The Republican onslaught

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

From day one, the Republicans and the right in general have sought to hamstring, cripple, and ultimately render the Obama presidency a failure.

This assertion is not based on opinion, speculation by Washington pundits, or the savvy analysis of pointy-headed academics. It comes straight from the horse’s mouth. At the very outset of the Obama presidency, Mitch McConnell, GOP Senate Minority Leader, said that the principal goal of the Republican Party should be to make Barak Obama a one-term president.  
    
Now, in the final miles of the U.S. electoral marathon, the GOP is working with a vengeance to obliterate the president and his party in November.

The Republicans’ main weapons are the mountain of money that the most reactionary sector of the richest of the rich (Bill Gates, Sr., Warren Buffet, George Soros, the Kennedy family, and many others in this super-elite economic class, people who have loads of money but also a social conscience, not included) are willing to provide the party that does their bidding for them, plus a ferocious and shameful campaign to disenfranchise those who are most likely to cast their votes for Obama – principally minorities, the young, and the poor.

First, let’s talk about money, “the mother’s milk of American politics” according to the ever-cynical Phil Gramm, a former Republican member of Congress from Texas. Gramm, who said that Great Recession of 2008 was a psychological phenomenon, was nevertheless on the mark on the role money plays in American politics.

With a few honorable exceptions, American politicians have always protected the interests of the rich. An ironical version of the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – states that those who have the gold make the rules.  
That’s pretty much how Washington functions most of the time, except that those with the gold make or break the makers of the rules, the members of Congress who actually write and vote on the laws. It goes without saying that the rules desired by the gilded elite and enacted by their political protégés are those that will ensure a growing flow of money into the crowded coffers of the ultra-rich.   

The revival of the Democrats in the 2006 Congressional elections and the Obama victory in 2008 created concern among rich rightists and their political minions. Their fears were not that Obama and the Democrats would change the basic rules of their rigged game. None of them really thought that the Democrats planned to usher in European-style social democracy, much less turn the United States into a socialist society. Still, whipping up such fears plays well with a sector of the GOP electorate afflicted with what has been called the “paranoid style” in American politics.

Political demagoguery aside, however, the real fear among the right-wing rich and the GOP was that Obama and a Democratic-controlled Congress could derail or at least delay the long and ongoing march toward an ever more plutocratic political economy that Ronald Reagan began in 1980. The conservative counterrevolution launched by Reagan and Gingrich in the 1980s, which weathered the Clinton presidency practically without a nick, might find Obama a somewhat tougher customer, although it’s debatable if that has actually been the case.

More importantly, the election of a black man to the White House (one with an impeccably liberal record – before he ran for president) largely on the basis of massive black turnout and overwhelming Latino support, could be seen as a harbinger of what the inexorable browning of America might mean for the plutocratic project. This, the right seems to think, may be the last chance to lock in their agenda, to make their counterrevolution irreversible by permanently starving the public sector and turning to dust institutions that seemed rock-solid only a few years ago, like Social Security and Medicare.   
         
Faced with the challenge of profound demographic change, a party with a plethora of plutocrats in its ranks and a large contingent of closeted and not so closeted racists, who abandoned the Democratic Party when it sided with the civil rights movement, is doing what one would expect. It is pulling out its colossal checkbook and doing everything it can to prevent minorities from voting.  

Thus, as the Washington Post reports in a May 19 article, so far this year conservative groups lead liberals by a whopping 4-1 margin in dollars raised for November’s Senate and House races. With the election still months away, conservative super PACS and non-profit organizations have poured “well over $20 million into congressional races so far this year,” according to the Post.

Thus the first prong of the Republican effort to preempt the political disaster that changing demographics portends is to draw a line in the sand now, attack with the monetary equivalent of many neutron bombs, and provide an object lesson to Obama and any future Obamas who may be lurking in the wings. And the Republicans are using their natural financial advantage at every level, from the local school board to the state legislatures, to the presidency.

Thus the media reports that, despite all the largesse the president has lavished on the banks, Wall Street contributions to the Obama campaign from the financial sector are down. At the state level, Rick Scott practically bought the Florida governorship in 2010, and since he has teamed with the Republican legislature to enact a ferociously pro-business agenda. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker, who evoked the fury of many in his state by denying public workers the right of collective bargaining, is attempting to fend off a recall effort with the help of enormous infusions of right-wing money.  

The other prong of the GOP onslaught is a wide-ranging effort to make it as difficult as possible for groups favorable to the Democrats – minorities, young people, the poor – to cast their votes. Republicans in eight states have managed to enact laws forcing voters to present an official identification, and in four others the legislatures passed similar measures but they were vetoed by Democratic governors.

The Republicans’ pretext – to prevent voter fraud – is as bogus as their motives are transparent. The incidence of voter fraud in this country is lower than that of all but the most exotic diseases. According to The Nation magazine, the Justice Department under President George W. Bush carried out a five-year effort to prosecute voter fraud. In a country of over 300 million people, the result was a meager 120 charges and eighty-six convictions.

The real reason for the Republicans’ zeal for voter identification laws can be inferred from a May 18 New York Times article:

“Twenty-five percent of African American voters do not have a valid government-issued photo ID, compared with 8 percent of whites, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school. The report also found that 15 percent of voters earning less than $35,000 per year do not have such an ID.”

What the late GOP Senator S.I. Hayakawa said about the Panama Canal – “we stole it fair and square” is what the Republicans, with their vast amount of money and their voter suppression strategy, are trying to do with this election. Will we let them? Can we stop them?