Month: February 2021

GOP LEADERS SEE TRUMP’S POWER THROUGH THE BLUR OF A REARVIEW MIRROR

The only thing that might save the Republican party from self-immolation is the warp-speed development of an anti-myopia vaccine.  Party leaders seem hell bent on crafting strategies for 2022 and 2024 with a vision that doesn’t extend past November of 2020. 

For the past four years, congressional Republicans showered an unhinged fool of a president with an obnoxious display of sycophancy.  They did this out of neither respect nor admiration. They did it out of fear. Donald Trump enjoyed consistently high approval ratings among GOP voters, not to mention a base that would literally go to war for him. And did. These legislators knew only too well from their fallen comrades that a binary choice awaited them: Either bow to the king or sacrifice your career. (Among the fallen: Jeff Flake, Bob Corker and Dean Heller.)

The issue then was about principled leadership. The goal for most Republican lawmakers was their own political survival, and that meant sacrificing their integrity for the electoral security afforded by Trump’s protection racket.  Although not exactly Profiles in Courage behavior, the choice was rational and understandable.  And it worked, until it didn’t.

The issue now is about how to steer the party in a post-Trump presidency, how to strategically craft an organizing principle that reaches beyond a warped reverence for a failed one-term demagog.  Sadly, for both the GOP and our democracy, this challenge is being badly blown. Stuck in pre-election and pre-riot mode, party strategists are forging ahead with a vintage 2017 litmus test: do no harm to Trump and his base.  

Smart, agile leaders don’t rely on the inertia of yesterday’s strategy to guide them through tomorrow’s challenges. Politics, like life, is dynamic, not static. Sure, Trump’s astronomically high polling levels among Republicans held for more than three years.  But that was yesterday. Today, his GOP approval rating has moved from the 80-to-90 percent range, to the 50s and 60s, according to the political polling site FiveThirtyEight.com.  National Public Radio reported last week that tens of thousands of recent Republican voters have changed their registration to either independent or to another party.

But that’s not all that has changed in the past few months.  Trump lost the election by more than 7 million votes, while Republicans did better than expected in down-ballot races. He lost his megaphone when Twitter permanently blocked him. Some 71 percent of Americans, according to a Reuters poll, believe the former president was responsible for the deadly Capitol riot. He became the first president to be impeached twice. Now that he is out of office, he faces a barrage of criminal and civil investigations that could well hold his feet to the fire for the next four years. 

Yet, the vast majority of congressional Republicans continue to cling to the same old script, somehow believing that Donald Trump’s political omnipotence knows no end. By looking behind them, they lose the opportunity to adjust for what lies ahead of them. In so doing, they end up feeding the beast when they should be starving him. 

There is a scientific concept that captures this dynamic, at least metaphorically. In 1927, Werner Heisenberg shook up the world of quantum physics by positing that you can’t, at the same time, know both the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle. The act of isolating the particle in order to measure its position, means you can’t simultaneously know how fast it is moving. Heisenberg’s work came to be known as the “uncertainty principle.”  You may remember it from physics class or Breaking Bad.  

Although politics hardly operates with the precision of quantum physics, it has its own version of the uncertainty principle:  A position created in and for a given moment is subject to unmeasurable momentum and therefore may not be suitable for future moments. Many politicians have ignored the uncertainty principle at their peril.  Remember “Read my lips: No New Taxes” from George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign? It got him elected.  Two years later, the economy took a dive and Bush signed a tax hike bill. Angry voters denied him a second term.  

Poor John McCain took a position in his 2008 presidential campaign that was obliterated by momentum in far less than two years.  “The fundamentals of the economy are strong,” McCain said, despite an approaching recession. Hours later, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The recession was on, and McCain’s quest for the White House was, for all practical purposes, over. 

Republicans in Congress had a perfect opportunity to take full advantage of the rapid momentum of Donald Trump’s decline. They could have hastened it with a total reset of the master-servant relationship of the past four years. After all, their lives and our country’s democracy were on the line when the 45th president sent his rag-tag militia on a violent rampage of the Capitol.  That inflection point cried out for an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote to impeach and convict in the name of national unity. It was the perfect time for Republicans to have changed their position in light of the momentum of Trump’s declining power.

The argument against such a move was that the party needs the Trumpism faction in order to win future elections, although it didn’t seem to work that well for Trump himself last November. As the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle wrote last week, “There is no Trumpism. There is only Trump.”   The MAGA thugs who desecrated the Capitol didn’t urinate on the floor or throw fire extinguishers at cops out of a deep commitment to supply-side economics or the appointment of originalist judges. They wanted the system blown up, and Trump was their guy to do it. 

Their hero is now out of the White House and off of Twitter. He sits on a Mar-a-Lago balcony thinking up insults to toss at Mitch McConnell. Except nobody really cares, certainly not Mitch McConnell.  The imaginary revolution is over. The swamp wasn’t drained. The wall wasn’t built. The virus didn’t disappear.

For shellshocked Republicans, all that remains is to decide whether to, once again, become a party of ideas, or remain a delusional coalition of Q-Annon loonies, angry Proud Boys and other assorted red-hatted white supremacists.  Those who prefer the former need to let go of Trump, to cut the cord and move on.

 Until that happens, the Republican Party will be but a noisy bastion of ineffective uncertainty.

GOP TO BIDEN: UNITY MEANS GIVING US WHAT WE WANT

It came as no surprise that Joe Biden’s clarion call for unity quickly devolved into a definitional food fight.  Every time the new president dropped the u-word during his inaugural speech, you just knew that Mitch McConnell’s lower lip was quivering, even as rhetorical retorts danced in his head.

Alas, in this malignant moment of putrid politics, when it comes to the meaning of unity, there is no unity. Only an overabundance of sophistry. 

McConnell whined to Fox News the other day about how Biden “talks a lot about unity,” but continues to push the Democrats’ agenda. Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted that the president’s call for unity was a “lie” because the person he chose to direct the administration’s Iran policy was not sufficiently hawkish.

Another Republican senator, John Cornyn of Texas, put out a tweet lambasting Biden for ignoring unity by overturning Trump’s ban on transgender troops serving in the military. Not to be outdone, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy told Politico that Biden turned his back on unity by offering a plan that would give undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. A large majority of Americans support the President’s position on both issues (here and here).

In each case, these Republicans defined unity as the process of giving them what they want. How utterly silly. Someone sticks a gun in your face and says, “Give me your money.” If you hand over your money, are you then in unity with your robber?  Of course not. Capitulation is not unity.  

The Cambridge Dictionary offers this simple definition of unity: “the state of being joined together.”  That nicely captures the heart of Biden’s inaugural peroration on the subject. Said the President: “My whole soul is in this: Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation, uniting to fight the common foes we face: Anger, resentment, hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence. Disease, joblessness, hopelessness.” 

In other words, we can disagree with each other on everything from tax policy to environmental regulation, but we remain “joined together” as Americans. We can do passionate political battle over ideas and values, and still respect each other as members of the American family. This type of unity is more of an aspirational construct than a governance rulebook. That’s why Biden, in his inaugural address, called unity, “. . .that most elusive of things in a democracy.”  

Other dictionaries define unity as “agreement, accord, a condition of harmony.” This is the meaning many congressional Republicans are attaching to the word. However, they go much further and posit – self-servingly – that only by agreeing with them can there be unity. 

It’s important to remember the context for President Biden’s unity speech. He spoke those words only days after his predecessor sicced a violent mob on the Capitol in a last ditch effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election.  It was the lowest point for American unity in our lifetimes.  No serious person could rationally conclude that the Joe Biden who left retirement in the twilight of his life to “restore America’s soul” would see unity as capitulating to the Republicans. 

Besides, even in better times, why would we want the type of unity that insists on an absence of disagreement? Vigorous debate over clashing viewpoints is the lifeblood of democracy. Voicing contrary opinions in places like Russia and North Korea will get you killed or sent to prison.  

Donald Trump was a master at creating that kind of forced unity, all based on people blindly following him.  He called folks who disagreed with him traitors or treasonous. He pushed Republicans to make the party’s platform whatever Trump wanted it to be.  Even after inciting a deadly insurrection, the vast majority of congressional Republicans stand united with him.  That’s the kind of unity to avoid at all cost.

And it certainly wasn’t the kind of unity President Biden summoned us to in his inaugural address. He didn’t equate unity with unanimity, nor did he call for the elimination of all opinions other than his own.   His plea to this very broken and angry country was simply to chill a bit, to take a collective deep breath, to turn down the vitriol a few notches, to remember that we are all Americans and that we are in this together.  

Early in my newspaper career, I covered the Minnesota Legislature. There was a phrase I heard often in those days, from lawmakers of both parties: “Let’s agree to disagree.”  I was young and cynical then, and always rolled my eyes when the line was spoken. It seemed trite and obvious. Looking back, however, I realized that those legislators – in a very different political climate – were doing what Biden called on us to do now. They dealt respectfully with each other, agreeing on some issues and agreeing to disagree on others, all without the need to call in the National Guard.  Agreeably disagreeing was unity.

We are lightyears away from that kind of environment right now. Members of Congress are wearing bulletproof vests and require police protection when traveling. The Washington Post just ran a story about the juxtaposition of a restaurant and a hospital in Michigan. The restaurant defied state laws on mask wearing and social distancing in order to cater to customers who believed the pandemic was a product of a left wing, socialist hoax.  Like minded folks drove miles out of their way in order to dine like it was 2019.  Down the road, the local hospital’s intensive care unit was filled to capacity with COVID-19 patients. 

Yet, there is every reason to believe that our long journey back to the civility of unity has begun. In the nearly three weeks our new president has been in office, we haven’t heard a single insult out of the White House.  Biden seems to have gone out of his way to avoid talking about Trump or his impeachment. On top of all that, he spent two hours last week hosting a meeting of Senate Republicans in the Oval Office.

Although it now appears that the president’s $1.9 billion stimulus bill will be passed with only Democratic votes, don’t believe the predictable punditry about Biden backtracking on unity. He can do two things at the same time: Seriously listen to and consider Republican arguments and suggestions for change, and get the best package possible for the Americans who desperately need it.  

That’s what agreeing to disagree is all about.