One of the top Politco stories at the moment is a three-page mashup titled “Right blasts RNC ‘autopsy’ as power grab“. (Which kinda pretends there is a “left” or even “center” faction still existent within the GOP, but then: Politico.) The actual nut seems to be that the besieged rump of the Permanent Party have succeeded in pissing off both the wild-eyed farther-right reactionaries at The Base, and the high-dollar revanchists who think everything’s gone to hell since the 1890s:
The GOP’s prescription to cure the ills that helped bring on yet another disastrous presidential cycle would revamp its presidential nominating rules in ways to benefit well-funded candidates and hamper insurgents – a move that quickly heated up the already smoldering feud between the Republican establishment and the tea party-inspired base.
Tucked in near the end of the 97-page report, formally known as The Growth and Opportunity Project, are less than four pages that amount to a political bombshell: the five-member panel urges halving the number of presidential primary debates in 2016 from 2012, creating a regional primary cluster after the traditional early states and holding primaries rather than caucuses or conventions.
Each of those steps would benefit a deep-pocketed candidate in the mold of Mitt Romney. That is, someone who doesn’t need the benefit of televised debates to get attention because he or she can afford TV ads; has the cash to air commercials and do other forms of voter contact in multiple big states at one time; and has more appeal with a broader swath of voters than the sort of ideologically-driven activists who typically attend caucuses and conventions.
The recommendations are also a nod to the party’s donor class. Several donors bluntly told RNC Chair Reince Priebus at meetings right after the election that they wanted Iowa, with its more conservative base, to have less of a role in the process.
Reaction was swift. Allies of potential 2016 hopefuls Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and former Sen. Rick Santorum, sensing a power play by the establishment-dominated panel, reacted angrily to recommendations they think are aimed at hurting candidates who do well in caucuses and conventions and need debates to get attention…
The autopsy committee members – former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer, South Carolina GOP Committeeman Glenn McCall, Florida GOP strategist and Jeb Bush adviser Sally Bradshaw, Mississippi GOP committeeman Henry Barbour and Puerto Rico committeewoman Zori Fonalledas – notably stayed out of the question of whether presidential delegates should be allocated at-large or proportionally. But they left no doubt that they wanted a primary that does less damage to their eventual nominee and wraps up more quickly to give their candidate more time to face the opposition…
Davie Bossie, head of the conservative group Citizens United, fretted that the proposals would mean conservative grassroots candidates, already outmatched organizationally and financially against the GOP establishment on the presidential level, “even less opportunity to break through.”
“I don’t think that is a good thing for the party and I definitely don’t think it’s a good thing for the conservative movement,” said Bossie.
I’ll admit I don’t understand why Citizens United, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, suddenly feels the need to pretend that they care about the little people, so “outmatched organizationally and financially”. Is it entirely a marketing ploy? Or do Charles and David Koch, steeped since birth in their dad’s Bircherite paranoia, really believe there is a secret insider “GOP establishment” (possibly related to David Ickes’ Lizard People), who wouldn’t sell themselves and all their political kinfolk into slavery for the promise of a cushy consulting gig?
Linkmeister
Bossie’s two-facedness is remarkable.
NotMax
He’s getting up there in years, but perhaps David Koch will try a last gasp run for ’16. He already has some limited experience in that area, having been on the Libertarian ticket for v.p. in ’80.
Then again, he’s on the record as supporting same-sex marriage and also stem-cell research.
Yutsano
Can you FEEL the JEBMENTUM!! now muthafuckas??
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Good Lord, they’re still giving work to David Bossie? the man who helped Dan Burton conduct his gourd shooting investigations of Vince Foster’s death. They really can’t find some young and hungry Ivy League libertarian?
NotMax
@Yutsano
Barring an official change of name, would actually be kind of an interesting (and messy) legal stew to determine how he would be listed on ballots, according to the rules in each state (and in each primary locale).
Some would (by law) be required to list him as John Ellis Bush or John E. Bush or John Bush, for example.
Others (again, by law) would accept the nickname, but only allow it to be printed on the ballot as “Jeb” Bush or John E. “Jeb” Bush(with the quotation marks).
Spaghetti Lee
@NotMax:
I had that problem when I ran for president. A bunch of states said they had to list me as Fred P. “Meatmissile” Smith. Sheesh, a guy does a few movies when he’s younger and he’s gotta pay for it forever.
Mandalay
Not that I give a flying fuck about David Bossie, but his fretting that the RNC report’s proposals would mean conservative grassroots candidates would have “even less opportunity to break through” is well placed. Why? Because if you read the content of that RNC Report it is in favor of the entire selection/election process being controlled by…..the RNC!
Quelle surprise!
Here’s an example (p.92) of what is making poor David soil his diaper:
Somehow I doubt that crazies like Rand and Ted will take kindly to a report which tells them to fuck off and respect their betters.
NotMax
@Spaghetti Lee
Heh. Now if they had not been, shall we say, lacking in production values, who knows?
I’d vote for Fred P. “Meatmissile” Smith over Fred C. “Goldlust” Dobbs any day.
Ah, if Willard had only thought to ask to be listed as W. Mitt “Ramrod” Romney.
piratedan
the thing is that this hurts those that grift from those that give. More candidates, more rubes to fleece, longer drawn out campaigns, more media buys, more consultants, more smoke filled rooms where “I know a guy” and ultimately, more popcorn. Kind of nice to see those that “believe” that we have a Kenyan Ursurper in office finally turn their gaze to the guys who have been playing them for suckers all along… Not that they would ever vote for a Dem in any election but would love to seem them get so disgruntled (because they KNOW how to do disgruntled, gawd forbid they ever get gruntled) form the Patriot Party so there could be more circular firing squads.
mdblanche
OT: I think this article was mentioned on an earlier thread, but it hit home for me.
The city in the article was my father’s hometown. It used to be a mill town. Most of the workers were surplus dirt farmers from Quebec who came since there was nothing for them in Canada, the world’s most overrated country, except poverty and discrimination. The fact that my father’s family had job skills meant they were relatively well off and eventually moved out. Not everyone did.
At its height Woonsocket promoted itself as the third largest French speaking city on the continent and attracted overseas investment from France and Belgium. But the investors were quick to relocate when the formerly docile mill workers started unionizing and even cheaper labor was discovered in Dixie.
The mills started closing after World War I and most of the remainder closed after World War II. They were replaced with nothing. All that’s left is a cheap housing stock that attracts people with nowhere else to go. The first newcomers were Southeast Asians, many dislocated by our imperial misadventures in their homelands. The newest to arrive are some of those Latinos we’ve been hearing about since the last election.
The economy there has been broken for a very long time, long before the rest of our economy broke. And nobody- not those mythical job creators, not Obama, not Reagan, not LBJ or JFK or FDR- has ever offered more than a band-aid. I don’t know how you can ever fix a place as broken as that, but I know it doesn’t involve a “self-made” scion of the same type of family that broke it in the first place like Paul Ryan taking the band-aid too.
David
If their crazy and/or pointless ideas didn’t stink debates wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Another Halocene Human
Or is Citizens United due for one of those famous Koch purges?
Another Halocene Human
@mdblanche: Lowell, Lynn, Fitchburg much the same. The jobs stopped there in the 1970s, the Southeast Asian immigrant communities there trapped in the well of poverty, and nobody cares or even really knows what to do. Cargo containers leave Eastern Mass empty.
Linda Featheringill
I’m glad to see the RNC report. It looks like an effort by the Republican Establishment to get control of the party back from the lunatic fringe.
It would be nice to have a two-party political system. I don’t trust one-party systems, even if it’s my party. [Sort of a corollary to “Power corrupts . . .”]
Now, whether the RNC will be successful is another question. I have no prediction about that.
Patricia Kayden
So if I’m reading that article correctly, does this mean no more RNC Conventions? Dang! I’ll miss avant-garde performance of old men talking to empty chairs. And wives of Presidential Candidates ending their speeches with “I love you women!!!!”
raven
@Patricia Kayden: No, earlier.
WereBear
What I see is a bunch of rats seeing the sinking ship shrink.
Thing about the Winger Grifters is that the worse the party does, the more they can send out emails claiming the Death Squads are coming to smash the heads of all your china dolls!
Send money here to keep that from happening!
geg6
I actually read the report and, I’ll admit, had a bit of trepidation about it because it made so much sense (and I really didn’t think the Obvious Anagram had any). If they did what is being recommended, they really could come back from Crazytown and win. But I should have known that the crazies would totally freak out. I also read that Limbaugh was having apoplexy over it, so I should have known right away that this plan will never go anywhere. Poor Reince, he forgot who really is the chairman of the RNC.
WereBear
@geg6: Dependent on the Rubes, they are.
Limbaugh and Presidential races and television and the basic email grift rely on numbers; the more the better. They don’t care how crazy they are.
But this turns around and bites them when it comes to their platform and how they look to non-members of the tribe. The money boys want to dial back the crazy… but I wonder if they can. What is left? The crazy takes off in a huff and then they are really small in numbers.
Schlemizel
@mdblanche:
I grew up on the East side of St. Paul and the story is similar. Fathers there worked for whirlpool, 3M or Hamm’s and made a living wage. Then those companies started finding cheaper labor in the South and overseas. Death was in the air by the late 1960’s as Whirlpool was gone, Hamm’s a dieing brand and 3M shipping jobs as fast as it could.
The neighborhood aged out at just the right moment to become home for the largest population of Vietnamese refugees in the country. It is very poor and has a gang and crime problem.
The fix for place like these is very simple – decent jobs at living wages with a hope for a better future. No government can do that though, it requires company management that cares more for their employees and looks to the good of the whole and cares less about their 8 figure bonuses and gold plated perks.
Just One More Canuck
So the RNC thinks the peasants are revolting?
Linda Featheringill
@Just One More Canuck: #21
:-)
Suffern ACE
@Mandalay: yep. The RNC wants you to spend your PAC money in RNC approved ways and on RNC approved people. Oh, and if you’d just give more money to the RNC itself…
Chris
So what if it benefits Deep Pocketed Candidates? If they’re deep pocketed, they’re obviously Job Creators, our betters in all things, who will know exactly what the country needs because they’re businessmen. Instead of disrespecting those wonderful people from whom all good things come by running against them, these lazy ungrateful people should be singing their praises and working on their campaigns.
jon
Not since 1928 have they won without a Nixon or a Bush on the ticket. And they’re all out of Nixons.
(Mojo and Cynthia each denied Koch Brothers’ proposals.)
Barry
Anne: “I’ll admit I don’t understand why Citizens United, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, suddenly feels the need to pretend that they care about the little people, so “outmatched organizationally and financially”. Is it entirely a marketing ploy? ”
Yes.
They looked at the 2012 freak show, and realized that it hurt them. They’d have been much better served with a short primary season (to better keep the taste of Santorum out of everybody’s mouth) and only a few debates, which would have been limited to serious candidates (no Newts or Cains).
If they had done that, Mitt would have had things clearly wrapped up in March, and the spotlight would have been on him alone.
Central Planning
@mdblanche:
That was a depressing article. There were some comments that blamed the local government, and the typical “they don’t know how to save”/blame the poor going on there too. What’s your take on the local government there?
And, what exactly is a dirt farmer? Do we have so much dirt that there are surplus dirt farmers? Is it a French thing? “Dennis! There’s some lovely filth down here!”
Full Metal Wingnut
Isn’t this a good thing? It seems like the National GOP is trying to sink the crazies, or at least extricate themselves from them given the past few years. What’s the Tea party gonna do, vote Dem? Vote for an untested branch off party? Hopefully!!!
Whatever the motives, anything that fucks over a guy like Rand Paul has my approval. I still dislike the old guard Republicans, but I don’t hate them on the same level I hated DeMint and now Cruz, Rubio, Paul, et al. Sink the crazies. Sink em.
Full Metal Wingnut
@Full Metal Wingnut: I guess to the extent it makes an R presidential candidate more electable, that’s a bad thing. But power will revert to the Republican Party eventually, that’s not a wild prediction. Better to have a slightly less crazy incarnation of the party when that happens.
Full Metal Wingnut
And to the extent this makes the party accidentally saner it’s a good thing. The choice between a Cruz and a Christie is still a shit sandwich, but incremental progress.
I was disturbed by all the Dems trying to push the nomination to Santorum. I got the strategy, but long-term we can’t pin our hopes on the R being to crazy to elect. That sort of overconfidence will kill us. The problem with the too-crazy-to-get-elected gambit is that if it fails, you have a crazy for a president.
Birthmarker
I enjoyed this post, and the comments…
Full Metal Wingnut
@Full Metal Wingnut: I also don’t have very much faith in independents (you know, the mouthbreathers who decide our elections). Betcha there are plenty of them that, in 2016 will think “Welp, 8 years of a Dem, let’s give a Republican president a shot,” regardless of who runs.
Hoodie
Because the Kochs don’t care about winning national elections if they can’t keep the Overton window shifted as far to the right as possible and get state governments to enact legislation that is ultra friendly to them. As long has they have a roadblock in the House and can run amok in the states, they’re happier than they would be with an national RNC that is on a thin leish. They wanted Mitt to win, but on their terms. The primary process forced Mitt to dutifully bow to every aspect of the Koch agenda. He was even forced to publicly humiliate himself by denouncing his own health care plan. And he came pretty close to winning. That is a key fact; the current process still produced a “moderate,” as there were idiots (i.e., pundits) who still believed Mitt was a moderate.
The Tea Party types have delivered big time for the Kochs, particularly at the state level, where tea-friendly state legislatures have enacted gobs of retrogade legislation. For example, here in NC they’ve been engaged in a nonstop slash and burn program to reverse years of progressive governance that has generally been bipartisan. Now, they have a captive formerly “moderate” governor and they’ve got him well-trained.
The problem they have with this new GOP “reform” is that it may help win national and statewide election, but will give too much independence to GOP politicians that hold those posts. Christie is a poster child for that, which may have been why he was locked out of CPAC. The Kochs want bought and paid for goons like Walker, not guys like Christie who have independent power bases and can tell them to fuck off. The Kochs want to keep the crazies around as enforcers.
Chris
@Full Metal Wingnut:
What does “sane” even mean anymore? The last two Republican-in-the-White-House eras gave us the same huge-military-buildup-with-tax-cuts-on-the-rich-ending-in-economic-disaster cycles, along with a completely unwarranted war in the last one. Both those presidents would be considered “sane” and “moderate” (or as the teabaggers call it, “RINO”) by the standards of the current party.
Even if you can get someone who’s “moderate” by the current standards (e.g. Chris Christie), he’d have to make so many compromises to the party’s freaks (as Romney) did he wouldn’t have much in common with the old Christie anymore.
lol
This has been making the rounds. All the other times the GOP was totally for reals going to make reaching out to blah people a priority… since 1977.
eyelessgame
@Full Metal Wingnut: Re eight years – yeah. If 1980 had gone the other way, we’d have had a perfect record, since 1944, of eight years D, eight years R, rinse and repeat. By that pattern, we’d expect a Republican president to be elected three years from now.
So long as it’s a Nixon or Bush on the ticket. :)
cmorenc
@piratedan:
Oh, please please PLEASE let there be enough (dis?)gruntlement for this to happen. Let’s cheer for team gruntle!
PIGL
@Schlemizel: Government has a solution to that: tax the bonusses and perks and inflated executive pay. That would change the incentives of the executives to align with their employees and with the investment funds who own the companies.
Until that solution becomes politically acceptable, there is no hope.
Villago Delenda Est
@Barry:
Not sure that would be advantageous. The more you get to know the Marquis du Mittens, the more you grow to loathe him (and his entire fucking family).
artem1s
@Suffern ACE:
ah yes, and Citizen’s United bites them in butt. whocouldanode?
Petorado
I can’t wait to see how the law of unintended consequences plays out on the RNC’s attempt to have a nice and tidy coronation for their candidate. Those guys have a wide open field with no obvious leader or visionary. Everybody thinks the cake is theirs for the taking – tea partiers, Paultards, and moneyed establishment. Instead of a slowburn primary where attrition will forge a frontrunner, Reince’s changes will mean every hopeful will have to come out of the gates swinging. Their nominee will be the guy with the black eyes, a bloody nose, and open sores to be picked at until election day.
gVOR08
I’ve thought for some time that we’re seeing glimmers of a split in the Republican elite. Was the Tea Party an insurgency, or part of a palace coup? It sometimes seems like there’s a Resource Extraction Elite who are seriously ideological and at odds with the more mainstream non resource Corporate and Financial Elite.
mdblanche
@Central Planning: I don’t know much about the city government but nothing I’ve heard is good. The city is on the verge of bankruptcy, but what do you expect when there’s no tax base and a lot of social needs? The Republican Party has had no real local presence since Herbert Hoover killed it off, but lately they’ve been picking up more support from culturally alienated elderly whites. The local Democrats ran out of ideas long ago.
Britain conquered Quebec in the French and Indian War but agreed to preserve local laws and customs until they could ship over enough colonists to outvote the locals, which they eventually did in Ontario, but they should have known better than to try and out-breed Catholics. Between large family sizes and French inheritance laws that divided estates between every son equally, farms were reduced to non-viably small sizes by the late 1800’s/early 1900’s. The colonists the British shipped to Canada were the worst Protestant chauvinists this side of Belfast and they (illegally) made it almost impossible for French Canadians to move to western Canada without abandoning their culture. Moving to the United States was often considered a better option even than Montreal where the same type of Anglos dominated the business community there. Things only improved once the province’s leadership finally stood up to them and people figured out the Church wasn’t really following through on its role as their protector.
Full Metal Wingnut
@Chris: I don’t even know what sane means anymore. I just know that if the crazy continues unabated in the Republican party, we will soon have a cataclysmic Republican president instead of just an atrocious one. One that will make Reagan look like FDR (in terms of government spending maybe not far off-just trying for a rhetorical point)
Full Metal Wingnut
@eyelessgame: I’m from Florida, and all my Republican friends and family lurrrrrv them some Jeb. They’ve already begun compartmentalizing and explaining away W.