While CNN was noting that “a handful of cranky and
inebriated Republican donors wandered about Romney's election night
headquarters, angrily demanding that the giant television screens inside the
ballroom be switched from CNN to Fox News, where Republican strategist Karl
Rove was making frantic, face-saving pronouncements about how Ohio was not yet
lost,” Mark Mardell of the BBC saw the election as “a three-legged race with
the runners struggling to go their own sweet way, while bound together by heavy
chains. There will be a lot of talk of the fiscal cliff - the mutually agreed
suicide pact that was meant to concentrate minds on agreement. Unless they do,
the Democrats will be hit by spending cuts they don't want and the Republicans
saddled with tax rises plus defense cuts that are abhorrent to them. Still
chained on the edge, they seem determined to jump off the cliff, wrapped in an
ugly embrace.”
Not to be outdone by such negativity, the radio-right has been
busy predicting Armageddon the morning after, and of course who else but that
keeper of the “conservative” agenda, Rush Limbaugh, is bemoaning the fate of
civilization as he knows it. For a taste
of how the fat man who for the past four years has made it his personal mission
to destroy Barack Obama through any means necessary was handling the situation,
I tuned into his somewhat subdued harangue, in which he expressed unhappiness that some Republican leaders were actually blaming him for the election defeat. Fortunately the conceited gas
bag also provided a complete written transcript for the country’s edification.
Here are some excerpts:
But first, let me tell
you, small things beat big things yesterday.
Conservatism, in my humble opinion, did not lose last night. It's just very difficult to beat Santa Claus. It is practically impossible to beat Santa
Claus. People are not going to vote
against Santa Claus, especially if the alternative is being your own Santa
Claus.
Limbaugh seems to be referring to his belief that Obama’s
supporters expect him to provide them with “gifts” from his Christmas bag of
government goodies. Of course, most of us who voted for Obama have no idea what
he is talking about. All I expect to receive from Obama is to force the
unwilling to invest in this country’s future—meaning education, infrastructure,
alternative energy and the like. I guess Limbaugh thinks these are just useless
“goodies.” And he expects an individual to take his or her hammer and nails and
build a bridge? Hell, even private corporations won’t do that unless the
government gives them money.
The Obama campaign was
about small stuff. War on Women,
binders, Big Bird, this kind of stuff.
The Romney campaign was about big things, was about America. It's mind-boggling to go through these exit
polls. You want to hear a statistic that
is somewhat surprising? Romney received
two and a half million fewer votes than McCain did. Now, who would have called that? Who in the world would have? I think Obama's vote tally was down ten
million from 2008, and we still lost. We
lost 50 to 48 nationally. We were not
able to build a turnout model that looked like 2004. Very puzzling.
It should be pointed out that Romney’s economic and jobs
program was little different than Obama’s; the difference was that while Obama
actually spelled-out what he was going to do, Romney merely broke down his plan
into bite-sized morsels that seemed “big” when you called it a “5 point plan.” Maybe
that’s why people didn’t come out for Romney as he believed they would. The only
difference was Romney included a regressive tax plan and a huge military budget
increase that was only comprehensible if it included gigantic cuts in social
programs—including Social Security and Medicare, which of course is what Paul
Ryan’s job description would have included. Thus it is not “puzzling” at all
that voters were even less enthused about the Romney ticket.
All of these things
that define the traditional institutions that made this country great, that's what
the Romney campaign was about. It was rejected. That way, or that route to
prosperity was sneered at. That route to prosperity was rejected. The people
who voted for Obama don't believe in it. They don't think it's possible. They
think the game's rigged. They think the deck is stacked against them.
Occasionally Limbaugh has moments of enlightenment, even if
he doesn’t realize it. Of course, Romney’s
route to wealth didn’t include actually making things (at least not in this
country), and the way financial gamblers like Romney operated, the fate of
workers was always in the hands of people who played by their own rules.
The thing that's
mind-boggling is that there is no new prosperity in America. There is no
improved standard of living. It's all going down. "But Obama cares. He
really cares! He cares much more than Romney. He really, really cares. In fact,
he cares so much, we're gonna give him a do-over. We're gonna give him a second
term to do what we know he wanted to do in the first term but wasn't able to
for whatever reason."
Don’t be fooled by the cynicism, which you could detect in
his tone. The standard of living of Americans has been going down since Ronald
Reagan’s “trickle down” economic policies were put in place, and his war on
labor. The problem is that some people who sit behind desks for a living think that they deserve
a lot more money than the people who work with their hands who actually make
the things, or buy the things that makes their largesse possible. Right now,
the best that we can hope for is that there are programs that will continue to be funded that
alleviate the worst abuses of the “system” that now controls corporate culture.
The problem Obama faces is if he can get any Republicans to “care” this time
around.
None of it makes any
sense! Mitt Romney and his wife and his family are the essence of decency. He's
the essence of achievement. Mitt Romney's life is a testament to what's
possible in this country. Mitt Romney is the nicest guy anybody would ever run
into. Mitt Romney is charitable. He wouldn't hurt a fly. He doesn't hate. He's
not discriminatory in any way, shape, manner, or form.
I don’t doubt that Mitt Romney is a good family man and
believes in his religion. I just don’t think he actually has any empathy or understanding
of the problems of anyone outside his own narrow social sphere (whose “problems”
seem to be that they are just not rich enough). They are just that “47 percent”
he sneered at.
Every Obama voter may
not be religious, but they believe in Santa Claus. And you know what else they
believe about Santa Claus? Santa Claus doesn't judge anybody. You're gonna get
your stuff no matter how you behave. You're gonna get your stuff whether you're
a good guy, bad guy, or a nonentity. Santa Claus isn't judgmental. In fact,
Santa Claus loves you because you have the deck stacked against you!
What is this thing about Santa Claus? He has certainly been
good to Limbaugh, whose corporate sponsors pay him $40 million a year to spout
this nonsense. He is a stooge of corporate America, getting fatter and lazier
with this kind of “logic” by the day.
CALLER: As a woman, and Republican woman as a matter
of fact, I just am totally disgusted for women not coming out to vote for Mitt
Romney. How could you not want to move
our country in the right direction instead of going backwards.
RUSH: Well, you see, we're getting to the rub of it
here. Apparently for the women who voted
for Obama, he is taking the country in the right direction as far as they're
concerned. The right direction for them
is making sure that Republicans don't take away their birth control pills or
their right to have an abortion. And I'm
not exaggerating. It's what the exit
polls show.
CALLER: Well, it's crazy to believe that. It's crazy to believe that they could do that
or would do that.
It probably is “crazy” to believe that women voted for Obama
on these issues alone; I suspect that if the exit polls actually did reveal
this, it was the handiest excuse the respondents could come-up with to differentiate Obama from Romney.
The truth is something
that we're losing here. We had better
try it at some point. Fear of the truth
is only causing us to lose. Fear of the
truth is only causing us to be outnumbered.
There is no truth on Obama's side of this. There is no truth to Obama's speech last
night. There was no truth in his campaign. There's no truth to what these people
believe. They believe in a mirage. They
believe in an image. They're voting for Santa Claus. Not only are they voting for Santa Claus,
they think they're entitled to a daily visit from Santa Claus. They've been told this country's unfair,
unjust, and immoral to them. It always
has been. That's Obama's great reach to
'em. He's the guy that's gonna fix all
this inequality and all this discrimination and all the disadvantages and all
the unfairness that this country has visited upon these various people. He's Santa Claus.
Ok, enough of this “Santa Claus” business. Let’s just say that
the truth, as Obama’s supporters know it, is that this is supposed to be a
country of the people, for the people, etcetera and so forth—not just the
people who pay Limbaugh’s obscene salary. Obama might not be able to fix all
the inequality and unfairness in this country, but it is not a “mirage” to
believe that he wants to. And I won’t lose any sleep if he continues to be a
pain in the neck to Joe Arpaio—who was elected to yet another shameful term as
Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff.
We do need to take a
conservative message to 'em. At the same time we need to show 'em it works! We
need to show there is a payoff to hard work, and that oftentimes it's not just
financial. There is satisfaction, the sense of achievement, the maximizing of a
person's potential, being the best you can be. Do you realize not one iota of
Obama's message is oriented toward greatness or excellence in the individual?
What one considers “greatness” is a matter of opinion, of
course. The history books look much more kindly on those who believe in
promoting justice in society, than those who promote greed and injustice. As
far as hard work is concerned, too many people are not seeing that payoff that
Limbaugh is referring to. As mentioned before, it is more than a little obscene
for someone like Limbaugh to talk about such things.
The Democrat Party is
more than willing to destroy the traditions and institutions that have defined
this nation's greatness. It doesn't matter what it takes. It doesn't matter
what they end up doing to people's lives. Because at the end of it they're all
gonna have a phone, a TV set, a car and 120 free minutes and food stamps.
We've got two things
that happened here. We are either outnumbered and are losing ground or one of
the most outrageous thefts of an election in the history of elections taken
place. One of those two things happened. You take your pick, but reality is reality.
Now, these two statements come under the heading “pearls of
wisdom.” Frankly, they are more like the rocks that were tossed into Charlie
Brown’s Halloween bag, or just gobs of manure. In any case, this is just the
election morning hangover; the irrational hate mongering will start anew come
tomorrow.
********************************************************
After I got tired of Limbaugh’s sad sack post-election act,
I turned to the local progressive station, where Thom Hartmann was as usual
trying to impress his white female staff by claiming that “women’s issues” were
the “key” to Obama’s reelection—while giving short shrift to the role of minorities,
especially Latinos, who he occasionally scapegoats for the country’s ills
anyways. This country had six years when all three branches of the government
were controlled by the right, and it should be pointed out that while there was
plenty of opportunity to do so, there was never any serious effort of undermine
Roe v. Wade and interfere on a state level with birth control providers; and while
in theory “equal pay” sounds obvious, most people realize that you can’t just
say that this is job is equal to that one (if it was just based on how hard the
work is, a ditch-digger would make as much money as Hartmann, or vice-versa),
and who is in what kind of jobs and in what number.
The fact is that other factors are far more pertinent than
“women’s issues” in defining the future Democratic “coalition.” It can’t be
that “women’s rights” are an issue that Democrats can hope to exploit as the
percentage of white voters slowly dwindles. If white voters believe they are
under “threat,” the 39 percent of the white vote that Obama received, and
future Democratic candidates as well, will decrease even more. The white Democratic
vote will be—as it was in this election—largely composed of liberal and
left-leaning “moderate” whites. “Women’s issues” doesn’t necessarily mean
“progressive”—it appears that for most white female voters, this could also be
perceived as “threats” on their “privileges” and “rights” by racial minorities.
This couldn’t have been more apparent than with the defection of spiteful
feminists to the Republican camp in both 2008 and 2012. I remember back in 2008
when feminist commentator Bonnie Erbe wrote an op-ed calling on Obama to step
aside from the nomination because “whites won’t vote for you.” She was
obviously including herself, and as mentioned before, former Ms. Magazine editor Elaine Lafferty even
joined the McCain campaign as an “adviser” on how to persuade disgruntled
Hillary supporters to vote for him.
The real issue that “progressives” and gender activists have
to get a grip with are numbers like these: 93,71,73. These are the percentages by
which Obama carried the black, Latino and Asian vote in 2012. 45 percent of
Obama’s vote came from this block. Even for a white Democratic candidate, these
numbers are likely to continue to move up, while the percentage of the white
vote decreases. Back in 1985, Michael Dukakis was crushed after losing the
white voted by 19 percent; Obama won reelection despite losing the white vote
by 20 percent. You can find well-off, political minority women who will say
that gender issues are important to them, but the vast majority did not vote for Obama
for that reason; they feel he is far more empathetic to the concerns of
minorities in general than Republicans; on the website Red State (a link to
which was provided by the BBC), one commentator admitted that one reason Romney
lost was because "The Romney
campaign (attitude) to the Hispanic community was atrocious and, frankly, the
fastest growing demographic in America isn't going to vote for a party that
sounds like it hates brown people."
I think far fewer white women actually believe that the Republican
party “hates” them; if this was true, than the 56-42 margin that exit polls
showed that white women supported Romney would be much less. The real key for
the Democratic party is to maintain their liberal base and convince enough
moderate whites that the future of the country is best served by not supporting
discriminatory and reactionary policies that have the effect of creating a
permanent underclass that is not economically productive and helping to
maintain a consumer-driven economy.
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