No Real Victory for Wisconsin GOP

You've probably heard that Wisconsin state Republicans managed to dodge the Democratic trend this year and retake the state Senate. There's a tight and contested election yet to be resolved, but Republicans will probably control the Senate 18-15. This gives the GOP the levers of state government -- the Assembly and the Governor's office are both in Republican hands. However, this may not be the disaster that it seems at first. Or, at least, not as bad a one.

The first and most obvious point in favor of this argument is that Senate rules that 3/5 of the chamber be present before any vote can be taken on budgetary matters. If 14 or more Senators are no-shows, you don't have a quorum. You might remember that this maneuver was the prelude to the recall fight. Both parties will want to avoid this in the future.

But a more important and convincing point is that Governor Scott Walker, while an ideologue, is probably the most ambitious politician in Wisconsin. He has ideological goals, but they pale in comparison to his personal career goals. He had hoped his union-busting would make him a Republican vice presidential short-lister, but things became much more contentious than he had imagined and that dream died. I think the whole thing surprised and scared him, leaving him legitimately chastened. That sort of overreach won't happen again.

Because if there's one thing that's really bad for your career, it's getting fired. And despite his party's victories at the state level, things at the federal level went very, very poorly. Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan was also defending his House seat and, although he did win, it didn't actually go as well as he would've liked. His share of the vote that reelected him was down nearly twenty points from just two years ago. According to the University of Minnesota's Eric Ostermeier, Ryan's win was "his narrowest ever congressional contest." Ryan's is a swing district and Walker will likely need it to survive reelection, a mere two years away.

Which brings us to the race that probably really put starch in Walker's drawers: Tammy Baldwin's defeat of former Gov. Tommy Thompson. Behold this graphic:


Of the counties won by Walker in 2010, twenty-three flipped Democrat to Baldwin -- many by very healthy margins. And Tommy Thompson is not some sort of pariah here; he was the longest serving governor in the state's history. He should've owned this race. He got caught up in a brutal primary against Tea Party nutjobs and he came out broke, sure. But take a look at that map again. Safe counties don't swing like that. Solid red counties would vote for a rabid squirrel before they voted for an openly lesbian candidate who's been -- hands down -- one of the most liberal members of the House of Representatives. The counties that would only vote Republican aren't enough to carry him. Not by a long shot.

No, that map spells trouble for Walker. Big trouble, unless he treads very lightly. Meanwhile, Obama's victory hands him a humiliating defeat on healthcare. He has to come up with a healthcare exchange -- something he had foolishly resisted doing -- and he has to do it in a big hurry. If he fails, the feds will create one for him. He begins this cycle not looking a whole lot like a winner.

As I said, if there's anything that trumps Walker's ideology, it's his ambition. He went all rightwing nutjob after 2010 because he thought this whole Tea Party fad was here to stay. Turned out that was a bad call. Now, he'll probably go all Mitt Romney and shake the Etch-a-Sketch, governing with a finger in the wind and an eye on the polls. Bold, ultra-conservative moves are likely behind him, unless (and until) the pendulum swings way back to crazy again.

"I look forward to working with members of both parties to grow our economy and create jobs," Walker said in a statement on election night. I have no doubt he looks forward to being seen working with members of both parties. Tea Party Scott Walker is most probably dead.

Meet Moderate Scott Walker.

-Wisco

Conservatives Learn the Exact Wrong Lesson

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been putting in some really stellar work over at The Atlantic for a while now, but he really deserves some sort of headline award for his post, "Hippies Wander Into the Lions' Den, Maul Lions." In it, he points out that crazy lefty ideas like marriage equality and marijuana legalization were big winners Tuesday night. Issues that the Republican Party thought were fairly safely on their side and only fringey nutjob politics turned out not to be so safe at all. The right had laughed at these things as weak and crazy liberal goofiness -- right up until weak and crazy liberal goofs cleaned their freakin' clock. This was not an election in which rock-ribbed conservatism was endorsed by the electorate. No, this was an election where barefoot, who-cares-who-you-love, tofu-chewing, pot-smoking, Prius-driving, gender-neutral Occupy Wall Street types smacked the rightwing stupid[er].

It was, in Coates' words, "one of the most progressive nights in American history, and arguably the most progressive night in American history in some 40 years."

Which makes this reasoning a little hard to figure:


[The Hill:]

Conservative leaders on Wednesday lashed out at Mitt Romney, saying his attempts to paint himself as a centrist and hide his principles cost him the presidency.

They vowed to wage a war to put the Tea Party in charge of the Republican Party by the time it nominates its next presidential candidate.

“The battle to take over the Republican Party begins today and the failed Republican leadership should resign,” said Richard Viguerie, a top activist and chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.

He said the lesson on Romney’s loss to President Obama on Tuesday is that the GOP must “never again” nominate a “a big government established conservative for president.”


Really? Because judging from the outcome, I'd say the "lesson" was actually the plural "lessons," that they were many, and that they include things like "don't attack better than half the electorate as sluts," "race-baiting doesn't work anymore," "people don't trust Wall Street," and "keep your crazy-assed theories about rape and pregnancy to yourself." Of course, I'm not a big, important towering intellect like Richard Viguerie. America went all gay and weed happy because it was so conservative, I guess.

Richard Mourdock, Todd Akin, and Allen West all lost because they weren't conservative enough either, right? Michele Bachmann barely held onto her seat -- meaning she would've been a lot safer if the Tea Party's rightest of rightwing nuts was more conservative, right? Am I getting this argument correctly? Because so far, it's making no damned sense at all.

You have to give them credit for trying to make this drooling moron of an argument make sense, but an A for effort is all they get. The result is still that drooling moron of an argument. The Hill quotes Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots calling Romney a "weak, moderate candidate hand-picked by the country club elite Republican establishment."

"[Voters] didn’t see a clear distinction so they went with what they know," she said.

I guess because a moderate is like a giant squid or something -- everyone knows they exist, but few have actually seen one. The sight of a moderate centrist terrified voters into the arms of the exact opposite of what they wanted. Because it only makes sense that's what you'd do, right? Just like if an election was between a Whig and a Nazi, everyone would go with the Nazi -- because they know what Nazis are all about. So an electorate hungering for a "true" conservative chooses a hippie pinko over the Moderate Mystery Box. That just stands to reason, right? You'll excuse me if I keep asking, because when you try to following this line of reasoning, it's so hard to tell if you're still on the pavement or careening off a roadside cliff.

There's a civil war brewing in the Republican Party. Unfortunately for them, they've chased out all the moderates and the crazies vastly outnumber the sane. The "Mitt wasn't conservative" enough crowd is going to win. And they're going to go off in search of a candidate who demands war with Iran, stoning gays, and who won't be able to shut up about how many rape babies America should be blessed with. That's their idea of a winner.

Man, those hippies are going to eat these fools alive.

-Wisco

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The Opposition (to Everything) Party

If you know a rightwing blogger, you might want to check in on them occasionally, to make sure they haven't opened a vein. The mood in the wingnut blogosphere -- as it was on rightwing Twitter last night -- is one of comically exaggerated doom. What happened on Fox News, when Karl Rove absolutely refused to believe that the president had won Ohio (and with it, reelection), is surprisingly not the norm this morning. I suppose they're in shock and may begin waving their "unskewed" polls around and shrieking that Obama stole the election once they've recovered a bit. But for now, it's all about depression. Over at Breitbart.com, the faithful are being consoled with tales of the popular vote and Obama's failure to gain it, but that particular solace is unlikely to even survive the day -- CNN already has the President at 50% and climbing as of this writing.

So what things should conservatives have learned from last night that they don't seem to be? There are a lot; don't pick fights with Nate Silver over math, don't pick fights with women over rape, don't assume your little Fox News/talk radio bubble isn't lying to you about your chances and making you way too complacent, etc. But the big one is that "divide and conquer" only works when you're dividing off the bigger portion to yourselves.


[Politico:]

...“The conservative movement should have particular appeal to people in minority and immigrant communities who are trying to make it, and Republicans need to work harder than ever to communicate our beliefs to them,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who will immediately be looked to as a potential 2016 presidential candidate.

But the GOP’s problem is more fundamental than one bloc of voters. For the second consecutive presidential election, the Republican got thumped among women and young voters in the states that decided the election.

“Our party needs to realize that it’s too old and too white and too male and it needs to figure out how to catch up with the demographics of the country before it’s too late,” said Al Cardenas, the head of the American Conservative Union and a longtime GOP leader. “Our party needs a lot of work to do if we expect to be competitive in the near future.”

Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), a prospective 2014 statewide candidate in a state moving sharply to the middle, was just as blunt: “After tonight, the GOP had better figure out that a big tent sounds good, but if there aren’t any seats in it, what good is it.”


The problem is, this would all require the right to abandon some of their most deeply held beliefs. And that's not going to happen. For example, the biggest winners from last night may be the LGBT community -- more commonly known on the right as "GAAAH!! GAY PEOPLE!! RUN!!!!" or "destroyers of traditional families."

And consider why Republicans turned off women and minorities -- because of the very things the rightwing base believes. That "urban voters" (i.e., African-Americans) all rely on food stamps and welfare because they're too lazy to get a job. That Latinos should be stopped and forced to prove they aren't undocumented. That life begins at rape. And working people and the middle class? Michelle Malkin summed up their feelings about them nicely when she sneered, "Romney types, of course, are the ones who sign the front of the paycheck, and the Obama types are the one who have spent their entire lives signing the back of them." This was Mitt Romney's "47%" argument condensed. When you suggest that wage earners are too stupid to be employers and ignore the fact that the majority of the population are wage earners, things aren't going to go real well for you. Siding with Wall Street against Main Street may sell to the endlessly chumpish Republican voter, but that position can't survive for long in the wild. It -- in the form of opposition to the auto bailout and the jobs that consequentially saved -- is what killed Romney in all-important Ohio.

But if I really had to boil it all down to one reason, I'd blame that rightwing media bubble and the feedback loop it generates. Outlets like Fox News don't exist to advance any ideology (for the most part); it's the Republican Party press office and it exists to get Republicans elected. They accomplish this by being extraordinarily reactionary -- everything liberals do or believe is bad, therefore Republicans must be elected to stop them.

The problem here is that being endlessly reactionary is endlessly reductive. If your argument is that everything that liberals believe is wrong, then you wind up opposing some popular ideas. Democrats, for example, like Social Security and Medicare -- so these are socialism and bad ideas that should be fixed through privatization. Why is inserting a pointless middleman into the equation and increasing costs a good idea? Because liberals are bad and shut up, that's why. As Republicans move closer to opposing everything, they find themselves racing toward zero.

No wonder the GOP watches its share of the electorate shrink year after year, month after month, day after day. They're actively kicking people out of it. They've become a party of straight white evangelicals who believe that the rich should get a free ride on the backs of the poor. Because liberals care about poor people and liberals suck. Just like the Earth sucks and people who get shot by wandering neighborhood watch lunatics suck and people who think that rape isn't a Blessed Gift from On High suck and kids who learn stuff from Sesame Street suck.

Maybe Republicans are headed the way of the dinosaurs and, like the dinosaurs, lack the capacity to understand that their own extinction is right around the corner. Or maybe they'll evolve, adapt, and survive.

I'd put my money on the latter -- if it weren't for the fact that evolution was one of those things that evil liberals believe and therefore sucks.

-Wisco

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Romney's Excellent Argument Against Electing Romney

The election campaign is pretty much over. There's some scrambling to be done here or there. A last minute effort to get to those few last voters who may not be undecided, but are unmotivated and still unsure whether voting this year will be worth their time. And that's who the post is aimed at; that voter, perhaps tired of the bitter partisan divide and disgusted with how dirty politics has become, who doesn't think voting will make any difference.

There are plenty of posts out there today -- and many more to be published before the election is over -- that spell out what life under a President Romney would be like. Juan Cole has such a post up now and it's worth a read. But Romney's been so inconsistent in his pitch that it really is impossible to predict exactly how he'll govern. I think he will be a plutocrat who believes that 47% of America is beneath his notice, mostly because his history -- both in the private and public sector -- is one of exactly that. But he's such a flip-flopper and a liar that you can't say with any certainty how he'll govern. And it may be that how he governs would be less consequential than how he got elected.

See, if we really want to know what the consequence is of electing Mitt Romney, we can look at his closing argument. In it, he reveals not so much about himself as of his party -- and it's damningly familiar. In his closing argument last Friday, Mitt Romney took the American people hostage.


[Talking Points Memo:]

In what his campaign billed as his “closing argument,” Mitt Romney warned Americans that a second term for President Obama would have apocalyptic consequences for the economy in part because his own party would force a debt ceiling disaster.

“Unless we change course, we may well be looking at another recession,” Romney told a crowd in West Allis, Wisconsin.

Romney said that Obama “promised to be a post-partisan president, but he became the most partisan” and that his bitter relations with the House GOP could threaten the economy. As his chief example, he pointed to a crisis created entirely by his own party’s choice — Republican lawmakers’ ongoing threat to reject a debt ceiling increase. Economists warn that a failure to pass such a measure would have immediate and catastrophic consequences for the recovery.

“You know that if the President is re-elected, he will still be unable to work with the people in Congress,” Romney said. “He has ignored them, attacked them, blamed them. The debt ceiling will come up again, and shutdown and default will be threatened, chilling the economy.”


The message is simple: elect Mitt Romney or his party will bring down the United States. What a freakin' patriot, huh?

And this is exactly why we shouldn't elect Romney. Imagine what politics will be like in the future if this sort of hostage-taking is considered a successful strategy. And it gets worse.

During Barack Obama's first term, Republicans have engaged in an unprecedented campaign of obstructionism. The filibuster has been abused to the point that absolutely nothing gets done in Washington. The strategy here is as cynical as it is un-American; bring progress to a halt, let the problems America should be solving fester and get worse, then blame Democrats and the president for the mess Republicans have created.

Imagine what happens if we reward that. Republicans will do this every time. They've made it eminently clear that they don't care about the nation -- if they did, they wouldn't filibuster things like the National Bombing Prevention Act or the Veterans Jobs Corps Act. If their strategy is successful, then every time there's a Democratic president or a Democratic majority, Republicans will shut down Washington until election day.

Finally, Mitt Romney has been the most dishonest candidate since Richard Nixon. Positively eager to tell you exactly what polling says you want to hear, Romney changes his own positions as often as his socks -- while engaging in the worst smears this side of Rick Santorum. And the GOP base is even worse. Imagine what happens when birtherism is seen as a political success story, when smearing the president as a communist and a terrorist sympathizer becomes the norm. Don't like politics now? I can guarantee that electing Mitt Romney will make it worse. If we reward all this, we normalize it.

Mitt Romney's closing argument should damn him. It's not even an argument, it's a threat. Seriously, do you really want to vote for the guy who just took you hostage?

-Wisco

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Romney's Running Out of Time

Election week began -- appropriately or inappropriately, depending on your point of view -- on Halloween. There are now less than seven days until the election. For Mitt Romney, the sentence, "There's still time to turn this thing around," gets more and more untrue with each passing hour. Signs of his desperation abound. The Cleveland Plain Dealer describes him "flailing" in Ohio, "recklessly" telling lies about Chrysler moving jobs to China. A company spokesperson said that Romney's Chrysler-Jeep story was "a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats." Meanwhile, tick-tock.

At the same time, the Republican nominee is dusting off his old -- and just as thoroughly debunked -- welfare lie.


[CNN:]

Mitt Romney's campaign has brought back a widely-discredited welfare claim in a new television ad, one week before Election Day.

In the ad--which was unannounced by the campaign but posted Tuesday on Romney's YouTube site–the narrator lists the "gutting" of the work requirement in welfare as one of President Barack Obama's so-called failed policies in his first term.

Along with high unemployment and a rise in food stamps, the Romney ad paints Obama as a threat to future generations.

"We may have made it through President Obama's first term," the narrator concludes, as footage of children are featured on the screen. "It's our children who cannot afford a second."


Politifact rated Romney's take on welfare and work requirements as "pants on fire" -- a cute way of saying the man is a blatant liar.

It didn't work the last time and it's hard to see how it would work now. The dog whistle is just a little too audible to non-racists and it may actually do more harm than good. Team Romney did not issue a press release for the ad, in the hopes that it would fly under the radar, unnoticed by anyone other than swing state voters. Meanwhile, tick-tock.

Over at FiveThirtyEight, the trend has shown Romney's chances slowly sinking. His "momentum" propaganda seems more and more ridiculous as that red line dips every day. I've compared Team Romney to Baghdad Bob in the past -- and I've done it because the comparison is so damned on the money.

FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver writes that Obama's midwestern "firewall" is holding -- perhaps even strengthening -- and that national and state polls are no longer in complete disagreement. A state-by-state electoral college count makes the president the clear favorite and national poll averages put Obama over the top as well. Talking Points Memo concurs -- according to polling averages, President Obama holds the slimmest of national leads. But a lead nonetheless. In their electoral college count, Obama easily clears the 270 mark with 303 electoral college votes (Silver gives him 300 and change). Talk of an electoral college victory and a popular vote loss has been fashionable among the punditry, but it should begin to die off now. We seem to be headed toward a victory on both counts.

Meanwhile, tick-tock.

Expect Romney to become more desperate daily. Expect his lies to be more egregious. Expect his flailing to be more frenetic. And I can say this with some confidence because Obama's victory is not assured by any means. A Romney win is doable, but unlikely. And it gets more and more unlikely the longer Mitt runs behind. Nate Silver:


Mr. Obama is not a sure thing, by any means. It is a close race. His chances of holding onto his Electoral College lead and converting it into another term are equivalent to the chances of an N.F.L. team winning when it leads by a field goal with three minutes left to play in the fourth quarter. There are plenty of things that could go wrong, and sometimes they will.

But it turns out that an N.F.L. team that leads by a field goal with three minutes left to go winds up winning the game 79 percent of the time. Those were Mr. Obama's chances in the FiveThirtyEight forecast as of Wednesday: 79 percent.


Actually, there were three minutes left on the clock and a one-in-five chance when he wrote that. Two minutes, fifty-nine seconds now.

Tick-tock.

-Wisco

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