Author: christian

2012 Election, Minnick

GOP Challenge

Posted on by christian

A Case of Curious Marketing

When former Florida Republican Gov. Jeb Bush suggested recently that “appealing to people’s fears and emotion” just might not be a winning political strategy for his party in 2012 and beyond, in part because, as Bush said, the GOP is handing Hispanic voters – the fastest growing block of voters in the country – to the Democrats for the foreseeable future. Given the state of GOP politics, perhaps it was predictable that Bush would be attacked from the right for his own stand on – you got it – immigration.

The attack poodle of the far right, Ann Coulter, branded Bush with the scarlet “A” for amnesty, a charge in today’s Republican Party about on par with being “soft on communism” in the 1950’s or proponent of “free love” in the 1960’s. Never mind that Bush’s analysis of the danger confronting the current and future Republican Party is entirely supported by real evidence in every direction you want to look.

Republican strategist and pollster Whit Ayres says the GOP cannot continue to lose Hispanic voters by a margin of 2-1, as the party did in 2008. “If we don’t do better among Latinos,” Ayres said recently, “we are not going to be talking about how to get back Florida in the presidential race, we are going to be talking about how not to lose Texas.”

But letting the noxious national debate around immigration drive the GOP over the nearest cliff is only the most obvious example of a national Republican Party that seems to be increasingly disconnected from minorities, young people, suburban women and, dare I say it, many moms and dads who aspire to send their kids to college as the surest path to a decent and economically secure life.

The hot button social issues that have driven the last few weeks of the Republican primary campaign has also included a great deal of talk about same sex marriage , an issue about which, all the evidences suggests, younger Americans care not a fig. Researach by Gallup in 2011 shows that Democrats and Independents have grown steadily more comfortable with the idea of same sex marriage, only the attitudes of Republicans haven’t moved. The percentage approving the idea among the 18-34 demographic is at 70%.

The religious liberty/contraceptive debate in the GOP contest has sharply increased the gender gap that has befuddled Republican presidential candidates for a generation. Barack Obama won the support of 56% of women voters in 2008 and with the help of Rush Limbaugh and a party strategy badly out of sync with where most Americans – especially women – live he is on pace to do even better this year.

Then there is education. Rick Santorum, a guy with three college degrees, launched a truly unusual line of attack on the president recently when he seemed to challenge the notion that most moms and dads should aspire for their kids to get a college education. Santorum dusted off the old line that college is a radicalizing experience for impressionable young people. Perhaps the former Pennsylvania senator is confused about college students wherem after all, his primary opponent, the “radical” Ron Paul, seems to enjoy some of his strongest support. In any event, Santorum is clearly on the wrong side of the mom and dad vote. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 94% of parents with kids 17 and under expect their youngsters to attend college. They also believe it is essential now days for a woman to get a degree and that college directly leads to a better life and higher income potential. And, of course, they are worried about paying for the education they deem essential.

“He wants everybody in America to go to college,” Santorum told supporters in Michigan in late February as he criticized Obama. Then Santorum warned that “some liberal college professor” would be “trying to indoctrinate them.”

“What a snob,” Santorum said of the president. “He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.”

The GOP message is both bad politics and bad marketing. It may be heartfelt ideology, but it simply doesn’t square with the concerns and aspirations of a very large swath of the electorate that the Republican nominee must appeal to in the fall and, as pollster Ayres points out, are key to Republicans remaining a national party in the decade ahead.

Apple Computer can sell almost anything these days because the brand and performance of its products are so universally accepted. Things don’t work that way with political parties. Ideas and how they are packaged matter in politics.

 

Basketball, Native Americans

The Jackrabbits!

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Kentucky, Duke, Kansas, NO…the Jacks

The Associated Press reported yesterday that some guy from Pennsylvania – Pennsylvania? – called the bookstore at South Dakota State University asking where he could get some Jackrabbit gear. You heard it here first – this logo is going to be popular!

My alma mater made the Big Dance! For the first time! It may be the biggest college athletic moment in the history of South Dakota.

The Jacks beat Western Illinois 52-50 in overtime night before last to claim the Summit League title and an automatic bid to the NCAA basketball tournament. The Jacks – admit it, you love that nickname – will know Sunday who they face in the first round of March Madness. Even with a 27-7 season record, the Jacks are likely to be a 14 seed, so nothing will be easy for the boys from Brookings.

By the way, the SDSU women’s team is headed overcame a 17 point deficit to win their fourth straight Summit League crown and another trip to the NCAA tournament.

South Dakota State does have a player on the roster from Bulgaria, but most of the Jacks are corn-fed Midwesterners from places like St. Cloud, Minnesota and Viborg, South Dakota. And, while this is the school’s first time to the Big Dance, SDSU has a long tradition of good basketball.

Jim Marking, a legendary high school and college coach in South Dakota, was roaming the sidelines when I was struggling through the snow to get to the old Barn for what were then North Central Conference games. Marking is still the winningest coach in SDSU history and over his entire career he won nearly 74% of the games he coached. The guy taught a fast break offense that when it worked was a thing of beauty.

I was the sports editor of the college newspaper – The Collegian – when a new basketball arena was built on campus. The old gym – affectionately known as The Barn – was a creaking old pile that was hot, noisy and vastly intimidating to a visiting team. The fans, particularly students, were so close to the floor that you could literally touch a player and if you were sitting in the front row you had to get your knees out of the way when a player was inbounding the ball.

It may have been an apocryphal story, but it always seemed true enough, that one visiting coach wouldn’t let his team dress in the crowded locker rooms in the old Barn and then gave them limited time to warm up before a game because he feared that his players would be intimidated, even before the tip-off, by the boisterous Jackrabbit fans.

When the new Frost Arena opened in 1973, I interviewed Coach Marking about his feelings moving into the spacious new digs. I expected he’d say the politically correct thing about being excited about the new venue, but true to Coach he told the truth. “We’re about to lose our home court advantage,” he said.

For years and years, South Dakota State football and basketball has be broadcast on 50,000 watt WNAX in Yankton. Lawrence Welk, the bandleader popular in my parent’s generation, got his broadcasting start, more or less, on WNAX, one of the few radio stations west of the Mississippi River with a “W” in its call letters. Ironically, Yankton is closer to the University of South Dakota in Vermillion than to SDSU in Brookings. As a result, WNAX announcers need to drive 130 miles for a home game. The radio guy I remember fondly – and once hoped to emulate – was the late-Norm Hilson, the radio voice of the Jacks and a worthy member of the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame.

If you want some of that Jackrabbit gear, here’s the link to GoJacks.com. Great logo.

 

2012 Election, Foreign Policy, John Kennedy, Minnick, Pete Seeger, Romney

The Water’s Edge

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Foreign Policy As Politics

First: Can Ron Paul, as I naively asked yesterday, win Idaho? Answer: Nope, not even close.

If Paul couldn’t win in Alaska, North Dakota or Idaho yesterday, he can’t win anywhere, but I still suspect he’ll stay around to the bitter end and try to be a force at the GOP convention, but no spoiler role for Dr. Paul.

Now…the topic of the day.

Somewhat lost yesterday amid Mitt Romney’s re-establishing himself as the bona fide GOP front runner was the president’s sharp retort to Romney and other Republicans who can’t seem to wait to get the country into another war.

Obama told them, in essence, bring it on. You don’t like the way I’m handling the prospect that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, be specific about what you would do. If that means launching a pre-emptive strike against Iranian facilities, say it in so many words.

The trouble for Romney and the rest is simply that, despite their protestations, there is little fundamental difference between what they would do and what Obama is doing. The historic import of this fact doesn’t relate just to the president’s re-election this fall, although it does relate, but what is also involved is the removal of the issue – Democrats being softies on foreign policy and defense – that has been hung round Democratic necks at least since George McGovern. Try as they might to tag Obama with the softie label, it won’t stick to the guy who went and got Bin Laden.

Frankly, from the standpoint of good politics and good policy Romney would have been better positioned to run against Obama in the fall had he used his speech to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to stand with the administration on Iran. Had he quoted the once-great GOP Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who famously said that “politics stops at the water’s edge,” Romney would have looked for the first time like a statesman, something few will credit him with resembling so far during his damaging run for the nomination.

Romney might also have said something like: “If I’m in the White House next year, Israel will find that it has never had a better friend – you can count on it. At the same time I will not stand aside and let an issue as important to both Israel and the United States as preventing Iran from having nuclear weapons become embroiled in U.S. domestic politics.”

In essence he could have obliquely, but firmly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to stick his nose into a U.S. presidential election. Had Romney played the moment to position himself as a serious student of the issues, as someone Americans can envision as Commander-in-Chief, he might have elevated himself above the petty and partisan. He can’t seem to make that pivot, however, and instead falls back on repeating the completely unsupportable opinion that he’ll keep Iran from having a nuke and Obama won’t.

Romney and the other GOP contenders also can’t reconcile their criticism of Obama with what is obviously the U.S. military’s caution about how to play the Iran situation. As the best writer around on national defense issues, Tom Ricks, notes in his Foreign Policy blog Romney clearly hasn’t thought deeply or clearly about the Middle East, but falls back on old lines of attack. Lines of attack, I’d note, that Obama will wrap around his neck come fall.

The GOP attack on Obama is all red meat, all Pavlovian response. As Obama said yesterday, “this [dealing with Iran] is not a game,” and he might have added not everything is partisan or can be played for partisan advantage.

The great Sen. Vandenberg, from Romney’s home state, could play politics with the best of them, but he also knew when to put politics aside. He had some nuance, an ability to finesse an issue, something the presumptive GOP nominee just doesn’t have.

 

2012 Election, Economy, Minnick, Otter, Paul, Pete Seeger, Political Correctness, Romney

Ron Paul

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Can He Win Idaho?

Watching the GOP field I have come to believe that only Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian from Texas, is truly comfortable in his own skin. He’s the only candidate in the race who hasn’t had to walk back his comments on one position or the other. The guy knows what he believes and says the same. But can he win something? Today may be his day.

Paul was in Sandpoint, Idaho yesterday rallying a crowd reported to be 1,300. It was one of three events he held in the state yesterday. Paul has an appearance planned today at the Nampa Civic Center. Writing in Politico today James Hohmann noted that Paul drew his big crowd in a community with only 7,365 residents.

The Coeur d’Alene Press had this about the Sandpoint rally yesterday: “The famously libertarian candidate…saw a wide variety of attendees to the rally. Some, like Bonner County Commissioner Cornel Rasor, were longtime members of the established Idaho Republican Party. Others, like Tea Party activist Pam Stout, were fiscal conservatives seeking a frugal candidate. Still others were politically unaffiliated or young individuals attracted to Paul’s message of small government and minimal federal interference.”

The conventional wisdom holds that Paul must win somewhere – and fast – or risk running out of steam as the primary campaign grinds on. He would seem to have a far shot in three states with a GOP caucus today – North Dakota, Alaska and Idaho. The Idaho GOP establishment is aligned with Mitt Romney and the state’s sizeable Mormon population is almost certain to give him an advantage, but – a big but – the insurgent wing of the Idaho GOP, the group that has come to dominate a good deal of the party’s business, is entirely capable of sending Romney and his Idaho supporters a big message. We’ll see if they do. It may be worth noting that while Paul was drawing 1,300 up the road in Sandpoint, Gov. Butch Otter, a Romney surrogate, was speaking to a crowd of 100 in Coeur d’Alene.

Paul won 24% of the GOP vote in the Idaho primary in 2008 and won a straw poll of 400 party activists earlier this year. His rallies have smartly targeted the conservative Idaho panhandle, the University of Idaho campus in Moscow, Idaho Falls and the typically very conservative Canyon County in Idaho’s southwestern corner. Canyon County will likely produce the largest GOP caucus turnout tonight.

The national media has turned virtually all of its attention on the big swing state of Ohio where Romney and Rick Santorum appear to be running neck and neck. If Ron Paul were to pull off a win tonight in Idaho, North Dakota or Alaska, they’ll have to pivot on a dime and try to figure out why. Paul may not win – it will be tough – but if he does once more the GOP contest will be scrambled.

It was just four short years ago that Illinois Sen. Barack Obama filled the Boise State University pavilion and then completely out organized Hillary Clinton to win the Idaho Democratic caucus. Paul’s campaign understands what Obama’s did then – it’s the delegates, stupid. History just might be ready to repeat.

 

 

Basques, Limbaugh, Media, Public Television

New – and Old – Lows

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When Limbaugh Wore a Fedora

Rush Limbaugh apologized over the weekend for a choice of words that he admitted “was not the best,” a reference to his radio show delivered “slut” and “prostitute” characterization of a  Georgetown University law student.

Conservative commentator David Frum summed up El Rushbo’s latest tirade when he wrote, “Limbaugh’s verbal abuse of Sandra Fluke set a new kind of low. I can’t recall anything as brutal, ugly and deliberate ever being said by such a prominent person and so emphatically repeated. This was not a case of a bad “word choice.” It was a brutally sexualized accusation, against a specific person, prolonged over three days.”

“Brutal, ugly and deliberate” for sure, unprecedented not so much.

Mostly forgotten now, and that may be the ultimate justice, is the man who was Rush before Rush. Limbaugh with a fedora – Walter Winchell. From the 1930’s to the 1950’s, Winchell commanded a national radio audience vastly larger than Limbaugh’s, plus he held forth in a daily newspaper column where he savaged his enemies, coddled his friends and was with great regularity brutal, ugly and deliberate.

Neal Gabler wrote the definite biography of Winchell and when you read his often searing descriptions it’s easy to substitute the name Winchell with the name Limbaugh. The two “entertainers” were cut from the same cloth and their style – a half century apart – is strikingly similar.

“Over the years,” Gabler wrote in his 1994 book, “Walter Winchell would lose his reputation as a populist who had once heralded an emerging new social order, lose his reputation as a charming gadfly. He would be remembered instead, to the extent that anyone remembered him at all, as a vitriolic, self-absorbed megalomaniac an image indelibly fixed by Burt Lancaster’s performance as gossipmonger J.J. Hunsecker in the 1956 film Sweet Smell of Success, which everyone assumed had been inspired by Winchell’s life.”

By the early 50’s Winchell’s bright light had flamed out. He became an apologist for Joe McCarthy and, as Limbaugh will become soon enough, he was only important because he had once been important. The meanness, the ego, the brutal, ugly, deliberate excess brought him down. The great wit Dorothy Parker quipped, “Poor Walter. He’s afraid he’ll wake up one day and discover he’s not Walter Winchell.”

Winchell died in 1972. His daughter was the only person at his funeral. As one observer wrote at his death, “In the annals of addiction nobody ever turned more people on than Walter Winchell.”

Poor Rush. One day, when the excess finally really drives away the advertisers and the Republican politicians who so carefully calibrate their responses to his outrages cease to do so, he’ll go the way of the Winchell. Another name, as Neal Gabler put it, “on the ash heap of celebrity.”

Leave it to Ron Paul, the one Republican in the presidential field who has nothing to fear from Limbaugh, to put the latest brutality in perspective.”I don’t think he’s very apologetic,” Paul said on Face the Nation Sunday. “It’s in his best interest, that’s why he did it.”

There will come a day when it’s no longer in any one’s interest to put up with the guy.

 

Garfield, Public Relations

Garfield

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What History Forgot

To the extent that President James A. Garfield is remembered at all today it’s because, as the history books summarize, he was shot and killed by a deranged office seeker.

But, as with most things, there is so much more to the story. Garfield, one of the “bearded presidents.” who somehow get lost to us between two other assassinated chief executives, Lincoln and McKinley, was, by all accounts, an exceptional person. Born in a log cabin – the last president to claim that distinction – Garfield sought a good education, loved to read and eventually became a college president. He amassed a distinguished military record during the Civil War, served with real skill and commitment in the Congress and, much to his surprise, became a dark horse, compromise Republican candidate for president in 1880.

Garfield won that very close election against another Civil War general Winfield Scott Hancock. Garfield’s popular vote margin was a mere 10,000 votes.

A reluctant candidate and, had he lived longer, very likely an effective president, Garfield immediately took on the task of reforming the “spoils system” of the federal government. He battled powerful interests in his own party on that issue and won. He also expressed a desire to work hard to bind up the wounds of the war that were still fresh in 1881.

Garfield’s rather remarkable life and his tragic death are stories well told in Candice Millard’s book Destiny of the Republic. Millard covers Garfield’s life in some detail, but her book is really about the awful suffering he endured after being shot in a Washington, D.C. train station and the fact that his doctor’s decisions – barbaric by 21st Century standards – really killed him.

Garfield likely would have recovered from his gunshot wound in the back – the bullet just missed his spine and hit no vital organ – if the doctors had employed even basic sanitary procedures and not probed the wound repeated with dirty fingers and instruments. When Garfield died 11 weeks after the shooting, his autopsy revealed that the slug wasn’t endangering his life, but that infection and blood poisoning had killed a good man who very well might have had a distinguished career in the White House.

As for the deranged office seeker, Charles Guiteau, he was eventually tried and hanged for the murder of the president, an act he carried out because he became convinced that God and the future of the Republic depended on him killing Garfield. Guiteau was a frustrated office seeker, too, who was reacting to what he saw as unfair treatment at the hands of Garfield and others in his administration. Clearly suffering from acute mental illness, Guiteau smiled and waved to the crowd as he was led to the gallows, happy until the last to be the center of attention.

Garfield’s devoted wife, Lucretia, lived until 1918, always seeking to burnish her husband’s reputation, and son James Rudolph Garfield served as Secretary of the Interior under Theodore Roosevelt.

Candice Millard’s fine book about a supremely interesting character, his politics, 19th century medicine and a fascinating period in American life, reminds us that the only thing new is the history we haven’t read.

 

Basketball, Native Americans

He Had Game

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And His Name Was Elgin

Some boys with a beat up basketball to dribble, a rim – hopefully with a net – in the driveway to shoot at and a little imagination can become a Michael Jordan or Jeremy Lin. At least you can dream of such things. For me the ideal was No.22 in Laker blue, the great Elgin Baylor.

Mom and dad thought I was sleeping on those long winter nights, but I was only pretending to doze with the radio turned very low, listening to the extraordinary voice of Chick Hearn calling the Laker games over KNX in L.A. I never wanted to miss the introductions of the game starters since – silly boy – the intro to Elgin made me quiver.

“At forward, 6’5″, from Seattle, No. 22, the Captain of the Lakers – El-gin Baylor.”

The announcers never mentioned that Baylor spent a year playing ball at the College of Idaho in Caldwell where he average more than 31 points and nearly 19 rebounds per game. He took Seattle University to the national title game in 1958 and was the tournament MVP. Seattle lost that game to Kentucky and has never been back to the finals.

I’ve been thinking about ol’ No. 22 this week amid the recollections of Wilt Chamberlain’s historic 100 pointgame in Hershey, Pennsylvania in 1962. Wilt’s remarkable accomplishment stands on its own, of course, but it’s worth noting that he broke the single game scoring record that had been set in 1960 by Baylor – 71 points. The case can be made, I think, that Elgin Baylor ushered in many aspects of the modern pro game. His turning, twisting reverse layups and running jump hooks were early versions of Jordan and Erving. Baylor was a great passer and handled the ball with skill and style. In fact, someone said if Erving was the doctor, Elgin was the surgeon.

Like Chamberlain’s 100 point game that went almost unnoticed at the time, Baylor’s career has never been fully appreciated. The guy was one of the all-time greats. Jordan broke Baylor’s single game playoff scoring record that had stood for 24 years. Baylor averaged more than 27 points and more than 13 rebounds a season in a career that spanned 14 years. Not bad for a guy who never played hoops until he was 14 and went to C of I on a football scholarship.

Baylor played in the era before the really big money, before players were able to hold their own with owners – although he helped usher in that era, too – and before African-American players enjoyed the respect, indeed the common courtesy, they receive today.

Elgin Baylor is probably the greatest NBA player to have never won a championship. He deserved one, but the great Laker teams could never get past the even greater Boston Celtic teams.

So, I can still close my eyes today and drift back to 1967 and hear ol’ Chick Hearn tell me that “the Lakers are moving left to right across your radio dial and the ball goes to Baylor on the wing. He’s on the dribble across the lane, he puts it up and he scores!”

Some things only get better with age and, in my memory at least, I’ll always wear No. 22.

 

2012 Election, American Presidents, Minnick, Obama, Pete Seeger, Romney

Politics 101

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Lessons from the Streets

For a while during his second comeback of the GOP primary season Newt Gingrich was spending more time talking about Saul Alinsky than his opponents.

“The centerpiece of this campaign,” Gingrich said at one point, “is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.” Such disconnected talk from the stump, like Rick Santorum’s Satan references or Mitt Romney singing, must leave a lot of voters scratching their heads and saying, “what’s he talking (or singing) about?” It’s a good question and let me offer part of the answer. Hint: it has nothing to do with exceptionalism or radicalism, but rather good, basic, traditional Politics 101.

As Romney stumbles out of Michigan with the win he had to have and reclaims for the fifth or sixth time the front runner label, the Republican field rolls on to Super Tuesday and what will undoubtedly be more twists and turns in this fascinating election. I’m left with two thoughts on the last day of February: there is a lot of time left between now and election day in November and, when it comes to campaigns, there is never enough time.

That second reality may prove to be the biggest challenge that Romney – and, yes, I still think he will be the Republican nominee – will face in a knockdown drag out race against Barack Obama. And that’s were the radical Mr. Alinsky comes to play. [Here’s a good primer on Alinsky.]

In a fascinating piece in The National Journal reporter Major Garrett provides a glimpse inside what Obama’s campaign has been doing while Romney has been talking about his wife’s Cadillacs and Santorum was calling the president a snob for suggesting that everyone should have a chance to go to college.

Garrett notes that Obama’s lead in battleground Michigan is now 18 points over Romney with all the talk of auto bailouts and contraception working to the president’s advantage. But Garrett’s real political insight in contained in this description of what the Obama campaign is doing on the ground in states that will be pivotal in the fall.

“While Republicans have been competing in Arizona and Michigan, the Obama campaign has been stepping up its voter-identification and mobilization efforts,” Garrett writes. “The reelection campaign already has eight offices in Michigan—in Detroit, Grand Rapids, Warren, Pontiac, Ann Arbor, Flint, Lansing, and Kalamazoo. In Arizona, three offices are open in Phoenix, Flagstaff, and Tucson. Another will open soon in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale and will focus on Hispanic outreach.

“The campaign is also aggressively organizing voter-registration drives and social events to contact new voters. From now until March 31, the reelection has 73 such events scheduled in Detroit, 22 in Grand Rapids, and 59 in Ann Arbor. The same kind of grassroots activity is planned in Arizona. From now until April 22, the campaign will conduct 69 organizing events in and around Phoenix. The Tucson area will have 40 events between now and March 29, and Flagstaff will host 16 between now and March 20.”

You can take it to the bank – or the polling place – that such organizational work is being done, often under the radar, in person, on Facebook and Twitter, in every state where the president has a prayer of winning in November. That is what you call “community organizing,” emblematic of the tactics that Alinsky wrote the book on during his neighborhood organizing days in Chicago.

As historian Thomas J. Sugrue wrote recently in Salon, “Gingrich versus Alinsky is not a battle over ideas; it’s about power, who should have it and who should not. That’s why 40 years after his death, the Chicago radical remains on the right’s enemies list.”

Come the fall, and remember it is a long time until the election, here’s betting the presidential contest will be very tight with Mitt Romney, despite all is troubles, a very serious threat to Obama’s re-election. Nonetheless, among Romney’s major worries must be the cold reality of Politics 101. While he battles for the heart and soul of the Republican Party and struggles to secure the GOP base, the president’s campaign is “organizing, organizing, organizing.”

As Alinsky’s organizing Rule 8 says: “Keep the pressure on…the major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

Barack Obama isn’t the dangerous radical Newt Gingrich paints him to be, but he – and his campaign – are smart enough to have gone to school on that which works. They learned from George W. Bush’s masterfully organized campaign in 2004 and using the new technology now available they adapted those lessons to 2008. The pressure is on in 2012 and they’re doing it again.

 

2012 Election, Baseball, Baucus, Minnick, Politics, Prostate Cancer, U.S. Senate, Wheeler

Primary Colors

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Defeating the Incumbent…in Your Own Party

Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas– that’s him in the photo when he was at the height of his influence – still holds the record as the longest serving Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He created the Fulbright Scholars program, was himself a Rhodes Scholar, at a young age the president of the University of Arkansas and in the 1960’s an early opponent of the Vietnam War. None of that seemed to matter much when he lost re-election in his own party’s primary in 1974. When Bill Fulbright died in 1995, The New York Times called him a “giant” of the Senate, but he’d once been rejected by his own kind.

Burton K. Wheeler of Montana was arguably the most powerful politician that state has ever produced. Elected four times from 1922 until 1946, he was one of the Senate’s great mavericks, battling presidents of both parties and forging a bi-partisan political movement in Montana. He lost re-election in 1946 in his own party’s primary.

In 1946, Sen. Robert M. La Follette, Jr. of Wisconsin seemed like a sure thing for re-election. He’d been in the Senate since 1925 having replaced his famous father who was regarded by many as one of the Senate’s greats and hated by some for being a dangerous radical. Young Bob lost his re-election by just a shade over 5,000 votes to a young, mostly unknown Republican by the name of Joe McCarthy.

An incumbent United States Senator losing in his own party primary is rare in our history – very rare – but that may be about to change as more and more Republicans face challenges from the far right of the GOP.

I wrote yesterday of the struggle Sen. Richard Lugar is facing in Indiana. Sen. Orrin Hatch is in trouble in Utah where his former colleague Bob Bennett was taken out two years ago. For a while it appeared Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, one of the least conservative GOP Senators, would also have a tussle with a Tea Party-inspired opponent this year, but that challenge seems to have faded. Still, Maine may be the exception that proves the rule.

[BREAKING NEWS: Late today, Sen. Snowe announced she will not run for re-election in Maine.]

Of the historic and contemporary examples I’ve cited, only Wheeler’s post-war experience in Montana, is an outlier. In every other case, the incumbent senator faced a challenge from the right. Wheeler’s demise was orchestrated from the left, primarily because he fell out of favor with some elements of organized labor in Montana. Generally speaking – and of course there are exceptions like Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut – imposing party discipline in the form of a primary challenge is a tactic employed by conservatives against someone who isn’t perceived as being conservative enough.

With the GOP more and more a branch of the Tea Party, look for more primary challenges to Republican incumbents and color the vast majority of them bright red.

 

2012 Election, Minnick, Paul, Political Correctness

Eating Their Own

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The Decline and Fall of the Moderate

Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana certainly ranks as one of the most significant politicians to ever hail from Hoosierland. He’s the ranking member and former chairman of the prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has been elected six times to the Senate. Lugar is as close as the Senate has to a respected senior statesman on the issue of how we control weapons of mass destruction. Democrats respect and often follow him on those issues. Under normal circumstances, Luger ought to have a lock on re-election. He doesn’t.

In a Politico profile of Lugar and his re-election, reporter Jonathan Allen says the 36-year Senate veteran is catching it from the left and right for being out of touch with Indiana. Lugar’s very conservative GOP primary opponent, for example, has been hitting him for not owning a home in Indiana and for having the independence to vote for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominees.

Allen writes, “this race is an epilogue to a 2010 election in which anti-establishment Republicans knocked off sitting senators and party favorites, and in several cases gave Democrats a shot to win seats that had seemed out of reach.”

If Lugar survives the Republican primary in Indiana he may have a serious Democratic opponent, but Lugar is likely to hold the seat. If he’s knocked off, as relative moderates like Mike Castle in Delaware and Robert Bennett in Utah were two years ago, Democrats may have a rare chance to pick up a seat where Republicans dominate. The reason is pretty simple: Republicans – nationally and closer to home – are culling the GOP herd of anyone who even appears to be a moderate.

In Idaho, two of the few remaining “moderate” Republicans in the Idaho House – Leon Smith and Tom Trail – aren’t running for re-election this year. Both have watched the party move steadily to the far right with more moderate Republicans pushed to the sidelines. In Idaho the moderate Republican in elective office has become almost as rare as a Democrat…or a native sockeye salmon.

More than the home he doesn’t own in Indiana or his long tenure in the Senate, Dick Lugar is trying to survive in a national Republican Party that is redefining itself out of the mainstream of American political life, which is why it’s worth watching how Texas Congressman Ron Paul is playing the game during the presidential primary season.

Ron Paul doesn’t have a prayer of winning the GOP presidential nomination, but he does stand a good chance of helping define what it will mean going forward to be a conservative and a Republican. It certainly doesn’t mean being in the middle on anything.

The National Journal recently did its analysis of Senate voting records and concluded – again – that the most conservative Democrat in the Senate has a voting record that is more liberal than the most liberal Republican. This ideological divide has happened only three times in the last 30 years, but has now happened twice in the last two years.

National Journal declared that, “Ideological mavericks are an extinct breed. The otherwise iconoclastic Tom Coburn of Oklahoma had the most conservative voting record in the Senate (Democrats Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York were tied for the most liberal), and the old fighter jock himself, John McCain of Arizona, voted more to the right than two-thirds of his GOP colleagues.”

The House of Representatives is every bit as ideologically divided as the Senate, but it wasn’t always so.

The National Journal piece notes that not that long ago, conservative southern Democrats joined with Republicans to influence national policy across the board. And there is this great quote from former Rep. John Byrnes of Wisconsin, a Republican on the Democratically controlled Ways and Means Committee in the 1960’s. 

“It was a pleasant operation. You weren’t constantly fighting on philosophical or other grounds and issues,” Byrnes said in an oral history. “You were trying to look for ways where we could compromise differences and move along [legislation].… It was part of the thing that made life worthwhile and interesting. You knew that you did leave some kind of an imprint, because any idea that finally developed into a consensus, you knew that you were part of that process.”

But, back to Ron Paul. He wants, as South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint also recently called for, a final showdown between conservative Republicans and Paul’s brand of libertarian Republicans with the winner defining the modern Republican Party. If Paul ends the primary season controlling enough delegates, and he just might, he can force votes at the GOP convention over his ideas for reforming (or eliminating) the Federal Reserve, a more isolationist foreign policy or putting the country on the gold standard. Paul’s aim, and why he won’t bolt and run on a third party line in November, is to remake the GOP into his vision of what a conservative party looks like.

Meanwhile, at the grassroots in Indiana, Dick Lugar is getting killed. A straw poll over the weekend found him getting eight votes out of 69 in a contest with his Republican challenger.

The GOP moderate really is disappearing with this heart and soul fight between the traditional Chamber of Commerce Republicans and the conservatives who find Mitt Romney too squishy on many issues. Will Democrats, also not averse to eating their own, be smart enough to capitalize? There is, after all, a lot of room for the party from just right of center to where Sen. Bernie Sanders sits.

Tomorrow…some reflections on Senators who survived the kind of challenge Lugar is getting and some who didn’t.