Rubio: The New Nixon?

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In late 20th century and early 21st century politics, what the public perceives visually - the "optics," in modern campaign-speak - is often as important, if not more important, as the actual words used.

It's said, for example, that people who heard the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates on radio were convinced that Nixon had won, whereas the people who saw them on TV saw a pale, sweaty, nervous-looking Nixon losing badly to the cool, urbane Kennedy.

I thought of that event while watching the president's State of the Union address and the GOP response this past Tuesday. Thousands of words have already been written about the content of both speeches, but it's clear that it was President Obama who won the battle of the optics.

A lot of the president's message was positive: Six million new jobs. The auto industry in the best shape it's been in in years. Less foreign oil imports than in the last 20 years. Rebounding housing and stock markets. Manufacturers bringing jobs back to America from Japan, Mexico and China. Both parties working together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion.

The president looked forward to and expressed hope for bipartisanship on things like immigration, joint business/government partnerships for research and development, and education. He looked as he usually does: calm, upbeat and confident, while Vice President Joe Biden beamed genially from behind him.

Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner sulked in his chair, looking like a man undergoing a painful and invasive medical procedure. He refused to join in standing ovations for veterans, school shooting victims, or even the 102-year-old woman who'd stood in line for seven hours to vote in Florida.

He looked less like a guy you'd want to have a beer with than the angry, bitter old man at the end of the bar who you'd want to stay away from unless you wanted to hear an hour of Scotch-fueled ranting about how terrible everything is, especially those damned kids.

Then came the GOP response, delivered by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Now, Rubio seems like a likable enough young man, but his speech was a visual disaster.

From the lighting that looked like something on public-access cable, to the sweat beading on Rubio's upper lip, to the terrible dry mouth from which he seemed to be suffering, the whole production was cringe-worthy. I used to work in a TV studio, and the whole mess made me wonder if the producer was an agent of the DNC.

Then came The Drink: the moment when Rubio looked around desperately for his water bottle, then ducked down nearly off screen to get it before gulping it loudly like a man who'd just staggered out of the desert.

And a joke was born. Within an hour, "Rubioing" - taking pictures of oneself drinking water or other liquids and posting them online - had become an instant fad. "Rubio's Water Bottle" suddenly had no fewer than 15 parody accounts on Twitter. Pictures proliferated of Rubio as The Most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis commercials saying some variation on "Stay Thirsty, My Friends."

The message might have been able to overcome the visuals, had the response itself not been so pedestrian. It was standard Republican boilerplate, less a response to the actual State of the Union than a recitation of the familiar catch phrases and talking points that did so poorly in the last presidential election.

The "idea that our problems were caused by a government that was too small - it's just not true," Rubio intoned. It's also not what the president said. But then, Republicans are always more comfortable trying to refute points that were never made.

Really, though, why should something like The Drink get so much attention? The guy just wanted some water, right?

In a sane world, I'd agree. But we do not live in a sane world. We live in the age of the viral video and the Internet meme, an "optics"-driven environment where a politician who, like Rubio, is being touted as a potential presidential contender can't afford to look as awkward and amateurish as he did Tuesday night.

Can Rubio come back from it? Well, maybe. He did one very smart thing: join in the joke by posting his own water-bottle pictures on Twitter. And of course, Nixon won the presidency years later. But the difference is that Nixon's brand of paranoid conservatism had not yet come into its own in 1960, and wouldn't until after the upheavals of the '60s.

Nixon, sad to say, was ahead of his unhappy time. The demographics of a changing electorate have put Rubio and Boehner behind theirs. The best optics in the world can't change that.

The Wannabe Wolverines

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One of my favorite movies in the so-bad-it's-awesome genre is director John Milius' 1984 right-wing paranoid fever dream "Red Dawn."

This American cinematic masterpiece tells the story of a group of teenagers who take to the hills and engage in an insurgency against an invading Soviet/Cuban force that, for some reason, begins the conquest of the United States by attacking a high school in the hinterlands of Colorado.

Naming themselves the "Wolverines" after their local sports mascot, the plucky teens (played by, among others, Patrick Swayze and a pre-insanity Charlie Sheen) disrupt and sabotage the occupation, all while maintaining their perfect '80s hair.

 It was a fun movie, largely because it was so completely absurd, sort of like Milius' other '80s masterpiece, "Conan the Barbarian."

Sadly, however, a lot of America's current gun debate seems to be driven by people who think this movie is some sort of manual for political action. We need to have high-powered military-style weapons, they assert, in case we have to take to the hills and go full Wolverine, this time against our own government.

Their poster child is James Yeager, the fellow from Tennessee who declared on YouTube that he was going to get his gun, fill his backpack with food, and "start killing people" over executive orders that no one had even read yet.

You know, I remember when even mildly criticizing the President Who Must Not Be Named in a newspaper column was enough to draw angry letters and emails accusing me of treason. It was, after all, a time of war. Now, a few years later, we're still supposed to be at war, but these Wannabe Wolverines talk openly about needing assault weapons and lots o' bullets to commit actual treason because they're mad at Barack Obama for - well, they're just mad at Barack Obama.

As we've seen from the example of Mr. Yeager above, the president doesn't really have to have done anything to excite their rage. I'm not sure what the Wannabe Wolverines think they're going to do, even with the most tricked-out AR-15, against an Army that can field attack helicopters, artillery, bombers, drones, tanks, etc.

If you really follow their "logic," then the right to bear arms would also include the right to anti-tank weapons, land mines, shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, etc. But, you know, that would be crazy.

So let's leave aside teenage-movie fantasies about taking on The Man with the AR-15 in your gun safe. Let's recall Justice Scalia's statement in the landmark D.C. v. Heller case that "the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose" and approving of the "historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons." So why not a blanket ban on assault weapons?

Well, the last time we tried to do that, it didn't work too well, largely because they tried to define "assault weapon" using the same criteria the medieval peasants in the movie "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" used to ID a witch: "It looks like one!"

Many of the characteristics that defined a banned weapon were cosmetic: folding stocks, pistol grips, barrel shrouds and the like. Manufacturers found it childishly easy to circumvent the law by making minor changes and giving the banned weapon a new model number. They didn't address the core characteristic that made people want to ban assault weapons, then and now: the ability to mow down lots of people, very fast, without reloading.

I've said before that the problem of gun violence in this country can be summed up as "too many guns in the hands of too many crazy people." Upon reflection, I'd amend that to "too many guns able to throw too many bullets in the hands of too many crazy people."

To solve this problem, we need a solution that addresses all of those. That means better mental health services, better background checks, and - yes - some limitation on the availability of high-power, high-capacity weapons.

While polls show that a simple "assault weapons" ban sounds good to a majority of Americans, to just slap on a ban and walk away thinking the problem's solved would be as simple-minded as the fantasies of the Wannabe Wolverines. In the words of another great film, it's not our job to be as confused as they are.

All kidding and all film references aside, life is not like the movies. Complicated problems require multifaceted solutions, and we need to start considering all our options and not let the entire conversation being about one kind of weapon.

Culture War Over, Republicans Defeated

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The Culture War is over. The Republicans lost. Hey, don't take my word for it. I found out when I read about an interview given last week by one Dave Kochel, a former adviser to the campaign of a guy named Mitt Romney. (Remember Mitt Romney? I hear he ran for President once.)

Kochel gave an interview on a TV station in his home state of Iowa, in which he mentioned, as many others have, the "demographic shift" in the country and how younger voters want to move away from "the arguments we've been having" on the culture wars, which "the Republicans largely lost."

He described a growing number of Republicans, including former RNC Chairman and George W. Bush adviser Ken Mehlman, who are openly advocating marriage equality for gays and lesbians. Kochel also mentioned that for his children's generation, issues such as abortion and birth control are "largely settled," and not in a way that would make Rick Santorum happy.

He wound up by observing that he hears "a lot of conversation off the record, people talking about how they'd like to move on past some of these old fights we've been having, and can't talk about it."

It should be remembered that Kochel, according to his company's website, is the guy who advised Lord Mitt, the Earl of Romney, in "Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and nationally" - all arenas in which His Lordship lost.

But don't take just his word for it either. The Boy Scouts of America abruptly announced that they're reconsidering their ban on gay members and leaders; the Defense Department finally lifted the ban on women in combat; and right wing poster girl and Culture Warrior Queen Sarah Palin got ignominiously dropped by Faux News.

Oh, and Jim Nabors, Mayberry's very own Gomer Pyle, married his male partner after 38 years.

On other fronts as well, the storm troops of the far right have begun to abandon the redoubts they once vowed to defend.

Republican and Democratic leaders got together on an immigration reform proposal that included a "path to citizenship" for the undocumented, something that was once as unthinkable to a right wing Culture Warrior as surrender would have been to a World War II-era Japanese soldier.

The House, as noted last week, passed a bill raising the debt ceiling without the spending cuts the Teahadists once claimed were the hill they'd chosen to die on (and take the U.S. economy with them) rather than surrender. Across this great land of ours, there are signs that we may be seeing The Twilight of the Wingnuts.

Now, I don't expect the most fanatical Culture Warriors to throw down their arms and greet the victors with flowers. It would take a complete chump to believe a war would end like that. I expect that there'll be some diehards and dead-enders who'll take to the hills in a sort of insurgency.

They'll probably engage in a few acts of political hostage-taking and terrorism by threatening to blow things up if they don't get their way. Metaphorically speaking, of course. At least I hope so.

And I know that for the next few years, we'll be finding islands with holdouts who refuse to admit that the war is over. In fact, I suspect we may be living on one such island right now here in North Carolina.

But demographics are inexorable. In 1992, Pat Buchanan rose from the ashes of his own defeated presidential campaign and declared the Culture War - in a speech, it should be noted, that helped move me from a moderate seriously considering voting for Bush the Elder into a confirmed Clinton liberal. But Buchanan is 74 now and finding it harder to find a network who'll let him on.

His sister Bay, also once an ubiquitous right wing pundit, has reportedly given up the fight and gotten her real estate license.

Most of the formerly reliable foot soldiers of the Culture War are getting pretty long in the tooth. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who's only crazy about 85 percent of the time, called it while in a lucid interval: "We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business over the long term."

So the signs give me hope that the Teahadists of the Rabid Right will continue their long decline, their Wingnutdammerung, if you will, and the Republican Party can free itself from their tyranny. Then maybe we can start having some rational debates over issues in this country.

There won't be as much material for mockery, but it's a small price to pay.

WINGNUTDAMMERUNG (Twilight of the Wingnuts)?

So, within a few days, the House passes a bill raising the debt ceiling without the draconian spending cuts the Teabagger Caucus  claimed were an absolute condition for such a raise; Sarah Palin gets ignominiously dropped by Faux News; the Defense Department lifts the ban on women in combat; Republicans and Democrats in the Senate get together on an immigration reform package that provides a "path to citizenship" for the undocumented; and the Boy Scouts of America are reported to be actively considering lifting the ban on gay members and scout leaders. A former Romney adviser admits that "the culture wars are over and Republicans largely lost."

Now, I've been fighting these wacked out, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, everything-but-them-phobic nutballs for so long, I'm not taking a victory lap just yet. There's still a lot to do. But you've got to admit, it's the best time to be a liberal  that we've seen in  a long, long time.

Debt Ceiling Crisis? What Debt Ceiling Crisis?

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You know, it would be very easy to make fun of Orange John Boehner and the House Republicans over their capitulation this past Wednesday on the debt ceiling.

You may have missed the story, because the media were more obsessed in the past week with a much more important issue- namely, "Who knew that Beyonce lip-synced the national anthem, and when did they know it?"

So in case you've forgotten what the debt ceiling fuss was about, let's review.

First, just as they did during the fake "fiscal cliff" crisis, the so-called "deficit hawks" of the GOP blustered and puffed up their chests and insisted that yes, by golly, they were perfectly willing to destroy the country's credit rating and plunge us back into recession if they didn't get massive spending cuts in exchange for agreeing to pay the bills we already have.

Then, when the president said he wasn't going to knuckle under or negotiate again in the face of that kind of terrorism, they went completely hysterical, howled, "OMG! OBAMA IS WORSE THAN HITLER!" and vowed a fight to the death. So, as you can no doubt see, it'd be easy to mock them when they meekly cave in and pass a three-month extension of the debt ceiling without a single spending cut.

But I'm not going to do that.

I'm not going to do that because I think that on the rare occasion that the Republicans act like grownups, they ought to be commended for it. Besides, the one condition they did come up with actually contains the seed of a good idea.

The bill contains a provision that any house of Congress that doesn't pass a budget by April 15 doesn't get its pay. Unfortunately, the 27th Amendment says that "No law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives shall take effect until an election of Representatives shall have intervened," so the best they could probably do would be to temporarily withhold their salaries - not, say, donate them to Planned Parenthood or the NRA or something like that.

But hey, it's a start. And at long last, we'll finally get the Republicans to do two things: (1) admit that while the president can propose a budget (and has), budgets are made by the legislative branch, and that talking about "Obama's spending" is disingenuous at best; and (2) finally come clean on exactly what it is they want to cut.

Up until now, the GOP line has been, "You Democrats have to give us spending cut proposals, so they look like your idea." They do this because they know if people saw what they really want to cut, they'd be even less popular than they are now. But now they're stuck, which is a good thing.

The only problem I have with the "no budget, no pay" idea is that under the current proposal, if one of the houses comes up with a budget, any budget, its members get paid. There's no real incentive for the Republican-controlled House to come up with a budget they know has a chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate, and vice versa.

Indeed, both the House's Paul Ryan and the Senate's Patty Murray have vowed to quickly come up with proposed budgets, each of which is pretty much guaranteed to give the other house's majority party the hives.

So here's my idea: If a budget isn't passed by both houses and signed by the president by April 15, nobody gets paid. Not the senators, not the representatives, not the president. No Democrats, no Republicans, no independents. If they don't come up with something everyone can live with by May 1, then the sergeants-at-arms of both houses will be ordered to remove all the chairs from the House and Senate chambers and all legislative offices. Let 'em work standing up. (I confess, I stole this last part from a legendary tale of a crusty old judge trying to motivate a hung jury to make a decision.)

If that doesn't work, by May 15, we chain the chamber doors shut with all of them inside. No budget by June 1? Cut off the air conditioning. If you've ever been in D.C. in the summer, you know what that means. We'll either get a budget arrived at by fair negotiation and compromise, or we'll need to elect a new Congress.

Frankly, I could go for either one.

The Red Dawn Fantasy

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“… in precisely which “tactical” scenarios do all of these lunatics imagine that they’re going to use their matte-black, suppressor-fitted, flashlight-ready tactical weapons?” I think we have to talk about what I call the Red Dawn fantasy. Red Dawn of course refers to the very entertaining film in which The Wolverines, a bunch of kids from a rural western community, heroically engage a division of Cuban paratroopers and their Soviet advisors who invade the United States at the start of World War III. If you ask those who insist they must own one or more assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols with high capacity magazines, the answer you’ll hear over and over again is: I want to be ready to defend America against the Commies, the terrorists, the immigrant invaders, the United Nations, and yes, even the government of the United States of America. That’s the Red Dawn fantasy. It’s time we saw it for the paranoid delusion it is, and stop giving craziness the legitimacy of the Second Amendment. The gun debate shouldn’t be about whether we need armed guards in every school, movie theater, and place of worship. I shouldn’t be about hunting rifles or weapons for home or personal defense. Take the Red Dawn fantasy out of the equation, and we’ll have no problem coming up with a sensible gun policy in America. But as long as it persists, and as long as we let a delusional minority dictate the terms of the debate, we’re accepting more mass shootings as the price we have to pay.

h/t: TPM Editor's Blog