Tuesday Reads: “Winds of Fanaticism”

Good Morning!!

I’m writing this on Monday night, but I’ll update in the morning if there is breaking news about either Isaac or Mitt and the gang. The Republicans appear ready to loose the hounds of hell in the next few days. We can only hope they will decide to cancel the rest of the hatefest if the hurricane does a lot of damage. For now, liberal writers are suggesting this could be the most racist convention in history and conservative writers are pretending liberals are imagining things.

There was much talk yesterday about Chris Matthews’ outburst at RNC Chair Reince Priebus on the Morning Joe Show, with liberals cheering him on and Conservatives terribly shocked by his supposed rudeness. I don’t usually like to link to right wing blogs, but I’m going to do it just this once. The National Review reported on Priebus’ reaction:

“When someone wants to grab the flag and try to be the biggest jerk in the room, sometimes you just let them go,” the chairman said with a laugh.

“We shook hands, but I will tell ya that someone from MSNBC, I don’t know if it’s a producer or somebody, has been trying to call us all day — I’m sure it’s to make amends, but there’s nothing to make amends [about]. When somebody wants to take the prize of being the biggest jerk in the room . . . I mean, he made the case for us. This is the Barack Obama surrogate of 2012. This is what they’re all about. They’re going to be about division, they’re going to be about distraction. And I’ve got to tell you, the brand of Barack Obama, hope and change and bringing us all together, it’s completely broken. When people come to realize that you’re not real anymore, you’re not who you said you were, that’s a big problem for Barack Obama.”

Sorry, Reince. The only reason you weren’t the biggest jerk in the room is that Joe Scarborough was there.

Here are three good reads on the Republican race-baiting issue.

David Corn at Mother Jones, Mitt Romney and GOP in Tampa: How Low Will They Go? It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s the conclusion:

Romney, who once upon a time based his successful political career on a claim to be a no-nonsense, get-things-done businessman, this week officially takes the reins of a party that has embraced an assortment of alternative realities. (Obama is an incompetent naïf but one possessing an intricate and sophisticated plan to fool the American public and remake the United States into a Europeanized secular-socialist state with a mad-with-power government crushing individual liberty; global warming does not exist; rape cannot cause pregnancy.) As a onetime middle-of-the-road governor who had succeeded wildly in the private sector, Romney has always had a compelling case to present in this campaign: Obama has not done enough to repair the economy; I can do better. And there are enough honest policy differences between Romney and Obama—on tax rates, government spending, foreign policy, abortion, gay rights, and more—to fuel a sharp, feisty, and fundamental debate based on a contest of ideas, not a clash of charges.

Yet Romney’s party did not want such a fight. They craved a mudfest, and Romney, a patrician quarter-billionaire, has obliged. So there’s really not much mystery in Florida. The Tampa convention will be a continuation of this cavalcade of sleaze. You dance to the tune that brought you. And not even a driving storm can wash Mitt Romney and his campaign clean.

Elspeth Reeve at the Atlantic: Race Takes Over the Race. Reeve provides a very interesting analysis of Romney’s several welfare ads and how they convey a racial message.

John Judis at CBS News: How Mitt Romney’s campaign strategy could set Republicans back for a decade. Judis compares Romney’s strategy of trying to get as many white people to the polls as possible while ignoring African Americans and Hispanics with George W. Bush’s approach in 2000.

Mitt Romney could not only lose the election, but set back any attempt by the Republicans to re-position themselves as a majority party. Romney has abandoned Bush and Rove’s strategy. He has taken a hard line against illegal immigration, backing measures in Arizona and other states that would stigmatize Latinos; desperate to defeat Texas Gov. Rick Perry, he even opposed Perry’s attempt to provide tuition for the children of illegal immigrants. Little that Romney can do at the Republican convention will erase an impression of hard intolerance toward Hispanics. Romney will be lucky if he wins 30 percent of the Latino vote.

Bush and Rove understood that majority coalitions have never been built on strict consensus. Instead, successful coalitions are heterogeneouos. They include groups (such as Southern whites and Northern blacks during the New Deal) that don’t get along with each other, but still prefer the one party coalition to the other. And a successful candidate will offend one part of the coalition (with the expectation they’ll still vote for him) in order to reach out to parts of the opposing coalition. Bush could support immigration reform and pick off Hispanic votes with the expectation that he would still win white working class votes. But Romney, perhaps because he is not really a Republican conservative, has sought to be all things to all parts of the Republican base — from the Tea Party opponents of any social spending to the nativists worried about a Mexican takeover of America to religious conservatives wanting to ban all abortions. As a result, Romney has closed off opportunities to pick off parts of the Democratic coalition.

Instead of trying to appeal to minority voters, Republicans are doing their best to keep them from voting at all with voter ID laws, efforts to purge voters from the rolls, and reducing the times available for voting.

As of late Monday night, it appears that the convention will go forward tomorrow. Mitt and Ann are going down to Tampa and, according to The New York Times, the roll call vote will go ahead Tuesday night just in case the rest of the convention has to be cancelled. Meanwhile, there was apparently a lot of intra-party bickering during the Monday downtime.

With the vacuum created by the postponement, “everybody who has a reason to be upset about something has time to talk about it,” said Drew McKissick, a South Carolina delegate. And, as seen Monday, to try to do something about it.

Mr. McKissick was busy rallying support to fight Mr. Romney’s legal team over new party rules that he said would hinder the kind of insurgent challenges that Mr. Romney has faced this year — a clash that appeared to have been resolved enough to prevent it from spilling onto the convention floor Tuesday.

A day of closed-door talks between Romney aides and conservative activists ended with a compromise that one person involved said would “result in what we think is a very warm and fuzzy convention.” Some activists announced that they had succeeded in preventing what they called a power grab by the party establishment.

But supporters of Representative Ron Paul of Texas expressed frustration over what they said were efforts by Mr. Romney’s aides and supporters to silence their voices in the convention hall. They were goaded along by Mr. Paul, who has declined a speaking slot, accusing the Romney campaign of trying to control his message.

And supporters of Representative Todd Akin, the Missouri Senate candidate who lost much of the party’s support after his comments on “legitimate” rape and pregnancy, revived Tea Party-infused arguments against the “establishment” wing of the party, saying Mr. Romney and “party bosses” had abandoned him after his remarks.

I strongly suggest reading this article by Jon Ward at Huffpo: The One-Termer? Ward managed to get some really interesting information and quotes from Romney campaign insiders. The gist of the article is that Romney may be hoping to do a repeat of what he did in Massachusetts. The model for Romney’s presidency, according to campaign manager Matt Rhoades is President James Polk.

Rhoades and the rest of the members of Romney’s inner circle think a Romney presidency could look much like the White House tenure of the 11th U.S. president.

Polk, who served from 1845 to 1849, presided over the expansion of the U.S. into a coast-to-coast nation, annexing Texas and winning the Mexican-American war for territories that also included New Mexico and California. He reduced trade barriers and strengthened the Treasury system.

And he was a one-term president.

Polk is an allegory for Rhoades: He did great things, and then exited the scene, and few remember him. That, Rhoades suggested, could be Romney’s legacy as well.

Basically, Romney wants to enact the Ryan budget, after which he will be wildly unpopular. But once he gets Congress to eliminate the capital gains and inheritance taxes, Romney will have achieved his goal of paying nothing in federal income taxes and made it likely that his children won’t have to pay taxes on the Romney fortune after he dies.

Multiple senior Romney advisers assured me that they had had conversations with the candidate in which he conveyed a depth of conviction about the need to try to enact something like Ryan’s controversial budget and entitlement reforms. Romney, they said, was willing to count the cost politically in order to achieve it.

“I think he is looking to get in there and fix some things and get out. I don’t think he cares,” one senior Romney adviser, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told me at the time.

I’ll end with this little tidbit, in case you didn’t hear it on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show last night or read it in the {gag!} New York Post. According to the Post, Ryan wasn’t Romney’s first choice for VP–Christie turned it down because he believes Romney will lose.

Romney’s top aides had demanded Christie step down as the state’s chief executive because if he didn’t, strict pay-to-play laws would have restricted the nation’s largest banks from donating to the campaign — since those banks do business with New Jersey.
But Christie adamantly refused to sacrifice his post, believing that being Romney’s running mate wasn’t worth the gamble….

The tough-talking governor believed Romney severely damaged his campaign by releasing only limited tax returns and committing several gaffes during his international tour in July.
Certain Romney was doomed, Christie stuck to his guns — even as some of his own aides pushed him to run, another source said.

Bwwwaaaaahahahahahahahaha! And Christie is the keynote speaker!! Hahahahahahahahaha!!

OK, I’m going to end there. I promise to update with any breaking stories in the morning. Now what are you reading and blogging about today?