Eastwood, the GOP, and the Harvey Syndrome

I’m a great fan of Clint Eastwood: Unforgiven; Gran Torino; Bird; Play Misty for Me; Sudden Impact; Escape from Alcatraz – all were good, as were the spaghetti westerns. The same can be said of the Dirty Harry movies. I’ll even give him a nod for The Bridges of Madison County.


But the last night of the Republican National Convention made me think he was having either a "senior moment" as Rex Reed declared several years ago when he was accused of shoplifting CDs at a Tower Records in Manhattan; or a Pee Wee Herman moment when he was caught pleasuring himself in a movie theater in South Florida; or maybe it was an Elwood P. Dowd moment when the empty chair on the stage in Tampa seemed to take the shape of a 6-foot invisible rabbit named Harvey.

Either way, the rambling, often off-point speech Eastwood made Thursday night seemed to say so much about the 2012 Republican National Convention. There Eastwood stood, talking to – and sometimes admonishing – an empty chair, not totally aware of what his own actions meant. An American icon reduced to a caricature. It was a disturbing scene, awkward in its execution, so eerie that one could not easily turn away. As Tom Brokaw tweeted: “Clint Eastwood became huge star as a man of few words As a surprise guest on the Tampa stage he had too many words.”

Even worse, Eastwood seemed to be leading tens of thousands of Republicans in a mental self-pleasuring while millions of people watched dumfounded, shocked at what they saw. Indeed – to borrow from Mike Lofgren, a former 30-year Republican staff member on Capitol Hill – the GOP looked like an “apocalyptic cult.” Forget the Kool-Aid; we’ll take the arsenic straight up, no chaser.

That was true of so much of the GOP convention. As I watched the unfolding of the coronation of Willard Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential candidate, I kept thinking of his party as a horde of petulant children. After breaking all the lamps and light bulbs in the house, they complained of the darkness and demanded that someone else pay the repair bill. The Republicans, particularly those in Congress, have spent nearly every day since Jan. 20, 2009, distorting America’s light until all that was left were shadows, a shadiness steeped in claims that President Barack Obama has been a failure, an un-American, post-colonial Kenyan Socialist.

Obama ignored an urgent report by his own 18-person debt commission, the Republicans said this week without mentioning that Rep. Paul Ryan, their vice presidential candidate, led the GOP charge to ignore that urgent report and to strike it down. Obama failed to save a GM plant in Janesville, WI, the Republicans said without mentioning that the decision to close the plant was made six months before Obama was elected. Obama is taking the work out of the welfare-to-work program, the Republicans shouted without mentioning that two Republican governors were among the five who recently sought waivers that would give each more flexibility in meeting federal work requirements.

And there were the claims that Obama had destroyed the economy, despite evidence that Obama has created more jobs in the time since the economic downturn ended than Ronald Reagan did in the same period of his presidency after the end of the economic recession of the early 1980s.

Of course, we expect a certain amount of fudging of facts in a political campaign, a certain amount of hyperbole, and a certain amount of partisanship. Political conventions are infomercials, a chance to sale the nation your candidate, to keep them from ordering the Jinsu knives or the Amway products being hustled on the other cable channels.

But this year’s GOP infomercial went beyond what we normally expect. It was peppered with outright lies and grand omissions, a floundering about in the marketplace of ideas. Racial overtones and undercurrents hovered over the Tampa Bay Times Forum. Concrete details about policies and national direction were as scarce as the number of dark-hued faces in an arena in a state where tans are ubiquitous.

Yet, that was nothing compared to the Hollywood deity who was once the Pale Rider, a gun-toting avenging preacher. He stood talking to a chair, looking not much different than Grandpa Simpson, a crotchety old man. Eastwood would have been better off if we could just chalk it all up to a “senior moment.” We can’t though. No wonder even Republicans take issue with their party. Let’s hope the Democrats do better when their turn comes up.

When the "Big Tent" Collapses

One has to wonder what is happening to the Republican Party and its members. Is the party’s establishment having a Grinch moment, finally coming to its senses on a myriad of issues, growing a heart where one did not seem to exist before? Or is it having a Scarecrow moment, finally realizing that having a brain is about whether one actually uses it? What about its members? Are they having the opposite experience, rejecting both the Grinch and the Scarecrow?

Those are some of the questions that hover over the GOP national convention in Tampa, Fla., this week. While the party of Lincoln appears united in its desire to defeat President Barack Obama, it seems more divided than it has been in some time, with various factions trying to out conservative the others, instigating a battle over such hot button social issues as abortion, making xenophobia part of the party identity, and articulating a disdain for government that has made the GOP far too extreme for most Americans.

Even Republicans – from Dan Quayle to George Pataki to Chuck Hagel to David A. Stockman to Jeb Bush to Mike Lofgren – have articulated the problems stemming from the party’s hard-right turn.

“The Republican Party needs to re-establish its philosophy of the big tent with principles,” former Vice President Dan Quayle told The New York Times recently. “The philosophy you hear from time to time, which is unfortunate, is one of exclusion rather than inclusion. You have to be expanding the base, expanding the party, because, compared to the Democratic Party, the Republican Party is a minority party.”

Former New York Gov. George E. Pataki said: “What I fear is that that very positive desire to limit the power and the role of the federal government could turn into a philosophy that is antigovernment. Sometimes, those who I fear have that antigovernment view, as opposed to the limited-government view, rise to the center of the nominating process. I think that is not a good thing for the Republican Party.”

Indeed, the GOP has moved so far to the right that Ronald Reagan, the man neo-conservatives praise repeatedly as their beacon, would not want to be part of it, according to Chuck Hagel, a former U.S. Senator from Nebraska who now teaches at Georgetown University.

“Reagan would be stunned by the party today,” Hagel told Josh Rogin for a story posted in The Cable on Foreign Policy’s Web site in May. “Reagan wouldn’t identify with this party. There’s a streak of intolerance in the Republican Party today that scares people. Intolerance is a very dangerous thing in a society because it always leads to a tragic ending....

“Ronald Reagan was never driven by ideology. He was a conservative but he was a practical conservative. He wanted limited government but he used government and he used it many times. And he would work with the other party,” Hagel said.

Hagel compared the battle over the soul of the current Republican Party to a similar battle in the 1950s, when such moderates as Dwight D. Eisenhower fought such conservatives as Joseph McCarthy. The moderates won that battle. Their heirs are losing this one.

“Now the Republican Party is in the hands of the right, I would say the extreme right, more than ever before,” Hagel said. “You’ve got a Republican Party that is having difficulty facing up to the fact that if you look at what happened during the first eight years of the century, it was under Republican direction.”

Hagel decried the current Republican Party as schizophrenic and intolerant of dissent. He cited the resignation of Republican senator Lamar Alexander from a leadership post last year as a clear indication of how the party has changed. “There has been a litmus test, purity factor that has been applied over the years. I saw it in the Senate myself,” said Hagel, who was in the Senate from 1997 to 2009.

Hagel is not alone in his assessment.

In an Aug. 13 op-ed piece in The New York Times, David A. Stockman, the former head of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985, described Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan as “the same empty conservative sermon.” Stockman should know since he was the person that oversaw Reagan’s budget office.

“Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to ‘job creators’ (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse,” Stockman wrote. “Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neocon conservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion ‘defense’ budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.”

Stockman went on to say that Ryan folded “like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout.” (Ryan the shrink-the-government radical also sought federal dollars to save a GM plant in his hometown, the same one he has repeatedly accused President Obama of failing to protect. GM announced in June 2008 that it was closing the plant, which happened in December 2008.)

“But the greater hypocrisy is his phony ‘plan’ to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade,” Stockman said. “A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing.”

The criticisms of the GOP by its old guard go further than just the budget lies being told by Romney and Ryan, and the abandonment of what were once Republican principles. Jeb Bush assailed the party for its harsh anti-immigration stance, saying in essence that the GOP is becoming the party of angry white people. Bush urged his colleagues to recognize that the shifting national demographics mean that the party must soften its rhetoric if it wants to lead.

Possibly more revealing was the warnings presented by Lofgren, who spent nearly 30 years as a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill. In a September 2011 article for Truth-Out.org, Lofgren lambasted both the Democrat and Republican parties for their ties to corporate America. He also described each as being rotten, but he was especially harsh on his fellow Republicans.

“Both parties are not rotten in quite the same way,” Lofgren said. “The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP. To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics.”

The “crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center” of the GOP today, Lofgren said. “Steve King, Michele Bachman, Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy,” he said.

“It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” Lofgren wrote nearly a year ago. “This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.”

He is right.

Pride in the Lies

How does one start to discuss the absurdity and hypocrisy of the 2012 Presidential campaign? Does one begin by detailing the outright distortions – actually lies – that are being bandied about? Does one seek the high road in assailing the transgressions of the candidates? Or does one simply jump into the fray, taking off the gloves and dropping all pretense of neutrality? Deciding which to do in this campaign season is difficult because one cannot be honest without stating the unadulterated truth, without seeming to take sides in a partisan manner.

Campaigns are always filled with innuendo, half-truths, political spin, and hollow promises. What one candidate sees as a strong plan to move America forward, the opposition sees as a plan to move the nation backward. Such arguments are legitimate because one person's great idea is another person's folly. It is part of our political process that we debate such things, that each candidate presents his wares in the marketplace of ideas, and the shoppers choose what they see as the best, the most worthwhile product.

That has not occurred so far in this election cycle. This presidential election has taken lying to a new low, has created an environment where there is a strong aversion to facts, has resulted in the greatest secrecy in the history of modern elections. And so much of it lies with the Republican Party and its presumptive nominee Mitt Romney.

Never before has a campaign shown such a disdain for truth. Never before has a campaign so openly lied to the public. Never before has a campaign so brazenly admitted that it is lying. Never before has a campaign hid from voters details of what its candidate believes for fear that knowledge of those ideas will result in his not being elected.

But Romney has done each. He has resorted to the age-old GOP ploy of turning a campaign that should be about ideas into one couched in racism and resentment. Worse than his actually doing those things is the inability of too many people to see the danger in his lies, to see the deceitfulness in his secrecy, to see the recklessness in his disregard.

A look at the ads offered by the Romney campaign is a good starting point in discussing the deceit and the manner in which it has gone without enough challenge. Early in the campaign Team Romney took a quote from then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama about how the economy would play in the 2008 campaign and presented it as if President Barack Obama had recently uttered those words. The edited quote was a response to Sen. John McCain and the Republicans. When challenged about the obvious inaccuracies in the ad, a Romney campaign advisor said:

“First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business…. Ads are agitprop…. Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context…. All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.”

Indeed, ads are about persuading people, convincing them that they must buy what they may not need nor want. Yet, there needs to be some truth in them, a sense that there is a foundation on which to build. Not for Team Romney. Outright lying is all within the framework of its idea of fair play.

The misuse of President Obama's quote was not an isolated incident. Recently, Team Romney took a portion of a presidential speech, edited it out of context, and argued that Obama is against small businesses. That the quote reflects an idea – no one is successful without help from somewhere or someone else – also expressed by Romney during the XIX Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City in 2002 was unimportant to Team Romney.

The same can be said of the effort to paint Obama as the "food stamp" or welfare president – code for Obama wants to take the hard-earned money of white America and give it to all those lazy black and Latino people sitting at home on welfare. Instead of honestly debating whether it is right to give states more flexibility in moving people from welfare to work, Team Romney seeks to paint a picture of Obama as simply wanting to send government checks to people unwilling to work. If one listened only to the Romney campaign one would not realize that Romney sought such a waiver while he was governor of Massachusetts or that two Republican governors sought those waivers from the Obama Administration.

The lies and deceit do not stop there.

In a speech in Colorado Thursday, President Obama said:

“I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back and GM is number one again. So now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs not just in the auto industry, but in every industry. I don’t want those jobs taking root in places like China. I want them taking root in places like Pueblo.”

Republican sycophants quickly proclaimed that Obama said he wants to create an auto-bailout like policy for other industries.

As if that is not enough, the Democrats and Republicans agreed to cut defense and domestic spending by $1 trillion over 10 years as part of the debt ceiling deal. Team Romney and the Republicans now call those President Obama’s defense cuts.

Romney also refuses to detail how he will cut taxes by 20 percent in a supposedly revenue neutral plan. He says only that he will make changes to the tax code by eliminating deductions. Will those deductions be on capital gains? Mortgage interest deductions on second homes? Multi-million dollar tax right offs for owners of NASCAR tracks? Or will those deductions be the ones that middle- and working-class Americans depend on: the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, the Tuition Tax Credit?

We do not know because Mitt Romney won't say. We could probably bet that most of those deductions he plans to eliminate will not include the areas from which he benefits. Of course we can’t tell for sure since he refuses to release more than two years of his federal tax returns.