The Death of Rush and the Decline of Conservatism

Our forthcoming book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.

Charles Sykes at WP:

For decades, Limbaugh, who died of lung cancer on Wednesday at age 70, was at the center of it all. It is hard to overstate the role that the syndicated talk-radio host played in the transformation of the character and culture of the conservative movement. Every Republican over a certain age has a story about how they were inspired or influenced by him.

...

But as time went on, Limbaugh went in another direction. If Limbaugh was once a thought leader among conservatives, he ended his career very much as a follower, scrambling to keep up with his people. As his ratings and ad revenue faded, he found himself in competition with younger, crazier outlets and he spent less and less time on actual substance, leaning instead into outrage and grievance.

The fact is that Limbaugh was fundamentally uninterested in ideas, and by the time he had helped Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency, the host was essentially done with conservatism as a set of principles. “I never once talked about conservatism” during the presidential campaign, Limbaugh told his listeners after Trump’s election, “because that isn’t what this is about.”

For years, he had touted what he called his “Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.” But in the era of Trump, he announced that he had changed it to the “Institute for Advanced Anti-Leftist Studies.”

Donald Trump's Freaky Friday

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character and record of dishonesty. The update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. 

Anne Gearan, Matt Zapotosky, Karoun Demirjian and Josh Dawsey at WP:

President Trump publicly pressured the Justice Department on Friday to move against his political adversaries and complained that Attorney General William P. Barr is not doing enough to deliver results of a probe into how the Obama administration investigated possible collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.

The delayed report is “a disgrace,” and Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, should be jailed, Trump said in a rambling radio interview, one day after he argued on Twitter that his current Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, is a criminal who should be barred from running.

Three weeks before the election and trailing Biden in polls nationally as well as in key states, Trump is issuing a new torrent of threats and demands for federal action against Democrats, including former president Barack Obama, that go beyond his familiar and often erroneous claims of wrongdoing by his perceived political enemies.

...

 Trump said he is disappointed in Barr over the federal probe, the results of which Barr has told Republicans will not be ready before the Nov. 3 election, said people familiar with the discussions who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.

“If that’s the case, I’m very disappointed,” Trump said during an interview with radio host Rush Limbaugh. “I think it’s a terrible thing. And I’ll say it to his face.”

Later, he added: “That’s a disgrace. I think it’s a disgrace. It’s an embarrassment.”

On live national radio, the Leader of the Free World dropped an f-bomb:

 

“If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are gonna do things to you that have never been done before.” — the President of the United States pic.twitter.com/RfDKchaw7i

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 9, 2020

A GOP staffer sends:

“JFC, this idiot is painting us into another corner”

Trump just said on Rush Limbaugh that he wants a bigger stimulus package than either party is offering... after canceling talks because he said the Dems wanted too much.

— Angry Staffer (@AngrierWHStaff) October 9, 2020

Alt-Right Fake News Conveyor Belt

Jeremy W. Peters reports at The New York Times on right-wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who tweeted in May that James Comey had denied under oath that Trump had asked him to stop the Kremlingate investigation. The claim was false:  Comey had answered a question about DOJ, not Trump.

Once Mr. Posobiec pushed the send button on Twitter, the conservative media machinery kicked into gear. Later that day, Breitbart News published an account of Mr. Comey’s May 3 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee under the headline “Comey Under Oath: ‘Have Not Experienced Any Requests to Stop FBI Investigations.’”

GotNews.com, a website that often misrepresents media accounts of the Russia investigation to cast Mr. Trump in a more favorable light, repeated the claim but also raised the possibility of a more serious offense. Mr. Comey, the site said, might have perjured himself if he had claimed in a memo — as outlets including The New York Times have reported — that Mr. Trump pressured him to call off an investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.

The next day, the perjury question was the subject of an article on InfoWars, the home of Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who has called the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks an inside job and questioned whether the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., really happened. InfoWars had almost five million visitors in the last month.

That afternoon, Mr. Limbaugh was also onto the story, telling his audience, “Comey said, under Senate oath, he had never been pressured to halt any investigation.” As evidence, Mr. Limbaugh read straight from the GotNews.com article. The whole Russia investigation, he declared, is “a political witch hunt.”

That account of the Comey testimony has lived on in the weeks since, with Sean Hannity of Fox News citing it as recently as Tuesday night. “And by the way,” he insisted on his program, “James Comey also said it never happened.”

Airstrikes and Politics

Speaker Boehner has announced support for a military strike on Syria.  He is not pandering to public opinion or the GOP base.

The Pew Research Center reports:

President Obama faces an uphill battle in making the case for U.S. military action in Syria. By a 48% to 29% margin, more Americans oppose than support conducting military airstrikes against Syria in response to reports that the Syrian government used chemical weapons.

The new national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Aug. 29-Sept. 1 among 1,000 adults, finds that Obama has significant ground to make up in his own party. Just 29% of Democrats favor conducting airstrikes against Syria while 48% are opposed. Opinion among independents is similar (29% favor, 50% oppose). Republicans are more divided, with 35% favoring airstrikes and 40% opposed.

...
 Overall, just 32% of Americans say Obama has explained clearly why the U.S. should launch military airstrikes against Syria while 48% say he has not explained the reasons clearly enough.

The Washington Post reports:

Americans widely oppose launching missile strikes against the Syrian government for its alleged use of chemical weapons, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News pollthat finds little appetite for military action across the country despite a growing drumbeat in Washington.

Broad opposition in the new poll contrasts with a December Post-ABC poll that found most Americans saying they would be supportive of U.S. action if Syria used chemical weapons. At that time, 63 percent supported U.S. military involvement when it was a hypothetical situation, while 30 percent were opposed.

Politico reports:

“Rarely have I ever witnessed such consensus from my audience that we should stay the heck out of Syria,” nationally-syndicated conservative talker Mike Gallagher told POLITICO. “Even liberal callers who usually challenge and criticize me say we should not intervene. I am delighted that the president has done this about-face and will now turn to congress for approval. Now it’s up to the Congress to do the right thing and deliver a big, fat ‘no.’”
...
Rush Limbaugh, meanwhile, told his listeners Tuesday that Obama’s decision was part of the president’s plan to “announce that he’s going to go to Congress to get a use of force authorization and then when the Republicans don’t give it to him, blame them for dead Syrians.” And the Syria question, he said, just comes down to politics for Obama.

“I get into arguments with people about this who still do not understand that no matter what the issue, no matter what day of the week, the either No. 1 or No. 2 objective in the world of Barack Obama is the elimination of any opposition,” Limbaugh said. “You cannot take the 2014 midterm elections out of this equation. You cannot remove from this equation just how desperate the Democrats are to win the House in 2014, anything that can be done to blame the Republicans.”

The Maher Issue

From yesterday's White House press briefing:

Q Last thing. The President spoke out in the news conference about how people need to be careful with their language in general, and he spoke about his own daughters and setting an example. I know he's not the language police, you're not the language police from this podium to pick on people on the left or the right. But there is a letter that went to the Chief of Staff today from a conservative group, Concerned Women for America, saying that the President should direct this super PAC, on the Democratic side, that took a million-dollar check from Bill Maher, who has had some pretty coarse things to say about conservative women.

And I understand the President can't -- he's not in charge of the super PAC, it's an outside thing. But he did bless that PAC and say to his supporters, you should give to this PAC if you want to. So can he also say, give a million-dollar check back if it's from somebody who said these things?

MR. CARNEY: I think the points that you made as you were asking your question are the ones that I will make, which is that we are not, and cannot be, the arbitrator of every statement that everybody makes in the policy and political arena.

As a general matter, obviously language that denigrates women is inappropriate. And I think I would point you to what the President said when he was asked about this during his press conference, which is that he chooses to lead by example, or to try to. He chooses to, in the pursuit of a more civil discourse in our public space, he chooses to try to practice that civility himself. And he calls on everybody to do just that.

A new video documents Maher's remarks about women and people with disabilities:

 

Operation Hilarity

Four years ago, Rush Limbaugh mounted "Operation Chaos" to encourage Republicans to support Hillary Clinton in Democratic primaries, with the goal of weakening the eventual Democratic candidate. Democrats are now returning the favor, as Michael Shear reports in The New York Times:

Rick Santorum’s campaign on Monday night began urging Democrats to vote against Mitt Romney in the Michigan Republican primary, apparently counting on cross-party support to win a close contest in the state on Tuesday.

With polls in Michigan suggesting a tight race between Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum, the victory could be determined in part by Democrats and union workers eager to cause mischief in Tuesday’s Republican presidential primary....

The chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, Mark Brewer, issued a press release last week reminding members of his party that they will still be able to participate in the Democratic caucus on May 5 if they vote as a Republican on Tuesday.

...
Markos Moulitsas, a liberal blogger, has called for “Operation Hilarity,” in which Democrats vote for Mr. Santorum. “Let’s keep the .G.O.P clown show going!” he said.

Mr. Moulitsas has gotten plenty of push-back from liberals who say the Democrats shouldn’t be playing such games. But he has called the idea a “no brainer,” saying that voting for Mr. Santorum would ensure that the Republican primary contest would be extended.

“The longer this thing drags out, the more unpopular the Republican presidential pretenders become,” he wrote on his blog, Daily Kos.

Santorum's Bad Night

The Mesa debate did not go well for Santorum.

At NRO, Rich Lowry writes:

Rick Santorum’s night was defined by explaining why he voted for things he opposed (NCLB, Title X). He’s right that politics is a “team sport” (at least most of the time), but that’s not the best posture to be defending when you’re occupying his slot in a Republican presidential primary. He didn’t know when to let go on the earmark discussion, which he couldn’t possibly win. He gave the best possible defense of his Specter endorsement, but as Romney said it was convoluted. Again and again Santorum got tangled up in his Senate record. Overall, he was too defensive, too insider, too complicated.

The Huffington Post reports:

Rush Limbaugh said that he "cringed" when he heard GOP candidate Rick Santorum call himself a team player to defend a controversial mark on his record at Wednesday night's debate.

Santorum was apologizing for supporting former President George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" legislation. He said that it had contradicted his personal beliefs, but took "one for the team" when he voted for it. When audience members booed, he added, "You know, politics is a team sports, folks, and sometimes you've got to rally together and do something, and in this case I thought testing and finding out how bad the problem was wasn't a bad idea."
Mitt Romney quickly seized on his opponent's comment, while others have speculated whether it would damage Santorum's campaign.

On Thursday, Limbaugh lamented Santorum's blunder. “I cringed when I heard him say this. Santorum is getting creamed for the team player comment," he said. "I heard it, I looked at [my wife] Kathryn, and I said, 'There’s going to be hell to pay for that one,' because I knew that Santorum opponents, both from the left and right, were going to harp on it."

Aaron Blake writes at The Washington Post that Specter is keeping another line alive for another news cycle:

Former Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter said Thursday that Rick Santorum got his facts wrong when he said that he endorsed Specter only after securing a promise that Specter would support GOP Supreme Court nominees.
...
"I said will you support the president's nominees? We had a 51-to-49 majority in the Senate. He said, 'I'll support the president's nominees as chairman,'" Santorum said.

But Specter said on The Michael Smerconish Program on Thursday morning that that wasn't the case.

"He is not correct. I made no commitment to him about supporting judges," Specter said. "I made no deal."

Romney at CPAC, Severely

Byron York writes of Mitt Romney's appearance at CPAC:

First, Romney seemed to try too hard to remind the crowd that he is, in fact, a man of the Right; he used the word "conservative" or some variant 24 times in the speech. To some ears, it sounded as if Romney was trying to prove his credentials simply by calling himself a conservative over and over.

...Second, Romney's explanation of his path to conservatism had nothing specifically conservative about it. He began by joking that he never read Burke or Hayek in college. "When I was your age, you could have told me they were infielders for the Detroit Tigers," Romney told the students in the crowd. Instead, Romney said, "My path to conservatism came from my family, my faith, and my life's work."
...
But the problem with Romney's my-life-is-conservative argument is that there are liberal Democrats who also get married, stay married, have children and do well in business. One can do all those things and support higher taxes, a more intrusive government, and a weak foreign policy.

And then, as Jonathan Martin writes at Politico, the "severely" thing:

Mitt Romney wanted to use his CPAC speech Friday to allay concerns about his candidacy on the Republican right, but with one ad-libbed word he reinforced conservative fears that he’s not one of them.

“I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” Romney told the annual gathering.

The response was immediate.

“Severely?”

“I have never heard anybody say, ‘I’m severely conservative,’” Rush Limbaugh noted on his show.

“That didn’t get a lot of applause,” firebrand Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) observed with a tight smile.

Rush v. Huntsman

Rush Limbaugh is less than enthusiastic about the Huntsman roll-out:

Jon Huntsman announced his candidacy today for the Republican presidential nomination, and he took a page from the book of the esteemed and the great Ronaldus Magnus. He went out there and made his announcement in front of the Statue of Liberty, and he's got a logo (a red rectangle with his name, "Jon Huntsman;" and then white with "JonHuntsman.com").* and somebody observed to me that it looks like a designer label that you might find in clothes. His logo does, his icon.

But it's interesting. I'll give you a little hint, a setup. He channels Ronaldus Magnus, does Huntsman. He basically says, "Look, we gotta go out there and we have to respect President Obama! I deeply respect President Obama. I am not going to run down anyone's reputation," and, by the way, the chattering classes both on our side and the left are going nuts here. I have a little media montage of the State-Run Media orgasmic over Huntsman making his announcement at the same place as Reagan frequently appeared. But it just illustrates exactly what we were talking about yesterday.

The Republican Party is still convinced that in order to secure the support of independents, that they have to be boring. They have to be serious and Milquetoast and cannot be confrontational, cannot be partisan, cannot go into attack mode. Somehow this is going to cause the independents to get nervous and send them running right back to Obama. Now, of course, that's flat-out BS, it's totally wrong. The elections of last November demonstrate that in a real world, real life example. But then there's also this. We're told -- and this is a trap, by the way, the left puts this out. It's designed to get us to be boring. It's designed to get us not to contrast ourselves with the left.

Actually the website is jonhunstmanjr.com, which redirects to www.jon2012.com. The website jonhuntsman.com belongs to somebody who opposes Huntsman, as Holly Bailey explained earlier this year:

Jon Huntsman may be staffing up ahead of a potential 2012 run, but President Obama's soon-to-be-ex ambassador to China apparently forgot about one very important task for any likely presidential candidate: Buying his own web domain name.

Visitors to JonHuntsman.com are now taken to a page that hosts the former Utah governor's so-called "love letter" to Obama that someone leaked to The Daily Caller last week.

The letter is posted against a pink backdrop dotted with light pink hearts. Meanwhile, whoever is behind the page also created a heart graphic for the site modeled after Obama's 2008 campaign logo.

According to WHOIS, the directory of web domain owners, someone anonymously purchased the domain in late January--weeks after Huntsman put out word that he was considering running for the GOP nomination in 2012.

Romney and Unofficial Conservative Powers

Ben Smith writes at Politico:

The Drudge primary has begun, and Mitt Romney is winning.

The former governor of Massachusetts may be the punching bag of the conservative media, ridiculed on blogs and talk radio as a plasticine, untrustworthy flip-flopper and the grandfather of the hated Obamacare.

But on the Drudge Report, Matt Drudge’s no frills but enduringly influential website, Romney is simply the frontrunner (“ROMNEY WINS NH STRAW POLL”,), the “BILLION DOLLAR MAN,” and the president’s most implacable foe (“ROMNEY: FIRST THING I WOULD UNDO IS OBAMACARE”).

A survey of the last year’s worth of Drudge headlines found only one debatably negative reference to the 2002 Olympics CEO (“Bachmann outraises Romney”) — and a survey of aides to his rivals found a rising level of frustration at what one described as “favoritism” by one of the most important, if also one of the quirkiest, referees.

“One of the mysteries of Drudge is how he continues to be such a mystery. Never clear how or why he leans for or against candidates. But there is a lot of behind the scenes, very quiet and secretive mojo that goes on,” said Mark McKinnon, who, as a top adviser to Sen. John McCain in 2008, watched with dismay as Drudge gave top billing to — in particular — questions about the Arizonan’s health.

“It looks like someone in Romneyland has figured out the secret code,” McKinnon said.

Frustrated rivals think they know the secret: a low-profile, hard-driving Republican operative named Matt Rhoades, who is now Romney’s campaign manager. Rhoades met Drudge, as POLITICO Editor-in-Chief John F. Harris and Mark Halperin reported in their book “The Way to Win,” when he became research director of the Republican National Committee and was introduced by his predecessor on a special trip to Miami. Rhoades has since been seen as a pipeline to the reclusive editor, who now has two veteran Washington reporters working on the site as well.

As Kathleen Parker observes, however, Rush Limbaugh is not on board:

Now he’s in the “hot seat” on global warming, a Post headline informs us. Romney has said that he believes global warming is real and that humans are contributing to it.

Whoa! Sorry, bub, but if you’re a Republican presidential contender, this is not an ideologically approved position. None other than Rush Limbaugh says Romney is history — “Bye-bye, nomination.”

One can infer that Romney is not Limbaugh’s candidate of choice, but is it really so remarkable that Romney would accept scientific evidence that Earth’s climate is changing and that humans, because of their historically unprecedented carbon emissions, might contribute to that effect?

Never mind that Romney couched his comments with enough disclaimers to leave a T. rex wiggle room, even saying that he didn’t know the degree of human contribution, the crux of the debate. The mere mention of a human role (vs., presumably, a divine plan) was enough to bestir the guardians of scientific inquiry at Conservatives4Palin, who averred that Romney is “simpatico” with Obama and that he “totally bought into the man-made global warming hoax.”

In Search of Enemies

David Plouffe carries on the Democratic search for enemies. From yesterday's "Meet the Press" transcript:

MR. GREGORY: Joining us now with a view from the other side we turn to the man who is in charge of getting Barack Obama elected president, his 2008 campaign manager and author of the newly-updated paperback version of his book, "The Audacity to Win: How Obama Won and How We Can Beat the Party of Limbaugh, Beck, and Palin."

...

MR. GREGORY: Finally, a quote from your book, handicapping the Republican field, this is what you write in the new part of "Audacity to Win." "This is the Republican Party of 2010, and I think it will be the Republican Party for a long time. It is hard to see how a Republican gets the presidential nomination without winning the plurality of the Palin-Limbaugh-Beck base of the Republican Party. Without a drastic change in orientation, they will probably nominate someone a good bit out of the mainstream." Who do you have in mind? Who do you think is the most formidable Republican likely to challenge President Obama?

MR. PLOUFFE: Oh, I have no idea. I mean, this time four years ago there was very few of us talking about Barack Obama running for president, including me. So I think some of the people that we think are going to run may not run. There'll be other people who'll run. We'll see. I wish I could just sit back with a tub of popcorn and, and enjoy it because I think it's going to be quite an adventure.

MR. GREGORY: But who is the leader of the Republican Party, would you say?

MR. PLOUFFE: I think the--I think right now--and this is a problem for them long term--I do think that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, they are the leaders of the party. And you see whenever--I was struck by--Senator Coburn from Oklahoma, I think, was at a town hall meeting and said, "I don't agree with anything the Democrats are doing, and I don't agree with Speaker Pelosi, but she's a nice person," and got attacked for that. There, there is an intolerance in that party and an extremism that I think is where the real energy is. And so I think, as you see in '11 and '12, as that presidential primary, those are the people that are going to come out to vote. So I think that's where the real energy is, and I think particularly in, in elections where more people vote, in presidential elections where you have a lot more younger people, minorities, independent voters who skew a little bit more moderate, that's going to be a big problem. So we'll just have to wait and see.

But let's get this--through this election first, and then we'll be right on to the next one.

Limbaugh and Palin have high negatives. Beck has less visibility. In a April 2010 CBS poll, 64 percent were either undecided or did not know enough about him to have an opinion. The rest were evenly split.

Republican Woes

Writes Beth Fouhy of the Associated Press:

Rush Limbaugh has been Topic A in the political world, with Republicans debating his influence on their party and Democrats trying to elevate the conservative radio host to the GOP's de facto spokesman. The skirmish has cast a bright light on the GOP and its search for leadership in the Obama era. But the personality-driven diversion has deflected attention from the deeper problems the party faces. Simply put, the public isn't buying what Republicans are selling right now. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll this past week put Republican popularity at near historic lows. Just 26 percent in the survey viewed the party positively, compared with 68 percent for President Barack Obama, despite the economic crisis and sharp GOP criticism of his $3.8 trillion budget plan.Republicans trailed by more than a 30-point margin on the
question of which party is best positioned to end the recession

Detailed data from the survey here.

Full Circle

Saying that the White House has anointed him the leader of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh has challenged President Obama to debate.

Obama's Manager Writes of Limbaugh

David Plouffe, who ran the brilliant campaign of Barack Obama, is pushing the joining the effort to make Rush Limbaugh the face of the GOP:The 2008 election sent many messages. At the top:

Americans wanted to turn the page on the politics of division and partisan pettiness, and they wanted a government -- and country -- that would put the middle class first. Watching the Republicans operate this past month, it would appear that they missed that unmistakable signal. Instead, Rush Limbaugh has become their leader.

As Jonathan Martin writes in The Politico, the tactic is deliberate and systematic. It is also clever. On the one hand, the focus on Limbaugh fires up Democrats who hate him. On the other hand, it presents Republican pols with a dilemma. Support Limbaugh, and risk attachment to his more radioactive comments. Criticize Limbaugh, and incur the wrath of El Rushbo.

The president is a student of Saul Alinsky, and it is clear that his troops are operating according to Alinsky methods. Consider these excerpts from Rules for Radicals:

• "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
• "The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”