What’s the journalistic step beyond beat-sweetener? Public ego massage? Molly Ball, at the Atlantic, does a workmanlike job of promoting Erick Erickson as the face of the new, younger, media-hip GOP. (I did not know that Erickson actually grew up in an American oil contract workers’ compound in Dubai, but it helps confirm his fitness as the Voice of the GOP Gated Community.) Rush Limbaugh’s name is invoked, but the GOP elder who seems to have the most to fear from the Erickson depicted in this story is Mike Huckabee:
… RedState draws about a quarter of a million unique visitors a month, according to comScore—a fraction of the audience of conservative sites like Newsmax and The Daily Caller. Erickson himself is not nearly as visible a pundit as, say, Ann Coulter or Karl Rove. But he may be more influential: His pronouncements can decide whether a policy lives or dies. His anointment can lift a candidate out of obscurity. Members of Congress have him on speed dial.
Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me he consults Erickson regularly, and the conservative faction of the House GOP looks to RedState for guidance…
Erickson’s influence stems from the fact that he’s not just a pundit—he’s an activist who gets involved in contentious primary battles, bestowing endorsements that draw attention and cash to little-known candidates. In 2009, he came out for Marco Rubio in Florida’s Senate race when the former state legislator was polling nearly 50 points behind and the whole GOP apparatus was backing Charlie Crist, the former governor who has since switched parties. More endorsements for Rubio followed, including from the deep-pocketed Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth, and Crist dropped out of the primary to run as an independent. Rubio ended up winning the general election by 19 points.
Other conservative challengers who benefited from Erickson’s endorsements in the 2010 cycle include Mike Lee, who took down Bob Bennett, a three-term Republican senator from Utah, and Rand Paul, who ran in the Kentucky Senate primary against Mitch McConnell’s preferred candidate, Trey Grayson.
A South Carolina state lawmaker named Nikki Haley was considered a long shot for the 2009 gubernatorial nomination when she caught Erickson’s fancy with her conservative zeal. For 10 days straight, RedState featured her on its front page, urging readers to donate. Haley gained momentum, and a late endorsement from Sarah Palin helped catapult her to the top of the field. “RedState was there in the very beginning,” Haley, who considers Erickson a “dear friend,” told me. “I was ‘Nikki who?’ ” Haley was just reelected to a second term as South Carolina’s governor, and has been on the longer lists of potential 2016 vice-presidential nominees.
Ted Cruz came from 3 percent in the polls and a three-to-one cash disadvantage to win his 2012 Senate primary in Texas, thanks in part to Erickson’s boosting. Cruz has attended every one of RedState’s annual “Gatherings” since they began in 2009. Cruz and Erickson have become friends, and Erickson has said Cruz is as great as “all the Beatles in one person” and called him “the leader of the conservative movement.” (Cruz returns the favor. “RedState gives people a voice,” he told me.)…
So Erickson is the rooster who crows so loudly, he can make the sun come up. Every morning!
… Spending so much of his childhood overseas also made him an outsider to American racial dynamics, Erickson says. He claims that, unlike Americans who grew up here, he lacks an intuitive understanding of racial politics. It’s a slightly absurd claim, reminiscent of the parodic color-blindness of Stephen Colbert (“I don’t see race!”), but, unlike some others in talk radio—Limbaugh, for instance—Erickson does not pepper his show with racial provocations. As we drove to get [his young daughter] Evelyn from her private Christian day school, where acres of neatly trimmed sports fields gleamed in the sunshine, he told me, with a sad shake of his head, that he believed only time, not government intervention, could heal America’s racial wounds…
In his gray Chevy Tahoe, Erickson gave me a tour of his neighborhood, a tony community of custom homes just this side of McMansions. Macon is dense with churches, and we drove past one whose marquee referred to the week’s primaries: vote for those who will seek wisdom from god…
Erickson’s main project on the [Macon city] council was cleaning up the Asian massage parlors that operated as fronts for prostitution and human trafficking in Macon’s downtown. Police raids didn’t work: the women working in the parlors either didn’t speak English or were afraid to talk to the cops. Erickson sought new regulations to drive out the illegitimate massage businesses without burdening the legal ones by, for example, requiring them to keep a log of visitors.
Some of the massage parlors had African American landlords, and Erickson was accused of trying to hurt black business owners. He enlisted an ally to reach out to black churches, asking them to help fight sin in their communities. After three years, his regulatory scheme passed, and for the most part, it has been a success…
The irony is not lost on Erickson: “Yeah, I know, the free-market Republican who ran for office and started passing regulations to put all these businesses out of business,” he told me, chuckling. But he believes more government functions should be performed by local bodies rather than by an overreaching federal bureaucracy, and he does not consider local government an inherently partisan endeavor. (“There’s not a partisan position on trash collection,” he said.)…
And therein speaks the true voice of the HOA partisan. Of course there are “positions” on trash collection, from the question of who is held responsible for doing it (the producers or the municipality) to the issues of who is paid to do it (government department or contract outfits? union or non-union?), who is responsible for seeing it done properly, and who benefits from both the collection and the eventual disposal. Not for nothing does Tony Soprano run his less licit businesses under cover of a waste management corporation. But in Erickson-World, “everybody” agrees that there is filth (some of it, regrettably, human) which must be removed from the community, and the only question is how this may be done with maximal efficiency at minimal cost. Decent folk, once having had the removal contract properly scrutinized by a local lawyer (and Mr. Erickson just happens to be one of those!) will avert their eyes from the messy details. Or so Mr. Erickson, and his contractors, devoutly hope.
…Erickson’s authority has always come from his status as an outsider to the Washington political class. But these days, he has better access to certain politicians than the K Street lobbyists do, and allies like Cruz often seem to wield more power than the GOP’s nominal leaders. Erickson began charging for speaking gigs through an agency this year. He has been known to ride the Acela. Isn’t he turning into one of them?, I asked…
“A lot of conservatives are now where liberals were after 2004—hysterically angry about things they have no business being angry about,” Erickson told me. “I think if you believe in a heaven, a hell, a savior who died and rose again, and a last day on which you’ll win because he wins, you probably should spend a lot less time getting worked up over the temporary politics of the here and now.”
I asked him about his increased focus on religion. What was he searching for? Erickson said he felt “called” to learn more about the faith that forms the backbone of his world view. “Some of my most-read posts involve faith,” he said. “At some point, I just accepted that I have a ministry, even if I never get in a pulpit.”
He says that, and then he goes right on throwing stones. In September, while substituting for Limbaugh, Erickson opined on the radio that minimum-wage workers didn’t warrant sympathy, because they were mostly either high-schoolers or people who deserved to be where they were. “If you’re a 30-something-year-old person and you’re making minimum wage, you’ve probably failed at life,” he said. The week before that comment, Erickson had begun his seminary courses…
I can see Erickson as a modern Dr. Grant, per Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. As a minor member of the rentier class, he is supremely happy in a world where he draws a good income to “preach a fine sermon every Sunday” and spend the other six fussing over the details of his excellent dinners, drinking too much vintage port, pestering his unfortunate servants, and jockeying for position in his chosen narrow hierarchy. If only one could count on “two great institutional dinners in one week” to carry him off in good time to wrap up a happy ending for the rest of us!
debbie
Apparently, the next thread down is too much even for Erickson:
talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/erick-erickson-scalise-david-duke
Kropadope
Words fail. That must have been one hell of a nap he took from 9/11/2001 until 1/2005. I guess he’s still half-right though. Better than most faux-conservatives.
cmorenc
Query: there’s no mention whatever of Huckabee in the linked article (from which the included quotes are taken). Where do you find the basis in that the article’s depiction of Erickson for the conclusion that he’s bad news for Huckabee?
Schlemazel
@debbie:
Every once in a while one of these inflamed assholes can surprise you. Apparently he really is just dense & obtuse & not an intentional racial. It hardly makes up for all his other evil but it is sort of nice to know I guess because so many of those guys are racist because they know it is a requirement of their job. Somehow its worse thinking they are doing it for greed & power than because they are just racist.
EDIT: Of course it just occured to me it may be that he is not upset with the Duke connection except “we don’t show that to the neighbors” sort of ‘baptist temperance’
Baud
I really couldn’t care less about the personalities in the conservative space. What this article really tells me as that, after all this time, there are no bloggers on the left worth talking about.
jl
I did not know Erick Erickson was the most powerful conservative in the U.S. or that he ever had any kind of edge at all.
I learned something today.
BD of MN
It’s tough to keep reading when the eyes are rolling so hard…. My fair burb decided, a couple of years ago, to bid out trash collection on a citywide basis instead of letting everyone pick their own trash hauler, and the wailing from the “free market” types was deafening. Never mind our rates went down and I now only have one heavy truck driving down my street on Mondays instead of five of them, the fealty to the Free Markets must be maintained….
Corner Stone
@cmorenc: Query: Are people who use the formulation Query, really big canoes, or the biggest canoes ever?
debbie
@Baud:
I doubt, being at Bloomberg.com, that Margaret Talev is a blogger on the left, but I still enjoyed this:
bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-12-29/five-ways-obama-can-mess-with-republicans-in-2015
Howard Beale IV
You can’t polish a turd, no matter how hard you try.
rusty
From the full article:
He told me about a man who had come up to him to rant about immigrants ruining schools and neighborhoods. “I’m like, ‘Why are you so angry?’ ” He thinks conservatives suffer from a persecution complex. “I hear it in radio. I see it in comments at RedState and in e-mail and on Twitter. When you as a conservative go out there and pound your fist on the table and say, ‘They’re coming to get me,’ who wants to say, ‘Yeah, I’m coming to your side’? I mean, be happy!”
It seems to me that a leading conservative light who does not understand or does not feed into the underlying persecution complex of the American right, will not have a lengthy tenure in his/her leadership position. The stabbed in the back phenomenon of American conservatives is going on 100 yrs old, and the people who understand and feed this phenomenon like Nixon, Cheney and Limbaugh, for example, seem to last the longest in their leadership positions.
M. Bouffant
Wonkette deals w/ this piece of crap. Two pieces if you want to count the typist. Via.
Baud
@debbie:
Sounds good.
Anne Laurie
@cmorenc:
Mike Huckabee is a highly-paid Fox News “advisor” who got that post by campaigning as a GOP godbotherer with a kinder, gentler attitude — hate the sin, not the sinner! Erickson is a radio personality, now going for his theological certification, who presents himself to Molly Ball as a kinder, gentler GOP conservative mouthpiece.
Limbaugh is a blowhard entertainer who struck lucky by riding the upswell in angry white “conservative” (radical) politics. His political rants were never more than a tool for his media ambitions. Erickson, like Huckabee, is using the media as a tool for his political ambitions. I don’t think there’s room for more than one national-level “GOD WANTS YOU TO VOTE (*ME* ) GOP” figure — if Erickson is going to expand his audience, it will be at Huckabee’s expense.
SatanicPanic
@Baud: worth it or not, I feel like we talk about bloggers on the left here often enough to make up for the rest of the media
Southern Beale
This is funny because of every time (liberal) Nashville or Memphis pass a law that our Republican supermajority doesn’t like (for example, gay non-discrimination bills), the state legislature passes a law against it.
So I’m just really confused about how conservatism is “supposed” to work. I suspect it’s, “whatever way we can get our ideology codified into law.”
jl
@rusty:
“I’m like, ‘Why are you so angry?’ ”
EE has no future in the current GOP. None.
Glad that EE helped clean up human trafficking during his stint in Macon, and has called for Scalise to resign (since Scalise is either a liar or too stupid to hold any position of any responsibility).
EE has managed to do two good things. He has suffered enough. He seems to have a nice family, why not retire from public life and spend some time with them? Then some toxic lunatic can take his place and drive more sane people out of the GOP.
jl
@Southern Beale:
‘ So I’m just really confused about how conservatism is “supposed” to work. ‘
I think a good summary is ‘Show me the money’.
Anne Laurie
@Schlemazel:
Agreed. That’s why he’s the Voice of the GOP Gated Community — “Ot-nay in front of the ildren-chay, neighbor!”
Baud
@SatanicPanic:
Not really. I think we’re a closed loop. What we discuss is enjoyable enough for us, but it doesn’t really penetrate the outside world.
Southern Beale
@Anne Laurie:
Erick Erickson is a “kinder, gentler” conservative? A perusal of his Twitter account proves how wrong that is.
Remembering when he wrote “IF we could just go back to hangings and firing squad, we wouldn’t have to wring our hands over how humanely we execute savage murders.”
What an ass.
Corner Stone
@Anne Laurie: It was not really difficult to locate this part and complete the connection:
That is pure Shuckabee Schtick.
cmorenc
@Corner Stone:
Damn, pulled over by a language cop. Could I please have your badge number, sir?
Southern Beale
@Corner Stone:
“I have a ministry” is a fundiegelical cliche. Every damn fundiegelical “has a ministry,” whether it’s selling donuts or preaching in a megachurch. And they all just love to tell you about their “ministry.” When you live in the Bible belt like I do, you run across this a LOT.
Mandalay
@ Anne Laurie: The bulk of this OP is reposting fifteen paragraphs from an Atlantic article written by someone else, with just a few lines of your own. You think that is fair use?
Not cool at all.
SatanicPanic
@Baud: I know, I’m just being silly
Jewish Steel
@Corner Stone: He’s been trying on the robes for a spell.
.
-EWE on twitter 10/25/12
SatanicPanic
@Jewish Steel: “the Obama”? “it”?
raven
Wait til Jody Hice takes office.
jl
@Southern Beale: I think that is Huckabee’s schtick too. Claim you think and say decent things, then slip in enough vicious wishes and recommendations and nasty fervent hopes, so that your audience know it ain’t really so.
The audience for this political type are suckers for affinity fraud, and they have a lot more affinity with Huckabee in many ways.
Can’t tell from his wikipedia gio, but EE don’t look like a man who done shot hisself squirrels and then fricaseed up their brains, licked his fingers and liked it. He didn’t go to no good Baptist school, but some sekeler rebiellious sin pot like Mercer (edit: that is, some godless BINO place -Baptist In Name Only). Erickson done hung around sinful big cities like Baton Rouge and Macon, and got grew up over in that there Dooobaaayhh, whatever that is.
Huckabee got nothin’ to fear from Erickson.
carolus
The seminary is getting someone who accused SC Justice David Souter of being a “goat fucking child molester.”
Look, this is all part of a campaign to mainstream Erickson so he can get a gig on national media. The ministry thing is a sham.
The guy’s a douchecanoe of the highest order.
Corner Stone
@cmorenc:
“Karma Police, arrest this man”
I am still so pissed about MM giving me that earworm I can not even possibly express.
Now I share it with you all! Go forth, and Radiohead!
Violet
@jl: Erickson looks like the Junior V.P. everyone hates. Just powerful enough to make your life miserable. Not as smart or capable as he thinks he is. Wife’s much better looking and smarter than him but seems afraid of him. Beats his kids and the dog. Tells inappropriate jokes and you cringe.
Corner Stone
@carolus:
!
He was already on CNN! WTF?
Corner Stone
That was so pig fucking stupid the Lions should dock his pay for that BS.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
As a Lions fan I can’t wait until Suh takes his act elsewhere. We can’t possibly replace his talent but I’ll feel better about the whole thing.
Jewish Steel
@SatanicPanic: Yeah, I know. Nice word salad, Ewick.
Mike in NC
Erickson probably knows a lot about message parlors.
His face invites a fist.
John
@Southern Beale: Let’s just start doing crucifixions again. If it was good enough for our Lord Jesus, it should be good enough for us.
carolus
@Corner Stone:
I know. You don’t think he’d want his own gig? Something a bit longer lasting and more lucrative?
Corner Stone
@carolus:
I think he just wants to serve the Lordt. His heart is pure, and his strength is that of 100 men.
I, for one, welcome our new Religio Overlordts.
low-tech cyclist
– Erick, son of Erick
I think if you believe that the guy who said to pray to God that “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is the Savior, then you damn well should be getting worked up about doing your bit to make that happen.
And too many jobs not paying enough to make a decent life off of, and not enough jobs of any kind to go around, while the richest of the rich make out like bandits, is pretty much the opposite of the way the Bible says it should be. And those of us who call ourselves Christians are called to not sit idly by and let this be the way the world works.
TriassicSands
Funny thing, neither Erickson, nor his fellow conservatives believe that to be the case for health care. If minimal cost and maximal efficiency (which would mean the best care for the most people) were the philosophy of the GOP, then they would have insisted on a single payer universal system long ago. But that’s not even close to what they believe.
What they believe is that people who can’t afford health care are bad people who don’t deserve health care. Therefore, they support a system that rations care by cost.
Frankensteinbeck
@TriassicSands:
What they believe is that people who can’t afford health care are black.
Although that’s really an oversimplification. They’ve built up a healthy level of ‘Fuck you, I want to watch you die and laugh about it’ on top of that, and it extends to pretty much anyone. Selecting for racial hate selected for hate, period.
another Holocene human
I read about halfway through this article. It’s not inaccurate per see but the skin is misleading. Infinite Ericks did not pluck Young Rubio from obscurity; Rubio was a party insider who was put forward by the anti-Crist faction in the party (Fla GOP) and retro actively dubbed “tea party”. Erick just did what he was told. His job was to get GOP voters to fall in line.
Pretty sure Haley was another insider put forward by party bosses as part of a deliberate nationwide tokenism strategy and labeled tea party back when the gop still bankrolled and controlled that label. So she’s mischaracterizing the role of someone like Erick, the way the GOP likes it I’m sure.
Chet
@Southern Beale: After that horrific Oklahoma City tornado last spring, Erickson’s first instinct was to tweet a cheap Benghazi joke (“I wonder when President Obama will find out about Oklahoma”). When people rightly took offense, his response was, essentially, fuckem if they can’t take a joke.
The Potter’s clay, surely.
Chet
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: You and me both.
Re: Suh, I keep seeing and hearing comments to the effect of, “He’s such a talented player, why does he resort to this stuff?” I suspect the answer is that the fucker gets off on it.
Matt
Translation: Ewick, like most self-proclaimed “libertarians”, believes that the ultimate freedom is the freedom to totally rule others in whatever tin-horn-dictatorship-in-minature you can scare up. Whether that means the county sheriff in bumblefuck who gets to arrest anybody he wants, or the father who gets to control his wife and children, or the pastor demanding 10% of everybody’s income so he can drive a Caddy, or the HOA president who gets to muscle around the rest of the gated community, or even just the dirt-poor cracker who gets to demand “respect” at the point of a gun from African Americans – it’s all the same impulse…
Don K
@BD of MN:
Only one? We get four every Wednesday (trash, recycling, yard waste, and heavy garbage), from just one hauler. Next-door Bloomfield Hills uses the pick-your-own-hauler system, and when the city commission proposed going to a single-hauler system a few years ago you’d have thought it was the end of freedom and the beginning of communism, reading all of the caterwauling from the Free Market purists.