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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Leftist Republican Party of the Future

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Ted Rall

To Survive, GOP Should Out-Democrat the Democrats

Republicans, engaging in the traditional losing party’s post-election wound-licking, blame-flinging and anger-at-the-dumb-voters ritual, are facing the awful truth: The American people just aren’t into their gay-bashing, race-baiting, woman-hating, Eisenhower-era positions on social issues.

“It’s not that our message–we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong–didn’t get out. It did get out,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville told The New York Times. “It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed. An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”

Exasperated radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh asks:

“Condoleeza Rice…is a pinnacle of achievement, and intelligent, and well-spoken…You can’t find a more accomplished person. Marco Rubio. And really, speaking in street lingo, we’re not getting credit for it…Are these people perceived as tokens?”

Yes. Uncle Toms are easy to spot.

“In order to get the Hispanic or Latino vote, does that mean open the borders and embrace the illegals?”

Yes.

“If we’re not getting the female vote, do we become pro-choice?”

Yes.

Liberal pundits are helpfully offering advice to their Republican counterparts this week, arguing that if that if GOP officials and pundits make a few nips and tucks into their Neanderthal platform and tone, downplaying their unpopular stances on social issues, they may yet save their white male–dominated party from irrelevance.

Let’s set aside the obvious fact that no one does nor should listen to counsel offered by their enemies. And that even a devastating defeat–not that this one was–doesn’t always necessarily take long to recover from. Consider, for example, the post-2008 commentaries wondering whether there was a future for the GOP; by early 2010 the written-off-as-dead Republicans were riding high.

Nevertheless, Republicans might be more willing to listen to me than to other left-of-center columnists. After all, I love the GOP just as much as I care for the Democrats (not at all). Really, truly, I don’t give a rat’s ass which corporate party wins or loses.

The Republicans’ big problem is that they think they’re me.

I am a pundit. I am an idealist. The pay isn’t great, but I get to be pure, to stand up for what I think is right regardless of whether or not anybody else is willing to follow me. My job isn’t to be popular. It’s to be right.

If I were tapped to head a major political party like the Republicans, however, I wouldn’t have the luxury of being right at the price of being unpopular. Political parties are in the business of trying to win elections. To paraphrase the philosopher Don Rumsfeld, you run campaigns with the voters you have, not the ones you wish you had.

It’s one thing to push for changes that your ideological base believes in. God knows the Democrats should do that sometimes. It’s another to commit political hari-kari, trying to fight the tide by espousing points of view that are not only in the minority, but whose constituencies are consistently shrinking.

If Republicans want to win elections here in the United States, they need to set the stage for a transformational shift as dramatic as 1932, when FDR turned the Democrats into the party of liberalism and progressivism.

Republicans need not wonder why Obama got 71% of the Latino vote; if anything, the shocker is that that figure wasn’t higher. For decades, right-wing talk radio hosts and other Republican surrogates have been bashing illegal immigration (racist code for anti-Hispanic propaganda, particularly on the West Coast). Now that the Latino vote has become essential to win national races, the GOP can no longer afford its hardline stance on immigration, whether the reasons behind it are evilly nativist, benignly protectionist or law-and-order upright.

On every social issue of note, Americans are moving away from the Republican Party. We are becoming more tolerant of gays and their rights, more supportive of abortion rights, and more open to people of different backgrounds. Despite the terrible economy, Americans are less inclined to blame their troubles on competition from undocumented workers.

These trends toward a leftier country are long term and unlikely to reverse in the near future.

Beginning last summer, Republican strategists consciously decided to downplay Mitt Romney’s stances Republican Party platform’s takes on social issues. Now liberal commentators are joining them, strangely and cynically suggesting that Republicans need to change their emphasis of their messaging–but not the content of their policies.

Style isn’t enough. Republicans are doomed unless they radically change to social-issues policies that are not only in step with the country, but to its left–since the electorate will soon catch up. If the Party of Lincoln is adaptable and intelligent–which I seriously doubt–they will exploit the opportunity to move, not just left, but to the left of the center-right Democratic Party, which abdicated its traditional progressive stands on social issues when, for example, Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act and gutted welfare.

The GOP could make good on its long-standing assertion that it favors a legal path to immigration by proposing that we open our doors to a huge surge of legal immigration. That would be consistent with previous opinions, and outmaneuver the Democrats, who have been reluctant to favor much immigration at all, and who have deported record numbers of Hispanics over the last four years.

Yes, Mr. Limbaugh, the Republican Party must become unabashedly pro-choice if it wants to keep the women’s vote. The Republican Party claims to be the party of small government conservatism; why not say that this is a simple matter of keeping the government out of our bedrooms and out of women’s bodies? Same thing goes for gay marriage and other rights for people who are discriminated against due to their sexual orientation.

You can’t roll out a new and improved Republican Party social-issues platform overnight without alienating the crazy Christian fundamentalists and other unattractive sorts who currently form the basis of the Republican Party at present. But you can start a transition to a viable future in a methodical, gradual way that prepares the Republican Party for the huge demographic shifts that will drive the politics of the country as it moves further and further to the left.

(Ted Rall‘s is the author of “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

VIDEO: Deconstruction of Alessandra Stanley’s Review of Oliver Stone

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Ted Rall

Here‘s what I’m like in the morning: unshaven, precaffeinated and pissed off at The New York Times. This time I was set off by Alessandra Stanley’s review of Oliver Stone’s documentary series “Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States.” I decided to video my take on Alessandra’s takedown of Oliver. Let me know what you think. I’ll do more if people like this.

Stephanie McMillan’s “The Beginning of the American Fall”

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Ted Rall

The official publication date of Stephanie’s new comics-journalism book about the Occupy movement, “The Beginning of the American Fall,” is tomorrow, Tuesday, November 13. It is AWESOME.

For those planning to purchase it from Amazon, I’d like to ask you a favor: if you do it on Tuesday (tomorrow), you’ll bump up the sales rank on that site, making it more visible and increasing sales overall.

Here’s the Amazon link.

It’s also available from her directly.

Reviews:
One of Publishers Weekly‘s Top Ten Graphic Novels for Fall 2012!

“American Fall is the definitive, thrilling and inspiring account of the beginning of the first major street-level protest movement since the 1960s: the Occupy Wall Street movement. Stephanie McMillan’s stunning illustrations, personal accounts and first-hand analysis documents the most exciting event in U.S. politics in generations.”
—Ted Rall, author of The Anti-American Manifesto

“Stephanie McMillan is an important and courageous political philosopher. This book movingly shows important lessons we can learn from the Occupy
Movement and apply as we move forward toward the revolution we so desperately need.”
—Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame, and A Language Older Than Words

Summary:
Can a cartoonist and millions of random strangers change the world? The initial stages of their attempt are chronicled in this book of comics-journalism and written observations.

Stephanie McMillan, long-time activist and cartoonist, has waited her entire life for the American people to rise up. Sparked by uprisings around the world, a new movement bursts onto the national scene against a system that denies the people a decent life and puts the planet at risk.

With delightful full-color drawings, interviews, dialogue, description, and insightful reflections, this book chronicles the first several months of the fragile and contradictory movement. It situates detailed personal experiences and representative narratives within the broad context of a truly unique and historical global conjuncture. This book will stand as a record of the emerging movement in accessible comics form.

Sample images from the book

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Our Contempt is Bipartisan

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Ted Rall

Both Zombie Parties Too Stubborn To Admit They’re Dead

Neither party gets it.

They both think they won. And they sort of did.

But we still hate them.

Democrats are patting themselves on the back, congratulating themselves for a mandate that neither exists–50.4% to 48.1% does not a mandate make–nor, if were real, would be actionable (Republicans still control the House). “Republicans need to have a serious talk with themselves, and they need to change,” Democratic columnist E.J. Dionne sniped in the Washington Post.

Not likely. If Republicans could change anything, it would be the weather. “If you hadn’t had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy,” Karl Rove told the Post. (Which leaves out the fact that the places hit hardest by Hurricane Sandy, New York and New Jersey, are not GOP states.)

“We [Congressional Republicans] will have as much of a mandate as he [Obama] will,” claimed Speaker John Boehner.

The donkeys and the elephants think they’re awesome. Their plan to govern America for the next four years? Keep on keeping on. Why change?

Both parties are insane and self-delusional.

Voters are narrowly divided between the Ds and the Rs–because we can’t decide which one we hate most.

One out of three people think the two-party system is broken, and complain that neither party represents their political views.

A staggering number of people are boycotting quadrennial exercises in pseudodemocracy. Despite the advent of convenient early voting by mail, Election Day 2012 saw a “major plunge in turnout nationally” compared to 2008. About 42.5% of registered voters stayed home this year.

There were a substantial number of protest votes.

In one of the most ignored and interesting stories coming out of Election Day, one and a half million people voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Since Johnson and Stein were even more thoroughly censored than previous third-party candidates–Johnson and Stein were denied interviews on the major networks and locked out of the presidential debates–many of these votes must have been for “none of the above.”

Democrats didn’t win this election.

Neither did the Republicans.

Give the parties credit: They’ve united us in our contempt. Liberals and progressives hate the Democrats, which takes their votes for granted and ignores them. Conservatives hate the GOP for the same reasons. And moderates hate both parties because they don’t get along.

Who won? Not us.

Since the economy collapsed in 2008, Americans have made consistently clear what their number-one priority was: jobs. Yet the two major parties have focused on anything but.

The Tea Party convinced Republicans to campaign on paying down the national debt. Deficits, the debt and entitlements are important–but those problems are not nearly as urgent as unemployment and underemployment. When you’ve lost your job–as millions of Americans have since 2008–you need a new job now. Not next week. Not next year. NOW. You sure don’t need a job next decade–and that’s if you believe that austerity stimulates the economy. “Romney is not offering a plausible solution to the [unemployment] crisis,” Jonathan Chait wrote in New York magazine back in June. Romney never did.

And that’s why he lost.

Jobs were the #1 issue with voters, Obama never reduced unemployment and Romney had a credible narrative as a corporate turnaround expert. By all rights, Romney should have won. But he never delivered what voters wanted: a credible turnaround plan for the terrible jobs market–one with quick results.

Not that Obama and the Democrats have much to celebrate.

The president nearly lost to one of the worst challengers of all time, a bumbling, inarticulate Monopoly Man caricature of an evil capitalist. Democrats only picked up a few seats in Congress–this to a Republican Party whose platform on social issues was lifted from the Taliban, and whose major political figures included two rape apologists.

Like the GOP, Democrats paid lip service to the economy but never put forward a credible proposal that would have created millions of new jobs next week, not next decade. In 2009, while millions were losing their homes to foreclosure, Obama dwelled instead on healthcare reform. Like the deficits, the healthcare crisis is real and important–but it wasn’t nearly as urgent as the jobs catastrophe. Which, planted stories about fictional recoveries to the contrary, continues unabated.

Four years into an existential crisis that likely marks the final crisis of late-stage capitalism, an economic seizure of epic proportions that has impoverished tens of millions of Americans and driven many to suicide, the United States is governed by two parties that don’t have a clue about what we want or what we need.

Change? Not these guys. Not unless we force them to–or, better yet, get rid of them.

(Ted Rall‘s is the author of “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Lower the Ladder a Little

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Ted Rall

I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).

This week: In the nearly two decades since Californians voted to bar undocumented immigrants from utilizing public schools and hospitals, the state’s electorate has become increasingly tolerant toward people who are in the country illegally, although it remains tough on border security and enforcement, a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll shows. The shift is partly explained by the growing clout of Latinos, who now make up 20% of California voters. But the attitudes of whites also appear to have changed.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: It’s 15% About Roe v. Wade

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Ted Rall

Why Romney Won’t Ban Abortion and Obama Won’t Legalize It.

As a poster to my blog commented sarcastically about Obama apologists: “Please vote for Obama. True, he sucks, but…”

Which summarizes the feelings of many Democratic voters.

Others, whether smarter or more long-winded, try to justify their cognitive dissonance with one simple plea: If Obama loses, abortion will be banned.

You’ve heard their argument:

“It’s all about the Supreme Court.”

“It’s all about Roe v. Wade.”

Indeed, because four members of the Supreme Court are in their 70s, a Romney victory could lead to the end of federally-guaranteed abortion rights.

Obama played on women’s fears in a recent interview with Rolling Stone:

“I don’t think there’s any doubt [that Roe v. Wade could be overturned],” Obama said. “Typically, a president is going to have one or two Supreme Court nominees during the course of his presidency, and we know that the current Supreme Court has at least four members who would overturn Roe v. Wade. All it takes is one more for that to happen.”

A woman’s right to control her body is important.

It’s also popular. 77% of Americans think abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances.

But single-issue voting is morally problematic. How does one weigh abortion rights for American women against the right of Pakistani (and Yemeni, and Afghan, and Somali) women (and men, and children) to not get blown up by one of Obama’s disgusting Predator drones, which have 2% accuracy? Should a feminist close her eyes to the Obama Administration’s actions in U.S.-occupied Haiti, where it pressured the post-invasion Haitian puppet regime to slash the minimum wage for (mostly female) workers in U.S.-owned sweatshops by half, to 31 cents an hour? Shall we turn a blind eye to the people of Honduras, suffering through the aftermath of an old-fashioned military coup against a democratically-elected president, an outrage backed by Obama?

Let’s talk about abortion.

If you can overlook Gitmo and the bankster bailouts and the lack of investigations of Wall Street and Bush-era torturers, even if you’re cool with the healthcare sellout and the assassinations and the wars and a president who golfs while the unemployed (including many women) lose their homes—if abortion is all you care about—there still isn’t much reason to vote for Obama.

Romney is barely pro-life.

And Obama is barely pro-choice.

First, let’s be clear about what’s at stake. Abortion rights are not at stake.

Abortion rights in states with conservative legislatures are at stake.

A City University of New York study guesstimates that 31 “red” states, mostly in the South and Midwest, would ban abortion if Roe v. Wade went away. The effect would be significant. An average woman would see the distance to the nearest abortion clinic increase to 157 miles.

If you live in northeast Kansas, it’s more like 600 miles. But northeast Kansas is sparsely populated. The state ban effect would be mitigated by the fact that the biggest states—California, Florida, New York, etc.—are liberal and pro-choice. “Under this scenario, abortion rates would fall by 14.9 percent nationally, resulting in at most, 178,800 additional births or 4.2 percent of the U.S. total in 2008.”

What we’re really talking about is whether abortion will be 85% safe and legal (post-Romney) or 100% (post-Obama’s 200th round of golf).

Like the independence of Taiwan, the status of abortion in America lives in an absurd legal netherworld, ad hoc, awkward and makeshift, neither legal nor illegal.

Abortion should be a settled issue. Roe v. Wade, only as good as the current composition of the Supreme Court, can and should be supplanted by a federal law passed by Congress and signed by the president.

Would Romney sign a federal ban? Probably not.

An Obama campaign ad includes a 2007 debate quote by Romney in which he said he’d be “delighted” to sign such a bill were it to cross his desk. But it leaves out what he said next, that a ban is “not where America is today.” Anything is possible, but not too many politicians—certainly not one as craven and wishy-washy flexible as Romney—are willing to piss off 77% of the electorate.

Of course, Romney is an unknown quantity. We don’t know what he’d do.

On the other hand, we do know what Obama did. And what he didn’t do.

Would Obama sign a federal legalization? Definitely not.

In 2007 he told Planned Parenthood that he would. However, after he became president—with a supermajority in Congress, natch—he walked that back. “Now, the Freedom of Choice Act is not highest [sic] legislative priority,” he said in April 2009. “I believe that women should have the right to choose. But I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on. And that’s—that’s where I’m going to focus.”

The White House ordered Democratic leaders in Congress to kill the Freedom of Choice Act. FOCA has never been introduced under Obama.

Romney and Obama are continuing their parties’ cynical posturing on abortion. Knowing that abortion is popular, Republicans rile up their right-wing misogynist base with loud rhetoric and minor legislative initiatives that fall way short of a federal ban.

Democrats, who exploit the fear that a right-wing Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, would lose their leverage over pro-choicers if they legalized abortion.

So, if you’re a pro-choice voter, if abortion rights is the main reason you’re voting for Obama, remember two facts:

First, only 15% of abortion rights is at risk.

Second, when Obama had the political capital and the Congressional backing to legalize abortion once and for all, he sold you out.

For Obama, women are “not highest legislative priority.”

(Ted Rall‘s latest book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

Cover Illustration for Isthmus: Tommy vs. Tammy

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Ted Rall

Freelance illustration assignments are few and far-between these days—at least for me—so it was fun to do this week’s cover for the alternative weekly in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s about the Senate race in Wisconsin.

Matt Bors Goes Kickstarter

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Ted Rall

Hard to believe, but Matt Bors has never published a proper cartoon collection. Of course, that’s not that shocking when you know the back story, as I do—major publishers won’t publish collections of editorial cartoons anymore. Even our syndicate, which has a publishing arm, won’t publish our books.

Which is why self-publishing makes sense. Not only do cartoonists keep more of the royalties through self-publishing, cartoonists can sell directly to their readers through their websites. Please help my friend, who also happens to be one of the best cartoonists anywhere, to make this happen by supporting his Kickstarter.

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