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| The Eight Banditos (minus five): McCain, Schumer, and Rubio |
From the Washington Post's "Right Turn" column:
Why is 2013 different than 2007?
By Jennifer Rubin, Published: May 10, 2013
The 2007 immigration reform effort under George W. Bush faltered.
As did, Bush's Pushes in 2001 (pre-9/11, by the way), 2004, and 2006.
So it is natural to wonder if the effort in 2013 won’t collapse as well. But much has changed in six years, and those changes work to the benefit of immigration reform.
Then: A president commanding an increasingly unpopular war and having lost the House was losing altitude, especially with his own party.
Now: A Democratic president desperate for some win — any win — is in office.
Then: The GOP had the White House and was busy constructing (so it thought) a “permanent majority.” Bush had been successful with Hispanic voters, even absent immigration reform.
Now: The GOP has now lost two presidential elections, understands (by and large) that it has a problem with minority voters and is eager to claim an accomplishment for which President Obama’s main contribution will be remaining quiet.
Jen is so infatuated with her own Machiavellianism that it doesn't occur to her that as soon as the bill Obama wants is laid on his desk, he will be all over the Hispanic media claiming credit.
Then: Maverick Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), bane of the right wing, led the charge for the Republicans with Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), the poster boy for liberalism, at his side. Republicans were not disposed to do them any favors.
This time: It is the darling of the GOP, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) who is leading the charge, charming the base and going over the heads of talk-show hosts to reach GOP voters. ...
Then: The conservative base was relatively monolithic and dominate in think tanks and talk radio.
Now: The conservative base is more heterogeneous, with heavy doses of libertarianism. A plethora of think tanks, pundits and activists are now pro-immigration.
Then: The president rolled out a policy initiative and got cut off by right-wing activists.
Well, the President back in 2007 (and 2006, and 2004, and 2001) was a Republican.
This time: Rubio is running a campaign-style effort, employing social media and old media, working both in public and behind the scenes.
None of this means that immigration reform is sure to pass. But it does suggest that the chances for passage are better this time around and that immigration opponents were caught flat-footed (on everything from Rubio’s effectiveness to the Heritage catastrophe), seemingly unaware how strongly a segment of the party had become more ideologically flexible and diverse. The opponents also lack, for the most part, telegenic, capable spokespeople for their cause who are media-friendly and can go toe to toe with pro-reform voices such as Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)
Meanwhile, for once, Republicans on the pro-immigration side laid out a game plan and organized themselves. Grover Norquist at Americans for Tax Reform, the Cato Institute, the American Action Network and many evangelicals have joined together with high-tech executives to run a full-blown campaign for immigration reform.
Marketing uber alles!
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21 comments:
What evangelicals?
Plus can someone explain Grover Norquist to me? I know about his tax pledge, but what kind of voting district does he improve your chances of winning a race if you see him plugging your candidate? Is there some section of the country that is keen on him? I'm drawing a blank myself.
It reminds me of the Lenin quip, after consolidating power: "all we have to do now is the proper bookkeeping."
All Rubin et al have to do now is the proper marketing, the proper mind control.
To paraphrase John Broadus Watson: "Give me 21st century political control as it has evolved in America and as it exists on the pages of the New York Times, and I can turn anyone into a rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; doctor, lawyer, merchant chief."
Marketing and targeting.
It worked for homos. I guess Mexers are just not glam material.
pinko de gayo parades are more 'fun' than cinco de mayo ones.
Couldn't we find a Mexican or Indian who can write decent English, who would be willing to work for the Washington Post for a couple dollars an hour less than this nitwit?
Re: "As I've long been saying, political journalism is increasingly turning into marketing criticism. The dominant instinct of today's Washington press corps is that not only do the best spinmeisters tend to win, but that they deserve to win."
Translation: they now believe their own bullshit.
In the end, that's like the pusher addicted to his own product -- the end is not far off...
I love this "going over the heads of talk-show radio hosts". This is not for lack of trying, he went on Rush and got his amnesty swatted down (though I see that later Rush says that Rubio is a "true conservative", whatever that means).
Rubin also doesn't know the difference between dominant (adjective) and dominate (verb).
Hi Steve,
Can we have a meme contest to escalate the Zuckerberg mockery? We really need to take this guy down a notch and mockery works about a million times better than rational argument. I created a "Scumbag Steve" (no relation to iSteve, of course) meme to drive the point home. I'm sure your very clever readers can come up with better stuff.
My entry: http://memegenerator.net/instance/37799848
The Heat have pulled out to a 20-something point 4th quarter lead on the Bulls, so yours truly is in a pissy mood. Damn Miami. Just glad I didn't go to the trouble of going to the game, as I was originally supposed to do.
Normally I wouldn't bother with such relatively pedantic matters, but my pissed-offedness over what increasingly appears to be an inevitable Miami Heat dynasty gives me license (kind of like when the young ladies take a couple sips of a mixed drink before going home with you, and can then claim that since they'd been drinking, it doesn't count).
Jen Rubin wrote:
Then: Maverick Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), bane of the right wing, led the charge for the Republicans with Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), the poster boy for liberalism, at his side. Republicans were not disposed to do them any favors.
This time: It is the darling of the GOP, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) who is leading the charge, charming the base and going over the heads of talk-show hosts to reach GOP voters. ...
Then: The conservative base was relatively monolithic and dominate in think tanks and talk radio.
It's a tactic of people on the left to label anyone whose politics are even slightly right-of-center as a "right winger." It's not just Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh who are called "right wingers." Even "moderate" RINO squishes like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins get called "right wingers" by lefties.
Actually, even Obama fanboy David Brooks gets called a "right winger" by some of the readers who leave comments on his columns in the NY Times.
Conversely, anyone whose politics fall anywhere left-of-center is called a "liberal," but never a "left winger." And that holds true whether the person is an infotainment-addicted socially liberal (but otherwise apolitical) single girl, or an avowed Marxist. Thus, everybody from Gavin Newsome to the Catholic illegal immigrants who do your landscaping to Rachel Maddow to Noam Chomsky to Paolo Freire to Bill Ayers is "liberal."
So why does our girl Jen use the linguistic framing techniques of her left wing opponents?
Also, how bad has American journalism fallen when a column can appear in a news organ as esteemed as the Washington Post that uses the word "dominate" when it should use the word "dominant"!?!
First, Rubin should know better. That's the kind of mistake that drunk idiots on message boards and yahoo college freshmen make at backwater schools like Northwest Hillbilly State make. Does she also write "should of" instead of "should have," "prolly" instead of "probably," "their" when she means "there" or "they're", and "granite" instead of "granted" (all are common mistakes)?
Second, the Post should of had a proofreader their to correct her mistake. Granite, newspapers have had to cut back on staff, so the prolly don't have proofreaders anymore.
@sunbeam wrote,
"Plus can someone explain Grover Norquist to me? I know about his tax pledge, but what kind of voting district does he improve your chances of winning a race if you see him plugging your candidate? Is there some section of the country that is keen on him? I'm drawing a blank myself."
Maybe Dearborn, MI?
Norquist wants to get all the social issues -- immigration/amnesty, gay marriage and gun control -- off the table (i.e., submit to whatever the Democrats want) so that Republicans can appeal to Latinos and other minority groups with promises of tax cuts.
Norquist is famously the Grand Poobah of the GOP tax cut fetishists.
But has anybody ever asked him what he thinks of the jizya?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9AOhPgCNJs
Conservative attempt at high-tech.
Rubin is not a conservative. She's in it only for Israel.
The girl was a hollywood lawyer for Christ's sake - for 20 years.
She 'discovered' conservatism at the peak of the neocon moment in the 2000s.
On basically every social issue, she's a liberal.
On the economic issue, she doesn't care. She's well-off and her family is even more so.
It's the foreign policy that converted her. As long as the GOP is pro-Likudnik she's a "conservative". If the GOP would go back to it's earlier, more cautious days on wars abroad, she would join the democratic party tomorrow and blast the GOP much like the daily kos.
But she serves a function. She was hired by Fred Hiatt, who himself is a neoconservative very concerned with Israel.
Plus can someone explain Grover Norquist to me? I know about his tax pledge, but what kind of voting district does he improve your chances of winning a race if you see him plugging your candidate? ...
Norquist has zero influence on Mom and Pop Republicans. He's supposed to be a big raiser of funds from corporations and from the Chamber of Commerce.
The U. S. Chamber of Commerce may sound like an antique form the Calvin Coolidge era, but it is still here, plugging for cheap labor.
The GOP has now lost two presidential elections, understands (by and large) that it has a problem with minority voters and is eager to claim an accomplishment for which President Obama’s main contribution will be remaining quiet.
The 1986 amnesty (aka "immigration reform") was passed by a Democratic House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican President. We all remember the "credit" the GOP received for this act of stupidity among Hispanics - the GOP of the Hispanic vote nose-dived and stayed low for decades.
"Republicans on the pro-immigration side laid out a game plan and organized themselves. Grover Norquist at Americans for Tax Reform, the Cato Institute, the American Action Network and many evangelicals have joined together with high-tech executives to run a full-blown campaign for immigration reform."
Why, yes, it's a well-know hallmark of conservative party platforms that the population of the country they claim to represent should be replaced. Helps to keep things real docile, real tranquilo.
Except for Republicans who really are in it for the money and have been bought by big business; Republicans who are complete ego-cases; Republicans who really are Democrats who couldn't get a job as a Democrat; and Republicans who are really ethnic activists (maybe I missed a few other types), I don't understand the Republicans active attempt to be pro-ethnic to the disadvantage of their historic constituents. Why immediately parrot "racist" whine?
I wonder if so many Republicans are lawyers today that they actually do believe the IQ issue is settled and has been found not to exist. There have been court cases, decisions, expensive school district integrations, etc., etc., so if there was any scientific basis for IQ, surely it would have come out in court? Surely the legal system has found the truth? Surely mere science can't get to the bottom of things the way our huge legal system can?
What if a big problem here is that the US judicial system, as an institution, has no way to even admit it was systemically wrong about basic scientific fact? Unlike even the catholic church, the US legal system can't say "uh, sorry about that, the earth really does revolve around the Sun." So the system gets increasingly farcical.
Plus can someone explain Grover Norquist to me? I know about his tax pledge, but what kind of voting district does he improve your chances of winning a race if you see him plugging your candidate? Is there some section of the country that is keen on him?
I suppose he's popular among Chamber of Commerce Republicans. They seem to believe this BS about how flooding the country with poor left-wing peasants will lead to lower taxes for all.
Then: The conservative base was relatively monolithic and dominate in think tanks and talk radio.
"Dominate"? More evidence for my contention that the WaPo no longer uses editors.
I've been a conservative all my life. It really pains me now to admit that my mental picture of a "Republican" is some pussy blowhard blowing smoke about about all the hardass things we have to do but went straight from cossetted childhood to college to air conditioned office building somewhere and is just compensating for his masculine deficiencies.
"Bush had been successful with Hispanic voters, even absent immigration reform."
Why do journalists and pundtis keep repeating this lie. Bush never won a majority of hispanic votes, ever. Not as Governor, not as President, not ever.
Mr. Anon,
It's government-speak. "Budget cuts" are when you increase a budget less than you did last year. "Success with Hispanic voters" is when you take less of a beating from them than the last guy did.
"The opponents also lack, for the most part, telegenic, capable spokespeople for their cause who are media-friendly and can go toe to toe with pro-reform voices such as Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)"
I love how this statement so completely gives away the game. There are, of course, immigration restrictionists who would run rings around these party hacks. But we won't see a debate between Rubio and Buchanan or Kirkorian, let alone Sailer, Brimelow, or Derbyshire.
Why not? Well, they're not "media-friendly," which is a pretty thinly veiled way of saying the media doesn't like *them*.
It's bad enough that open-borders types occupy the commanding heights. But do they really have to be so sneering and brazen about it?
Ms. Rubin's media colleagues won't give restrictionists a fair hearing, and Ms. Rubin cites that as evidence that restrictionists can't make their case! Unbelievable.
Drunk Idiot said . . .
So why does our girl Jen use the linguistic framing techniques of her left wing opponents?
Because they aren't her "left wing opponents," they are her comrades.
For the right price, I can be your straight man all the time . . .
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