Tag Archives: George Allen

News from the Virginia Senate debate: Neither side wants Bowles-Simpson, George Allen wouldn’t force anyone out of Social Security

Posted on by
Reply

News from the Virginia Senate debate: Neither side wants Bowles-Simpson, George Allen wouldn’t force anyone out of Social Security

 

Kaine

C-Span televised the final encounter of Virginia Senate candidates Tim Kaine (D) and George Allen (R) last night. Kaine has an enviable ability to stay cheerful while crisp, on-point in rebuttal while upbeat. That kind of internal energy is refreshing to see. Virginia enjoys the distinction in 2012 of having two former governors running for senate, one of them—Allen—also a former senator.

Thus part of the meeting involved the candidates each bulleting reminders about the other’s track record in office. Kaine got the better of the exchanges: he speaks faster, stays clear, doesn’t get tongue-twisted, and has a sharp memory. Also he had more to work with than Allen did.

 

Allen

Allen, for his part, targeted the old-fashioned white vote to some extent, attempting to tie Kaine to President Obama as though that were the recipe for victory. Kaine came off better in that one, too, emphasizing national-state partnership as well as public-private partnership. He did not run away from Obama or from the administration.

 

Debate forum at Virginia Tech

Allen also referred to “this sequestration deal” (in Congress) more than once, pejoratively.

Given the opportunity to repudiate the debt-ceiling deal (sequestration), however, Allen pfaffed. Moderator Jay Warren, of WSLS-TV, asked both candidates point-blank whether they would vote for the Bowles-Simpson plan of tax hikes and spending cuts “as is.” Allen instantly riposted that Bowles-Simpson was “the president’s idea.” On the direct question he was less emphatic, saying that some parts of Bowles-Simpson need changing while other provisions are good, referring to the deficit, but declining to say that he would vote for Bowles-Simpson. Kaine got the same question and after some repetition, back-and-forth, and cross-talk, summed up both his and Allen’s response: “No, and no.”

Moderator Warren stuck with that answer, quitting while ahead.

It would be interesting to find out whether any senate candidate, in a competitive race, anywhere in the U.S., supports Bowles-Simpson unequivocally.

Kaine’s question for Allen was at least equally significant: Kaine asked Allen whether he would privatize Social Security. Allen did not come up with the right answer, a direct ‘No’. Instead he declared, “I would never force anyone out of Social Security. He did mention “income adjustment,” without defining the adjustment envisioned.

Forcing someone out of Social Security is not usually on the table in discussing entitlement programs. A central flaw in the privatization ideas floated is that they might entice younger workers not to get into Social Security.

This is exactly the possibility hinted at in Republican talking points about ‘choice’. You can ‘choose’, under some plans, to gamble your retirement on the stock market instead of placing it in a stable program. (Social Security, by the way, does not increase the federal budget deficit. Quite the contrary.)

Predictions are vain, but somehow it is hard to imagine Allen re-capturing the Virginia senate seat he lost to Jim Webb, even without a ‘macaca moment’.

[Update]

They’re all using the same playbook. Connecticut GOP senatorial candidate Linda McMahon, of World Wrestling Federation fame, also declined to say what exactly she would recommend for Social Security and Medicare. McMahon and Democrat Chris Murphy also appeared in debate last night. Murphy, like Kaine, leads in recent polling.

The more things don’t change: Prufrockian candidates for a played-out Wall Street-owned GOP

Posted on by
Reply

The more things don’t change

Recycling old political talent is the special province of Wall Street defenders and apologists, and we’ve been seeing a lot of it since November 2008. In fact, most of the smarmiest and most uncouth attacks on the president have come from recycled consultants, money men and white-collar goon squads whom it would be flattery to call hacks. They get used by the GOP mainly for two reasons: one, the GOP—as Willie Sutton said about banks—is where the money is, and they can get well paid for their efforts; and two, the GOP needs all the hired help it can get because it has no inspiration to offer. As I said years ago, basically the contest is people on one side, money on the other.

 

Wisconsin Gov. Walker

So the same worn ideas get fed into the public discourse, or rather, the same slogans and euphemisms get trotted out, to obfuscate the same attacks on the public weal. Examples are easy to find—‘debt’ and ‘budget’ and thrift-associated language, used to justify the gigantic unthrift of throwing money at the top; vilifying ‘big government’ and ‘regulation’, to prevent essential reforms in everything from mines to giant banks acting as stockbrokers without accountants.

 

Iconic street sign

To deliver the smoke bombs, smoke-and-mirrors or smokescreens—pick your metaphor—the same conveyances get used over and over. Massive paid advertising on television, financed by PACS and super PACS, is the most overt example and a given. Airing right now in the DC area, there’s one about President Obama’s ‘broken promises’—the national debt being the main example. Predictably, the (pro-Romney) ad does not mention that the Republicans’ trillion-dollar wars and trillion-dollar tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations produced the debt, or that the last outgoing Democratic administration left a budget surplus, or that Republicans in Congress have opposed every federal cost-saving measure in health care. Et cetera.

This is not to say that the lexicon is completely unvarying. In the wake of the most recent Wall Street disasters—JP Morgan Chase and Facebook—we are actually hearing a little discussion, in public, about ‘too big to fail’ and related problems including lack of scrutiny, in the business press and on cable business programs. There are even corporate-media commentators saying mildly critical things about the hand that feeds them. So what do they (currently) go after? Excessive executive compensation? Bonuses? Lack of capital reserves? Lack of tangible assets? Excessive ‘leverage’, aka debt? Millions spent on lobbying and on cost-ineffective legal defenses in court? Bad investments? A blindly greedy merger-and-acquisition focus resulting in offshoring, outsourcing and layoffs that cut into their own customer base? A determined refusal to boost sales by improving product and service?

Get real.

No, lately they’re going after—wait for it—companies that pay dividends. ‘Dividends’ is the new dirty word on Wall Street. The temerity of those companies that would actually reward their investors, you know, pay something back to the millions of people who enable the companies to stay alive . . . The argument seems to be that a company that pays out stock dividends—watch out for the word ‘austerity’ in this context*–is engaging in crowd-pleasing mountebankery, sort of like reminding the public of public health and public safety issues in a political context.

Sigh. (Note: Income from dividends, as from capital gains, is still income and IMO should be taxed as such.)

Does U.S. stand for Usual Suspects?

Back to the same-old.

Not only do we get the same words and slogans, the same tactics, and the same delivery system, we also get many of the same personnel. Naturally former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, in politics for most of his life, and GOP lifetime honchos in Congress—Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. John Boehner–are in the old sleaze game up to their hips. Naturally some of our least distinguished representatives preying upon the southeastern states—Rep. Joe “You lie!” Wilson—are carrying on as ever, sustained by money, ignorance and prejudice. Naturally some of our longest-serving GOP congressmen continue to represent rural districts and continue to turn an ever blind eye to the meth labs fueling their local economy. Take a close look at the Conroe, Texas, region for a good example of GOP-dominated law and order at work. Or not.

Meth residue? --No problem.

Naturally some of the same old hands also continue to operate less conspicuously behind the scenes. George H. W. Bush’s national co-chairman Peter Terpeluk, Jr., is one of the names behind the GOP’s infamous 2010 ‘Joker’ campaign strategy, reported by Politico. Despite the hoopla over the Tea Party, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), writing rightwing state laws around the country, continues to work through local non-movers and non-shakers ensconced in state GOP hierarchies. NationofChange reports that the anti-Newt Gingrich ads produced by a pro-Romney super-PAC came via some of the consultants who bestowed on us the Willie Horton and ‘swift boat’ ads of 1988 and 2004. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that retreads from the GWBush administration, the GHWBush administration, ghosts of Congress past and longtime GOP consultancies dominate the political discourse as reported in media, just as they serve as gatekeepers to the political process, often for both major parties. Former Sen. Rick Santorum, after being ousted from his senate seat by Pennsylvania voters, kept his hand in in Washington, D.C., by working as a lobbyist until entering the 2012 presidential election contest—a point only tepidly acknowledged during the season of Santorum’s peak attention.

All this goes far to explain why the general public often turns away from the political process—a turning away that benefits exactly the people and companies who cause it—and why the national political press has lost so much credibility, especially among younger voters.

The damage is exacerbated when national media attention goes to some of the most transparently spent, used-up, reused and hauled-out-of-storage media personalities in politics, who emerge from other operations to present or to re-present themselves as candidates for high office. Viz Donald Trump. Rudy Giuliani. Rick Perry. Newt Gingrich?!? Do the fans-of-prominence writing for major newspapers and the television networks honestly believe, in their hearts of hearts, that anyone out there—aside from flaming overt racial bigots–didn’t look at the Gingrich candidacy and say, inwardly if not to the family-room walls aloud, Really?!?

The larger corporate media outlets always lean corporate-ward. It’s in their DNA. Thus we have a spatelet of reports the past few days emphasizing Romney’s money draw. Not that Romney doesn’t pull in big bucks from his fellow Wall Streeters, of course; that’s a given. But the Center for Public Integrity reports that the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee nearly doubled the haul of Romney and the GOP for April.

If Romney and the GOP had done the same (instead of the reverse), the headlines in the WashPost among other capital media outlets would have been bigger (instead of nonexistent).

Nor is the heavy reliance on used-up retreads in the GOP getting the political analysis in news media that it deserves. Perhaps nowhere is this breathtaking blandness about the unthinkable more apparent than in regard to the Commonwealth of Virginia, where the GOP frontrunner for senator now is George Allen.

Yes, Mr. Macaca himself is currently the foremost candidate for the Republican Party nomination for U.S. Senate in the Birthplace of Presidents.

 

So much for lessons learned from Penn State

This is the kind of thing that makes the work of satirists so difficult.

 

Remember the big news about Gov. Allen during his last senate campaign—which was in 2006? It was his mother’s descent from a Jewish family in Tunisia. Unknown to Allen himself in his growing-up years, he had a Daniel Deronda story in his background; his mother was part of the Lumbroso family. –And widespread news reports were followed by inevitable commentary along the lines of look-what-George-Allen-found-out. My own take was a little different: Forget what George Allen found out. Look what the Lumbrosos found out.

The Lumbroso family in Europe, called the ‘Italian Rothschilds’, seems to be a family not just of wealth but of some distinction. Along with companies headed, family members have contributed significantly to the arts as well as to industry; it’s all a rather scintillating heritage of culture as well as presumably of status. So they find Our American Cousin and whom do they get? –George Allen. Where they could in another distribution of DNA have scored a Madeleine Albright or a John Kerrey or at least a step-grandparent of Hillary Clinton, instead the Lumbrosos get this shit-kicker, and not a real shit-kicker either, but the synthetic self-identified kind born in Whittier, Calif., grew up in Los Angeles and Chicago, son of a famous football coach, in the Senate via the University of Virginia on top of his father’s reputation; sort of the plastic kind of shit-kicker you hang from your rear-view mirror driving away from Lubbock. What my late father used to call a drugstore cowboy. You can always tell a drugstore cowboy at a glance; he’s the one who wears cowboy boots with his business suits because he has never been informed that boots are for riding, not walking. That’s why cowboy boots have those high heels canted back on high arches, to keep the feet in the stirrups. Traditionally they used to be made for sinewy little guys with aristocratic small feet.

If Allen turns up wearing a yarmulke prior to Virginia’s GOP senate primary on June 12—unlikely—or the general election Nov. 6, it will be no more spurious than, or less spurious than, his boots.

 

Speaking of remakes–

 

I have not seen the remake of All the King’s Men, with Sean Penn in the role earlier played by Broderick Crawford, so am not reading through any review of it or reading down to the bottom of comment about it. My question is whether the movie retains the ending in the Robert Penn Warren novel or goes with the revisionist moralized ending. I hope that Hollywood has had the decency to go back to the original ending rather than to the bowdlerized one, but I don’t want to know before seeing the film.

That said, All the King’s Men is still not a very strong book. Robert Penn Warren found himself with the ungracious task of trying to contain Huey Long, who had been assassinated eleven years before but who was bigger than Willie Stark, and bigger than Warren. The prose is padded with misogynistic, repetitive descriptions of female beauty aging, a kind of rhapsodizing adored by insecure Prufrockian guys who in another generation used to subscribe to National Geographic so they could look at naked native ladies without censure.

 

Southern politicians are a rare example of a political topic handled as badly by popular culture, including fiction, as by the big news outlets.

 

*Or any context.

 

Btw The saying that “The more things change, the more they stay the same” is a tiresome saying. Planet on one side, cynical superficialities on the other. The problem is not things changing or staying the same per se; the problem is failing to distinguish between better and worse.

The 2012 primary in Virginia; any news?

Posted on by
Reply

Virginia and Ohio—quiet and quieter

On tomorrow’s ‘Super Tuesday’ primaries, safe predictions do not abound. One remaining prediction is the lack of suspense over the outcome in Virginia.

Mitt Romney

With only two candidates allowed on the ballot—neither of them Newt Gingrich with his southern strategy, who had been leading the polls in Virginia—a nation is not bating its breath. Items of real news aside from vaginal probes are few and thin.

One is that King George County, Virginia, is not under the Voting Rights Act as of now.

Another is that on the eve of the primary, Rep. Eric Cantor has endorsed Romney. No surprise there. There is no Gingrich or other ‘alternative’ on the ballot, and it was a safe guess that Rep. Ron Paul was not going to get Cantor’s endorsement. Almost simultaneously, a top Cantor aide has abruptly resigned from Cantor’s staff to join the ‘Young Guns’ Super PAC. An objective observer could also bet that Romney’s chances in tomorrow’s Virginia primary are considerably more solid than those of the upper-ticket GOP in the general election in Virginia.

More on the general tenor of the political discourse in Virginia (setting aside vaginal probes), from Roll Call:

“Similar attempts at “no super PAC” pledges have fallen flat in California and Virginia. Former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D) told a debate moderator that he would “agree to it tomorrow” if he and former Sen. George Allen (R), his opponent in the open-seat race, could nix outside spending. Allen responded during the forum that such a pledge would tread on free speech.

Anti-Kaine broadcast attacks by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS have already topped $1.5 million, according to his campaign. Kaine is one of eight Senators and a dozen House Members targeted in a U.S. Chamber of Commerce ad campaign that by some estimates is in the $10 million range.”

There’s a lot of quiet free speech of the behind-the-back kind in Virginia, the state that most resembles Dallas on a larger scale.

That quietness has been breached lately, to the intense regret of GOP insiders, by the remarkable state requirement that prospective abortion patients get a vaginal probe.

Virginia governor

If only corporate media outlets would stop talking about ‘moderate’ Republicans. In practice, the so-called moderates are those flexible on the social issues who always go along with rapacious economic policy.

But more on that later. Unfortunately, the big contest re Virginia, bigger than Romney’s tax returns, is not hitting in the big-time media. The big contest is the court battle—initiated by Gov. Rick Perry—over the issue of how far a state party can go, even in-state, to block intra-party competition.

 

Rick Perry

Quick run-down or recap:

Perry having failed to qualify for the ballot in Virginia’s GOP primary, he sued Republican members of the State Board of Elections, joined by the other GOP candidates who likewise failed to get on the ballot, over Virginia’s onerous rules for qualifying. District Court Judge John Gibney, who gave Perry et al. a temporary ruling holding up the mailing of absentee and overseas ballots, then ruled against Perry’s bid to be placed on the ballot. Perry et al. appealed the decision (not joined by Michele Bachmann, who had dropped out of the race). Both sides were briefly appellants.

Siding with Perry along with his fellow GOP non-qualifiers was the ACLU.

Gibney allowed the ballot process to go forward, saying that the plaintiffs—Perry, Newt Gingrich, John Huntsman, and Rick Santorum—could not re-play the game after losing. Huntsman dropped out of the lawsuit, having dropped out of the presidential nomination fight.

Rick Perry dropped his appeal Jan. 27. Newt Gingrich dropped his appeal Feb. 6. Case closed. So it’s over–except that it’s not over, because the rules are still on the books.

As politicos know–and discussed for a couple of days, before designating Mitt Romney as the inevitable nominee, then almost dumping him, then waffling on the razor’s edge of whether a primary loss could finish him off—Perry and Gingrich failed to get on the Virginia ballot when they could not turn in enough signatures. Only Romney and Ron Paul managed to qualify as candidates for the Virginia primary with its 50 delegates to the national convention. At issue are Virginia’s rules for signature gathering: Even a major-party candidate must turn in petitions with 10,000 valid signatures, including 400 signatures from each of the Commonwealth’s congressional districts. Furthermore, Virginia requires that all signature gatherers must be residents of Virginia. Judge Gibney commented that the resident-gatherer rule struck him as unconstitutional but said that plaintiffs should have filed earlier.

Since in most cases a party must be injured before filing a lawsuit, it is puzzling to a non-lawyer how a candidate can claim injury before being excluded from the ballot (or before losing).

Another problem with the time-frame argument in the Virginia case, however, is that the party rules used to keep Perry and (especially) Gingrich off the ballot are new. As the Republican Party of Virginia said in its official statement on the certification process,

“In October 2011, RPV formally adopted the certification procedures that were applied on December 23 . . . Candidates were officially informed of the 15,000 rule in October 2011, well in advance of the Dec. 22 submission deadline.”

 

A little local history

Recapping–as previously written, the use of a primary election in Virginia is itself relatively new. As one local blogger and political watcher points out, there was no Virginia Presidential Primary before 1988. Previously, both parties chose their presidential nominees, as in many other states, in a nominating convention. “The state decided to hold a primary in 1988, likely in an effort to gain more prominence for the Commonwealth in the first election since 1968 where there would not be an incumbent President running on either party’s ticket.” The rules for getting on the ballot were fairly loose: a candidate had to be “prominently discussed in the news media” or qualify for primary season matching funds. The first primary was won by George H. W. Bush for the Republicans and Jesse Jackson for the Democrats.

For whatever reason—possibly Jesse Jackson’s victory, the local informant suggests—Virginia went back to using conventions instead of primaries in 1992 and 1996. (The move also kept Independent Ross Perot from making much headway in the Birthplace of Presidents.) The Commonwealth brought back the primaries in 2000, but with strict rules, the same as now—except that in 2000 and 2008 they were not enforced. There was no GOP primary in 2004, because incumbent George W. Bush was the only GOP candidate on the ballot. In 2012 there is no Democratic primary in Virginia.

What brought about this sticking to the letter of the rules? The major difference is that “in October 2011, an independent candidate for the legislature, Michael Osborne, sued the Virginia Republican Party because it did not check petitions for its own members, when they submitted primary petitions. Osborne had no trouble getting the needed 125 valid signatures for his own independent candidacy, but he charged that his Republican opponent’s primary petition had never been checked, and that if it had been, that opponent would not have qualified. The lawsuit, Osborne v Boyles, cl 11-520-00, was filed in Bristol County Circuit Court,” too late to affect his election but with noticeable effect on the presidential primary. Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli was so dismayed by the exclusion of almost all the Republican candidates from the primary ballot that he briefly considered trying to change the rule during the election year.

We are reliably informed, in short, that GOP contenders for the White House are being held to a standard previously unmet—not only the most restrictive of any state in the nation, but newly adopted (or enforced) only months before the election. If Obama or Tim Kaine or any other Democratic candidates had shifted procedural ground this way, it would be blazoned coast to coast.

Oddly, this historical fact also did not feature in the defendants’ filings to the appeals court. To the contrary, defendants argued:

“The presidential primary is scheduled for March 6. Two candidates met the statutory requirement of filing 10,000 valid signatures, including at least 400 from each Congressional district. In past elections, there were larger slates of candidates who have met the Virginia statutory requirement and were included on the primary ballot.”

Unsurprisingly, the entire GOP state establishment supported Romney and the Board of Elections in the lawsuit, against plaintiffs Perry et al. Perry gained the support only of Gingrich, Huntsman, Santorum and Michele Bachmann—before she dropped out of the presidential race—and briefly of Cuccinelli, along with the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU filed an amicus brief arguing that the rule that signature gatherers must be from Virginia is unconstitutional, violating the rights of speech and assembly.

 

By the way, Virginia law also recognizes only the Democratic and Republican parties as political parties. No third parties allowed. Furthermore, no write-ins are allowed in the primaries.

Ironies abound in the current situation. The well-funded Texas Governor Rick Perry, Virginia resident and U.S. history consultant Newt Gingrich, and three other Republicans failed to get on the ballot in ‘red-state’ Virginia. Perry did not get enough signatures. Gingrich collected more than 11,000 signatures, but over a thousand turned out to be fraudulently signed by one person. Candidates Bachmann, Huntsman and Santorum did not even file to get on the ballot in Virginia. Thus only Romney and Paul remained eligible to compete, this in a year when—as ever—southern states are eager to make their mark on history. Florida even gave up half its delegates by moving up its primary date, against GOP national party rules.

Under the U.S. Constitution, rules for getting on the ballot are left to the states, and there is no national standard for ballot access. Legislation to limit how far states could on restricting access has been introduced repeatedly by Rep. Ron Paul, but without success.

The rationale for restrictions to ballot access is protecting the integrity of elections. Yet the Virginia rules give a pass to exactly those most liable to jeopardize election integrity, namely the biggest and best-funded campaigns. The biggest list of signatures is exempt from any checking at all. The defensive RPV statement shows that the RPV itself recognizes this exemption as questionable.

Only the Virginia GOP brought you that rule that even the Democratic and the Republican parties, established parties, have to spread their signatures around among every congressional district. The rule effectively prevents a college town from harvesting enough signatures to put, say, Ron Paul on the ballot with ease. Ironically, it did not bar Ron Paul, whose supporters are both dedicated and able to read. It just barred every other potential not-Romney candidate.

 

Ohio

With regard to Ohio, briefly it can be said that the GOP establishment has worked, behind the scenes, to keep things from getting even uglier in the state. Some of the same people who fabricated Terry Schiavo’s case as rightwing martyrdom are still out there, in the wake of the Chardon, Ohio, shootings.