Losers

Quick question:  Will a Republican ever be elected president again?

I don’t mean to be flippant in asking.  I’m completely serious, although, as a liberal, I can’t pretend to despair at the prospect that the answer might be “no.”

Historically speaking, the odds of such a thing are just a hair north of zero.  Indeed, if the past several generations of elections have taught us anything, it’s that American voters can stand one party in the White House for only so long before swinging the other way and throwing the bums out.

In the last 63 years—that is, since the election of 1952—only once has the same party won three presidential elections in a row—namely, two by Ronald Reagan and one by George H.W. Bush.  On all other occasions, the executive branch has seen a transfer of power from one party to the other within either four or eight years.

Fundamentally, the country is split down the middle when it comes to political ideology, with the small group of folks in the middle ultimately determining which way the wind blows.  The last seven elections have been won by a margin of less than 10 percent, which is rather remarkable when you consider that five of the preceding nine were won by more than 10 percent.

So it stands to reason that—if only to satisfy statistical norms—a Republican will, in fact, win the presidency in 2016 or, at the absolute latest, 2020.

That’s before factoring in the legacy and current standing of the man whom our next president will succeed.  From a composite of recent polls, President Obama’s approval rating sits at 44 percent.  While by no means catastrophic—George W. Bush ended his presidency at 34 percent—it’s not exactly reassuring to a Democratic Party that might otherwise want to capitalize on Obama’s successes in anointing his heir apparent.

If Obama’s current levels of (un)popularity hold, he would be in roughly the same shape as George H.W. Bush, who couldn’t save himself in 1992, and in considerably worse shape than Bill Clinton, who was at 60 percent on Election Day 2000 and still couldn’t save Al Gore.

As if that weren’t bad enough, there was the media’s reminder earlier this month that, for all the Democrats’ dominance on the national level, the Obama era has seen sweeping victories for Republican candidates on the state and local levels.  There are ten more Republican governors today than in 2009 and, as reported in the New York Times, “Democratic losses in state legislatures under Mr. Obama rank among the worst in the last 115 years, with 816 Democratic lawmakers losing their jobs and Republican control of legislatures doubling since the president took office.”

In short, the 2016 race is the GOP’s to lose.  But they’re going to lose it, anyway.

Why?  Because Republican voters are determined to do so.

You don’t need me to tell you which GOP candidate is currently—and enduringly—ahead in the national polls.  Nor, for that matter, do I need to explain why this is such a spectacular moral farce.

However, in light of how close the Iowa caucuses have become and how little the polls have changed over the last several months, it is entirely worth spelling out this travesty in full, just in case the full force of it hasn’t yet sunk in.

Lest we forget that, for all his popularity with GOP voters, Donald Trump remains the man who ridiculed John McCain for having been a prisoner of war.  The man who said a Black Lives Matter activist deserved to be “roughed up” at one of his campaign rallies and that a pair of supporters who assaulted a Hispanic homeless man were “very passionate” people who “love this country.”  The man who is so hilariously thin-skinned that he picks (and loses) Twitter fights with people whom most Americans haven’t even heard of—including, most recently, a reporter whose physical disability Trump gleefully mocked onstage.

It has gotten people asking:  Is there anyone left in America whom Trump has not tacitly (if not personally) offended?

Apparently there is, because (at the risk of repeating ourselves) he remains the top dog among his party’s base, with his numbers consistently in the mid-to-upper 20s in a 14-person contest.  Much can still happen before Iowa and New Hampshire (to be held on February 1 and 9, respectively), but for now GOP voters have made their views clear, and the rest of us have no choice but to acknowledge it.

Once we’ve done that, however, we can proceed directly to the next self-evident truth, which is that Donald Trump will never, ever, ever in a billion years be elected president of the United States.

It’s not just that he’d barely get a single vote from Hispanics, whom he has tarred—directly or by association—as rapists and drug dealers.  Or that he’d garner zero interest from African-Americans, whom he affectionately refers to as “the blacks.”

Nope, in the end, his downfall may well come at the hands of the whites.

Should he secure his party’s nomination—following a demolition derby of a primary season, no doubt—he will discover that there is a good chunk of moderate, independent white voters who, despite conservative or libertarian worldviews, just cannot bring themselves to support a man who behaves like a real housewife of Beverly Hills.  Who is so emotionally unstable that he throws a spontaneous fit whenever anyone says anything unflattering about him, and so intellectually insecure that he name-drops his alma mater almost as frequently as his net worth.

For all their fickleness and inscrutability, American voters are cognizant of the image they project to the world when they elect a commander-in-chief.  While we are certainly susceptible to leaders who project strength through swagger and machismo (see Bush, George W., 2004), we are not so weak and panicky that we will surrender the Oval Office to a fellow who would enshrine religious and ethnic discrimination (back) into law.  We don’t mind sacrificing some of our privacy in the interest of fighting terrorism, but we aren’t prepared to sacrifice all of it.  We appreciate a chief executive who indulges in social media, but not necessarily at 4 o’clock in the morning.

We could go on and on about what a child Donald Trump truly is, but that would unfairly let the rest of the GOP off the hook.  As anyone paying attention to national politics knows, Trump is not the only “serious” candidate with a knack for behaving like a petulant toddler.  On Friday, for instance, the New York Times ran an amusing story chronicling the off-the-charts use of profanity by candidates throughout the campaign season, noting that employing four-letter words is perhaps the most promising way to draw attention to oneself and hopefully experience a bump in the polls.

Is there anything more pathetic than that, let alone more childish or un-presidential?

More broadly, the GOP in Washington shows no particular interest in shaking its reputation for obstructing every last Obama proposal for no reason except that Obama proposed it.  As the recent struggle to find a new House speaker demonstrated, Republicans in Congress have long since transitioned from a governing body into a gang of hyperactive, nihilistic know-nothings whose ambitions are limited to negating every major piece of legislation the previous few Congresses have passed, while spending the rest of the time calling each other names and screaming about the end of the world.

With a legislative branch like that, are we really on the verge of anointing an executive branch that’s on the exact same page?  To paraphrase Trump, how stupid are we?

The silver lining here—for Republicans and the country alike—is the theory that primary voters will eventually come to their senses and nominate one of the alleged grownups in the field—someone like Marco Rubio or John Kasich, whose experience and relative sanity could plausibly give Hillary Clinton a run for her money.  Trump supporters are, after all, a slim majority of all eligible voters and would be hugely outnumbered if only Trump non-supporters could reach a consensus as to which non-Trump candidate they prefer.

It could happen.  The 2016 general election may well end up as a variation of 2012, with two flawed but serious contenders who both see the world more or less as it actually is.  It’s not too late.

But if that doesn’t happen—if the GOP goes insane and nominates someone who is manifestly unacceptable to 55-60 percent of the country—then the next four years will probably look an awful lot like the last eight, featuring an ideological civil war within the party, during which its two major factions will debate, yet again, about whether the GOP should retain its extremist Tea Party bent and remain ideologically “pure,” or whether it should entertain such heretical concepts as moderation and compromise, which might include recognition of climate change, same-sex marriage and the consequences of white supremacy and lax gun control laws.

Shortly after Obama was first inaugurated, blogger Andrew Sullivan predicted that, with respect to the GOP, “It will get worse before it gets better.”  The past six-and-a-half years have certainly vindicated that assessment, although we are still waiting for an answer to the natural follow up:  Will it ever get better, or will the party ultimately disband and start over again from scratch?  It’s a crazy, outlandish scenario—one that hasn’t happened to a major political party since the death of the Whigs in 1856—but we may well have found the crazy, outlandish goons with the power to make it happen.

The Entertainer

Quick question:  Is there is any meaningful difference between Sarah Palin and Donald Trump?

There are probably a few distinctions worth mentioning.  Several billion dollars in net worth, for one.  Palin is (or was) a career politician, while Trump has never been elected to anything.  Palin has held unyieldingly conservative views her entire adult life, while Trump has oscillated back and forth as it has suited him.  Palin stars in reality TV shows, while Trump only hosts them.

On the whole, however, I am increasingly finding the two Republican stars interchangeable.  The longer our present Trump hysteria persists, the more it conjures déjà vu for that period in 2008 when, thanks to John McCain, America was presented with a singular political phenomenon it could not ignore, however hard it tried.

Specifically, I have decided to approach the Trump question as comedian Lewis Black approached Palin.  Asked in 2010 about his estimation of the one-time Alaska governor, Black quipped, “What I believe is she’s actually not real.  That’s the only way my mind can deal with it, that she’s a fiction character come to life.”

Sounds about right to me.

Donald Trump may technically be a living, breathing human being—in possession of some semblance of a heart and brain—but to the tens of millions of us observing the presidential race from our respective couches, he is, for all intents and purposes, a cartoon character.  A TV-based caricature whose presence has no relationship to reality and who will never, ever, ever be elected president.

This has been true from the moment in 2011 when Trump, disposing of whatever dignity he had left, publicly converted to Birtherism by expressing doubt as to whether President Obama was born in the United States.  Then, none of us actually took his rantings seriously, but we happily imbibed them nonetheless, because, hey, we all need to indulge our guilty pleasures now and then.

Now, of course, the circumstances are slightly different, insomuch as Trump is running for president and is currently the highest-polling candidate in the Republican primary field.

But here’s the weird thing:  We still don’t take him seriously.

If I may be allowed a prediction:  Should he win the nomination, we won’t take him seriously then, either.

And if he is elected president?  To quote Basil Fawlty:  “We’ll worry about that when we come to it, shall we?”

Of course he won’t win the nomination, let alone the keys to Air Force One.  Up to now, his candidacy has been built on a foundation of sheer chutzpah, blissfully bereft of anything in the way of policy prescriptions, intellectual maturity or basic ideological coherence.  While plenty of candidates have succeeded with one or other of those characteristics, Trump would be the first to pull off the hat trick.

But he won’t, because sooner or later, the utter ridiculousness of his existence will cease being a mixture of hilarious and appalling and be merely appalling, and his whole act will just plain get old.  Sure, in the future he may experiment with actual legislative proposals—launching a drone war against China, perhaps?—but there is little evidence that this would have much effect on his core fans, who seem perfectly content with the substance-free specimen they have now.

A word about those supporters.

In most recent opinion polls, Trump is gobbling up endorsements from 20-25 percent of registered Republican voters—more than any of his competitors by far.

But let us realize how insignificant this data point actually is.  According to Gallop, 23 percent of Americans today identify as Republicans.  (Democrats are 28 percent and independents are 46 percent.)  While it is certainly impressive for anyone to carry 25 percent support in a 17-person field, when we talk about one-fourth of GOP voters, we are only talking about one-fourth of one-fourth of the total American electorate.

Which means—if my calculations are correct—that, for all our shock and awe at Trump’s supposedly amazing popularity, the enthusiasm in question is felt by little more than one-sixteenth of all American voters—an amount that would be negligible if it referred to any other subject about which pollsters might bother to inquire.

We might refer to Trump supporters as a fringe group.  Statistically-speaking, they are.  Indeed, their number is less than half the percentage of those who currently approve of the U.S. Congress.  (Presumably there is minimal overlap between the two.)

So when we—and especially our media—continue to treat this cretin as if he were a legitimate political figure, we are just being lazy, selfish hedonists.

We follow Trump’s antics for the same reason we eat junk food:  Because it provides a temporary rush of pure primal pleasure, followed by a crushing sense of shame, guilt and emptiness, which in turn can only be cured with…more junk food!

No one in the journalism profession genuinely thinks Trump is worth covering.  They cover him anyway—and we tune in—because of how morally superior it makes us feel.  We see a grown man behaving like a petulant child and we think, “Well, I may not be rich or famous, but at least I’m not a complete jerk.”

Trump’s campaign has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with distracting ourselves from the deadly serious matters that, sooner or later, we will have to confront for real.

For now, it’s all one giant freak show, and—you know what?—we might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

In a priceless new Rolling Stone  article titled, “Inside the GOP Clown Car,” Matt Taibbi argues that we probably shouldn’t be so flippant and blasé about Trump’s total media saturation, since its perpetuation could lead, in Taibbi’s words, to “the collapse of the United States as a global superpower.”  Not to mention the generally poisonous atmosphere that his comments about women and immigrants have unleashed.

I see very little to worry about.  The environment that Trump hath wrought is ugly now, but it will pass soon enough, and equilibrium will return to our system as it always does.

I began with a comparison to Sarah Palin because I think her own character arc is instructive here.

As you’ll recall, Palin totally shook up the 2008 race when she landed on the underside of the GOP ticket, galvanizing Republican voters with passionate speeches, snappy one-liners and her inspiring, wholesome family.

And then she lost the election by 8 ½ million votes, quit her job and was forever lampooned by Tina Fey and others because—oh, that’s right—she is a total flippin’ idiot.

Palin’s status as an unqualified clown is bleeding obvious to us now, but she made quite a mess before we finally, collectively, decided to treat her like the reality TV sideshow that she is.

With Trump, there are no ambiguities whatsoever.  We know exactly how absurd he is—it’s confirmed every time he opens his mouth—and if he remains a role model for a plurality of Republican voters then, well, that’s because they’re absurd, too.

The party will eventually snap out of it, if only out of self-preservation.  In our lifetimes, neither the Democrats nor Republicans have nominated a candidate so transparently unelectable who, all the while, held no particular political views and was openly detested by virtually every other official in his own party.

Naturally, Democrats are rooting for exactly that, and the liberal media have every reason to keep pretending that this man is a real story.

If I were a Republican voter, I would be horrified by this sordid state of affairs.  As it stands, I can’t imagine being more thankful that I’m not.

That is, unless the Donald somehow secures the nomination and selects a certain former Alaska governor as his running mate.

Ducking Donald

I hope Donald Trump runs for president forever.

He has proved an indispensable component of the 2016 GOP primary race, and he needs to stick around so his singular contributions can continue.

At this point in Trump’s quixotic quest for the Oval Office, most Americans have come to regard him as the worthless piece of excrement he has always been—the shameless blowhard with a comical lack of self-awareness and the emotional maturity of an infant.

Fair enough, but this assumption all-too-casually overlooks the role he has swiftly and boldly assumed amid the dizzying Republican fracas that has been puttering around the early primary states these last several months.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently proclaimed Trump “exactly what the Republican Party deserves.”  But he is also—for some of the same reasons—the candidate the GOP needs.

In an environment of chaos, Donald Trump is the great clarifier.  He is a big, fat Republican ink blot that allows us to see exactly where everyone stands—how each of his co-candidates truly feels about the issues he is all-too-willing to broach.

Let us begin at the beginning.  In announcing his candidacy for president, Trump (in)famously tarred the entire Mexican immigrant population as murderous, drug-smuggling rapists.  (He then charitably added, “Some, I assume, are good people.”)

OK, then.  This is the kind of mindless xenophobia the GOP has espoused for years, albeit previously in a more restrained and respectful manner.  But now that Trump, lacking the capacity for restraint or respect, has taken the liberty of getting right to the point, we are able to see—more clearly than we otherwise would—how every other candidate views the immigration question writ large.

Generally speaking, when a public figure asserts—without evidence—that the majority of immigrants from a friendly, neighboring country are effectively the scum of the Earth, the correct response is either to ignore that person entirely or to call him out for his ignorance.

After some prodding, a handful of Trump’s competitors did exactly that.  Former Florida governor Jeb Bush called the comments “extraordinarily ugly” and Trump “wrong” to make them.  Florida senator Marco Rubio characterized the rant as “offensive,” “inaccurate” and “divisive.”  South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham called it “hurtful and not helpful.”

However, an equal number of declared candidates have opted for Door No. 3:  Tacitly agree with the premise of Trump’s blather.  Texas senator Ted Cruz took the opportunity to croon about how much he admires Trump as a person, as did New Jersey governor Chris Christie.  While Christie responded that he was “not personally offended” by the ramblings in question, Cruz went so far as to “salute” Trump for “focusing on the need to address illegal immigration”—a sentiment echoed almost word-for-word by former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum.

In other words:  Never mind the fact that Mexican immigrants aren’t all dangerous criminals coming to prey on our women.  The point is that illegal immigration is important to talk about, so why quibble over the details?

It’s an appalling way to think, not to mention lazy and dishonest.  It would be like Bernie Sanders asserting that investment bankers were forming gangs and ripping off liquor stores, followed by Hillary Clinton defending him by saying, “The important thing is that he has addressed the need to exercise greater oversight of the big banks.”

But I digress.  The point, in any case, is that Republican primary voters are much more informed about what’s going on in the heads of their ballot choices, and all because Donald Trump said something ridiculous.  Indeed, I know more than a few registered voters for whom the sentence, “I like Donald; he’s a good guy” is all the information they need about whether to ever vote for Chris Christie.

If this long, long pre-primaries period of presidential preening serves any purpose at all, it’s to allow us to cross-examine our commander-in-chief wannabees in a more freewheeling environment than in the tense, over-scripted final leg.  While there are billions of opportunities during this time for anybody to ask any candidate anything—some of which make the evening news or go viral on YouTube—there is an added power to moments (not least the debates) when a party’s banner-carriers are confronted directly and simultaneously by the logic (or illogic) of their core policies.

So long as Trump remains in the race—and why on Earth wouldn’t he?—we will see this happen over and over again.  The man himself is in no immediate danger of suddenly learning basic table manners, and our infantile media are more than happy to indulge him.  Then there’s the matter of the opinion polls, in which he currently ranks in the top two.

Which means the Donald will continue to be the yardstick against which all the other candidates are forced to measure themselves with respect to their party’s identity.  Elections are in large part a test of character, and Trump—a character in his own right—may prove the most grueling test of all.  If his insane ideas about immigration—and, more recently, about what it means to be a war hero—demonstrate real staying power among GOP primary voters, what do the remaining competitors have to gain by condemning such ideas as the lunacy that they are?

Their integrity, for one.  Indeed, many voters have a soft spot for basic human decency in the heat of a high-stakes election.  We’re certainly not gonna get any from Trump, but he may well inspire it in others.  As has been so richly demonstrated in light of his maligning of Senator John McCain, it is not terribly difficult to assume the moral high ground when the maestro of the “Miss Universe” show is the only other man in the room.

His more even-tempered counterparts would do well to mine the anti-Trump vote for all it’s worth, as it is certain to be worth plenty.  After all, a man can only insult and belittle so many of his fellow Americans before there aren’t any left to vote for him.

Here is one Republican billionaire today’s candidates can afford to give a pass.

Nothing to See Here

The problem isn’t that Hillary’s burrito bowl doesn’t matter.  The problem is that it does.

Oh, it certainly shouldn’t be anybody’s concern that Hillary Clinton popped into a Chipotle somewhere along her magical mystery tour through the Midwest last week.  Contrary to popular belief, presidential candidates do occasionally eat lunch.  It’s not an inherently newsworthy event.

In fact, you’d need to be more or less clinically insane to be so invested in a potential president—19 months before the election—that you wonder where (and what) they ate this week.  Or ever.

Many words leap to mind.  One of them is “stalker.”

But, of course, that’s what our country’s venerable press corps spent its time doing in the opening days of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

From the moment the former secretary of state announced her candidacy in a YouTube video on April 12, a gaggle of reporters raced to her roving campaign headquarters—a Chevy Explorer named Scooby—and they’ve been holding her road trip under a microscope ever since.

When word came that Clinton had patronized a Chipotle without anyone noticing, the media couldn’t let it go.  Over the next several days, no stone of Burritogate was left unturned:  What Clinton ordered, whether she left anything in the tip jar, why she was there incognito and didn’t mingle with other customers.

This is probably the moment for us to wryly observe that if the media had been as maniacally vigilant about the Iraq War as they are about a former senator’s dining habits, the last dozen-odd years of Middle East calamities might have been avoided.  But that’s a cliché for another day.

The fact, in any case, is that the press is treating this early phase of the 2016 election pretty much as you’d expect:  By clinging onto every last microscopic detail of the two parties’ respective contenders and wringing as much meaning out of them as they can.

At bottom, this is the result of two simultaneous—and seemingly unavoidable—conditions.  First, the reporters in question apparently only exist in order to cover these sorts of things.  Because, you know, it’s not like there’s anything else happening in America that might provide a better use of their time.

And second, since the first primary ballots of the 2016 race won’t be cast for another nine months, they really have no choice but to cover literally anything the candidates do.  Thus far, Clinton is the only active campaigner on the Democratic side, so there you have it.

The logic of it, however depressing, seems airtight.

It’s not.  There is a choice involved here, both for journalists and for us:  The choice to look away.  To ignore everything to do with the 2016 election until—oh, I don’t know—the year 2016.  To wait patiently until something interesting happens, rather than trying to create interest out of nothing.

We could allow ourselves a scenario—if we so chose—in which presidential aspirants would go on their whistle stop tours of Iowa and New Hampshire for years on end, but without reporters and cameras breathing down their necks 24 hours a day.  Grant the good residents of these early primary states the attention of the candidates, but not of the entire country.  Really, what do the rest of us care?

There are those—particularly on the interwebs—who will insist to the last that early nuggets from the campaign trail can serve as insights into a candidate’s character and managerial style, and are therefore worth covering and commenting upon.

As much as I would love to dismiss this theory outright as a load of hooey—political pop psychology run amok—I am in the unfortunate position of agreeing with it.  At least some of the time.

For instance, it became clear in the early days of John McCain’s first run that his scrappy, welcoming attitude toward the press would make him an uncommonly congenial and entertaining nominee (a fact that, admittedly, didn’t quite hold the second time).  Conversely, I think Rand Paul’s already lengthy history of arrogance and condescension toward reporters asking him simple questions should rightly give pause to anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to make this guy America’s chief diplomat to the world.

I’m not convinced, however, that it requires two full years of coverage for the truth about these people to come out.  Indeed, I am as certain as I can be that a person who completely tunes out all “news” about the 2016 election from now until, say, next February will be no less informed of its essentials than someone watching The Rachel Maddow Show every night between now and then.

I should add that, so long as reporters continue hounding candidates day and night, I have no particular problem with viewers at home following it as pure, disposable entertainment.

Just don’t pretend that it’s anything else.

Personally, I think it’s kind of hilarious that Hillary Clinton has named her campaign van Scooby.  It’s goofy, whimsical and endearing—and possibly a latent grab for the stoner vote, considering whom it’s named after.

But I did not need to know that.  It’s not important, and it reveals nothing relevant about Clinton that I won’t learn through debates, speeches and actual primaries.

More to the point, I did not need a professional journalist to tell me the van’s name, knowing what that journalist might have learned and written about instead.

The key in covering a round-the-clock event that goes on forever is knowing how to distinguish the things that matter from the things that don’t.  When reporters treat everything equally—as if where a candidate eats lunch is just as important as what he or she thinks about climate change—they license voters to do the same thing, leading to a campaign that is dangerously trivial.

The trouble, you see, is that talking about a trip to Chipotle is a lot more fun than talking about, say, ISIS.  Given the choice, there isn’t one of us who wouldn’t secretly (if not openly) prefer the former, even though we know the latter is infinitely more consequential and pertinent to being president of the United States.

Which means that we can’t be given the choice.

We can’t have our laziest instincts accommodated by being told that following the most inane details of a presidential campaign makes us informed citizens.  It doesn’t.  It just makes us voyeurs and turns our candidates into exhibitionists.  To elevate irrelevant pablum to a level of respectability is to enable both us and them into being our worst possible selves.

As we well know, the cultural erosion this practice creates does not end with the campaign.  Think about how many precious TV hours and newspaper columns have been expended on the exploits of the first family, or on the president’s March Madness bracket.  Or the fact that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is still a thing.

The human need for trivia is plainly innate and inescapable—hence the proliferation of reality TV, People and the National Football League.

However, government and politics are supposed to exist outside the world of superficiality, not least because the future of the republic depends upon them.

Is it too much to ask that we take this one aspect of American life seriously?

If our press corps didn’t spend days on Hillary Clinton’s burrito runs and the like, would we really be unable the handle the stuff that really matters?

Don’t answer that.

Revenge of the Gays

I must confess that, in my capacity as a ranking member of the gay community, I did not expect to be called a “bully” by a member of the U.S. Congress at this early date.

Yet there was Michele Bachmann, the fourth-term representative from Minnesota, categorizing last month’s veto of Arizona Senate Bill 1062 as the result of coercion by a gay cabal against those with “sincerely-held religious beliefs.”

“The gay community thinks that they’ve so bullied the American people and they’ve so intimidated politicians that politicians fear them,” said Bachmann during a conservative talk radio program last week.  “And so they think that they get to dictate the agenda everywhere.”

The bill in question, you will recall, would have empowered any Arizona business owner to withhold services from anyone, if providing such a service would violate the dictates of the business owner’s faith.

Following a national uproar, the bill was ultimately vetoed by Arizona’s governor, Jan Brewer, who concluded, “Senate Bill 1062 does not address a specific and present concern related to religious liberty in Arizona.  I have not heard of one example in Arizona where a business owner’s religious liberty has been violated.”

Nonetheless, as Bachmann and company would have it, the death of Senate Bill 1062 came at the hands of some nefarious gay mafia that cares not one whit about the freedom of expression and seeks to suppress the right to practice one’s religion untrammeled, and to further the proverbial “gay agenda” in the process.

Never mind that Senate Bill 1062 was conceived and written specifically with same-sex relationships in mind—and along with them, the desire by some Christians to act as if such relationships don’t exist, or at least don’t deserve to be treated as legitimate.

Never mind that the final, fatal blows to the Arizona bill came almost exclusively from Republicans—John McCain, Mitt Romney and a handful of the bill’s original supporters in the State Senate, to name a few.

And never mind that, even without this bill, gay people in Arizona are subject to no legal protections whatever regarding employment.

Nope.  The true “victims” in this drama are not the gays being denied the right to be treated as equals.  Rather, it is the Christians being denied the right to treat others as inferiors.

This is not to say that the right to regard others as morally reprehensible is not real and not worth defending.  To the contrary, the First Amendment’s guarantee to free expression means exactly that.

The blogger Andrew Sullivan—himself a devout Catholic who is also gay—has written to great effect about the need to respect those who object to homosexuality on theological grounds, even while decrying the tendency by some to play the victim, as if the present-day acceptance of homosexuality is, itself, a form of persecution against those who think differently.

What I find most intriguing is the cultural role reversal implied by Bachmann’s and others’ use of the word “bully” with regards to gay rights activists.

Surely it cannot be lost on them—or perhaps it can?—that no single issue has been of more pressing concern to gay young people in recent years than being bullied—be it the outright physical abuse that has robbed innumerable high school students of life and limb, or the psychological torture that has led its targets to take their own lives or simply spend the balance of their adolescent years in abject misery and fear.  See the “It Gets Better Project” for examples.

With this reality in mind, for the gay community to then have the word “bully” deflected back at it strikes as just the slightest bit insensitive and strange, and not a little ironic as well.

To be sure, gays are the not the first minority group to face a charge that had long defined its tormentors.  To wit, the State of Israel is regularly accused of employing Nazi-like tactics against its Palestinian inhabitants, while African Americans are sometimes tarred as “reverse racists” for their support of affirmative action and like programs.

The real question, then, is whether these labels are deserved, and what it means for our culture if they are.

It is undeniably true that the gay rights movement has so successfully executed its “agenda” of achieving legal equality in America that it has become a real political and culture force—a lobby as powerful as most others.

But do this group’s tactics constitute bullying or simple, good old political pressure?  I would argue the gay community has agitated no more aggressively or unfairly for its interests than the NRA or anti-abortion groups have for theirs.  That’s what lobbying is all about.

In the absence of any strong evidence to the contrary, I would suggest that any long-repressed group that so metamorphoses into a social success story not sweat the “oppressor” label too severely, and instead take it as the backhanded compliment that it is.

Not Born in the U.S.A.

Ted Cruz is the junior senator from Texas.  Elected just last November, he has swiftly garnered national attention, along with fellow Washington neophytes Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky, as a passionate adherent to, and banner-carrier for, the enduring Tea Party movement in American politics.

As well, thanks to the dreadful precedent established by President Obama that less than a half-term in the Senate qualifies one to seek higher office, Senator Cruz is now regularly included among serious and semi-serious contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

Should he heed the call and take the plunge, one very particular fact about the senator’s background will summarily and sharply come to the fore.

Ted Cruz was born in Canada.

His father, Rafael, grew up in Cuba before fleeing to America shortly before the 1959 revolution.  His mother, Eleanor, was born and raised in Delaware.  In 1970, when Cruz was born, the family happened to be living in Calgary, Alberta, where the couple worked in the oil business.

Should Senator Cruz run for president—in 2016 or any other year—his place of birth will be no small piece of trivia.  On the contrary, it could single-handedly derail his campaign before it even begins.

As outlined in Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution, there are precisely three qualifications to be president of the United States.  One must be at least 35 years old; one must have lived in the United States for at least 14 years; and most interestingly, one must be a “natural born citizen.”  (The Twelfth Amendment would later clarify that the vice president is bound by this same triad.)

As we were reminded during the nonsensical non-controversy regarding President Obama’s birth certificate, determining precisely what constitutes “natural born citizenship” is where the real fun begins.

Rather surprisingly, this term has yet to be officially defined.  The Constitution is of no help at all and the Supreme Court has never been tasked to offer an opinion of its own.  Like certain other clauses in our founding documents that we have never fully hammered out, the meaning of a potential president being (or not) a “natural born citizen” has been hitherto backlogged as a “we’ll worry about it when it happens” problem.

Of course, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a trove of legal hypothesizing on the matter, both by independent thinkers and government officials.  In 2011, a report by the Congressional Research Service offered the following:

The weight of legal and historical authority indicates that the term “natural born” citizen would mean a person who is entitled to U.S. citizenship “by birth” or “at birth,” either by being born “in” the United States and under its jurisdiction, even those born to alien parents; by being born abroad to U.S. citizen-parents; or by being born in other situations meeting legal requirements for U.S. citizenship “at birth.”  Such [a] term, however, would not include a person who was not a U.S. citizen by birth or at birth, and who was thus born an “alien” required to go through the legal process of “naturalization” to become a U.S. citizen.

This fairly all-encompassing definition, if formally adopted, would encompass people such as Senator Cruz, who has argued that his mother’s standing as a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth made him a citizen as well.

It would also include someone like Senator John McCain, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father was stationed as a naval officer.  The Canal Zone was under U.S. control at the time and was therefore technically a part of the United States, although under the above definition, Senator McCain would be “natural born” even if it were not.

And by the way, this definition would also apply to the imaginary Barack Obama who was born in Kenya.  Like Cruz, Obama descends from a foreign-born father and an American mother, and would not necessarily need to have been born on U.S. soil to qualify for the White House.

Of course, all of this is merely the tip of the iceberg, as even the broadest interpretations of “natural born citizen” do not extend to immigrants, of whom the United States is becoming ever more composed.

There have been several attempts in recent decades to open the opportunity to run for high office to those who were born abroad and became U.S. citizens later in life, including in 2003 to allow for Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger to occupy the Oval Office.

While all such proposed legislation has failed thus far, one senses it is only a matter of time before the question arises once again.  After all, were we to definitively establish that a foreign-born U.S. citizen with one non-citizen parent is good enough to be president, is it really that much of a jump to say the same for those with none?

Moral Vanity

One of the great challenges in running for office is the necessity to sell one’s virtues to the voting public while also, paradoxically, maintaining an aura of humility.  People tend not to admire political figures (or non-political figures) who come off as a trifle too self-regarding, and yet it is the nature of campaigning to explain to everyone how wonderful you are.

Gabriel Gomez, the Republican candidate in the special election for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, is finding it especially difficult to square this particular circle.

For a while, any great interest in the race to replace John Kerry in the Senate appeared to be one more casualty of the Boston Marathon bombing.  The party primaries were held two weeks after the attack, and attention was severely limited.  The candidates, for their part, made themselves relatively scarce, with the myriad angles of the Marathon’s aftermath sucking all the oxygen from the room.

Now, with the nominees chosen and the general election scheduled for June 25, the campaign has proceeded full steam ahead, and any fears that this would turn into a sober, issues-based affair have been duly squashed over the past couple of days.

The particular spat that has gotten the nastiness rolling—uninteresting except for what it reveals about the players involved—began with an advertisement by the Democratic candidate, Ed Markey, which assailed his opponent, Gomez, for involving  himself with a group that accuses President Obama of politicizing the killing of Osama bin Laden.  For several seconds of this ad, an image of Gomez sits on the left side of the screen while one of bin Laden floats in from the right.

Team Gomez, testing the general gullibility of Massachusetts voters, ran a TV spot in response saying Markey’s ad “compared [Gomez] to bin Laden.”  In an interview, Gomez himself continued the thought by postulating that, in doing so, Markey was “pond scum.”

And the tone of the race was set.

What lends this silly campaign flash point an added level of intrigue is Gomez’s distinction as a retired Navy SEAL.  He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and served as an aircraft carrier pilot before joining the SEALs, where he rose to be a platoon commander.  His military career totaled 13 years before he moved on to his current vocation as a businessman.

It is a highly impressive background, by any standard.  As a Senate candidate, Gomez would be crazy not to underline it as a demonstration of his physical fortitude and dedication to his beloved country.

The question, then, is when to stop.  To recognize the point at which promoting one’s history of service begins actually to hamper, rather than help, one’s campaign.

In reacting to Markey’s supposed “comparison” of bin Laden to him, Gomez phrased his disgust thusly:  “To put me next to bin Laden?  A former SEAL—maybe he doesn’t realize who actually killed bin Laden.  The SEALs did.”

We have seen this rhetorical sleight-of-hand before:  I served in the U.S. Armed Forces; therefore, anything I do or say relating to the military is axiomatically beyond reproach, and any related criticism by my opponent is beyond the pale.

During the 2008 presidential race, columnist George Will coined the term “moral vanity” to describe this attitude as it applied to Senator John McCain—the idea that one’s particular background on a particular issue cannot possibly be questioned, and especially not by those who lack the same experience themselves.

This is a decidedly unattractive quality to possess, as it would seem to rule out any honest debate on a given subject right at the outset.  After all, if one candidate has such moral superiority about this or that issue, why trouble ourselves arguing over it?  Why can’t Candidate B just accept Candidate A’s inherent rightness and move on?

Further—to my initial point—the person who commits such transgressions against intellectual openness tends ultimately only to inflict political harm upon himself, by creating the impression of having drunk one’s own Kool-Aid, and thus lacking the modesty and self-doubt that are essential in building good character and a good leader.

Gabriel Gomez served an honorable Naval career, of which everyone ought to be made aware and no one has any cause to put down.  Of the rightness of his views on the issues—military and otherwise—well, let us be the judges of that.

Knowing Your Limits

Cinco de Mayo was the day I learned my limit.  The moment I first discovered when (read: at what time in the evening) to stop drinking.

The details of the night to which I refer are not terribly important.  Suffice it to say that the combined ingestion of beer, vodka, orange juice, tobacco, fruit punch, Sprite and one hour is not quite as much fun as it sounds, and that to an unassuming college freshman, certain things cannot be learned from books—they can only be verified through experience.

I say this Cinco de Mayo party was when I reached my “limit,” although that is perhaps not quite the word for it.  In the world of boozing, the concept of a personal ceiling is generally associated with a number—how many drinks one can consume before bad things happen—and on this night I had no earthly idea how much liquid courage I had poured down my gullet until it began to reverse direction, at which point the only calculation that interested me was the number of paces to the nearest trashcan.

Then again, this rather handsomely illustrates the real problem:  You don’t realize you have gone too far until you have gone too far.  It is the nature of alcohol to impair your ability to think and behave rationally, and while it is certainly feasible to control yourself while imbibing, the odds are against you and, in truth, the danger of spiraling out of control is part of the fun.

With experience, of course, one does acquire a real sense of what one can handle—and, with it, what one cannot—and can use that wisdom to behave in a more informed, intelligent manner thenceforth.

Would that our leaders in the nation’s capital possess the growth potential and self-discipline equal to that of the average teenage drunk.

Following the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 children and six adults were murdered, most Americans seemed to have reached their limit for how many mass shootings they were willing to tolerate before Congress intervened—not necessarily through any particular piece of legislation, but just by doing something.

The poll numbers suggested as much, with nine in ten respondents asserting that requiring more robust background checks for gun purchases was a reasonable response to the random acts of gun violence that have become a wee bit too common in recent years.

Yet the U.S. Senate nonetheless rejected a bill that would have effected such changes in the ways firearms could be amassed, and Wayne LaPierre, the cartoon Batman villain in charge of the National Rifle Association, continues to make public pro-gun declarations of such resolute bluster that the very concept of going too far seems to have flown directly over his head.

Can we blame him?  So long as LaPierre and his anti-regulation fellow travelers continue to get exactly what they want, what reason do they have to stop demanding that America’s gun laws be made no tighter than they currently are, and to continue to think they can get away with it?  They can still see straight and aren’t completely slurring their sentences, so why not unscrew another bottle of whiskey?

Then again, the entire federal government resembles nothing so much as a frat house bursting with those who never seem to connect their massive hangovers to their activities the previous night (perhaps because they can’t remember them).  Rather than recognizing where their collective competency ends and working within those boundaries, our nation’s lawmakers perennially attempt to push the envelope.

There are folks such as John McCain, whose personal take away from our interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq is that there is no such thing as too many U.S. footprints in the Middle East—as evidenced by McCain’s current advocacy for an active American role in Syria.  One would think the last 12 years of U.S. foreign policy would lead one in the opposite direction—that if moral questions did not enter into the equation, the prospect of eventually running out of soldiers and money would—but why let some uncomfortable facts get in the way of a perfectly good ideology?

This might naturally lead us into a review of the ways Washington, D.C., conducts its spending habits overall, but our time and patience have their limits, too.

Whatever the issue, be it personal or international, the ideal is to allow the intellect to kick in, accept that you are neither invincible nor infallible, and refrain from behaving as if you were.  One can wake up from only so many hangovers before one fails to wake up at all.

Justice

I want Dzhokhar Tsarnaev represented by the finest lawyer in America.

I want him put on trial in an ordinary American courthouse to face judgment by an impartial jury of his peers.

I want him read his Miranda rights and subjected to all manner of due process afforded any other American citizen.

I want him to have his day in court.

Tsarnaev is, of course, the surviving member of the pair of brothers who stand accused of plotting and executing last Monday’s Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three and injured 170.  He is further accused of the murder of an MIT police officer named Sean Collier at the start of a car chase and shootout that led to the wounding of several more police officers and the killing of Tsarnaev’s brother, Tamerlan.

Given the extraordinary circumstances of the whole business, a movement has sprung—led by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, among others—to deny Tsarnaev the usual processes of the American justice system, and instead to treat him as a so-called “enemy combatant.”

The essence of McCain and company’s argument, in effect, is that the American justice system is simply too good for the likes of Tsarnaev.  That the crimes he has allegedly committed are too horrid, too outsized—too much of an affront to all the values we Americans hold sacred—for our usual system to handle.  Courtesies such as due process and trial by jury?  Why, he doesn’t deserve them.

That, in so many words, is the point.

The American justice system is too good for someone like Tsarnaev, if he did what we assume he did.  His crimes were horrid, profane and utterly out of proportion.  He doesn’t deserve the sort of patience and accommodation the United States court system offers all those who are accused of breaking United States law.

And that is precisely why we are going to go through with it anyway, and why, if we don’t, we’ll regret it for the rest of our days.

Our system is designed to be too good for those who undergo its oh-so-elaborate machinations.  It is meant to accommodate those who don’t deserve to be accommodated.  It is built to withstand the most horrendous crimes imaginable and, what is more, to give those accused of committing them every possible opportunity to proclaim their innocence.

Never forget:  The burden of proof is always on the prosecution, not the defense.  As Americans, we would rather let a guilty man go free than an innocent man go to prison.

Were we suddenly to abandon these core principles, granting an exception in any particular case, then our Constitution would be rendered meaningless.

Let’s not dance around what is surely a central, if unspoken, concern:  The danger of Tsarnaev being found not guilty on the basis of a technicality, such as a key piece of evidence being gathered in an improper fashion.

Well:  By all known accounts, Boston’s law enforcement has conducted itself with the utmost care and professionalism throughout this whole ordeal.  What better way to prove it—if only to ourselves—than to put all their hard work to the test?

Some argue the brothers Tsarnaev should be treated as foreign terrorists, their plot as some unorthodox act of war against the United States.

In point of fact, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an American citizen who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He is no less American than you or me or John McCain.  While he (and especially his brother) may well have been influenced by ideas and rhetoric from his place of birth in the Caucasus, in the Boston bombing he and Tamerlan appear to have acted on their own.  Can America really be said to be engaged in a war against an individual?

In any case, we ought to try Tsarnaev as we do any other accused person because that is what a great and strong country does.

A great country is one that follows its own rules.  That takes every opportunity to demonstrate that its system of laws is superior to every other.  That treats its citizens as equals.  That presumes a man innocent until he is proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

In the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his guilt in the Boston Marathon atrocity seems so self-evident and, indeed, so far beyond doubt that any trial will surely amount to a mere formality—a slam dunk.

All the more reason not to deviate from the usual routine.  As Charlie Brown might say:  We are going to do this trial, and we are going to do it right.

A Case For Romney

The political media sphere can be such an echo chamber of cliché and conventional wisdom that it strikes as a special treat whenever a piece of analysis escapes from it that actually makes one pause and think.

One such truffle from the 2008 presidential race holds particular interest for us today.  Matt Taibbi, the renegade scribbler for Rolling Stone, speaking with Keith Olbermann about John McCain’s many policy oscillations, offered the following perspective:

“The worst thing about George Bush was that he had convictions.  It was the things he actually believed in that got us into the most trouble.  John McCain is a guy […] who will change his mind at the drop of a hat.  He’s a cynic, as opposed to a true believer.  In these times, I’ll take the cynic.”

It is ironic, in retrospect, that McCain’s most formidable primary opponent was Mitt Romney, who today is rewriting the book on not letting conviction get in the way of winning the damn election.

At this late date, it is simply a fact that Romney is prepared to finesse, alter or outright negate his public views about virtually every issue in the electoral bloodstream, if doing so might increase his chance of being elected president of these United States.

So we are led, inevitably, to the $64,000 question:  What happens when he actually becomes president?  Will he finally stick to a set of “core beliefs”—if so, which ones?—or, rather, will his term be ideologically neutral, guided purely by practicalities?

Now that we are tasked to take the prospect of a Romney victory seriously, we are equally compelled to entertain that his nature as a no-looking-back flip-flopper is a good thing.  It just might be.

Taibbi’s point about President Bush was largely about Iraq:  If Bush had not been so ideologically hell-bent on “staying the course,” the reasoning goes, then he would have more clearly seen how badly the war was going and made smarter, more practical decisions to rectify it.  Bush’s certainty of the inherent goodness of the United States’ intervention in Iraq blinded him to the bloody, bloody consequences.

Mitt Romney, for his lack of foreign policy experience, is a much smarter and more pragmatic man than Bush.  It is very difficult to picture Romney plowing ahead with a particular strategy if all the evidence shows it to be a failure.  Romney’s reputation in the business world suggests nothing so much as an utter lack of tolerance for inefficiency, particularly if it makes Romney, the boss, look bad.

On foreign affairs, then, we might welcome a leader whose views will likely be conditional to the facts on the ground—who has nothing in particular to prove, other than his own competence.

Not that Romney’s stated views on the subject could be described as timid.  Speaking earlier this month at the Virginia Military Institute, he asserted boldly, “[I]t is the responsibility of our president to use America’s great power to shape history—not to lead from behind.”  This would suggest a foreign policy much closer to the eventual Bush doctrine that promised “ending tyranny in our world,” rather than Bush’s initial promise in 2000 to preside over “a humble nation.”

Nonetheless, Romney speaks of American power in a more inward fashion.  Where Bush’s concern was ostensibly with oppressed citizens of foreign nations yearning to be free, Romney’s focus is more self-serving:  America should assert its military might for its own sake, and not necessarily to uphold some larger ideal.  Those are not the words of a man prepared to be bogged down in any particular foreign hellhole for a decade or more.  Where is the profit in that?

Naturally, this is all speculative.  One of the many lessons from George W. Bush was that a man’s world outlook can change rather dramatically between being a candidate and being leader of the free world.  Further, we have not broached how a lack of ideological conviction might translate on the domestic front, which is no small concern.  Nor have we factored in the residual force of the Tea Party to create mischief against Republicans and Democrats alike.

What we know we have, in any case, is the latest in a long line of Oval Office suitors who believe a good business sense is just what America needs.  In Romney’s case, this would seem to require a degree of non-ideological thinking, which can be a very useful quality in a leader.  A ruthless eye for the bottom line knows no partisan loyalty, and if ruthless efficiency is indeed Romney’s true nature—if he can be said to have a true nature—then he would do the electorate and himself a great deal of good simply to admit it.