Breaking News in Moderate-land

Arlen Specter switches parties.

I don't care precisely why he did it right now, because it was long overdue. He held out for a revival of the moderate wing of the GOP, but instead it's continued to shrink, and now extinction seems likelier than not. No doubt, he'll miss being ranking member of Judiciary, but hopefully the warm welcome wagon will be some consolation.

Yeah, I've always liked this guy, my former senator, but today seals the deal.

Those poor House Republicans: They held a filibuster in the dark...

... and nobody came.

Although we can't be completely sure of that, since C-SPAN was long gone, too.

And my favorite former Republican senator...

... Lincoln Chafee (to whom I believe I once dedicated a sculpture of a weeping chocolate elephant -- or at least, in my mind, it was weeping) wrote a book, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President, and was interviewed on NPR.

"Bitter" Quote du Jour: Rep. John Shimkus

I guess I'm not the only one switching camps.
Now House Republicans are doing PR damage control for Obama in their speeches on energy prices. I know this guy's from Illinois, but still...

from a news conference today:

REP. JOHN SHIMKUS (R-IL): Illinois was just declared one of the biggest states that is moving wind power. We want them all. Because more supply, with a demand, will mean lower costs. And these are true costs.

And why do we use the terminology "bitter?'

Well, you know why we use "bitter." There is bitterness out there. And it's bitterness because of these high costs. And in rural America, where people have to travel long distances to get to work -- and we don't have the buses, we don't have the light rail. We have working trucks, big trucks to haul our beef and our pork and our beans and our corn.

McCain and the Republican Apocalypse: A Win-Win Situation

That's how I see it, anyway.
If Rush & co. are right, and McCain's potential nomination means the end of their ilk holding sway over 50 percent (give or take a point) of the American electorate, that's nothing less than a cause for celebration.
Their influence has been a blight, nay, a festering sore on the American visage for far too long.
In other words, it's not the Republican Party, per se, that's the problem; it's what the Republican Party has become, an insular, regressive, fanatical, and mean-spirited flock with barely even lip service for the Christian ideal of compassion, and a closed door to anyone who dares speak its name anymore.
Now, coming from a Democrat who has dreamt of winning back the White House for seven long years, this may seem like blasphemy, but hear me out. If Clinton or Obama gets the White House, I will be ecstatic. However, the consolation prize of a McCain administration that irrevocably fragments this coalition of conservatives that Rove assembled to put Dubya in the White House and take the Senate, in order to dominate two (aiming for three) branches of government, is consolation indeed.
The only downside would be if trigger-happy McCain decided to go ahead and drag us into World War III.
So, yeah, I'm definitely leaning more heavily toward Door #1...

Breaking News: Florida GOP Voters Couldn't Care Less What Rush Limbaugh Thinks.

And with also-ran Giuliani's likely endorsement tomorrow, McCain's looking more and more like the nominee every day.

Is it possible that the majority of Republicans nationwide also don't care what Rush Limbaugh thinks?

That prospect is so heartening, it almost makes me forget for a second that I'm a Democrat.

Who's next, Pat Robertson? (Well, apparently so, since he endorsed Giuliani, and that worked out really well for him...)

In some areas (notably the war) Romney is more centrist than McCain; he's almost certainly more level-headed, is far better versed in economics, and (importantly) is probably way easier for either Clinton or Obama to beat in the Fall. So I guess I should be rooting for him over the Mav.

But anything that bursts Rush's balloon of imagined relevance can't help but make me smile.

And then there's the "F" word.

OK, maybe I'm being too down on the GOP today. And I hate to sound like an apologist for the new Congress, because they've disappointed me, too, but I'm just kinda burned out with hearing what a failure it is, when it's basically operating with its hands tied behind its back.
Yes, they've been cowardly in many ways; the impeachment issue being one, and they've failed their promise to do something about Iraq. But whenever they try something proactive, whether it's to do with Iraq or anything else, it's blocked at every turn. For one, there's Bush treating his veto power like a new toy he hadn't realized could be so much fun until he tried it...
And does anyone remember when "filibuster" was such a dirty word that it made poor Senate Leader Bill Frist break down in teary press conferences, at the mere suggestion the Dems might possibly employ it?
Now it's such an implicit matter of course that "a Senate majority" is commonly defined as 60 votes, the number needed to block a filibuster, rather than 51.
How soon some forget.

What are they putting in Joe Scarborough's "Morning Joe"?

He was acting awful loopy during this interview with John Edwards yesterday... Good thing Mika Brzezinski was there to nervously laugh off his line about Republicans. Maybe it was truth serum. If only Fox News used the same catering people.

BRZEZINSKI: What do you make of what's going on in the Republican Party, with the surge of Governor Huckabee?

And some analysts might say that the Republicans don't know what they want yet, but Huckabee seems to be sticking, at least for now, and is winning heavily in several states...

(RAUCOUS LAUGHTER FROM SCARBOROUGH)

BRZEZINSKI: What?

SCARBOROUGH: Republicans never know what they want.

BRZEZINSKI: Well...

SCARBOROUGH: Other than war. We want war.

BRZEZINSKI: Oh, (OFF-MIKE) Don't listen to him.

(LAUGHTER)

What do you make of Governor Huckabee's surge so far?

What do you think voters are responding to here?

EDWARDS: Oh, I have to be honest. I don't spend a lot of time following what's happening on the Republican side...

(LAUGHTER)

BRZEZINSKI: That's smart.

Quote du Jour: John Boehner

This proves once and for all that Republicans, at least those who've spent any time in Washington, either have no concept of irony, or less powers of recollection than that guy from Memento:

Republicans have been shut out of this process from the beginning. This process that they've employed of private negotiations amongst literally no more than a handful of people is troubling.

-- discussing the House energy bill in a press conference last Thursday.

And by the way...

While Iran's president is still on our turf, now the Senate is trying to hand Bush another ambiguously worded authorization for war?

I'm going to pretend I didn't notice the glaring omission of a certain junior senator from New York (whom I was almost ready to consider picking as a tentative frontrunner for my very own not-so-coveted primary vote) in the list of senators who voted against the Lieberman-Kyl amendment.
At least, happily, the most offending two paragraphs were removed from the amendment, the ones which essentially called (admittedly with all the force of a "Sense of the Senate" resolution) for war at any moment when the president happens to be feeling especially scrappy, and a sort of qualifying amendment was added at the end, but why did such an overwhelming number of Democrats feel compelled to vote for it at all? Have the neocons perfected their voodoo technology, or have the Dems learned nothing from these ever-present polls, their (now so distant-seeming) victorious election, etc.? Are they just trying to make Hagel and Lugar look especially heroic?
The American people do not want any more wars. We don't even want the one we've got.
Can't they hear us anymore, or have they just tuned us out?

Here's the speech by Jim Webb that I had just assumed was going to be more influential than whatever mind-altering drugs ended up in all but 22 of the Senate water pitchers.

The Rise and Fall

Listening to the rehash of the Rove resignation on The NewsHour, Charlie Rose, etc., last night and reading articles like this one in The Washington Post, I was just pondering the "might have been" for the Republican plans of a permanent majority were it not for A) Iraq, B) Katrina, and C) the campaign-driven decision to abandon "compassionate conservatism" for bringing out the base.
Compassionate conservatism was a great buzzword, and it got people excited in 2000 (even if not quite excited enough to elect GWB in the popular vote.) And after 9/11, Bush the Younger had won over even those who had considered him a laughingstock, at least temporarily.
However, none of those three events came from the "outside."
Iraq was the definition of pre-emptive.
The unfunded levees; the bureaucratic mishandling and seeming apathy from the White House toward Katrina were rooted in misplaced trust and serious disorganization in the ill-conceived Department of Homeland Security and in a growing isolation of those at the top, and an insulation of the president from anything seemingly unpleasant that was going on "out there" in the country.
And the choice to humor the base at all costs was a miscalculation that proved Rove's undoing, and an ironic one, since it's been pointed out that, back in Texas, the Religious Right was not in the W. camp. The battles within the GOP on immigration and the Harriet Miers disaster are reminders that there's still a bit of the Elder (moderate) Bush in the son, as well as the Texas pragmatist who once made his repuation on knowing how to compromise with Democrats.
When you ask what went wrong, the answer seems to simply be that Rove just took it all too far, and stopped listening to anyone, thinking he could somehow pull it back together in the end. It came to be just the two of them, and now they're going down together.
If things were otherwise, would the Democrats have simply faded away, little by little? It's very possible; that's how good the Rove machine was when it was good. If it hadn't self-imploded, even the lean and hungry team of Emanuel, Pelosi and Schumer would have struggled for a few seats here and there. But fortunately for the Dems, it did implode, and now, given a chance, they've begun to get their groove back. And the wheel keeps on turning.

Speaking of sleep...

... who's live-blogging the Senate slumber party?
Don't look at me... Maybe it's just the humidity of mid-July in D.C., but politics has been making me yawn this past week or so, as my spotty posts seem to indicate.
Wake me up when there's a chance in heck of getting any meaningful legislation passed.

It's about time...

... moderate (and former "lifelong" Democrat) Mayor Michael Bloomberg admits he doesn't really want to be a Republican anymore.
Early pundit reaction basically translates this as the first step toward an independent run for the White House, a move that would greatly threaten the GOP nominee's chances and be another breakthrough election for third parties.
So there's really nothing not to like in this story, as far as I'm concerned ;)

Quote du Jour: Bob Schieffer

From "Face the Nation" today:

And finally today, I have never been much for third parties and independent candidates. For all its flaws, the old two-party system has brought us a long way in this country, and I'm slow to change.

But as I watched the Senate fumble around with the immigration bill, it made me wonder, has our two-party system lost the ability to get anything done?

We keep hearing that both parties are playing to their base. Republicans don't want to offend conservatives, so they block real immigration reform. Democrats fear the liberal left, so they don't want reform.

Result: nothing gets done on that or anything else. Yet polls show a majority of Americans want reform, want a guest worker program for illegal immigrants in this country, favor a way to make their status legal.

Who speaks for that segment of the electorate?

Certainly not Democratic and Republican leaders, who are so busy pacifying those so-called base voters.

You know, I hope we do see a third-party candidate in the presidential race next year, not because I favor anyone who might run as an independent, but because a third choice would force both the Republicans and the Democrats to move more to the center, to stop an independent from siphoning off moderate voters.

If both parties are forced to shift their hunt for votes to the center, rather than the edges of their parties, who knows?

They may find some common ground every once in a while, and actually get something done.