, was ratified four years later in his 49-state landslide. Nixon’s strategy was to revitalize the Republicans as a party by assimilating Southern Democrats and ethnic suburban white-flight Catholics in reaction to a post-New Deal Democratic party tainted by antiwar dissent, minority protest and countercultural experimentation – “amnesty, acid and abortion,” as Vice President Spiro Agnew captiously put it.

Nixon’s Republican majority was the template for Reagan’s consolidation. Reagan’s grin replaced Nixon’s scowl, but the strategy was basically unaltered. Watergate had only temporarily derailed the project. Reagan’s chief innovation was to acknowledge and encourage the nascent religious right as an evolved form of Southern Democrats metamorphosing into Southern Republicans.

That’s true as far as it goes, but Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was most basically an appeal to racism, as explained in this, this, and especially this post. In a nutshell: After some prominent Democrats aligned themselves with racial equality and civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, Richard Nixon and some other Republicans made a blatant appeal to racism to pull white voters away from the Democrats. This trend continued into the 1980s, as Ronald Reagan winked and nodded at the “Reagan Democrats” — white blue-collar men — with his stories of Cadillac-driving “welfare queens.”

Fast forward to 2006: Thomas F. Schaller writes,

First and — sadly — foremost, as it may have been in Tennessee, is race. Analyses of the National Election Study data from 2004 show that the attitudes of white Southerners on national defense and even abortion fail to explain their preference for Republican presidential candidates, but attitudes on race do. Anyone who needs proof of the power of racial polarization in the South need only look at the blackest state in the union. Mississippi is 38 percent black, yet has a Republican governor, two Republican senators, and delivered its electoral votes to George Bush without a fuss twice. Southern whites vote as a racial bloc for the GOP. Statistics seem to show that loyalty to the Republican Party is at its highest among voters in Wyoming, Idaho and Utah –- until you start crunching the numbers for white voters only, and realize just how solid and white the GOP’s solid South is.

Race isn’t the only reason:

Second, the South is the most religious and evangelized region of the country, making it the most fertile ground for a socially conservative message. It is also (third reason) the nation’s most rural region, which only reinforces its social conservatism.

Fourth, the gender gap in voting that prevails nationally is smallest in the South. Even the women in the South are Republican. In 2004, there were only five states in the entire country where there was either no gender gap or an inverse gap — Bush doing worse among men than women — and three of those states were in the South.

This is interesting:

All of which brings us to the fifth and last reason: The South is the least unionized region. The one group of white, working-class Americans among whom Democratic loyalty still remains strong is union members and union households, and they are scarce in the South. In the 2006 midterms, non-union household members split their congressional votes evenly between the parties, whereas union members, retirees and family members broke Democratic by a 30-point margin. Forty years ago, Richard Nixon began the process of turning the South Republican by appropriating George Wallace’s appeal to disaffected working-class whites. Race, often encased in such coded phrases as “law and order,” was the basis of much of the GOP’s appeal. Over four decades, by fits and starts, the Republicans captured the South. With the ballast and votes that capture provided, the GOP emerged as the national majority party from the top of the ballot to the bottom by 2000.

Those “disaffected working-class whites” didn’t do the one thing that might have made them less disaffected, which is unionize. As Meyerson wrote, “It’s clear from the fact that in a period of broad economic stagnation, the populism of working-class Southern whites, like a record stuck in a groove, remains targeted more against cultural than economic elites.” Meyerson continues,

So: A Southern low-wage labor system is cruising along until it seeks to expand outside its region and meets fierce opposition from higher-paid workers in the North. Does that suggest any earlier episode in American history? The past, as William Faulkner once wrote of the South, isn’t even past. And now the persistence of Southern identity has become a bigger problem for Republicans than it is for Democrats.

Meyerson was alluding to slavery, and I think he’s on to something. But it’s important to understand that slavery didn’t oppress only African Americans in the antebellum South.

Before 1860 the majority of white southerners were not slaveowners, and the slave-based economy kept those whites dependent on subsistence farming to survive. There were few jobs in a region in which the monied classes used slaves to provide goods and services. Because the monied classes resisted change, the industrial revolution avoided the South. The South even lagged far behind the North in providing public education, so poor southerners were more likely to be illiterate than poor northerners.

Yet to a large extent the “yeoman farmers,” as the social historians call them, supported slavery and and the plantation system. The “yeomen’s” own racism was a factor, of course. Even though they were dirt poor and ignorant, in their minds being white made them privileged. And for some reason the “yeomen” deferred to the plantation class, even as the plantation system kept them impoverished. I’m painting a broadly generalized picture here, of course, and there were plenty of exceptions. I’m just saying there may be old and deep cultural phenomena going on here that none of us completely understands.

After the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow was a nationwide phenomenon. People think the South was more racist than the North, but for the most part it I don’t think it was; it was just more blatant about racism. But through most of those years the Deep South had a larger percentage of African American citizens than the North. This means that racism had a harder economic impact on the South than on the rest of the country. By denying so many of its citizens full participation into the economy, large parts of the South kept itself poor. Whites were considerably better off than blacks, of course, because whites kept what jobs and wealth there were to themselves. But southern whites on the whole remained poorer than they would have been otherwise. They couldn’t see that their discrimination against blacks was biting them in the ass, as well.

Resisting unionization didn’t help them. But the South resisted unionization largely with the complicity of poor whites who would have benefited. In earlier days of the labor movement, southern whites associated unions with immigrants; later, they associated unions with immigrants and Communists. Since unions in the North shut out African Americans until the 1960s, racism wouldn’t seem to explain why poor southern whites simply accepted the status quo and went along with the economic elites who exploited them. I think racism was a factor, however, because until the 1970s — later, really — jobs other than domestic help and basic laborer were reserved for whites. Poor southern whites didn’t see themselves as oppressed as long as there was another big class of people whom they could oppress. The blatant racism of the South — with legally segregated schools, parks, drinking fountains, restaurants, etc. — IMO had the effect of blinding southern whites to their own disadvantages.

(Segregation in the North, on the other hand, was de facto — white northerners pretended not to notice it even while they practiced it, and for them blacks were mostly out of sight and out of mind. Thus the socio-psychological consequences were, IMO, somewhat different.)

Meyerson brings us up to current events:

In case you haven’t noticed, a fundamental axiom of modern American politics has been altered in recent weeks. For four decades, it’s been the Democrats who’ve had a Southern problem. Couldn’t get any votes for their presidential candidates there; couldn’t elect any senators, then any House members, then any dogcatchers. They still can’t, but the Southern problem, it turns out, is really the Republicans’. They’ve become too Southern — too suffused with the knee-jerk militaristic, anti-scientific, dogmatically religious, and culturally, sexually and racially phobic attitudes of Dixie — to win friends and influence elections outside the South. Worse yet, they became more Southern still on Election Day last month, when the Democrats decimated the GOP in the North and West. Twenty-seven of the Democrats’ 30 House pickups came outside the South.

The Democrats won control of five state legislatures, all outside the South, and took more than 300 state legislative seats away from Republicans, 93 percent of them outside the South. As for the new Senate Republican caucus that chose Mississippi’s Lott over Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander to be deputy to Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, 17 of its 49 members come from the Confederacy proper, with another three from the old border states of Kentucky and Missouri, and two more from Oklahoma, which is Southern but with more dust. In all, 45 percent of Republican senators come from the Greater South.

More problematic, so does most of the Republican message. Following the gospel according to Rove (fear not swing voters but pander to and mobilize thy base), George W. Bush and the Republican Congress, together or separately, had already blocked stem cell research, disparaged nonmilitary statecraft, exalted executive wartime power over constitutional niceties, campaigned repeatedly against gay rights, thrown public money at conservative churches and investigated the tax status of liberal ones. In the process, they alienated not just moderates but Western-state libertarians.

“Boy genius” Karl Rove gained his reputation by picking off Democratic incumbents in deep southern states, using the ugliest, dirtiest, appeal-to-the-lowest-common-denominator campaigning the country has ever seen. But he doesn’t seem to have realized that the Republican Party he was shaping was way far to the right of most of the nation. Rove’s instincts are fine-tuned to southern sensibilities, clearly, but he’s turning out to be tone deaf to the rest of the nation.

After the midterm, I hope the Democrats have finally gotten over the idea that they have to be the “me too” party — Republican Lite — to win voters. The bigger issue for Dems is — do they need the South at all? Schaller has argued that they don’t. I’m not sure that his strategy requires abandoning the South; he seems to be saying that the Dems should stop moving right to win Southern voters. Instead, the Dems should stand firm on progressive ideas that the majority of the rest of America supports. In the short term it may mean losing some southern electoral votes in 2008. But this might be the best “southern strategy” in the long run.

Back in the 1850s, Abraham Lincoln believed the best long-term strategy against slavery was to keep it confined to the southern states. He didn’t believe the Constitution gave the federal government the authority to end slavery in the slave states. Ending slavery nationwide would require a constitutional amendment, which in the 1850s had no chance of passing. But if confined to the South, he thought the “peculiar institution” would die a slow death.

Lincoln didn’t get a chance to see that experiment through. But maybe it’ll work on the gumbo of extremist religiosity and nationalism that poisons American politics today.

Today’s Assignment

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Or, the blog post I’d write if I didn’t have to leave in a few minutes for jury duty — take this quote about Senator Joe McCarthy:

    “The McCarthyist fellow travelers who announced that they approved of the senator’s goals even thought they disapproved of his methods missed the point: to McCarthy’s true believers what was really appealing about him were his methods, since his goals were always utterly nebulous.” –Richard Hofstatder, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962)

Update by substituting “Bush” for “McCarthy”; think “global war on terror.” Or make other substitutions that occur to you. Discuss.

Update: Let’s refocus this, because people are tripping a big too much on the words goals and nebulous. Let’s consider something specific, like Bush’s desire to trash the Geneva Conventions and conduct what many of us consider torture. Bush’s claims to the contrary, it is extremely doubtful that what little useful intelligence obtained from detainees was squeezed out by the “tough” means Bush favors. According to Ron Suskind, the “tough” methods mostly gave the CIA information on plots that did not exist.

Yet if you suggest to a rightie that maybe we should stick to interrogation methods that are less harsh but which have a better track record of obtaining accurate information, they get hysterical and accuse you of siding with jihadists.

Look also at this Washington Post editorial from a few weeks ago, discussed here.

THE BUSH administration has pushed aggressively for expanded surveillance powers, military commissions and rough interrogation techniques. When it comes to fighting the war on terrorism, just about anything goes. Except, that is, those routine steps with no civil liberties implications at all that might significantly interrupt terrorism — such as, say, reading the mail of convicted terrorists housed in American prisons. The federal Bureau of Prisons, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine wrote, “does not read all the mail for terrorist and other high-risk inmates on its mail monitoring lists.” It is also “unable to effectively monitor high-risk inmates’ verbal communications,” including phone calls. So while the administration won’t reveal the circumstances under which it spies on innocent Americans, the communications of imprisoned terrorists, at least, appear sadly secure.

Seems to me that Bush’s goals vis a vis the “global war on terrorism” are pretty damn nebulous —

    1. Cloudy, misty, or hazy.
    2. Lacking definite form or limits; vague: nebulous assurances of future cooperation.
    3. Of, relating to, or characteristic of a nebula.

This is not to say that he doesn’t have goals, or at least intentions, and that those goals are not well served by “tough interrogation.” The point is that Bush’s real (or inner) goals have to be inferred, or guessed at. That makes them nebulous to us observers. For all I know they are nebulous to Bush as well.

However, for now I do not care about what’s going on in Bush’s head. I am asking about what’s going on in his supporters‘ heads — note that Hofstatder’s observation was less about McCarthy than about McCarthy admirers.

The fact that his stated or official goal of saving the world from terrorism is not at all well served by his methods ought to be obvious to most vertebrate species by now. But the consideration at hand is not Bush himself, but his supporters, or what’s left of ’em. These are the people who think it’s just grand that Bush suspends habeas corpus for detainees, including citizens, at Bush’s discretion. They continue to argue that our lives and our nation will be forfeit if the CIA has to give up waterboarding. And they still have some hazy notion that we can “win” in Iraq.

I’m saying that these people stick with Bush because of his methods and practices, including violations of the Constitution. They really don’t much care about the results. The goals are nothing but empty rhetoric, and that’s OK with the true believers.

Poppy II

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Dan Froomkin:

Even as Washington’s punditocracy relishes the storyline of the elder-statesman father riding to the hapless son’s rescue, President Bush insisted yesterday that he doesn’t talk shop with his dad — and certainly doesn’t ask for his advice.

Bush’s first one-on-one interview since his brutal rebuff at the hands of the voters on Nov. 7 was a tame affair, thanks to Fox News anchor Brit Hume. Here’s the transcript and the video.

But when Hume brought up the issue of his father’s influence, Bush responded with a forced grin, a clenched fist and a somewhat petulant response: “I’m the commander in chief,” he said.

And Bush’s explanation for why he doesn’t talk policy with his dad simply doesn’t hold water.

“You know, I love my dad,” Bush said. “But he understands what I know, that the level of information I have relative to the level of information most other people have, including himself, is significant.”

Oh, please. That’s obviously not the real reason.

So here are two more-likely possibilities: Either Bush does talk to his dad and doesn’t want people to know; or he truly has no interest in what his dad thinks.

The latter still strikes me as the most likely. Bush, after all, remains the son whose actions can be seen in large part as a reaction to his father — rather than an homage.

As Bush biographer Bill Sammon wrote in 2004: “President Bush is resolved not to repeat what he thinks were the two fundamental blunders of his father’s one-term presidency: abandoning Iraq and failing to vanquish the Democrats.

And don’t forget Poppy’s “no new taxes” pledge.

You don’t have to be Freud to know that Junior suffers from the Mother of All Oedipal Complexes. Someone on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown last night pointed out that Junior has spent his whole life trying to one-up his old man. For example, Poppy was an oil guy, so Junior tried to be a bigger oil guy (and failed). Let’s also take note of the fact that Poppy is known for his patrician, eastern blueblood demeanor, while Junior is the only person in his family who developed a Texas accent and affected an aw-shucks, regular-guy persona.

Thomas de Zengotita writes at Huffington Post about Poppy’s breaking into sobs while talking about Jeb:

Well, obviously, he wasn’t really talking about Jeb. It was all about W.

Little George is hopeless, and always has been–and Big George knows it, and always has, and so has the whole family. Medium George may be nothing special, but he is a grown-up and, most important, he displays that wire-jaw air of moderated self-possession that is the very definition of Wasp manhood in the privileged precincts wherein the Bush tribe dwells.

Jeb was always the heir apparent. He was supposed to be The One.

Little George, on the other hand, was a profound embarrassment to the Bush clan, drunk or sober, oozing and leaking uncontrollable emotions, in triumph and defeat, ever since he earned his mother’s lasting scorn throwing his tennis racket to the ground after flubbing shots on country club courts back when you had to wear whites to play that urgent (but discretely so) pong-ponging game with those who bore so effortlessly the grace of timeless class.

In his heart, Big George blames himself for Little George’s manic need to match and surpass him. In his heart, Big George knows that this Iraq insanity has been a long drawn out substitute for the fist fight a drunken Little George once challenged him to on the lawn of one of their stately manors back in the day when the world was young and the Atlantic stars shone down upon the estates of a virtuous American ruling class.

There could be more to the sobs — or less. Lord knows nobody named “Bush” is going to be elected president for at least a century. Given the fact that what happened in Florida 2000 was a family project, I can’t feel too sorry that the lot of them must abandon politics and crawl into private obscurity as soon as Junior is pried out of the White House. This whole family drama is karma on meth.

I still think it’s significant that the words Poppy choked on were decency and honor.