Before recent events, I intended to write about the GOP's message problem with the headline: "Shoot the Messenger."
Sunday's fatal shooting of abortion doctor George Tiller makes my title inappropriate, but the idea remains relevant.
The adage, of course, is "Don't shoot the messenger," meaning we shouldn't necessarily blame the person who delivers bad news. For the Republican Party these days, however, the problem isn't so much the message. It's the messenger.
By grotesque coincidence, Tiller's murderer furthers the point.
It has long been a problem for the GOP that some of the party's cherished positions are embraced most enthusiastically by people whose grip on reality is sometimes . . . tenuous. This is especially true with regard to abortion.
There are certainly compelling secular arguments against abortion that one might be perfectly willing to hear. Then Randall Terry shows up.
Terry, the colorful founder of Operation Rescue, doesn't represent the Republican Party, but he is nevertheless the most familiar face of the antiabortion movement. When President Obama recently gave the commencement address at Notre Dame, who showed up to lead the protest but Terry and the equally odd carnival performer Alan Keyes?
Rather than persuading people to think differently about abortion, the Terry-Keyes act makes one want to write checks to Planned Parenthood. And smart Catholics, who were perfectly capable of articulating their objections to the president's invitation to America's premier Catholic university, were suddenly stuck in the frame with rabble-rousers who demean the message.
Such is the continuing dilemma of the GOP: How do you get out the message when the messengers keep getting in the way?
Now comes a fanatic with a gun. Let me be clear: I don't mean to compare Terry or Keyes to the shooter. The former are passionate protesters; the latter is a murderer.
Nor do I join those who accuse talk show host Bill O'Reilly and others who have spoken out against Tiller as somehow being responsible for his murder. The man who pulled the trigger is responsible for Tiller's death. Period.
That said, fire-breathers on the right don't help, whatever the cause. They may warm the base, but the Republican base is becoming a remote island in mainstream America. Everyone else is paddling away.
Accurately or not, the right-wing wacko contingent increasingly dominates the public perception of the GOP. And, fairly or not, that perception makes it easier for characters such as Scott Roeder, the suspected shooter, to become associated with the party.
Roeder is already emerging in stories as a right-wing character from central casting. Previously arrested on explosives charges, Roeder was once attracted to the Montana Freemen, best known for engaging FBI agents in an armed standoff in 1996. Roeder's ex-wife told the Associated Press that he had become "very religious, in an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye way. . . . That's all he cared about is anti-abortion. 'The church is this. God is this.' Yadda yadda."
Indeed.
Some Internet commentary even refers to Roeder as a "Christian terrorist." Let's see: Christian, pro-gun, anti-government, pro-life. Sounds like a Republican, right? Oh, and he's suspected of being an assassin. Connect them dots.
No, it isn't fair. The GOP can't control who joins the party, and Republicans don't have a corner on random crazies. But what the Democrats have that the Republicans lack is a moderating voice to neutralize the party's more strident characters. While Democrats have Obama, Republicans are stuck with the squeakiest wheel du jour.
One can convincingly argue that the media have a hand in perpetuating the conservative caricature, but the Republican Party has contributed to the distortion by pandering to its less rational elements. Still fresh in our minds is the last presidential election -- a strange season that might be attributed to GOP desperation if not for a prior history in times of political prosperity.
Two words: Terri Schiavo. During that 2005 Operation Rescue debacle -- complete with death vigils and lamentations -- Bill Frist, then the Senate majority leader and a practicing physician, lent credibility to the circus performers by diagnosing Schiavo's condition via video and challenging other medical opinion that she was in a persistent vegetative state.
And let's not forget how the GOP handled the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois against one Barack Obama. They inserted their own African American, none other than Alan Keyes. That worked out well.
We should never shoot the messenger, it should go without saying. But until the Republicans marginalize those who belong in the margins, they won't be attracting many new recruits. And the messengers will continue to obscure the message.
- from the Post comments, this is exactly right:willandjansdad1 wrote:The most prominent voice in the Democratic Party (Obama) pulls the party to the center. The most prominent voice in the GOP (Limbaugh) pulls the party to the extreme. I don't remember any apostate Democrats apologizing for comments questioning the President.
If someone from Code Pink was the dominant Democratic voice, I'd tear up my card in a heartbeat. The Republicans can't seem to find that courage.
Mark Schmitt (TAP): The Mystery of the Right - The right's abrupt decline is one of the most puzzling questions in political history.
One of the greatest accomplishments of the first several months of Barack Obama's presidency has been the near-total marginalization of the Republican right. Rather than developing a coherent alternative to the president's agenda, the right has descended to frantic, tone-deaf cries of "socialism," has allowed some of the least popular figures in public life -- Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich -- to be their spokespeople, and most recently, seems to have staked everything on a defense of the previous administration's most disgraceful (and, incidentally, unpopular) conduct.
Even moderate Republicans, such as Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois, seem to have waded deep into the crazy swamp. Kirk, a Senate hopeful who once bragged to me that he had worked for George Soros on a humanitarian project in the Balkans, recently denounced a proposal to increase a state tax by 1.5 percentage points: "The people of Illinois are ready to shoot anyone who is going to raise taxes by that degree." Mistaking the small rallies called "tea parties" for actual backlash, one Republican bragged to Politico that opposing a yet-unnamed Supreme Court nominee would bring them back to power, "just as we helped ourselves by opposing the [economic] stimulus."
But as the right has taken its rhetoric and self-delusion to 11, its popularity, credibility, and congressional power have sunk to unprecedented lows. (There have been fewer Republicans in Congress before, but that was back when Southern conservatives were still Democrats.)
None of this was inevitable. Self-marginalizing insanity is not an inherent Republican trait. When historians are finished writing countless books in awe of the rise of the right, they will turn to its abrupt decline and find it one of the most puzzling questions in political history.
One answer -- and the reason I called it an "accomplishment" -- is that Obama's approach to partisanship helped marginalize the right. Often seen as a naive assumption of bipartisan cooperation, Obama's invitation to Republicans to join in governing and offer their best ideas was instead a brilliant calling out of a faction that was prepared only to oppose. (Hence the right's gleeful anticipation of a fight over a Supreme Court nomination, which is a pure yes-no choice.)
Going a few years further back, the explanation for Republican decline may lie in the strategy of governing adopted when the right was in power. With a narrow majority based in the white South, and with demographic trends running against them, the Republicans pulled out all the stops and tried to wring every possible advantage from the moment, a strategy exemplified by former House Speaker Dennis Hastert's "majority of a majority" rule, under which he would refuse to bring to the floor any legislation that wasn't supported by a majority of Republicans, blocking many bipartisan coalitions. Trained to govern in this desperate, high-stakes mode, the Republicans have no ability to step back into the role of a constructive minority that actually tries to collaborate in governing. They governed more like a high-flying hedge fund than an investor with a long view. In opposition, they take the same approach.
A third explanation is suggested by the obituaries in early May for former Rep. Jack Kemp. Kemp was in many ways a disappointing, incoherent, manic figure who, like Newt Gingrich, mistook slogans for ideas, but he very much represented the path not taken for the Republican right. That path was one of racially and culturally inclusive conservatism, based on an ideal of broadly shared economic opportunity and security.
Given the cultural conservatism of many African American and Hispanic voters, and the aspirational values of most families, conservatives could have had a chance to construct a durable coalition around Kemp's values. If Republicans could get even a third of the African American vote and retain the 40 percent of Hispanic votes they reached in 2004, the entire map of American politics would be different. It's likely that a more racially inclusive politics would be more appealing to younger voters as well. But Republicans didn't do it, and now it's too late.
Why did the right not take the path Kemp offered? Perhaps the party's mostly Southern leaders just didn't get it or didn't want a racially inclusive party. Maybe they would have lost more white votes in the process. Or perhaps the whole idea was doomed by its incoherence, and what Kemp really had to offer was liberalism combined with massive tax cuts.
We'll never know, because the right chose a different path. Conservatives, or at least the Republican Party, will return to power, but not until they show some curiosity about their mistakes.
sgw: Somethings Been Missing On Mornng Joe
Chapter and VerseI have a love hate relationship with Morning Joe and no matter how frustrating it is to watch I still find myself watching it every weekday morning. Well the last two days it has been very apparent that Joe Scarborough and his yes men and women have gone out of their way to not talk about the assassination of Dr George Tiller by a crazy right to lifer. I thought it was pretty cowardly for them not to talk about it but I just chalked it up to the yellow streak in Scarborough's nature.
Turns out there is more to the story.Maddow actually led with a headshot of Michael Griffin, the first abortion-doctor murderer, who killed Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida in 1993. She then moved on to copycat Shelley Shannon, who wrote letters of support for Griffin shortly before she shot George Tiller in both arms, an ominous foreboding of his murder 16 years later.Maddow could have called on a colleague with first-hand knowledge of the Griffin case -- Joe Scarborough, the folksy host of the network's Morning Joe and Griffin's pro-bono lawyer in 1993. A Voice cover story in 2008 examined in great detail Scarborough's role in the case, as well as the singular impact his exploitation of the abortion issue had in Scarborough's 1994 initial election to Congress. So what might his colleagues have learned about defending abortion-doc killers from Morning Joe?So Scarborough himself has first hand experience with representing domestic terrorists, and for free no less. Of topic but I would say representing a cold blooded killer because he is a family friend is worse to me than "palling around" with Bill Ayers.
Well....
Scarborough's hometown of Pensacola -- where his show once frequently originated -- was the site of the first two abortion murders, the second also occurring during his first run for Congress in 1994. A raw 30-year-old, Scarborough's surprising Republican win was principally funded by anti-abortion groups and he immediately went to Washington and voted against bills to protect abortion clinics, including one version sponsored by a Republican congressmen.
Griffin handwrote the Voice two long letters last year after we contacted him in prison, describing in depth his relationship with Scarborough. While Scarborough tried to minimize his ties in an interview, claiming he was merely doing "a favor for a friend" and briefly searching for a lawyer who'd take the case to trial, Griffin detailed Scarborough's efforts to stay on the case and work with the trail attorney.
So the question is will any guest who goes on Morning Joe this week push the issue and bring up the murder or will they do like most of them always do and kiss Scarborough's ass?
Red flags ignored? June 2: MSNBC's Rachel Maddow describes the criminal history of accused murderer Scott Roeder and talks with Dr. Warren Hern about whether more needs to be done to protect women's health practitioners from violent domestic terrorists.
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Encouraging violence June 2: Almost everyone is condemning the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, except for some radical anti-abortion activists who are going as far as to praise the accused gunman as a "hero." Rachel Maddow talks about their comments with National Abortion Federation president Vicki Saporta.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Karen Tumulty: Newt Gingrich Apologizes For Calling Sotomayor A Racist
Well, sort of. This is perhaps the strongest sign yet that Republicans are reconsidering the wisdom of personal attacks on Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee. Or maybe, that Newt Gingrich is reconsidering the wisdom of sending out his every thought on Twitter.
My initial reaction was strong and direct -- perhaps too strong and too direct. The sentiment struck me as racist and I said so. Since then, some who want to have an open and honest consideration of Judge Sotomayor's fitness to serve on the nation's highest court have been critical of my word choice.
With these critics who want to have an honest conversation, I agree. The word “racist” should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person, even if her words themselves are unacceptable (a fact which both President Obama and his Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, have since admitted).
Now he says the issue is really "judicial impartiality." You can read his new argument at the link.
UPDATE: Taking on that other R Word that is being used against Sotomayor, Ruth Marcus examines the statements that Gingrich finds "unacceptable," setting them against Sotomayor's vast record on the bench, and decides:
The amazing thing about the case against Sotomayor is how thin it is. The now-famous 32 words about a wise Latina judge. Her vote -- part of a unanimous three-judge panel -- against white firefighters denied promotions. The YouTube comment about judges making policy. And not much else.
This is a woman with more years on the bench than any Supreme Court nominee in the past 100 years. During that time, you'd think even the most middle-of-the-road judge would have provided some unintentional ammunition for critics -- maybe freeing an especially unsavory criminal on a supposed technicality. If Sotomayor is the judicial radical of conservative imaginings, certainly there ought to be something more in her paper trail.
Except there isn't -- at least from what's known so far. An examination of Sotomayor's decisions shows a careful judge who tends to rule for the government over criminal defendants; who has been skeptical of most civil rights claims that have come before her; and who, to the extent that she has ruled on cases that touch on abortion, has come down against the abortion-rights side. She's not apt to be David Souter in reverse -- a Democratic pick who turns out to be a closet conservative. But there's no evidence that she will be outside the liberal mainstream on the current court.
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