GOP Wants to Throw Up

The out-of-power party is using bile instead of brains. By substituting bumper sticker rhetoric for platform policy, Bush’s architect Rove succeeded in transforming the GOP’s constituency to a radio audience of non-reading, non-college educated, white, males, who privately refer to the President in epithets. Political celebrity Sarah Palin voiced easy-to-repeat sound bites that echoed across AM talk radio and Twitter. The transformation succeeded in driving conservative moderates, intellectuals, African-Americans, and Hispanics out of the Party to become amorphic Independents. The Republican Party now seems to be working on alienating women voters over health care issues. The GOP’s successful failure as majority party of the House of Representatives is reflected in record low, single digit congressional approval ratings. Epic sized Super PAC cash-backed poser conservatives are in a campaign that is all about advertising on television and radio. The national good goes unmentioned.

In a surprising New York Times column, David Brooks blames “the professional politicians” who in private “bemoan where the party is headed” and “in public they do nothing.”  Although Republicans had a chance to retake the White House, Brooks writes that those pro polls allowed the party to trash its “reputation by swinging from one embarrassing and unelectable option to the next: Bachmann, Trump, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.”

This is not to say that eastern major market pundits like Brooks or fellow conservative travelers like Charles Krauthammer and Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post know something that the rest of country does not. But when they seem united in their conservative consternation about the likes of Rick Santorum, it begs a question. I am not sure what telling the world that “I almost threw up” after reading the text of a speech by President John F. Kennedy says about Santorum or to whom that comment is supposed to appeal.

The 1960 JFK speech in question had to do with Kennedy’s Catholicism as much as the separation of church and state.  Republicans raised his religion as an issue about the Senator’s candidacy much as Romney’s Mormon religion has been questioned. At best, Rick Santorum botched his commentary about the absoluteness of church and state separation by his reference to sickness. At worst, he did not grasp Kennedy’s nuances, or he just does not think before he speaks, which is not a smart presidential qualification.

Santorum later said he wished he "had that particular line back." He should talk to Howard Dean about that kind of wish.

As to Romney, who split his home state of Michigan with Santorum, the former governor suffers much the same think-before-you-speak dilemma as the former Senator. Romney recently told an Ohio reporter, regarding a bill to overturn the Obama administration's much-debated birth control requirement, “. . . the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a women, husband and wife, I’m not going there.” Then he added, “contraception is working just fine, let’s just leave it alone.”

This is why it should be no surprise that Republicans like New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christy and Florida’s former Governor Jeb Bush have eschewed entering the race, a word that seems contextually out of place. They are smart not to enter. The reason is that it would blight their résumés to run and loose to the incumbent President Barack Obama. They have chosen to let the dummies do that. Christie and Bush will save their political cachet for the 2016 election to run against Obama’s Democratic successor. It will also give the GOP time to throw up and recover.

Say What?

I thought the problem with Romney was that he does not do well without a script. That is not the case. By his latest famous quote about being “severely conservative,” he demonstrated that he does not do well when he ad libs. If you watch you will see that his body language is out of sync with his words. When the question is whether or not we want a President who can deliver lines with conviction, the name Ronald Reagan has got to come to mind. The Gipper was one of the best either on or off script and was the last great rhetorician to occupy the White House. It helps to have great writers, which is something Mitt Romney does not have and desperately needs.

Here is a little trivia about the Presidents’ age (birth year) and their writers. Reagan (1911), a trained actor, had Peggy Noonan. Richard Nixon (1913) worked hard at delivering lines and even used 3 X 5 index cards to practice small talk. William Safire scripted Nixon. A towering and passionate rhetorician, Lyndon Johnson (1908) relied on Richard Goodwin, who named LBJ’s political agenda “The Great Society”. Jack Kennedy (1917), the first television president relied on Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorenson to craft his speeches.

Here is the point of the trivia. When Reagan, Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy were young men, radio was the dominant medium of mass communication, masterfully utilized by President Franklin Roosevelt with his famous fire-side chats. World War II intensified the importance of radio. The spoken word, the rhetoric used in public speaking, and the crucial importants of written words characterizes the manner in which those men formulated their thoughts. It also influenced their choices of writers who they regarded as critical to their political success. That became more important as the dominant medium became television by 1960.

Mitt Romney (1947) is a baby-boomer for whom the dominant medium became television with the assassination of President Kennedy. Words formulating Romney’s thoughts are sound-bites, not the paragraphs of the radio era. It is bumper-sticker rhetoric, ideal for Twitter. To complicate Romney’s predicament further, he is a spreadsheet man. His speeches could well be written in Excel for a PowerPoint presentation. It would also appear that Romney does some of his own editing.

That is proving to be a mistake. In our media environment, words are like toothpaste. Once they are out, it’s tough to get them back in the tube. Do you think someone really wrote the lines “corporations are people,” “not concerned about the very poor,” or “severely conservative?” Could it be a cynical plot to discredit Romney in the eyes of various constituent groups? Can such thoughtless remarks be purposeful?

The only thing inevitable about Mitt Romney is that he will respond to the pressure of this campaign by trying to outdo his opponents and saying things he will have to redact. If he is wins its nomination, the Republican Party had better hire some great writers to load his lips. He could also use an acting coach to synchronize his body language with his lines. Since no one in the GOP seems to like him, Romney should study Nixon. The party did not like him either, but Nixon won. Otherwise, Romney is in over his head in a rhetorical duel with President Obama.

 

Article first published as Say What? on Blogcritics.

Asking Not

Fifty-one years ago President John F. Kennedy delivered his inaugural address containing the thought provoking line, “And so, my fellow Americans - ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” That short speech contains several other rhetorical gems such as, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” Kennedy declared, “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” Today, the few who are rich seek to benefit from fear and a lack of negotiation as they seek what their country can do for them.

Foremost among those rich few is the Republican nominee apparent Mitt Romney. In his speech after the marginal New Hampshire primary, Romney castigated President Obama. “He wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society,” the candidate said.  The GOP echo chamber reverberates with variations on the "European-style socialism" theme from television to Twitter. But just because Republicans repeat it does not make it so. The veracity of such rhetoric suffers the problematic flaws of ignorance and inaccuracy.

The ignorance is that most Americans do not know much about Europe other than its economic situation is in far worse shape than our own. "Associating Obama with Europe links him to the current malaise in Europe, and Americans know it's a basket case," according to Rosemary Hollis of London's City University. "It plays to the stereotypical notion that the USA has about Europe, that they [Europeans] are freeloaders, with no defense capability, and live on welfare [state] benefits." She also said that Romney is "relying on a history of socialism being viewed as the enemy." Socialism is the new Communism.

The inaccuracy is that Europe has increased its privatization which has led to a decline of the welfare state, a post WWII idea crafted by the British economist and social reformer William Beveridge. He saw poverty, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness as the five "giants on the road to reconstruction." Beveridge proposed setting up a welfare state with social security, a National Health Service, free education, public housing projects, and full employment as its objectives. The welfare state adopted the ideas of economist John Maynard Keynes, specifically that a government could keep its economy vigorous by increasing public spending. The British Labour government used its U.S. Marshall Plan aid money to get industry going. Then it nationalized the trucking, railways and coal industries in 1947 and the steel industry in 1951.

The accusation that President Barack Obama is leading the country into any kind of socialist state is as erroneous as making the same accusation about his predecessor, President George W. Bush. Republicans conveniently ignore the fact that under Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson the government nationalized major banks. The TARP bailout also contained what can be called socialist elements. If Obama deserves a hit, it should be for hiring Republican appointees Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, whose deregulatory policies of the ‘90s helped create the crisis that required such a government rescue.

Romney has been wrong before. He opposed the automobile industry bailout. “IF (sic) General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed,” he wrote in a 2008 New York Times opinion article. “Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses.” That is not what happened.

The President is not leading the country into a European-style entitlement society, as Mitt Romney pontificates. If anything, President Obama is presiding over an inherited American-style entitlement society that has its origins in FDR’s New Deal, with the Social Security Act, extending through the JFK’s New Frontier and LBJ’s Great Society, with the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid. The Republican elites who opposed Democratic Presidents Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson decried them as socialists too.

Anti-European, anti-socialism, anti-Obama rhetoric aside, let’s think about what JFK said, as his niece did last year in the Atlantic. “I almost never hear anything like that call to sacrifice for the good of our country from our leaders today,” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wrote. “When President Kennedy asked what we could do for our country, he didn't pretend it would be easy, or painless, or even fair.” John F. Kennedy’s death for his country affirms that.

“So let us begin anew,” said the 35^th President, “remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof.” So far, that too is being lost on the wealthy Republican candidates seeking the Presidency. As they sink more deeply into incivility, their sincerity leaves much to be proved.

 Originally published as Asking Not on Blogcritics.

Presidential Approval: So What?

Presidential popularity begs a lot of questions. The most important question at election time is what candidate gets the most Electoral College votes, making the popular vote only interesting. Presidential approval begins with inauguration day and can be less than 50% to start, as with the administrations of Kennedy, Carter and “W” Bush. Between 1961 and 2001, voters changed their opinions widely about the eight presidents who occupied the White House. They disapproved of all of the presidents and demonstrated that economics drives public opinion more than current events.

Gallup has been tracking presidential job approval since Harry Truman took office in 1945. The Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center shows President Obama with an all-time high of 69%, when he took office in January 2009, and a to-date low of 40% recorded at the end of July. He is about two-months shy of being in office 1000 days and his average approval is 50%. Regardless of how one interprets the data, one thing abundantly clear: an awful lot of people disapprove of a President most of the time. Who is in office does not really matter.

Imagine becoming President with barely half of the vote by any measure. In 1960 Democrat Senator John Kennedy became president by defeating Vice President Richard Nixon with a 0.1% margin of the popular vote, 49.7% to 49.6%. Since JFK’s overall approval is 70.1%, he is assumed to have been well approved by Americans. That was not the case at the time. People who did not like him personally despised him. In the South for example, I remember seeing Ku Klux Klan bonfires burning to celebrate his assassination because Kennedy was a Catholic and a pro-civil rights president.

JFK also sent the first US troops to a country few people had ever heard of – Vietnam. During his 1036 days in office, JFK’s budgets ran deficits to finance his New Frontier programs. His approval ratings scored a high of 83% and a low of 56%. They had been trending down when he was murdered.

JFK’s Vice President Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency and then won the 1964 election in a landslide, defeating Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. LBJ also won the popular vote by a margin of 61.1% to 38.5 %. Johnson’s overall 55.1% approval rating ranged from a high of 79% to a low of 35%. He used his popularity when he had it, too. His Administration submitted 87 bills to the 89^th Congress and LBJ signed 84 of them into law.

''This country,'' LBJ said, ''is rich enough to do anything it has the guts to do and the vision to do and the will to do.'' His Great Society is still with us ''in Medicare and Medicaid, in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the rivers and lakes we swim in; in the colleges our students attend; in the medical miracles from the National Institutes of Health; in mass transportation and equal opportunity,'' as former Johnson advisor Joseph A. Califano has stated. LBJ also expanded costly US involvement in the Vietnam War. With his approval ratings in decline, Johnson did not run for reelection.

As a private citizen, former Republican Vice President Richard Nixon won his second campaign for president in 1968 defeating two other candidates: LBJ’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Alabama Governor George Wallace, who ran as an Independent. Wallace captured 13.5% of the popular vote, leaving a 0.7% margin between Nixon and Humphrey, 43.4% to 42.7%. Although Nixon won reelection in a 1972 landslide victory and 60.7% of the popular vote, he resigned the presidency under the threat of impeachment and saw his approval numbers fall from a high of 67% to a low of 24%. Nixon had an overall term and a half approval rating of 49%.

Nixon inherited a weak economy from the Johnson administration but delivered a balanced budget in 1969. However, inflation, rising energy costs and high unemployment troubled Nixon’s administration. Despite wage and price controls and other measures that did not work, Nixon’s budget plans included using large deficits to marginally improve the economy. Although Nixon called upon “the great silent majority” for support, continued expansion of the Vietnam War, including bombing Cambodia, and the costs of war in addition to the Watergate scandal further degraded his approval numbers.

After Nixon’s resignation, Vice President Gerald Ford assumed the presidency and served its remaining 845 days only to lose his subsequent election bid in 1976. During his time in the White House, Ford gave Nixon a presidential pardon and concluded US involvement in the Vietnam War. His overall approval rating scored 47.2% for the time of American discouragement with politics that followed the highly publicized Watergate hearings that contributed to Ford’s becoming president. Ford’s approval ranged from a high of 71% to a low of 37%. Despite the Ford “Whip Inflation Now" program, 7% inflation and growing unemployment continued to weaken the economy that had slipped into recession and further eroded his approval numbers.

The next presidential race was so close, many voters stayed up until the early morning hours to see Georgia’s Democrat Governor Jimmy Carter win the 1976 election. A US Naval Academy graduate and peanut farmer, Carter won the election with a less than a 2% popular vote margin, 50.1% to 48%. Elected by just half of the voters like Jack Kennedy, Jimmy Carter only earned an overall approval rating of 45.5% that ranged from a high of 75% to a low of 28%. The federal government was in deficit every year of the Carter presidency. Slow recovery from the ’73-‘75 recession, fuel shortages, double-digit inflation and 9% unemployment plagued the Carter administration which lasted one term only. The American hostage situation in Iran exacerbated disapproval of Carter.

The country turned to a former Hollywood actor and spokesperson in the 1980 election of California Republican Governor Ronald Reagan, who won with 50.7% of the popular vote to Carter’s 41% and Independent Congressman John Anderson’s 6.6% protest vote. Reagan got his landslide reelection four years later, defeating former Vice President Walter Mondale by 58.8% to 40.6%. While Reagan’s overall approval rating is 52.8%, it ranged from a high of 68% to a low of 38%.

Reagan survived an assassination attempt and took credit for the end of Communism with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although he railed against the debt ceiling, it raised 17 times during his eight-year administration. His supply side “Reaganomics,” which his critics called “voodoo

economics,” created more new debt than the combined deficits of all previous presidents. While Reagan said he was committed to reducing government spending, it rose by $321 billion during his presidency, to more than a trillion dollars. He also raised taxes seven times. Only his age and the 22^nd Amendment prevented Reagan from running for a third term.

Instead, with a revenue improved economy, the enormous popularity of Ronald Reagan and relative world peace, Vice President George H. W. Bush won the presidency by defeating Massachusetts Democrat Governor Michael Dukakis by a popular vote margin of 53.4% to 45.7%. Best known for his famous pledge, "Read my lips: no new taxes," a recession began. Rising deficits, a declining economy plus a growth in mandatory spending began to further increase the federal deficit. Bush’s approval ratings ranged from a high of 89% to a low of 29%.

By 1990 the deficit had grown to three times its size in 1980. The federal government shut down for three days and the Democratic majority in Congress eventually forced Bush to raise tax revenues. But events of the Gulf War pushed economic issues out of the news and Bush ended up with an overall approval rating of 60.9% for his term in office, second only to Kennedy.

After three Republican presidential terms and the economy again in recession, two candidates ran against President Bush in the 1992 election: Arkansas Democrat Governor Bill Clinton and Independent businessman Ross Perot. Bush's 89% approval ratings following the Persian Gulf War made him look like a certain winner, but the economy trumped his approval ratings at the ballot box. Clinton prevailed with 43% of the popular vote to Bush’s 37.5% and Perot’s 18.9%. Ross Perot capitalized on the economic woe in his 1992 campaign and ran again in 1996. He siphoned an 8.4% popular vote as incumbent President Clinton defeated Kansas Republican Senator Bob Dole 49.2% to 40.7%.

The Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus between the years 1998 and 2000, the longest economic expansion period in US history. Only the second president to be impeached by the House, the Senate failed to muster the Constitutional two-thirds majority requirement to convict and remove an officeholder. Despite the impeachment and another government shutdown, Clinton left office with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any US president since World War II at 60.6%. His highest approval rating scored 73% and his lowest recorded 37%.

Economy tends to trump political events no matter how much of a splash those events create. Kennedy’s high rating occurred because he died in office before his first term ended. Reagan’s approval rating of 52.8% falls behind the 55.1% approval rating of LBJ and Bill Clinton, who tie for 3^rd place. George H.W. Bush comes in second to JFK at 60.9%. Those are the numbers.

Here are some more. Take a look at the disapproval ratings for the eight presidents and keep them in mind the next time approval ratings is brought up as some kind of data being foisted as something significant.

John Kennedy: 56

Lyndon Johnson: 35

Richard Nixon: 26

Gerald Ford: 37

Jimmy Carter: 29

Ronald Reagan: 37

George H.W. Bush: 38

Bill Clinton: 37

The public changes its mind with regularity and presidents are just not that popular. Why anyone would want such a job is another question.

Article first published as Presidential Approval: So What? on Blogcritics.