Vanity Fair POLITICS

Congressman Alan Grayson, Democrat from Florida, tells Christopher Bateman he wants the troops home. Now.

Steele, but No Magnet

It's not yet clear how the one-armed-midget demographic is shaping up, but everybody else seems to be bailing on the GOP.

Begging the forgiveness of one-armed midgets, I'm merely quoting Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. In a Washington Times interview shortly after being elected head of the GOP, Steele met Howard Dean's gays/guns/God challenge and raised him a jackpot of grief.

Steele was making the point that the GOP needed to "uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets." That was February. This is now:

As state party chairmen gather this week in Maryland, a new Gallup analysis shows that since 2001, fewer people in all but one demographic (those who attend church weekly) have been identifying themselves as Republican.

People moving away from the GOP include those who attend church nearly weekly or monthly, Midwesterners, Southerners, married people, moderates, college graduates, and nongraduates.

The findings confirm growing disenchantment with a party that is viewed as belonging primarily to older white men, despite the GOP's having selected a hip-hop-friendly African American to lead it.

Whatever the thinking is, it isn't working.

The party is roiling between the purgers (good riddance to anyone who thinks outside the pup tent) and the bingers (we love everybody!). Within those two groups are subsets: the sane people who are not afraid of paradox or advanced degrees, and the "Billy Bobs" who think it's terribly clever to pass a resolution insisting that the Democrats rename their organization the "Democrat Socialist Party."

And then there's Steele.

The running joke is that Republicans have "tragic" where Democrats have "magic." The emerging consensus is that Steele, though he means well, has the wrong personality for the job.

"He's goofy and light in heavy times," as one insider put it.

Many are suddenly nostalgic for "whatshisname" -- the guy who ran the party before Steele, whose name no one can quite remember. Oh, yeah, Mike Duncan. At least he kept the trains running on time, they say. To which criticism Steele says, "Stuff it."

One could rest one's case at this juncture, but the list of complaints doesn't stop at Steele's shoot-from-the-lip style. Of equal concern are his handlers (about whom more anon) and the Republicans' failure to win the recent New York special election.

On his speaking style, the only person who can't wait to hear what Steele will say next is Joe "Bunker" Biden, who surely begins each morning with a prayer: "Please, God, let Michael Steele go on TV today."

Or radio.

Case in point: Despite rigorous briefings on judges, Steele recently rambled off into the brambles while guest-hosting Bill Bennett's radio show. Commenting on Obama's plan to appoint judges who are, among other things, empathetic to how rulings affect everyday lives, Steele managed to invoke Miss California and beauty pageant judge/blogger Perez Hilton.

Let's see: David Souter. Perez Hilton. Sure. We get that.

"What was so outstanding about Miss California, let's do a little parallel," said Steele. "The empathetic judge in this case, the judge of the beauty pageant, asked this woman a question and instead of taking her answer at face value, he was empathetic to a particular community and he thought her answer should be favorably disposed towards that particular community . . ." If you get Steele's drift, you may want to grab a flotation device.

Helping Steele in his self-demolition are power brothers Curt and Wes Anderson, media consultant and pollster, respectively. All one needs to know is that Curt, affectionately noted for chewing tobacco and taking cellphone calls at intimate dinner parties, was the magician behind Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's perky performance after Obama's February address to Congress.

Finally, winning cures all ills in politics, to borrow a Republican friend's words. And Steele isn't winning. "Right now we're considered losers," she said. "We get back in the game by winning."

Insiders feel that the GOP should have won the New York special election to replace Kirsten E. Gillibrand, the Democrat who succeeded Hillary Clinton in the Senate. And internal polling showed that the contest, lost by just 700 votes, was winnable. Although Steele directed some money to New York, his critics say that it wasn't spent strategically enough to draw out soft Republicans -- the GOP's real target demographic.

Even the most empathetic judge perusing Steele's record would be forced to wonder: What's up with that?

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Today's Orlando Sentinel front page

ANALYSIS

 California voters exercise their power -- and that's the problem

May 20, 2009

Californians are well known for periodic voter revolts, but on Tuesday they did more than just lash out at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature over the state's fiscal debacle.

By rejecting five budget measures, Californians also brought into stark relief the fact that they, too, share blame for the political dysfunction that has brought California to the brink of insolvency.

Rightly or wrongly, voters in the special election refused either to extend new tax hikes or to cap state spending. They also declined to unlock funds that they had voted in better financial times to set aside for special purposes.

Nearly a century after the Progressive-era birth of the state's ballot-measure system, it is clear that voters' fickle commands, one proposition at a time, are a top contributor to paralysis in Sacramento. And that, in turn, has helped cripple the capacity of the governor and Legislature to provide effective leadership to a state of more than 38 million people.

Clogged freeways, the decline of public schools, an outdated water system and a battered economy are just a few of the challenges demanding action by state leaders. Instead, they are consumed by yet another budget crisis, one that voters worsened Tuesday.

"No one's really stepping back and confronting the harsh realities that face our state in a critical sense, because of constraints put on our elected leaders," said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California. "We're unable to focus on the long term and the big picture at a time when we desperately need to do so."

The results Tuesday fit Californians' long-standing pattern of demanding what is ultimately irreconcilable, all the more so in an economic downturn: lower taxes and higher spending.

"We all want a free lunch, but unfortunately that doesn't exist," said former Gov. Gray Davis, whose 2003 recall stemmed largely from a budget crisis brought on by the dot-com bust. For decades, Davis said, Californians have been "papering over this fundamental reality that the state has been living beyond its means."

Davis and many other elected officials bear some responsibility for that. But so do voters.

In the Proposition 13 tax rebellion of 1978, Californians voted to require a two-thirds approval by the Legislature to raise taxes, a major obstacle to budget agreements. Over the last couple of decades, voters have also passed a patchwork of ballot measures directing billions of dollars to favorite causes, among them public schools and transportation projects.

On Tuesday, Californians showed they were unwilling to scale back their demands in tight times: Voters turned down propositions that would have freed up money that they set aside years ago for mental-health and children's programs.

"The irony is that the more the hands of the Legislature and governor are tied up, the more frustrated people are," said Tim Hodson, director of the Center for California Studies at Cal State Sacramento.

Together, voters' piecemeal decisions since the 1970s have effectively "emasculated the Legislature," said John Allswang, a retired Cal State L.A. history professor.

"They're looking for cheap answers -- throw the guys out of power and put somebody else in, or just blame the politicians and pretend you don't have to raise taxes when you need money," he said.

"This is what the public wants, and they deceive themselves constantly. They're not realistic."

The public's contradictory impulses were laid bare by a recent Field Poll. It found that voters oppose cutbacks in 10 of 12 major categories of state spending, including the biggest, education and healthcare. Yet most voters were unwilling to have their own taxes increased, and they overwhelmingly favored keeping the two-thirds requirement for tax hikes.

"They clearly want more in services than they're willing to pay for in taxes," said Ethan Rarick, director of the Robert T. Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service at UC Berkeley.

Also intensifying California's troubles is a surge in debt, often with voter consent at the ballot box, which makes future budgets harder and harder to balance. Under Davis, outstanding general-obligation debt jumped from $26 billion to $37 billion; it has soared to more than $70 billion under Schwarzenegger, according to the state treasurer's office.

Adding to the state's difficulties is the complexity of many ballot measures, no doubt a factor in the defeat of the main budget measures that lawmakers put before voters Tuesday.

"We pay the legislators to go to Sacramento and figure these things out," said Denise Spooner, a lecturer on California history at Cal State Fullerton.

As for the cumulative problems created by the last few decades of ballot-measure voting, she said, "I certainly don't think this is what the Progressives had in mind."

To John Hein, a veteran Sacramento campaign consultant, the absence of any master vision by voters appears to be a key flaw in the state's recent history with ballot measures.

"They kind of take each issue in a microcosm, rather than relate the decision to prior decisions, or future decisions that they might make," he said. "Voters don't think about the consequences of how one thing fits with another."

Others point to the term limits that voters imposed on state officials in 1990 as an enduring problem. Lawmakers who focus on quick career advancement tend to neglect California's long-term problems, they say.

Whatever the ups and downs of the proposition system, California's voters have seen themselves for a full century as "the arbiters of the future of the state," said social historian D.J. Waldie. To Waldie, the grim circumstances of Tuesday's election suggest that they are losing faith in any grand ambitions for public investment in California's future.

"I'm rather pessimistic at this point," he said. "We're reaching the point where Californians are throwing in the towel."

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In Defense of the Liberal Arts

TheAtlantic.com

Correspondents: Lane Wallace 19 May 2009

Have the Humanities Become an Unaffordable Luxury?

The Afterlife of George W. Bush

 

Tony Gutierrez / AP

The Simple Life: Bush on the way to his Dallas home

CNN's Jack Cafferty says "the pain won't go away" until Bush administration's misdeeds are addressed.

" George W. Bush and his accomplices damaged this country like it's never been damaged before. And it's not just the phony war in Iraq or the torture memos that justified waterboarding. It's millions of missing emails and the constant use of executive privilege and signing statements."

Senate Leaders Balk at Closing Guantánamo Prison

Moving to avoid a bitter partisan feud, Senate Democratic leaders have decided to remove from a war spending bill the $80 million that President Obama had requested to close the detention center for terrorist suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

House Democrats had already removed the money from their version of the $96.7 billion military spending measure, which will finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and some other national security programs through Sept. 30. It was overwhelmingly approved last week by the House.

The Senate had included the money in its version of the legislation, headed for a vote this week, but with tight restrictions that for now at least would have barred the transfer of prisoners tothe United States.

Both the House and Senate had directed the White House to provide a more detailed plan for closing the detention center and relocating the more than 200 terror suspects still being held there. The Obama administration has announced plans to revive the military tribunals first proposed by the Bush administration, but lawmakers were still clamoring for more information about what would happen to the terror suspects after the Guantánamo prison was closed.

In his first week in office, Mr. Obama signed an order for the prison to be closed by Jan. 22, 2010.

Senate Republicans had signaled their plans to propose several amendments related to the Guantánamo camp when the military spending bill reached the Senate floor later this week. Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, and other Republicans at an Appropriations Committee hearing last Thursday that they were preparing amendments and would hold back from offering them to avoid delaying the bill.

The White House has urged Congress to finish work on the bill this week and get it to the president’s desk. But that timetable seemed unrealistic given the differences between the House and Senate measures. The removal of the money to close the Guantánamo camp eliminates one of the major differences between the two bills and heads off would could have been an angry and protracted debate on the Senate floor.

The fight over what to do with the terror suspects would also likely have drawn further attention to the criticism by House Republicans of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, over when she first learned of the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation techniques and whether she should have done more to stop them.