Powell is both wrong and right
This morning's edition of Real Clear Politics linked to a story that had me in high dudgeon the moment I read its title: "Powell: GOP Polarization Backfired."
Colin Powell- a man I've always admired despite our disagreements on social issues, and one who was badly used by the Bush administration- disappointed me mightily when he endorsed a man who initially premised his candidacy for the White House on a promise to pull the rug out from under our troops in Iraq, and who had not backed off that promise. Granted, the success of the surge has changed the landscape in Iraq. Granted, even the Iraqis have agitated for, and achieved, an agree deadline for the withdrawal of American troops. But the best military assessment continues to be that 2012 is too soon, from the point of view of Iraqi national security, for the troops to leave. A powerful case can be made that this hardly matters, since our presence in Iraq has become politically untenable. It's been diplomatically problematic from the very beginning. Powell doubtless took these factors into account in making his decision to endorse Obama.
Despite his disavowals of the notion, I suspect that- perhaps without Powell even realizing it- Barack Obama's race did, indeed, play a role in that decision. In fact, he or any other African- American who wasn't strongly attracted to the notion of voting for a fellow member of a once-enslaved and still marginalized minority would probably not be entirely human. That the candidate in question was a man of Obama's intelligence, eloquence, and leadership qualities would only have made the case more compelling. Nor would that necessarily be a bad thing.
Many of my Republican friends argued during the campaign that to vote for a candidate because of his race is just as racist as to vote against a candidate for the same reason. I might agree if race was the only factor. But Obama's race was a plus for many white Americans as well. As deeply as I disagree with Barack Obama on social issues, as strongly as I supported Sen. McCain, and as disappointed as I remain at the outcome of the election, I am far from the only American of European descent who doesn't rejoice at the election of our first African-American president even as I deplore many of his positions.
What rankled about the position attributed to Sec. Powell by the headline was its implication that it's the Republicans who are uniquely or even primarily to blame for the political polarization that plagues America. Of course the idiots on the Right- the ones who habitually refer to "Barack Hussein Obama," stressing his middle name as an implication that he is less than American, who repeated the absurd stories that he is or has ever been a Muslim, or attended a radical madrassa in Indonesia, and who will doubtless continue to oppose the man the National Review has begun referring to as P-EOTUS through attacks on his person rather than criticisms of his policies- bear their share of the blame. But Obama's supporters both in and out of the media have exaggerated that point shamelessly, even to the extent of libeling McCain and running mate Sarah Palin with accusations that they encouraged such nonsense. Ray Suarez to the contary, Palin never encouraged supporters to repeat the Muslim lie, and despite the solemn outrage of Democratic politicians and members of the media alike, the Secret Service tells us that the incident at a McCain rally in which someone supposedly responded to a mention of Obama's name by yelling "Kill him!" never happened.
There is nothing new about poltical polarization, of course; thoughtful readers of American history will recognize that however distasteful its level has been of late, a heavily-polarized electorate has always been more the norm for America than one dedicated to civility and mutual respect. Bill Clinton- admittedly one of the most shameless men ever to occupy the Oval Office- was treated shamefully by Republicans. But not even the Republican contempt for Clinton ever approached the levels of shrill malice that Democrats have shown during the past eight years not only for President Bush but for Republicans generally. Nor have we ever experienced media as powerful as today's, so routinely "spinning" the facts, spreading lies and misrepresentations, and treating libel and slander against Republicans and conservatives as if it were fact. Nor was left-wing malice in any of its manifestations exactly absent during the recently concluded campaign. It continues even now-as witness the relatively small percentage of all the embarassing quotations attributed to Sarah Palin by partisan bloggers and late-night talk show hosts which are actually genuine.
From discredited lies about George Bush's National Guard service (the AWOL slander was disproven within weeks of its first appearance, and the general whose offhand comment that he didn't remember Bush serving under him set off the whole meme withdrew his statement and pointed out that, after all, he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease)to disingenuous attacks on the IQ of this admittedly inarticulate holder of a Harvard MBA, issues have been much less prominent in Democratic political discourse these past four years than personal attacks far more virulent than any aimed at Barack Obama. That there was skullduggery carried out by both sides in Florida in 2000 and nationwide in 2004 cannot be denied- even though, in both years, the evidence implicates the Democrats as being responsible for the bulk of it. Yet ordinarily normal, reasonable people even now come completely unhinged and begin almost literally to foam at the mouth at the merest suggestion that the two presidential elections previous to this one might not have been stolen after all, or that the role of the Democratic party in the doing of political dirt over the past eight years has ever been other than that of victim.
It's not the Republicans who are even primarily responsible for the polaraized state of our nation. To his credit, P-EOTUS has long called for a return to restraint and civility in our political discourse- and will doubtless get the credit he deserves for that position even as his supporters continue their slander, lies, and name-calling toward anyone who dares disagree with them. It's interesting that the comments on the Powell story about the consequences of Republican polarization include a reaction to a mention of Rush Limbaugh suggesting that "Rush Limbaugh" is really only another way of saying "Joseph Goebbels!" Whatever one may think of Rush Limbaugh, this is not the language of either moderation or of reason.
Accusations that Barack Obama is a Marxist are regrettable and over the top. On the other hand, Rush Limbaugh did not attend a church whose minister was a Nazi for twenty years, nor take the title for any of his books from one of that minister's sermons; the liberation theology that is Jeremiah Wright's creed is Marxist to the core. Yes, the idea that it's Republicans who are primarily responsible for our national polarization needs to be closely re-examined.
Arguably it was the essentially negative tone of John Kerry's campaign in 2004 that doomed any chance he ever had- and opened him up to the attacks of the swift boaters (who were not, the cherished legend of Democratic mythology to the contrary, operatives of either the Republican party or the Bush-Cheney campaign) with nary a chance of a sympathetic backlash. But the Democrats themselves (Obama himself perhaps being an exception) were shrill enough in the campaign just past that the same thing simply can't reasonably be said of the Republicans in 2008.
Which doesn't, of course, prevent the partisan media from saying it anyway.
But then, that's not really what Powell was driving at. It turns out that what he had in mind was a very valid criticism of not only the Republican campaign just concluded, but of the Republican party generally. "Polarization" is perhaps an unfortunate choice of words, implying at least cynical mean-spiritedness and at worse outright racism. But there can be no question that Republicans have failed miserably to reach out to the minorities who- as Powell rightly says- will be the majority not too far in the future.
If this seems an odd observation for the first African-American secretary of state- appointed by a Republican administration which never had a secretary of state who was not African-American, and gave members of minorities positon of greater authority in greater numbers than any previous administration- that may be part of the problem. Appointing members of minority groups to influential positions is all well and good. But it's not the same thing as appreciating the world in which members of minorities live, and engaging them in such a way as to address their concerns and potentially enlist them as members.
Consider: in the 2000 and 2004 elections, George W. Bush made quantum leaps in attracting Hispanic voters- a socially conservative, family-oriented constituency which found a great deal of the Republican platform increasingly attractive. George Bush won 35% of the Hispanic vote in 2000, and 40% in 2004. Since Hispanics are the most rapidly growing voting bloc in America, the increasing appeal of the GOP for Hispanics was one of the reasons pundits were saying only four years ago that the future looked bright for the Republicans, and bleak for the Democrats.
And then, conservatives decided to go medieval on the immigration issue. I do not say that they were wrong to insist on stricter enforcement of immigration laws. I doubt that Hispanics as a group would have been turned off by that- if it had been accompanied, not by a xenophobic and wholly impractical impulse to build literal fences and walls and make illegal immigrants the scapegoats for the economic ills of America, but by accompanying quietly stricter enforcement with a recognition of the human dimensions of the plight of those moved to enter the nation illegally, and a systematic and very conservative initiative to undercut the motivations for illegal immigration by encouraging massive investment in the Mexican economy so as to not only promote the prosperity of a neighbor and trading partner, but provide jobs offering a decent income to Mexicans while in Mexico.
It's ironic, of course, that both President Bush and Sen. McCain- to their political cost within the Republican party- advocated a more realistic and compassionate approach to immigration than did most Republicans. But Hispanics as a group, it seems, gave credit to neither of these men for the positions they took on immigration, much less the poltical risk they took in taking those positions. Barack Obama reversed the trend of the previous two elections, and carried the Hispanic vote by a margin of better than two-to-one.
A strong argument can be made that the hard line Republicans took on immigration cost them the margins by which they lost Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and even Virginia and Indiana in 2008. And unless the Republican position on immigration is drastically revised, the Hispanic vote will likely continue to go Democratic by similar margins.
Unless the Republican party is able to reverse the trend among Hispanic Americans the 2008 election displayed, and return to that of the 2000 and 2004 elections, it may never elect another president.
Perhaps the perfect illustration of Sec. Powell's point is the number of conservatives who are actually able to distinguish between the fate of the Republican party and that of conservatism. Ideology is a fine thing. But people for whom ideological purity has any particular value absent the opportunity to see that ideology triumph are far too numerous on the Right. The answer is not to forget about ideology, but to find creative ways to articulate that ideology in such a way as to appeal to groups that trend Democratic in large measure because the Democrats have taken the time and the trouble to make the case that the interests of the members of those groups are best served by adopting their own, highly flawed ideology.
Sometimes- as was the case with socially conservative groups with unusually strong family orientation, like Hispanics- it would be relatively easy for Republicans and conservatives to make that case. George W. Bush was making it very effectively until the immigration controversy cut the ground underneath his feat. Before the days when absurd and utterly impractical rhetoric about closing the border became the GOP mantra, Hispanics were well on the way to becoming perhaps the keystone of a permanent conservative majority.
But no longer.
Any suggestion that anything the Republicans could have done would have made inroads among African-Americans this year would, of course, be silly. And I am one of those out-of-touch European-American Republicans who is a bit cynical about the prospect of Republicans ever making substantial inroads among African-Americans, much less of returning to the status we once enjoyed as their preferred poltical home. But that's all the more reason why out-of-touch, cynical, and frankly discouraged European-American Republicans like me need to do a great deal more listening than we have.
No, Sec. Powell. We didn't lose this past election because we polarized the electorate. We have some responsibility for that, yes- but if anything the party that won bears more of that responsibility than we do. But malice and rancor serves nobody's interests when they substitute for reasoned and principled debate. For far too long we've responded in kind to Democratic tantrums instead of shaming them by behaving like grownups ourselves.
But you're right about the need to be more sensitive to minorities- and yes, the mathematical case can be made that our alienation of Hispanic Americans did play a large role in costing us the election.
So tell us, Sec. Powell- you who are, after all, an African-American Republican. despite your defection this year: what do we need to hear?
We're listening.
Colin Powell- a man I've always admired despite our disagreements on social issues, and one who was badly used by the Bush administration- disappointed me mightily when he endorsed a man who initially premised his candidacy for the White House on a promise to pull the rug out from under our troops in Iraq, and who had not backed off that promise. Granted, the success of the surge has changed the landscape in Iraq. Granted, even the Iraqis have agitated for, and achieved, an agree deadline for the withdrawal of American troops. But the best military assessment continues to be that 2012 is too soon, from the point of view of Iraqi national security, for the troops to leave. A powerful case can be made that this hardly matters, since our presence in Iraq has become politically untenable. It's been diplomatically problematic from the very beginning. Powell doubtless took these factors into account in making his decision to endorse Obama.
Despite his disavowals of the notion, I suspect that- perhaps without Powell even realizing it- Barack Obama's race did, indeed, play a role in that decision. In fact, he or any other African- American who wasn't strongly attracted to the notion of voting for a fellow member of a once-enslaved and still marginalized minority would probably not be entirely human. That the candidate in question was a man of Obama's intelligence, eloquence, and leadership qualities would only have made the case more compelling. Nor would that necessarily be a bad thing.
Many of my Republican friends argued during the campaign that to vote for a candidate because of his race is just as racist as to vote against a candidate for the same reason. I might agree if race was the only factor. But Obama's race was a plus for many white Americans as well. As deeply as I disagree with Barack Obama on social issues, as strongly as I supported Sen. McCain, and as disappointed as I remain at the outcome of the election, I am far from the only American of European descent who doesn't rejoice at the election of our first African-American president even as I deplore many of his positions.
What rankled about the position attributed to Sec. Powell by the headline was its implication that it's the Republicans who are uniquely or even primarily to blame for the political polarization that plagues America. Of course the idiots on the Right- the ones who habitually refer to "Barack Hussein Obama," stressing his middle name as an implication that he is less than American, who repeated the absurd stories that he is or has ever been a Muslim, or attended a radical madrassa in Indonesia, and who will doubtless continue to oppose the man the National Review has begun referring to as P-EOTUS through attacks on his person rather than criticisms of his policies- bear their share of the blame. But Obama's supporters both in and out of the media have exaggerated that point shamelessly, even to the extent of libeling McCain and running mate Sarah Palin with accusations that they encouraged such nonsense. Ray Suarez to the contary, Palin never encouraged supporters to repeat the Muslim lie, and despite the solemn outrage of Democratic politicians and members of the media alike, the Secret Service tells us that the incident at a McCain rally in which someone supposedly responded to a mention of Obama's name by yelling "Kill him!" never happened.
There is nothing new about poltical polarization, of course; thoughtful readers of American history will recognize that however distasteful its level has been of late, a heavily-polarized electorate has always been more the norm for America than one dedicated to civility and mutual respect. Bill Clinton- admittedly one of the most shameless men ever to occupy the Oval Office- was treated shamefully by Republicans. But not even the Republican contempt for Clinton ever approached the levels of shrill malice that Democrats have shown during the past eight years not only for President Bush but for Republicans generally. Nor have we ever experienced media as powerful as today's, so routinely "spinning" the facts, spreading lies and misrepresentations, and treating libel and slander against Republicans and conservatives as if it were fact. Nor was left-wing malice in any of its manifestations exactly absent during the recently concluded campaign. It continues even now-as witness the relatively small percentage of all the embarassing quotations attributed to Sarah Palin by partisan bloggers and late-night talk show hosts which are actually genuine.
From discredited lies about George Bush's National Guard service (the AWOL slander was disproven within weeks of its first appearance, and the general whose offhand comment that he didn't remember Bush serving under him set off the whole meme withdrew his statement and pointed out that, after all, he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease)to disingenuous attacks on the IQ of this admittedly inarticulate holder of a Harvard MBA, issues have been much less prominent in Democratic political discourse these past four years than personal attacks far more virulent than any aimed at Barack Obama. That there was skullduggery carried out by both sides in Florida in 2000 and nationwide in 2004 cannot be denied- even though, in both years, the evidence implicates the Democrats as being responsible for the bulk of it. Yet ordinarily normal, reasonable people even now come completely unhinged and begin almost literally to foam at the mouth at the merest suggestion that the two presidential elections previous to this one might not have been stolen after all, or that the role of the Democratic party in the doing of political dirt over the past eight years has ever been other than that of victim.
It's not the Republicans who are even primarily responsible for the polaraized state of our nation. To his credit, P-EOTUS has long called for a return to restraint and civility in our political discourse- and will doubtless get the credit he deserves for that position even as his supporters continue their slander, lies, and name-calling toward anyone who dares disagree with them. It's interesting that the comments on the Powell story about the consequences of Republican polarization include a reaction to a mention of Rush Limbaugh suggesting that "Rush Limbaugh" is really only another way of saying "Joseph Goebbels!" Whatever one may think of Rush Limbaugh, this is not the language of either moderation or of reason.
Accusations that Barack Obama is a Marxist are regrettable and over the top. On the other hand, Rush Limbaugh did not attend a church whose minister was a Nazi for twenty years, nor take the title for any of his books from one of that minister's sermons; the liberation theology that is Jeremiah Wright's creed is Marxist to the core. Yes, the idea that it's Republicans who are primarily responsible for our national polarization needs to be closely re-examined.
Arguably it was the essentially negative tone of John Kerry's campaign in 2004 that doomed any chance he ever had- and opened him up to the attacks of the swift boaters (who were not, the cherished legend of Democratic mythology to the contrary, operatives of either the Republican party or the Bush-Cheney campaign) with nary a chance of a sympathetic backlash. But the Democrats themselves (Obama himself perhaps being an exception) were shrill enough in the campaign just past that the same thing simply can't reasonably be said of the Republicans in 2008.
Which doesn't, of course, prevent the partisan media from saying it anyway.
But then, that's not really what Powell was driving at. It turns out that what he had in mind was a very valid criticism of not only the Republican campaign just concluded, but of the Republican party generally. "Polarization" is perhaps an unfortunate choice of words, implying at least cynical mean-spiritedness and at worse outright racism. But there can be no question that Republicans have failed miserably to reach out to the minorities who- as Powell rightly says- will be the majority not too far in the future.
If this seems an odd observation for the first African-American secretary of state- appointed by a Republican administration which never had a secretary of state who was not African-American, and gave members of minorities positon of greater authority in greater numbers than any previous administration- that may be part of the problem. Appointing members of minority groups to influential positions is all well and good. But it's not the same thing as appreciating the world in which members of minorities live, and engaging them in such a way as to address their concerns and potentially enlist them as members.
Consider: in the 2000 and 2004 elections, George W. Bush made quantum leaps in attracting Hispanic voters- a socially conservative, family-oriented constituency which found a great deal of the Republican platform increasingly attractive. George Bush won 35% of the Hispanic vote in 2000, and 40% in 2004. Since Hispanics are the most rapidly growing voting bloc in America, the increasing appeal of the GOP for Hispanics was one of the reasons pundits were saying only four years ago that the future looked bright for the Republicans, and bleak for the Democrats.
And then, conservatives decided to go medieval on the immigration issue. I do not say that they were wrong to insist on stricter enforcement of immigration laws. I doubt that Hispanics as a group would have been turned off by that- if it had been accompanied, not by a xenophobic and wholly impractical impulse to build literal fences and walls and make illegal immigrants the scapegoats for the economic ills of America, but by accompanying quietly stricter enforcement with a recognition of the human dimensions of the plight of those moved to enter the nation illegally, and a systematic and very conservative initiative to undercut the motivations for illegal immigration by encouraging massive investment in the Mexican economy so as to not only promote the prosperity of a neighbor and trading partner, but provide jobs offering a decent income to Mexicans while in Mexico.
It's ironic, of course, that both President Bush and Sen. McCain- to their political cost within the Republican party- advocated a more realistic and compassionate approach to immigration than did most Republicans. But Hispanics as a group, it seems, gave credit to neither of these men for the positions they took on immigration, much less the poltical risk they took in taking those positions. Barack Obama reversed the trend of the previous two elections, and carried the Hispanic vote by a margin of better than two-to-one.
A strong argument can be made that the hard line Republicans took on immigration cost them the margins by which they lost Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and even Virginia and Indiana in 2008. And unless the Republican position on immigration is drastically revised, the Hispanic vote will likely continue to go Democratic by similar margins.
Unless the Republican party is able to reverse the trend among Hispanic Americans the 2008 election displayed, and return to that of the 2000 and 2004 elections, it may never elect another president.
Perhaps the perfect illustration of Sec. Powell's point is the number of conservatives who are actually able to distinguish between the fate of the Republican party and that of conservatism. Ideology is a fine thing. But people for whom ideological purity has any particular value absent the opportunity to see that ideology triumph are far too numerous on the Right. The answer is not to forget about ideology, but to find creative ways to articulate that ideology in such a way as to appeal to groups that trend Democratic in large measure because the Democrats have taken the time and the trouble to make the case that the interests of the members of those groups are best served by adopting their own, highly flawed ideology.
Sometimes- as was the case with socially conservative groups with unusually strong family orientation, like Hispanics- it would be relatively easy for Republicans and conservatives to make that case. George W. Bush was making it very effectively until the immigration controversy cut the ground underneath his feat. Before the days when absurd and utterly impractical rhetoric about closing the border became the GOP mantra, Hispanics were well on the way to becoming perhaps the keystone of a permanent conservative majority.
But no longer.
Any suggestion that anything the Republicans could have done would have made inroads among African-Americans this year would, of course, be silly. And I am one of those out-of-touch European-American Republicans who is a bit cynical about the prospect of Republicans ever making substantial inroads among African-Americans, much less of returning to the status we once enjoyed as their preferred poltical home. But that's all the more reason why out-of-touch, cynical, and frankly discouraged European-American Republicans like me need to do a great deal more listening than we have.
No, Sec. Powell. We didn't lose this past election because we polarized the electorate. We have some responsibility for that, yes- but if anything the party that won bears more of that responsibility than we do. But malice and rancor serves nobody's interests when they substitute for reasoned and principled debate. For far too long we've responded in kind to Democratic tantrums instead of shaming them by behaving like grownups ourselves.
But you're right about the need to be more sensitive to minorities- and yes, the mathematical case can be made that our alienation of Hispanic Americans did play a large role in costing us the election.
So tell us, Sec. Powell- you who are, after all, an African-American Republican. despite your defection this year: what do we need to hear?
We're listening.
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