Obama: ‘16 presidential race not as important right now as midterms

Reuters: President Barack Obama gently chided Democratic donors on Wednesday for paying too much attention to the next presidential race in 2016 and not enough attention to the upcoming midterm elections in 2014.

Reminding Democrats at a fundraiser in Boston that “we got whalloped” in the 2010 midterms, when Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Obama warned that “it could happen again if we don’t fight on behalf of the things we care about in this election.”

“No one could be more invested than me in having a Democrat succeed me,” Obama told about 70 supporters at a dinner where tickets cost $5,000 to $20,000. But he stressed to Democrats they need to invest time, money and energy on the November midterms.

“In the midterms, Democrats too often don’t vote. Too often, when there’s not a presidential election, we don’t think it’s sexy, we don’t think it’s interesting, people tune out,” Obama said.

Of course, he’s right. Democrats’ biggest problem is turnout. The way things go right now, if there’s a Winter Olympics that year, Republicans do well; if there’s Summer Olympics, Democrats do well. For some reason, Democratic voters are much more likely to show up for the “big game” on leap year than at any other time.

If Democrats could convince voters that every game is the big game, Republicans would be wrecked in election after election. Republicans turn out much more consistently than Democrats; meaning that off-year elections go to Republicans by default, not by effort. Americans haven’t elected (as opposed to reelected) a Republican President since Bush senior (Bush junior lost the 2000 popular vote) — and even then, Bush the Elder was a quasi-incumbent as Reagan’s Vice President. Without the power of incumbency, Republicans are screwed in Presidential election years, because America as a whole is a blue state — that is, when the voters that make it a blue state bother to show up.

Democrats and liberals would be a lot better off letting 2016 take care of itself — they’re all but guaranteed a win, anyway — and take all that energy and put it into 2014. If Democrats could figure out how to replicate presidential year voting turn out, eventually there would be no Republican Party to speak of. They’d be a permanent minority in both houses of congress, in much the same way that they’re currently all but shut out of the White House.

The GOP’s nightmare scenario is now: cascading stupidity effect under way

Just a little something to back up my earlier post arguing that attempts to spin away the GOP’s War on Women only serve to prove it’s real.

Right Wing Watch: On Friday, Allen West spoke with Steve Malzberg where he defended Mike Huckabee’s recent comment by declaring that “the Left tries to win the women’s vote by talking from the waist down” while Republicans seek to reach the hearts and minds of female voters.

Asserting that Democrats want the government to be “the sugar daddy” and replace men, West said Democrats have been “caught guilty as always” and are responding by attacking Huckabee. He then went on to claim that the Left remains utterly silent when women like Malala Yousafzai are abused and attacked by the Taliban before declaring that “I’m going to be very blunt: the Left tries to win the women’s vote by talking from the waist down.”

See, because women aren’t really concerned about all that contraception and reproductive health stuff — or if they do are then they’re wrong. Only Republican men like Allen West and Mike Huckabee know what’s important to women, so listen up and learn, ladies.

But this is also the beginning of the nightmare scenario, where one moron says one very stupid thing and other morons rush to defend him because that’s what they think you do when conservatives get criticized. This is what the GOP has been trying very, very hard to avoid and most likely won’t be able to. You can’t spend years encouraging this sort of thing and expect to be able to shut it off when it turns out to be bad politics. These people are going to engage in insane and clueless sexism because that’s modern conservatism. It’s what Limbaugh does every day, it’s what rightwing blogs do every day, so it’s absolutely normal and not at all crazy to these guys. They’re going to keep doing it because they just don’t know any better.

And West is probably more popular in the base than Huckabee — meaning that even more people will likely come forward to defend him. Then others will come out to defend them. And cetera and cetera and cetera, until the unofficial Republican position will be that women who care about reproductive health and freedom are just loose, slutty morons being preyed upon by Democrats.

That’s exactly the wrong way to convince people you’re not waging a sexist War on Women. But it’s exactly what the base believes.

[photo by Gage Skidmore]

Republicans try to tamp down latest unhinged candidate outbreak

Maybe they shouldn’t have abandoned that whole rebranding thing after all.

Raw Story: A Republican congressional candidate from Illinois refused to honor her party’s call for her to abandon the race despite her sudden infamy, the Chicago Daily Herald reported on Thursday.

“I’m not withdrawing from the race,” Susanne Atanus told the Herald. “I don’t know why they are not standing behind me. They should talk to me personally. I will not back out of the race.”

Atanus’ candidacy gained the wrong kind of national spotlight on Wednesday after she expressed her belief that God created autism and dementia and extreme weather conditions to punish the U.S. on account of legalized abortion and the increasing support nationwide for marriage equality.

“God is angry,” she told the Herald. “We are provoking him with abortions and same-sex marriage and civil unions. Same-sex activity is going to increase AIDS. If it’s in our military it will weaken our military. We need to respect God.”

Atanus is running against David Earl Williams III for the right to represent the GOP against incumbent Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL). However, Republican leaders at both the local and state level released a statement on Thursday disavowing her completely.

This is the GOP’s recurring nightmare heading toward November; that some out-there, bigoted, ignorant ‘bagger candidate will become the face of the Republican Party. Mike Huckabee (although not a candidate, definitely a Tea Party type) ran that scenario yesterday and of course there are others, like the Florida candidate who won’t step back from his fervent belief that Pres. Obama must die.

But the bigger concern isn’t exactly that people will assume that candidates like Atanus speak for the GOP, but rather that they’ll prove that many in the party believe this horsecrap. One of the more important bits of fallout from Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” fiasco was that there was no shortage of people — either in the media or in the party itself — who thought that Akin was absolutely right. The idea that rape rarely results in pregnancy because women have some sort of auto-contraceptive system that kicks when they’re sexually assaulted is such a common lie among anti-choice zealots that nearly everyone in the GOP base actually believes it. To them, Akin was only saying what they thought was common knowledge and defended him as they would the truth.

And Atanus doesn’t sound any different from any random Tea Party activist or columnist for WorldNetDaily. People go on Fox News and say things like this without any pushback at all, because this is the sort of mumbo-jumbo that so many of them believe is absolute Gospel. So the base, like Susanne Atanus herself, has to be wondering what the big deal is. Hell, this sort of thing is just an average day on talk radio or wingnut blogs. Why’s everyone freaking out about it now?

What Republicans are afraid of isn’t what Atanus said, but that what she and other candidates and pundits like her say may become an intraparty debate. They don’t want to shut her down before liberals notice and start to attack, they want to shut her down before conservatives notice and rush to defend.

Poll: Walker tied with relatively unknown challenger Burke in Wisconsin Gov. race

Wisconsin Public Radio: A new Marquette University Law School poll shows Gov. Scott Walker would narrowly defeat Democrat Mary Burke in next year’s gubernatorial election.

The poll of 800 registered voters last week shows Walker at 47 percent, and Burke, the former state commerce secretary, at 45 percent, with a 3.5 percent margin of error.

The poll is far from a prediction of what will actually happen in the election. Marquette pollster Charles Franklin says the survey also found that 70 percent of respondents don’t know enough about Burke to like or dislike her. Franklin says that ultimately the results show a sizable number of people know what they have in Walker.

Given the margin of error, this is a statistical dead heat and there will be no celebrating in the governor’s office over it. The campaign hasn’t started, ads haven’t run (at least, none that I’ve heard), most positions haven’t been staked out. Given a choice between Scott Walker and the mystery box, half of Wisconsinites choose the mystery box. Since she’s unknown, that half isn’t so much pro-Burke as anti-Walker.  Some of those going with Walker right now have to be persuadable — it’s just playing the odds — and Walker can’t manage the majority it would take to win a two-person race.

None of which is to say that Walker is headed toward a certain loss, but he should have all the advantages and the polling shows he has none — or if he does, that they’re statistically insignificant. If this latest John Doe probe starts to rock the governor’s boat, he could find himself swamped.

[photo via Burke for Wisconsin]

Tea Party announces RiNO hunt

Right Wing Watch: Tea Party groups are still reeling from the unsuccessful push by Sen. Ted Cruz and his allies to use a government shutdown to force the defunding of the Affordable Care Act, blaming RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) for their failure.

Tea Party Nation emailed members today urging them not to support so-called RINOs, even in the general election:

In every state where there is a RINO running for the Senate and certain establishment Republicans are running for reelection in the House, like John Boehner and Eric Cantor, conservatives need to agree on one challenger to support against the incumbent.

If that challenger wins, then everyone supports the challenger in the November 2014 elections. If the challenger fails, then instead of grudgingly supporting the establishment Republican, we all then need to fall back to supporting an independent or a third party candidate who is worthy of support.

Other ‘bagger groups are making similar noises, meaning the damage may go beyond intra-party skirmishes in the primaries and onto a completely brainless and counterproductive splitting of the conservative vote in the general.

And just sort of a random observation: I wonder if Tea Partiers realize they use the acronym “RiNO” the same way Maoists used the term “counter-revolutionary”? Violations of conservative PC are basically thought crimes and no independent thinking is allowed. It’s party line 100% down the line or you’re — ironically — a commie.

[photo by Talk Radio News Service]

Teabaggers not done with kamikaze runs quite yet

Daily Kos: The Senate Conservatives Fund, a conservative political action committee founded by Heritage CEO Jim DeMint when he was in the U.S. Senate, has endorsed Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin, who is running a tea party challenge against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky GOP Senate primary next May. Louisville Courier-Journal:

"We have interviewed a lot of candidates this year and Matt Bevin is one of the very best. He’s principled, passionate, and has Ted Cruz-like courage,” said Matt Hoskins, the group’s executive director, referring to Cruz, the U.S. senator from Texas, who led the fight to shut down government in an effort to defund the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

So, if Kentucky Republicans are looking for the second coming of Ted Cruz, SCF says Matt Bevin is their man…

True to the headline, Sarah Palin is also making some pro-Bevin noise, which is probably not the world’s best news for Mitch. Right now, McConnell’s in a bona fide tossup with Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, who he’s currently trailing by two points. Split the conservative vote between McConnell and Bevin (who was previously destined to be a footnote) and Grimes is the obvious beneficiary. DeMint and Palin would be punishing Mitch McConnell, to be sure, but they’d also be helping Grimes. Cutting off your nose to spite your face seems to be a favorite Tea Party pastime.

Tea Party wings swears to Jesus that they haven’t gotten any less crazy

Politico: Sarah Palin, who supported losing Senate candidate Steve Lonegan in New Jersey and the efforts to defund Obamacare in a government funding bill that led to the shutdown, said the focus after losing both fights should be on 2014.

“Friends, do not be discouraged by the shenanigans of D.C.’s permanent political class today. Be energized. We’re going to shake things up in 2014,” Palin wrote on her Facebook page early Thursday morning. “Rest well tonight, for soon we must focus on important House and Senate races. Let’s start with Kentucky – which happens to be awfully close to South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi – from sea to shining sea we will not give up. We’ve only just begun to fight.”

In each of the states she mentioned, a Republican incumbent senator that has been a target of tea party challengers is up for reelection in 2014.

Meanwhile, over at the wingnut Twitter aggregator Twitchy, the mood is “Yay for Sarah Palin! Let’s hunt some RiNOs!”

Allow me to point to one of my recent posts on the shutdown, Tea Party sore loserism, and the 2014 elections:

[I want to offer] a counterargument to the whole “this is all going to blow over by the time the elections roll around” narrative offered by the punditry right now. Why is anyone assuming that Republicans are going to suddenly be struck sane or learn some sort of lesson from this? Ted Cruz, for example, shoveled coal into this runaway train from the gitgo, knowing full well that it wasn’t going anywhere in the end. By mixing nihilism with political opportunism, Cruz was able to make a hero of himself to the endlessly chumpish base. Why does anyone think he’s going to stop being an influence when this is over — or that the lesson the rest of the GOP learns won’t come from Cruz’s example?

If this shutdown/debt limit disaster is supposed to have no effect on the 2014 or 2016 elections, then it follows that the Republican Party, rightwing media, and the Tea Party base will be struck sane by the experience and stop being kamikaze pilots/hostage takers/wild-eyed, unhinged warriors against reality. Hands up, who actually sees that happening?

No, they’ll lose this fight, but they don’t feel compelled to operate within reality. They’ll probably even get worse. The fact that they lost here doesn’t mean they’re willing to stop fighting. It’s Cruz et. al. vs. the Republican realists now and the rhetoric is going to get unhinged. We are in for brutal intra-party primary battles in 2014. It’s practically guaranteed.

If there’s one thing the far right loves, it’s nursing their own failure. You get to play victim cards and you get to tell everyone, “The fight is not over!” — which is a fundrasing bonanza. Anyone who said that this wouldn’t have an effect on the 2014 elections may have badly miscalculated just what a motivating force failure is to people with fear-based political messages. Talk radio is going to amp everything up to eleven, Tea Party nutjobs are going to become even more shrill, and Republican primaries are going to produce a new crop of Todd Akin/Christine O’Donnell/Sharron Angle-like candidates who say completely insane things that the completely insane base will rush out to defend until their last breath. And, of course, grifters like Palin see a chance to stretch out their fifteen minutes of fame by exploiting the abject terror that accompanies wingnuts’ losses.

The ‘baggers have not finished making self-destructive political decisions. Not by a long shot.

[photo by Gage Skidmore]