A History Lesson!
By Mark Greene
Todd
Akins and Paul Ryan’s 2011 bill has two repugican Congressmen
cosponsoring legislation about what is or is not “legitimate rape”.
The stridency of anti-government and anti-tax rhetoric coming from
Tea Party activists within the repugican cabal has its roots in Ronald
Reagan’s two Presidential campaigns and what is known as the Southern
Strategy. In 1984, Reagan’s political messaging operation leveraged the
Southern Strategy as masterminded by the campaign’s deputy director Lee
Atwater.
What is the Southern Strategy? (Make no mistake, it is still being employed with a vengeance.)
Wikipedia notes: ”Though
the “Solid South” had been a longtime Democratic Party stronghold due
to the Democratic Party’s defense of slavery prior to the American Civil
War and segregation for a century thereafter, many white Southern
Democrats stopped supporting the party following the civil rights plank
of the Democratic campaign in 1948 (triggering the Dixiecrats), the
African-American Civil Rights Movement, the passage of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, and desegregation.”
This
approach to converting longtime Democratic voters to the repugican
cabal was
evident in Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. But it was in
the 1980′s that the Southern Strategy was formalized as a central
repugican political strategy by operatives like Lee Atwater. He knew
that he could turn out white Southern voters by leveraging racial code
language delivered in the carefully nuanced political abstractions of
the repugican cabal.
Wikipedia quotes from political scientist Alexander P. Lamis’ book
titled Southern Politics. In that book, Atwater framed the Southern
Strategy this way: Atwater: “You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger,
nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you.
Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all
that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about
cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally
economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse
than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying
that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that
coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the
other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want
to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a
hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Atwater’s no
holds barred street fighting style of electioneering
continues today in the ongoing influence of Karl Rove, Ed Rollins, Roger
Ailes, Lush Dimbulb, and others who have helped drive the messaging of
the repugican cabal. This emotionally volatile, wedge issue driven
style of politics has, over the last thirty years, increased in
stridency to the degree that Ronald Reagan’s wingnut credentials
would fall far short of what is required in present day tea party
politics. This increasingly ideological hardening of the repugican cabal
that has fostered the rise of the present day tea party anti-tax,
anti-government, and virulently anti-immigrant platform. The highly
emotional framing and messaging Lee Atwater encouraged and Karl Rove
carried forward, the wedge issues, the southern strategy, the use of
anti-big government rhetoric, have been amplified in subsequent
elections to the degree that they have dramatically shifted the ideology
of the repugican base to the far right, alienating independent,
Latino, and Women voters.
With each ensuing election, the repugican cabal has, out of the need
to again energize its base, pushed further and further to the
ideological right, encouraging its supporters to attack gay rights,
public education, abortion, birth control, environmentalism, immigrants,
social security, and a range of the Democratic Party’s core ideological
strongholds.
This strategy has proven to be highly successful over the last 30
years, shifting the political center in America to the right. But the
endgame of Atwater’s anti-government Southern Strategy is now playing
out in a much different way than he might have hoped. Because as the
political rhetoric of far-right candidates continues to shift ever
further right, we are seeing that no matter how far those ideologies go,
there is always an additional step they can take, and as they express
these next ideological shifts, they are imploding their political
prospects at crucial moments in state wide and national campaigns.
Four years ago, Sharron Angle failed in her run for U. S. Senate in
Nevada. By all rights, it was a year in which Democrats like Senator
Harry Reid were very vulnerable. Two years into Obama’s first term, the
economy was in tatters. The House of Representatives shifted repugican
by huge margins, often due to tea party candidates who, because they
were not running in state wide or national elections, could leverage
their extreme rhetoric to win in limited regions of the country where
voters shared their philosophy. But Angle’s race was state wide. Meaning
that her political platform needed to appeal to more than just the tea party base that was instrumental in her nomination.
Angle has stated:
• She does not believe Constitution mandates the separation of church and state.
• She favors the privatization of Medicare.
• She opposes abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, saying that it is against god’s “plan”.
• She says that the Social Security system should be “transitioned out”.
But what was most alarming during the campaign was Angle’s repeated
mentioning of what she calls “second amendment remedies;” a direct
reference to the right to own guns. For example, On Bill Manders’ radio
show, she stated that the Second Amendment is there “to defend
ourselves. And you know, I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second
Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid
problems.”
On Lars Larson’s radio show, she stated “…but, you know, if this
Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward
those Second Amendment remedies and saying, ‘My goodness, what can we do
to turn this country around?’ I’ll tell you the first thing we need to
do is take Harry Reid out.”
And so it has been going in elections across the country. Again and
again, the tea party is showing it has the muscle to nominate
candidates, but in many cases, those candidates once nominated in the
much more ideologically dogmatic party primary are supporting policies
that make them unelectable in a general election. And now we have the
implosion of Congressman Todd Akins, who until a few days ago was
competing successfully against embattled Sen. Claire McCaskill, in the
race for the U. S. Senate seat from Missouri.
As reported by the Washington Post, ”Akin,
an engineer by training, was asked about his staunch opposition to
abortion even in the case of women getting pregnant after a rape.
“From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Akin said.
“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that
whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or
something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment
ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”
The implication that Adkins has clear ideas about what does or does
not qualify as “legitimate rape” has created a firestorm of public anger
and once again reinforced the message that where women’s issues are
concerned, the repugican cabal just doesn’t get it.
If this were a singular instance, it could be viewed as an anomaly.
But it is not. The daily drumbeat of extreme comments by repugican candidates
is reinforcing the view that the repugican cabal is being dominated by ideological
extremists.
In California, the repugican cabal has simply collapsed.
The New York Times reports:
“It’s no longer a statewide party,” said Allan Hoffenblum, who worked
for 30 years as a repugican consultant in California. “They are down to
30 percent, which makes it impossible to win a statewide election. You
just can’t get enough crossover voters.”
“They have alienated large swaths of voters,” he said. “They have become
too doctrinaire on the social issues. It’s become a cult.”
By creating the perfect storm of conservative religious fervor and
anti-government zeal over the last few decades, the repugican cabal has
shifted its base past a political tipping point. In order to be
nominated, national and state wide candidates supported by the tea party
lunatic wing of the party hold political beliefs that alienate cross over
voters in the context of a general election. What once was a guarantee
of national election viability, the building of coalitions between the
southern red state voters and disillusioned independent voters, has
moved incrementally further right to the degree that independents have
begun the flee the ideological shift of the repugican cabal. Meanwhile,
Democratic politicians, in their own rightward shift have filled the
vacuum with what Bill Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council called New
Democrats. Democrats that have moved away from the left leaning
democratic politics historically epitomized by Presidential candidates
like Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. But Democrats continue to reach
out to women and minorities.
In two very specific ways,
increasingly vitriolic repugican rhetoric
has already had a significant impact on the 2012 election cycle. First,
what has come to be framed as evidence of the repugican “war on women”
is Lush Dimbulb’s notorious attack on Sandra Fluke wherein he called
her a slut for wanting access to birth control via her health care
benefits.
That coupled with the aging white tea party’s virulent
anti-immigration stance has set the repugican cabal on a path veering toward
political irrelevance. And now, with Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan
as his VP candidate, the repugican cabal presidential ticket is one degree of
separation away from Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment. Why?
ABC is now reporting:
“Akin and Ryan cosponsored a 2011 bill, the No Taxpayer Funding for
Abortions Act, that would redefine rape as “forcible rape,” narrowing
the scope of what’s considered rape in cases of abortion. Akin and Ryan
also cosponsored a personhood bill and the Unborn Child Pain Awareness
Act of 2004, which would require abortion providers to “make a specified
statement to the pregnant woman that Congress has determined that there
is substantial evidence that the process will cause the unborn child
pain.”
Todd Akins and Paul Ryan’s No Taxpayer Funding for Abortions
Act which seeks to legally redefine rape as “forcible rape” puts them
both in the room during discussions about what is or is not “legitimate
rape.” This is only the beginning of the public’s growing awareness of
Paul Ryan’s extreme positions on a range of issues outlined in his
budget proposal and other legislative efforts.
Sometimes endgames are planned. Sometimes a particular endgame is the
result of events set in motion by limited vision and an obsession with
short term gains. And unless I miss my guess, the 2012 Presidential
election will be another example of the declining fortunes of the
increasingly extremist repugican cabal, which in its growing stridency and dogmatic
inflexibility, will lose critical races in a political and economic
environment.
Dr.
Catherine Baucom was on her way to the Elliot Mastology Center in Baton
Rouge, Louisiana, where a patient was waiting for her to perform
surgery on Wednesday morning. But an accident on I-10 created a huge
traffic jam in which hundreds of cars were stopped. That's when Baucom
took matters into her own hands, creating a scene right out of a
Hollywood movie. She recognized the neighborhood, and knew a colleague
that lived nearby.
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