Republicans turn on each other

After the election:

David Frum Points The Finger At Fox News For Romney's Loss

http://www.newshounds.us/david_frum_points_the_finger_at_fox_news_for_ro...

The GOP’s blame game

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-republicans-working-...

Denial. “I think this is premature,” Karl Rove protested on Fox News election night, after the cable network, along with other news outlets, correctly projected that President Obama had won Ohio — and therefore the presidency. “We’ve got to be careful about calling things.”

Bargaining. “We’re willing to accept new revenue under the right conditions,” House Speaker John Boehner offered Wednesday, shifting his budget negotiating posture before reconsidering the next day, but “the president must be willing to reduce spending and shore up entitlement programs.”

Depression. “If Mitt Romney cannot win in this economy, then the tipping point has been reached,” Ann Coulter said on Laura Ingraham’s radio show. “It’s over. There is no hope.”

Anger. “We should have a revolution in this country,” tweeted flamboyant mogul Donald Trump, who had served as a prominent surrogate for Romney. “This election is a total sham and a travesty.”

Acceptance. Uh, well, there hasn’t been much of that yet. 

The future of the Republican Party

What not to do

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/11/future-republi...

2012 or Never

Republicans are worried this election could be their last chance to stop history. This is fear talking. But not paranoia.

http://nymag.com/news/features/gop-primary-chait-2012-3/

Election leaves Republicans at a loss for answers

http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/09/politics/gop-disarray/index.html?hpt=po_c2

Excellent!

America: Love it or be left behind

Obama can only do so much: Angry older whites have to decide if they want to secede from our multiracial future

The most delusional and divisive claim about President Obama’s election victory came, not surprisingly, from the disgraced Karl Rove, who told Fox News on Thursday that Obama “succeeded by suppressing the vote.” Make no mistake: Rove was talking about the white vote. Earlier that day Real Clear Politics writer Sean Trende had written a piece wondering about “disappearing” white voters, claiming white voter turnout had dropped significantly, by roughly 7 million votes, as whites rejected both parties. Since blacks, Latinos and Asians increased their turnout, as did women and young people, Rove couldn’t be talking about anybody but whites, and particularly older white men.

A quick reality check: Republican pollster Bill McInturff immediately debunked claims of disappearing voters of any color, reminding analysts that as always two days after a presidential election, many votes remained to be counted. The Thursday after the 2008 contest only 58% of the electorate had “turned out;” turnout climbed a bit above 62 percent when all the votes were tallied. In the end, turnout may be down this year, and it may well be mainly among whites, perhaps because of Hurricane Sandy. But to call that voter “suppression,” in the face of genuine voter suppression efforts by Rove’s own party – shortening early voting periods, attempts at repressive voter ID laws –  is just another example of the shameless capacity to degrade, project and flat-out lie that is Turd Blossom’s singular political brand – a brand that has, God willing, been terminally tarnished.

But Rove’s wail about “suppressed” white voters reflects his party’s broader outrage that the supposed “permanent Republican majority” he tried to build on the back of Kevin Phillips’s “emerging Republican majority” of the late 60s – the one that used racial appeals to make whites, especially the white working class, its cornerstone – no longer exists. Whites only made up 72 percent of the 2012 vote, down from 77 percent in 2010, and even Romney’s 59 percent of white voters, up from John McCain’s 57 percent, couldn’t make him president anymore.

Republicans will not go gently into that bad night, and thus we are hearing a range of reality-denying reactions, some of them flat out crazy. We’ve seen Rove’s deranged explanation for his party’s shellacking by what John Judis and Ruy Teixiera identified a decade ago as “the emerging Democratic majority:” Obama suppressed the white vote, Rove insists, primarily by running a negative campaign against Romney (John Kerry would like a word with you, Boss Rove). Let’s walk through a few others:

Obama’s emerging Democratic majority consists of slackers and moochers who just want things.

“People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?” Bill O’Reilly said during his Tuesday self-pity party. “The white establishment is now the minority….The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore.” A majority of Americans, O’Reilly opined, “want stuff. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it, and he ran on it.”

The self-satirizing Ann Coulter declared “It’s over. There’s no hope if takers outnumber makers,” reprising the failed VP nominee Paul Ryan’s Ayn Randian depiction of the American divide. Rush Limbaugh declared, “I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country.  I don’t know how else you look at this…Conservatism, in my humble opinion, did not lose last night.  It’s just very difficult to beat Santa Claus,” continuing the theme of the Obama coalition going to the polls for handouts.

That “the white establishment” built the modern social welfare state (albeit mostly for white people) is lost on O’Reilly, Coulter, Limbaugh and their ilk. That whites make up the vast majority of “takers” is likewise lost on them. But not on uber conservatives like Charles Murray, or the National Review’s dyspeptic hater Mark Steyn. “The fact is a lot of pasty, Caucasian, non-immigrant Americans have also shifted,’ and are very comfortable with Big Government, entitlements, micro-regulation, Obamacare and all the rest — and not much concerned with how or if it’s paid for,” Steyn wrote Wednesday.

No doubt a lot of the “pasty” folks Steyn talked about voted for Mitt Romney, since the red states are the new welfare queens, sucking more from Big Government than they provide in taxes. Don’t expect white GOP voters to process that contradiction in the early stages of grief, however.

The emerging Democratic majority can’t provide Obama a mandate without more white voters.

It’s not only GOP hacks who are saying stupid things about the white vote. Two days before the election Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHai declared that Obama’s problem with whites might make it hard for him to be the president of all America. “It’s possible,” the pair intoned darkly, that Obama “will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000″ (he didn’t). Then they lowered the boom:

“A broad mandate this is not.”

Really? Let’s review. Obama won 93 percent of African Americans, 71 percent of Latinos and an astonishing 75 percent of Asian Americans, a group that used to split between parties. He won a majority of Catholics, Jews and Muslims as well as the religiously non-affiliated (he only lost white Protestants.) He won women and young people. The only group he lost was white people, and particularly older white people and extremely particularly older white men.

Does Obama have really have a problem attracting broad support? Or would the problem belong to the stubborn minority bloc that won’t vote for him, no matter what he does? Do the math, lads.

Unfortunately, it’s not just GOP hacks or their admirers at Politico who are making a version of this argument. In The New Republic before the election, the perennial booster of the white working class bloc William Galston complained that Obama had rejected Bill Clinton’s transformational, transracial appeal for a transactional, racial/interest group pitch:

For young people, lower rates on student loans. For Latinos, announce a non-legislative version of the Dream Act. For gays and lesbians, endorse same-sex marriage. For single women, pick a fight over contraception with the Catholic Church and run a national convention in which the centrality of abortion rights startled even seasoned observers. Bill Clinton’s mantra—safe, legal, and rare—is a distant memory. In its place: “Julia.”

As someone who tends to agree that Democrats shouldn’t write off the white working class entirely, I’m flummoxed by Galston’s pitch. For a guy who seems to think bread and butter issues should be more prominent than cultural ones, he apparently can’t see bread and butter issues if they’re targeted to certain newer members of the Democratic coalition. Lower interest on student loans, the DREAM act, no-cost contraception and health screenings, and even to an extent gay marriage are also economic issues. Galston might also note that the president did best with his cherished white working class voters in Rust Belt states where he delivered for them with the auto bailout and tougher moves on China. In Ohio, one of the states that helped to give Obama his second term, the president only lost white men by 10 percentage points, and he pulled even among white men with incomes under $75,000. (He won flat out won working class white women in Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa).

When did nominal Democrats decide politics shouldn’t be about delivering “stuff,” anyway? What a patrician view of self-government. We pull together to do things we can’t do alone. For most of us, at some times in our lives, that involves getting “stuff” – help with college, or health care, or becoming citizens – that we can’t do alone. Or maybe it’s not “stuff” when it goes to white men?

Even more disappointing Tom Edsall, who normally is smart about class politics, took to the New York Times to lament Obama’s committed appeal to women:

Must-see morning clip: The Simpsons mocks Karl Rove

How Bill Kristol could split the GOP in two

The influential conservative's call for a tax hike on the rich risks re-launching the Republican civil war of 1990