Tag Archives: Republicans

GOP’s The Walking Red

  By

Rick_Perry_by_Gage_Skidmore_10

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaign, drifting around near the bottom of a field of 17 and struggling to escape the shadow of a badly bungled 2012 effort, is reportedly out of money and has puts its entire staff on unpaid “volunteer” status, nationwide.

Watch as a super PAC keeps this zombie walking…

The Perry campaign reported raising $1.14 million in the second quarter of this year and on July 15 reported having $883,913 on hand.

But a group of Opportunity and Freedom super PACs promoting Perry’s candidacy was in far healthier state financially, having raised nearly $17 million by the end of June.

Austin Barbour, senior adviser to the super PAC, said the group would step up “to aggressively support the governor in a number of different ways.”

 
Never before in modern American political history has it been easier for a completely dead and broke major party presidential campaign to keep going for no discernible reason and with virtually no chance.

Super PACs are like cult of personality worship machines for the excessively wealthy cult faithful.

I guess they’re creating a lot more consulting and media buying jobs though, maybe? There’s that trickle-down we’ve all been promised for so long… trickling all the way from the 0.1% to the 1% and back to the media companies owned by the 0.1%. That’s what passes for social mobility these days: Money moving around the hands of those within sub-tiers the top tier.

Bill’s reaction: The “Mitt” documentary

  By

Mitt_filmI watched the “Mitt” documentary. I don’t think it really changed my opinion of Mitt Romney particularly — perhaps because I’m from Massachusetts and already had a strongly held negative opinion about him rather than a vaguely negative opinion based in national media caricatures. I obviously was aware he was a person behind closed doors. That doesn’t have much to do with his bad policies and record.

What I did take away from it was how strongly Mitt Romney believed even in the moment of his (perceived) ‘surprise’ defeat that Pres. Obama was literally destroying the country in fall of “great nations” terms and believed America would reach an irreparable “tipping point” in “5 years” because of Obama’s policies. Mitt’s a relatively moderate and reasonable person, at least by comparison to most national elected Republicans these days, and even he had bought into that notion. (And in the documentary at least, a couple months earlier, Mitt and Ann were passionately discussing tax burdens on small businesses as a reason to win, rather than a perceived need to avert doomsday.) That’s pretty stunning and disturbing.

I think maybe the costs (personal, financial, emotional) of running for office have reached such intense levels that the only way you can convince yourself to keep going through it all is not only to megalomaniacally believe that only you can do the job (as most political candidates have long seemed to believe), but also that the other person will be so bad at it that it will be something the community/state/nation can’t recover from it.

In other words, to run for president these days, you can’t just have a messiah complex but a sincere conviction that the end-times are nigh. Which meshes perfectly with the presently now-mainstreamed (!) thought-currents rippling and roiling through the Republican Party. But even if it didn’t, that kind of divisive framing of campaigns is only going to fuel the toxic cycle that keeps producing worse and worse candidates and leaders at so many levels of government. There will be no good and decent people left on the campaign trail.

The smaller takeaway (as other people have observed) is: Wow, they really were delusional by the final month of the campaign and literally didn’t understand how the electoral math/map was going for them or needed to be handled. To which I would add: Can you imagine a Mitt Romney presidency if the “bubble” around him was that impervious to reality and basic structural facts that politics couldn’t alter?

The first GOP debate was a record-breaking cable event

  By

On Thursday night, Fox News Channel hosted a Republican presidential primary debate with 10 of the 17 Republican candidates. At 24 million viewers, it became the most viewed non-ESPN program in cable history. Hell, even I tuned in for part of it (after watching the more interesting Canadian leadership debate) — the first time I’ve ever intentionally watched Fox News. Possibly even the first time I’ve watched Fox News and wasn’t also stuck in a train/bus terminal or airport.

The debate beat out last year’s record-breaker for a non-sports event, an episode of The Walking Dead, by a margin of 6.6 million viewers. The previous record-holder for a cable news event was Larry King’s 1993 moderation of a CNN debate between Al Gore and Ross Perot on NAFTA’s proposed ratification in Congress. Even that audience was 7 million smaller.

This debate had more than 20 million more viewers than the first Republican debate in 2011. Analysts credited — who else but the reality TV star? — Donald Trump’s anticipated presence for generating widespread awareness of exactly when the debate would be, so that more people didn’t miss it. Sadly, the clown car that is the 2016 Republican presidential field has officially become one of America’s top reality TV programs, it seems. A reality show like The Bachelorette only pulls in 8 million viewers at the most these days.

However, in general, Broadcast TV often still generates much larger audience numbers than cable on a fairly regular basis, although there too sports events continue to be the mega-draw. Still, the Thursday night debate exceeded the average viewership of the past decade’s most popular non-sports network show, NCIS, for both the most recent season and any other season, including its peak in 2012 at 21.34 million viewers.

Another interesting comparison point is against series finales on network TV. So for whatever it’s worth, in absolute numbers, this debate’s audience was between the finale viewership counts for St. Elsewhere (22.5m in 1988) and Full House (24.3m in 1995) — 19th and 18th respectively on the list of all-time highs for network TV series finales. However, it has been more than a decade since any network TV series finale exceeded the viewership of Thursday night’s debate. For example, the debate audience was nearly twice the audience of the much-anticipated 2014 finale of How I Met Your Mother.

Remarkably, the “JV debate” earlier in the day was still one of Fox News Channel’s highest-rated primary debates in history, although 18 million fewer people tuned in and there was barely even a live audience.

August 5, 2015 – Arsenal For Democracy 137

  By

Posted by Bill on behalf of the team.

AFD-logo-470

Topics: Presidential megadonors; Medicare turns 50; Nigeria asks US to close banking loopholes. People: Bill, Kelley. Produced: August 2nd, 2015.

Discussion Points:

– Presidential megadonors: Like ridiculously expensive racetrack betting and equally pointless.
– Medicare just turned 50: Are Democrats pushing Big Ideas in public policy these days?
– Nigeria’s new president argues closing corruption loopholes in the West is more helpful than loans.

Episode 137 (51 min):
AFD 137

Related Links

– NYT: Million-Dollar Donors in the 2016 Presidential Race
– The Hill: President: ObamaCare finishes job started by Medicare, Medicaid
– NASI: Medicare’s Efforts to Reduce Disparities
– AFD: Buhari: Anti-corruption help better than foreign aid, for Nigeria

Subscribe

RSS Feed: Arsenal for Democracy Feedburner
iTunes Store Link: “Arsenal for Democracy by Bill Humphrey”

And don’t forget to check out The Digitized Ramblings of an 8-Bit Animal, the video blog of our announcer, Justin.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS