The New American Politics thread

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by nik-

Are they even getting the big corporate money anymore? I was under the impression a lot of the rich folks funding them backed off after they went full ###### with the debt ceiling crap and their willingness to default on debt.

The corporate money just isn't transparent anymore, the PR damage potential is too high. Now their funding, over 90 percent, comes from major anonymous donations. It's a legal form of money laundering. The money is still coming from the same sources except the corporate logo isn't attached.

[DuffMan]

Interesting that democrats weren't even going to run anyone against Cantor, but have someone going against the TParty now.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by New Era

Americans for Prosperity are still right behind the Tea Party and that is funded directly by the Koch brothers. Big money still supports the Tea Party because the Tea Party is the John Birch wing of the conservative movement, and the John Birch movement has always been supported by the hardline capitalists who want to rid the world of the socialist threat and the welfare state. That is unless that welfare state is more focused on corporate welfare, then that's a whole new ball of wax.

Originally Posted by nik-

AFP runs anti-Obamacare and anti-Democrat ads, but in terms of actual money to Tea Party candidates, is there recent evidence?

It's interesting you brought that up, Nik-.

I think the most impressive part of this emergence and sustained presence of the tea party is in the novel approach to funding it.

The surrounding infrastructure of the radical right is funded by the interests referred to earlier, but it's so much more effective than lump sum donations or cash infusions. This primary loss is maybe the best example I could hope for to explain what I mean, as I am actually quite impressed by it.

Brat reportedly raised 230k compared to the over 5 million raised by Cantor, but that money didn't matter, because Brat had the radical media presence as his mouth piece. 230k doesn't buy you a ton of TV and radio time, but having one of the foremost 'conservative' personalities outright endorse you nationally and then hold a rally for your cause is a more substantial investment than a million bucks for some TV spots.

It's really some next level ####. Build a massive talking head infrastructure to influence popular opinion.

[nik-]

Yeah, I don't know if I really buy that. People aren't really listening to right wing radio because they want help deciding who to vote for. Those stations and personalities are just base reinforcement.

You're probably right when it comes to primaries, which tend to get more radical, but for big picture voting, these people who listen to those programs have already made up their minds.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by nik-

Yeah, I don't know if I really buy that. People aren't really listening to right wing radio because they want help deciding who to vote for. Those stations and personalities are just base reinforcement.

You're probably right when it comes to primaries, which tend to get more radical, but for big picture voting, these people who listen to those programs have already made up their minds.

Right, but this is what I'm saying, the purpose is served through intimidation. "Either get behind what we're selling, or we'll endorse the other guy."

And it goes even deeper than that. The people promoted to these positions don't get their by accident, nor based on merit. Laura Ingraham can say she is free to write or say what she wants, but she has a megaphone because she behaves accordingly. She says what she likes because they like what she says.

When you're dealing with black and white, blue and red, right or wrong, the position you support can be distorted. The people who listen to right wing talk radio are probably never going to vote democrat, but, the depth of their conservatism is influenced by what they see and hear.

That's how a multi-term politician who was more or less a lock in his gerrymandered district can lose a primary to a guy who's never run before and raised 200k.

It really is quite impressive, and partly why the US conservative movement has become so hard line; you can't show any weakness or vulnerability. You have to out conservative your opponent, and if that means going off the deep end, well, that's where you go.

Whether it screws with the party at the federal level doesn't matter, because this isn't about reverting to bygone attitudes, it's about slowing progress as much as possible. The status quo is profitable. Any thing that can distract from meaningful policy initiatives and prevents bipartisan efforts to effect change is a desirable outcome. That's really what is driving this, creating an environment that is toxic towards bipartisan legislation.

[nfotiu]

Originally Posted by nik-

Yeah, I don't know if I really buy that. People aren't really listening to right wing radio because they want help deciding who to vote for. Those stations and personalities are just base reinforcement.

You're probably right when it comes to primaries, which tend to get more radical, but for big picture voting, these people who listen to those programs have already made up their minds.

That's the thing though. Tea Party guys are able to weasle into republican nominations, but aren't really winning elections. Same thing happened in the Virginia Governor race.

I suspect it will be the moderate Republicans who end up abandoning their party and leaving it to the Tea Party. I suspect Cantor would easily win our house seat if he ran under a new moderate conservative third party.

There are so many examples where the tea party is coming in and winning nominations in districts and states where the republican has about a 90% chance of winning only to have their wing nut lose in the general election.

[Tinordi]

Somewhere Hilary Clinton is a having a pretty good day.

[Tinordi]

Agreed with Flash on this.

The Tea Party is a tool, a tool of fear and terror for those on the right. People were waxing on about the declining influence of the tea party pointing to this year's primaries where successful tea party candidates had declined in their absolute numbers from years before.

But that mistakes the role of the tea party which was never really about forming a government. It was about intimidation to an almost religious cause to defend the angry, stupid, and scared white people and the corporate paymasters. Many were scared the Republican party would veer left searching for the middle voter which is unequivocally moving left as the population becomes more diverse.

Where the tea party is successful and what is essentially its core strategy is not how many they beat but WHO they beat. They go after the big fish and Cantor is the biggest yet. It's also fairly telling that Cantor was at one time a reformist conservative trying to move the party to more technocratic principles. That would not stand for the the ideologues.

[CaramonLS]

Comment from Reddit on the Cantor / Brat race:


Republicans recruited some grassroots organizations, trained them, gave them weapons, and used them to defeat their enemies. But the newly trained forces went rogue and the whole thing came back to bite them in the ass. It's almost like they never ####ing learn.

[Flash Walken]

This is a pretty big deal.

Cantor, who has represented the Richmond suburbs since 2001, lost by 11 percentage points to Dave Brat, an economist at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va. It was an operatic fall from power, swift and deep and utterly surprising. As late as Tuesday morning, Cantor had felt so confident of victory that he spent the morning at a Starbucks on Capitol Hill, holding a fundraising meeting with lobbyists while his constituents went to the polls.

By Tuesday night, he had suffered a defeat with few parallels in American history. Historians said that no House leader of Cantor’s rank had ever been defeated in a primary.

That left stunned Republicans — those who had supported Cantor, and even those who had worked to beat him — struggling to understand what happened.

...

Brat was boosted for months by conservative talk-radio hosts, including Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, who touted him as a contender to their listeners and drove small-dollar donations into Brat’s coffers.

Unhappy with what they considered a too-hesitant-to-fight GOP, they championed Brat as a fellow warrior for an ideological cause, lifting him with the GOP’s base as he hovered under the national radar.

When Election Day came, the turnout was high: About 65,000 people voted, which was up from 47,037 two years ago (when Cantor captured 79 percent of the vote).

After the race had been called, Brat spoke to cheering supporters in the atrium of a nondescript building at an office park. He told them that he had won by adhering to conservative principles.

“I love every single person that God made on the planet because they’re all children of God,” he said. He returned to a tea party tenet, talking about the need to control government spending: “It’s not a punchline, it’s called fiscal responsibility.”

...

“I know there’s a lot of long faces here tonight,” Cantor told the crowd, appearing just after the race had been called about 8 p.m. “It’s disappointing, sure. But I believe in this country. I believe there’s opportunity around the next corner for all of us.”

He spoke for about four minutes, thanking his supporters and saying he would continue to “fight for the conservative cause.” He then quickly exited the ballroom and got into a waiting SUV, ignoring questions from reporters.

Then things became rowdy. A group of immigration activists suddenly stormed the ballroom, screaming and waving a flag. “What do we want? Immigration reform! When do we want it? Now!”A few Cantor supporters tried to block them, and there was pushing and shoving. One supporter threw his glass of wine onto a female protester. She swore at him in return.

...

In Washington on Tuesday, the idea of Cantor’s loss was so strange that there was no plan in place to deal with it. Other Republicans puzzled: Did Cantor have to resign his position as the House Republican leader immediately?

“This is an earthquake,” said former congressman Vin Weber (R-Minn.), a friend of Cantor. “No one thought he’d lose.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...11f_story.html

No one thought Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, could actually lose. His primary challenge in his suburban Richmond district, from a local economics professor named David Brat, was thought to be nominal. No sitting majority leader has lost a primary since the position was invented in 1899. Cantor, though unloved by many in his party and in Congress, was seen as the speaker-in-waiting whenever John Boehner decided, or was forced, to hang it up.

But all those assumptions went out the window Tuesday night, when Cantor shockingly lost—and by a wide margin. With 97 percent of the vote counted, Brat had 56 percent of the vote to Cantor's 44 percent.

In retrospect, there were signs Cantor felt endangered. As the Washington Post reported, in a dispatch that seemed far-fetched at the time but now appears prescient, Cantor was booed at a local Republican gathering last month, and his handpicked candidate for district GOP chair was defeated. His campaign aired TV ads and sent mailers crediting him for blocking immigration reform—signs he had begun to sense a threat. Meanwhile, Brat, a Tea Party activist, was championed by national conservatives like Ann Coulter and Mark Levin. (According to Virginia's "sore-loser" law, Cantor can't run against Brat as an independent in the general election, though he might be allowed to mount a write-in bid.)

Cantor's loss will prompt the reexamination of some other pieces of conventional wisdom: One, that the Tea Party is dead—clearly, at least in one restive precinct, anti-Washington anger is alive and well. And two, that supporting immigration reform doesn't necessarily hurt Republicans in primaries—Cantor's supposed support for "amnesty" was Brat's chief line of attack. Supporters of immigration reform now fear that Republican members of Congress, leery of touching the issue before, now will never be persuaded that it is not politically toxic. As one immigration-reform-supporting conservative operative emailed me mournfully: "I can't vote for Democrats because I am pro-life, but my party seems beyond repair."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...-upset/372550/

[ernie]

Excellent. The more Tea Party buffoons that remain in the GOP the better it will ultimately be for the people....because it makes the GOP unelectable in 2016.

[nik-]

Originally Posted by ernie

Excellent. The more Tea Party buffoons that remain in the GOP the better it will ultimately be for the people....because it makes the GOP unelectable in 2016.

Yeah, it's great for Presidential politics. The problem is they're electing enough of them in the midterms to grind progress to a halt.

[Coach]

Maybe they should stop working to win elections and start actually working.

What's the Tea-Party's stance on the military budget in reference to cutting government spending? Or do they need to cut the unimportant things like education, healthcare and social assistance programs?

[CaramonLS]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...climate-change

Good article on some of the things Brat believes. I guess I am quite shocked that this guy ever studied or taught economics.

[nfotiu]

Originally Posted by nik-

Yeah, it's great for Presidential politics. The problem is they're electing enough of them in the midterms to grind progress to a halt.

I think their numbers are actually going down. Their effectiveness is obtained by scaring the republicans into voting their way, or they'll replace them at the primary/caucus level. The Tea Party is very effective at rallying their supporters to vote in these mostly ignored races. All this crap is on tv about Cantor losing because he wasn't paying attention to his district or other red herrings. Fact is that only about 5% of the people in the district voted in the primary. So they were able to rally about 3% of the population to get out and vote and easily overwhelmed the typical 2% of the population that normally vote in these things.

Similar thing happened in the Virginia governor race. The Tea Party was able to change the rules from a primary to a caucus (since a tea party guy had no chance in a Virginia wide primary) to get their guy in. The governor race was supposed to be easily won by the assumed Republican nominee, but instead all the Tea Party did was get the Democrat elected.

It's not like Bratt gets to replace Cantor as majority leader or speaker, so it is not really that significant if Bratt wins or loses. Except that it puts fear into the moderate republicans.

[Senator Clay Davis]

Some of the article "highlights"

And he has called for drastic cuts to education funding, explaining, "My hero Socrates trained in Plato on a rock. How much did that cost? So the greatest minds in history became the greatest minds in history without spending a lot of money."

If you let Americans do their thing, there is no scarcity, right? They said we're going to run out of food 200 years ago, that we're goin' to have a ice age. Now we're heating up…Of course we care for the environment, but we're not mad people. Over time, rich countries solve their problems. We get it right. It's not all perfect, but we get it right.

For the first 13 years of your kid's life, we teach them no religion, no philosophy, and no ethics…Who is our great moral teachers these days? Every generation has always had great theologians or philosophers by the century that you can name. Who do we got right now? [Audience: Jay-Z] Right. Right. [Audience: Beyoncé] Right. Beyoncé. When you can't name a serious philosopher, a national name, or a serious theologian, or a serious religious leader, at the national level, your culture's got a major problem. We got a major problem.

The left does not believe in diversity. They believe in top-down, I'm going to force my way onto you. Obama is forcing un-diversity onto everybody. It's not diversity. It's top down, central planning, on everything.

[Senator Clay Davis]

His Facebook page has been scrubbed clean, but not before someone busted out the PrintScreen.

[Displaced Flames fan]

Originally Posted by DuffMan

Interesting that democrats weren't even going to run anyone against Cantor, but have someone going against the TParty now.

Evidently the guy is a professor at the same university that Brat is. Kind of odd.

In fact, it's kind of odd that a university economics professor would be a Tea Party member.

[Displaced Flames fan]

So, here we are less than 29 months from election day and there isn't a single palatable candidate being discussed on either side. It's frightening.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by Displaced Flames fan

Evidently the guy is a professor at the same university that Brat is. Kind of odd.

In fact, it's kind of odd that a university economics professor would be a Tea Party member.

He appears to be an economic philosopher.

Lots of Randian hocus pocus and Christianity as an economic idealism.

I've been reading some of his stuff in the last couple of days, embarrassing for the university that he's a faculty member.

His dissertation reads like a theologian's history of economics.