Back To The GOP Playbook

by DemFromCT

The PNAC Iraq democracy experiment is in tatters. Iran is threatening to build nuclear weapons. Gas prices are soaring. Bin Laden is still not caught. And so our President naturally decides to expend energy on the Burning Issue Of The Day:

Asked at a news briefing in the Rose Garden on Friday whether he believed the anthem would have the same value in Spanish as it did in English, Mr. Bush said flatly, "No, I don't."

"And I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English," Mr. Bush said. "And they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English."

Mr. Bush has tried to occupy a middle ground in the raging debate over immigration, supporting legislation that would grant immigrant workers temporary legal status and perhaps a path to citizenship, while pushing for immigrants to learn English also pressing for more steps to stop the flow of newcomers over the border. But his statement about the anthem was taken by members of both parties as a clear signal to conservatives that he stood with them on what many of them see as a clash between national identity and multiculturalism.

His remarks touched directly on the divide over the impact of immigrants on the nation's culture, crystallized this time by the release of the Spanish version of the anthem, loosely translated and featuring Spanish-language stars like Gloria Trevi and Carlos Ponce.

This is his chance to signal the base that he stands with them on matters of importance. It ranks right up there with flag-burning amendments and gay marriage declarations... a substantive attempt to address the deep-seated structural issues that threaten us all. Not. But as long as Bush advocates guest worker programs, the knuckle-draggers in his party will not be behind him the way he and Karl (newly freed up to concentrate on issues like this) envisioned.

Minuteman organizers say this spring's marches have proved to be an unexpected recruitment tool for Americans who feel uneasy about the burgeoning immigration movement but may have considered the organization a pack of gun-toting vigilantes.

"We're not trying to be more mainstream - mainstream has found us," said Stephen Eichler, the group's executive director. "They're saying, 'These guys actually have teeth, they don't all chew tobacco, they don't all have a gun rack in the back of their truck.'

Immigration clearly is a major domestic issue. And since nothing else is going right for the GOP, it's time to let Bush be Bush. But oversimplifying doesn't quite work the way it used to:

1. the anthem is an ambiguous symbol at best
2. this hurts the GOP with Latino voters now and in the future
3. Bush is not trusted anymore
4. previous Bush oversimplifications have been failures (see Iraq, Katrina, stem cells, Bin Laden, etc)

Now if we could have a President that thinks complex but is plain spoken when needed, instead of one that talks and thinks like a radio talk show host, we'd be in a different situation, but those days ended when George Bush was sworn in. We all knew it; the GOP is now feeling the depths of the consequences of Bush's IOKIYAR governance.

The result is scandal after GOP scandal (and more to come), poor preparation for disasters both natural and of Bush's making, an unraveling of the K Street DeLay mentality, and a very pissed off electorate waking up to the fact that precious little has been done in the last five years to make our future more secure (baby boomer retirement? Medicare/medicaid fixes? a more balanced budget?).

They think their Great Achievement is the current corporate economy? Puhleeze. Health care and pensions are being withdrawn from American workers and gas prices mean more than corporate profits to voters. So let's talk about Our National Anthem. There's really nothing else the GOP can afford to focus on for accomplishment.

 

Comments

[coral]

Just wondering, given Bush's mental capacity could he sing our National Anthem in English without reading off a teleprompter? Hmm...given his reading ability, maybe he couldn't even do it with a teleprompter.

[Mimikatz]

I don't think we can underestimate the impact of the breaking Duke Cunningham-Brent Wilkes-prostitutes and poker scandal, folowing on the heels of the Abramoff scandal, which isn't close to finished. The confluence of corruption, cynicism, and black ops is hard to top, and will demoralize the religions right and the fear crowd.

While the Dems have been looking for a way to neutralize Bush and the GOP on national security, it has been staring them in the face all the time. There is nothing inherently wrong with Dem positions on national security, or their conduct of foreign and security policy over the last 65 years. What has hurt them in the post-Vietnam period are two things:

(1) relentless battering from the GOP, accusations against their patriotism and competence. These are almost completely undeserved, but they have lodged themselves in both the Dems' and the national psyche, leading to

(2) the reluctance of the Dems to fight back against the GOP. I think it is this, more than anything, that creates the image of a weak and insecure Dem Party. Couple this with Bush's cowboy talk after 9/11, and the Dems have been toast.

But it is all a sham. The truth is, the GOP is just as incompetent and corrupt at national security as everything else. They prosecuted the Iraq War on false pretenses and in an incompetent fashion, undermining the Afghan War and making it useless. They have also allowed billions to be siphoned off by contractors and crooks, while the needs of the troops have been shorted. All of this has been to the detriment of our security.

All the Dems need to do is call the GOP on its corruption, cynicism and incompetence. This would demonstrate that they have the will andf guts to stand up to enemies, it might pierce the veil of GOP competence, and it might let the public hear the Dems' common sense, reasonable solutions to international problems. I really think that after 5 1/2 years of this garbage people are willing to listen, making it absolutely unnecessary, counterproductive and tone deaf for the Dems to try to out-tough the GOP on the issues, like the folks at the misnamed Democracy Arsenal that Emptywheel skewered the other day.

Leave the demonstration of toughness for the fight with the GOP. That will do the trick.

[Crab Nebula]

My gut reaction was that Bush played the anthem issue very well. I would have made an economic argument...learn the language and integrate to expand your opportunities, and symbolically this anthem seems to say, don't learn english.

Immigrant protests, I think, are now going too far, unless people start hitting the streets wearing suits. The point has been made...why continue? Because it feels good?

I think the GOP could postively net a handful of points in key regions of the country if these protests continue, because at this point the self-congratulatory, fist-pumping celebration hits the wrong emotional notes.

If R's play this skillfully, it'll help them with their turnout problem in Nov, but it won't be enough thanks to prevailing economic and war issues, which are only getting worse.

[kaleidescope]

We may have reached the point where Bush's unpopularity and desperation causes him to try to rev up his base -- the neo-Confederate Know Nothing mass base of the Republican Party -- in ways that are net losses for the GOP. Steve Gilliard has a nice post up today that goes well with DemFromCT's. The Republican alliance with anti-black racists made African Americans the most loyal Democratic voting block. Only sick people align themselves with a Party that hates them existentially. The need to get some kind of mojo for the mid-terms has painted Bush and his allies into a corner of race hatred, this time directed against Latinos, the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States. On the Nuestro Himmo, Democrats can just sit back and let Bush talk. If asked, they should say the National Anthem sounds beautiful any way you sing it.

I'm thinking of the series Ruy Teixeira has run all week about the innate demographic strengths progressive Democrats have long term, how Democrats can win by keeping (or expanding) their share of the growing constituencies like Latinos and the young, while staunching the flow of white working class people away from the Party. Bush and the Repulbicans seem to be doing this for the Democrats. (Which is lucky since the Democrats don't seem to be able to do much for themselves these days.) Teixeira's prescription could be filled if the intensifying hatred Republicans preach alienates a few subsets of their white working class, christian, anti-communist and finance coalition. Perhaps it's time for Democrats to start talking some about Christian love, tolerance, and the example of Christ.

I hope this isn't too much of a digression, but I'm reading Taylor Branch's magnificant "At Cannan's Edge", which kicks off with the Selma marches and the culmination of the voting rights struggle. LBJ, political genius that he was, understood that the Civil Rights Act had alienated white southerners (and also northern racists) and would lose the Solid South to the Democrats for a generation. Both Johnson and Barry Goldwater knew this well before the 1964 election. Johnson's response was a long term vision -- mobilize and get voting the people who benefitted from the Civil Rights Act and its 1965 companion, the Immigration Reform Act, which repealed race-based quotas on immigration applicants. To that end, Johnson sponsored the Voting Rights Act and got it passed. Faced with a horrible dilemma, Johnson exchanged one voting block for another.

Also, importantly, he did the right thing.

We may now be seeing LBJ's strategy coming to fruition. The polling Teixeira highlights tends to confirm the wisdom of Johnson's strategy. And Democrats should help it along by sending our own code to some of the immigrant ethnic groups that have traditionally voted Republican. Here I'm thinking of anti-communist exile Asians such as Vietnamese, Taiwanese and culturally conservative Irish.

Even as recently as six months ago I'd get a knot in my stomach when Republicans revved up the hate machine. Lately they've been making me smile. Republican race hatred in the morning smells like desperation. And that smells like . . . victory.

[TCinLA]

American "Know-Nothingism" on the issue of immigration is - unfortunately - an old, old story. It particularly rears its head when the immigrants involved are both low-status and non-English-speaking, as anyone reading this of Polish or Italian ancestry can easily attest from the stories told in their families and the jokes they would still fight a war over if they heard them today. The lady in my life, who arrived here a 3-year old Lithuanian immigrant born in a DP camp in postwar Germany, has plenty of first-hand memories of she and her sisters being called "stupid DP's" by their fellow students in Chicago (most of whom were probably the first in their family to grow up speaking English as a first language) for their then-lack of facility in English. Today the three "stupid DPs" are a senior IT industry executive (older sis), an artist (swmbo) and a professor of biological sciences at U Wis (little sis). That's the way it goes in America, and it's what creates the good parts of this idealized system. It's too bad we have to give the mouth-breathers their time for "hazing" the rest of us.

12 years ago, I ended up getting to know the Latino family who lived next door in the apartment complex the "vicissitudes of life" had ended up with me moving to. He came here (illegally) as a refugee from the (U.S. supported) death squads in El Salvador; she came here (illegally) as the survivor of an "ethnic cleansing" by the (U.S. supported) Guatemalan Army. At the time I knew them, they had recently become citizens, and were both working 2 jobs. A year later, they moved out, to the home they had just bought. This last week, I heard from them that their son just got notification of acceptance to UCLA on a full academic scholarship in pre-med this fall.

I myself had been as afraid of the non-English speaking immigrants flooding the neighborhoods of Los Angeles, as the refugees from our Central American wars came to get away from our bombs and bullets, as any other Anglo - until I met my neighbors, and their friends.

I absolutely refuse to believe that this country is not a better place for the presence of that little family among us, and the story of SWMBO also points to the fact that were it not for those willing to come here and work their asses off as they do, the idiots of the Beer Belly Militia wouldn't be here in the first place to be the ignorant mouth-breathing morons they are.

The only difference between my political/religious/economic refugee ancestors and my former next-door neighbors is a few hundred years and an ocean. Other than those minor details, it's the same exact story.

Every time I run across these Know-Nothings, I wish I had access to one of my dogs-and-Irish-stay-off-the-grass ancestors' shillelaghs, to "lay about mightily" with.

[kaleidescope]

I'm reaching back to the Politics and Religion class Booth Fowler taught at Madison, so I may have this wrong, but my memory is that there was a rising Know Nothing tide in Wisconsin against German immigrants (at a time when Milwaukee had five German language dailys). This culminated in the Wisconsin legislature passing a law mandating that only English be taught in schools. The next election there was a massive electoral backlash, tossing out the nativist majority. The Repuplicans are playing with fire and this won't be the first time someone got burned playing the ethnic hatred card.

[Mimikatz]

There has been opposition to every wave of immigrants, back into the 18th Century. All the "English Only" stuff is a crock. With both Latinos and Asians, of whom we have a very large number here in the Bay Area, it is no different from other immigrant groups--the older people may not learn English, the middle aged struggle some with it, but the kids want to and do pick it up pretty quickly. I have worked with many Latino students and a few recent Asian immigrants over the past 6 years. There is no desire by young people NOT to learn English, nor do I have any sense their parents don't WANT to learn it, they just may not have time for classes because they are working so hard.

It is all just the fear of the unknown, and the fear in a time of change that what you have will be devalued, somehow. Lots like the psychological constituents of the opposition to gay marriage. People who see themselves falling behind grab onto what they have, what they feel makes them, special and better than someone else. They don't want to see it spread too far. Bob Dylan's classic "Only a Pawn In Their Game."

What the Dems need to do is stress that it isn't all a zero sum game, that the bad guys aren't immigrant workers but companies and corporations who insist on having it all for themselves and exploiting the weak. All workers will benefit from strong worker protections, minimum wage increases and universal health care.

[Big River Bandido]

Great comments above, all around. I would particularly like to address the idea of "backlash". The anti-immigrant propositions in California in 90s are particularly instructive here. The propositions, which would have stripped undocumenteds of any state services (including education and health care) did far more than create a backlash. Gov. Pete Wilson's vocal support of the initiatives kindled a fire among immigrants in California (most especially Latinos) — essentially, that was the event that politically mobilized immigrants to vote. As a result, California underwent a profound political alignment. Wilson's presidential ambitions died on the vine, and even Orange County — a former bastion of conservativism that sent William Dannemeyer to Congress — flipped its Congressional allegiance, electing Loretta Sanchez instead. The spark for all this was Wilson's zeal to placate the right-wing, which led him to endorse the initiative.

To date, the Republicans nationally have been very effective (and cynical) in manipulating public policy and their own rhetoric regarding immigrants. They have essentially been playing both sides of the street, working both their hardcore right-wing base as well as trying to expand their take of the Latino vote. But they appear to be approaching their day of reckoning, as with the issue of immigration heating up it is getting more and more difficult for Republicans to avoid taking stronger stands that ultimately offend some of the voters they are courting. The demonstrations we've seen over the last few weeks are the first that I can recall in years with the anger and passion that roiled California in the 1990s. Now Bush's comments on the national anthem, though they may seem trivial and harmless, will only hurt him. They might even prove to be his "Wilson moment", because they are so symbolically simple that they give the lie to any of his policy pronouncements.

If immigrants are sufficiently angered, inspired, and mobilized, as they were in California in the mid-90s, it is conceivable that they could tip the balance of marginal states — but also completely re-align the electoral politics of several states which today lean Republican:

Arizona
New Mexico
Florida
Texas

Florida? Texas? Well, there's always hope. May history repeat itself!

[Fred in Vermont]

I heard a discussion of this on public radio where they interviewed a guy from an LA station who had played the song a few times. He said about 60% of his callers, mostly Spanish speaking, thought that the translated song was disrespectful.
This was restated several times and each time in a way that sounded like there might be something about the choice or words in the translation that was designed to disparage the US. The bottom line seemed to be that anyone who does not know Spanish well enough to evaluate the tone of the words used in the translation just needs to take the word of Spanish speaking Americans that it is "disrespectful".
I can't argue because I don't know enough Spanish to evaluate the translation even if I had the written text in front of me which I don't. But I think this was a set-up. I strongly suspect that the translation is respectful and that the only thing bothered some people was the way it was put together with different artists doing various Latin style arrangements of different parts.
I don't see how there is anything disrespectful about people doing their own musical arrangement. Some people were sort of shocked when that started about 40 years ago but it is now standard at public events. The only question I have is whether it could really work esthetically to have different artists doing different arrangements of different sections. It seems to me that would be hard to pull off in a way that did not somehow distract the listener in a way that made none of the arrangements really work.
But if that is a problem, and I am just saying it could be, then it should be discussed from that point of view and not in terms of a lack of "respect" for the National Anthem that only Spanish speakers and hear.

[DemFromCT]

Jose Feliciano, 1968, Vietnam era.

[republican man]

Hey Dems...

After mopping up the country with you guys for the last 3 elections i actually think that we are about to do it again.

The Senate is ours and Stevens is wheezing. HA HA, another
appointment for Bush.

As for the House.... You guys have a shot, but you'll blow it..

And to Big Rover Bandido.... You are the most un-American poster on this site, which says alot. Ashame that Americans have fought for you... Your sad...

[Syl]

Doesn't it bother any of you here that you are labeling half the country who simply hold different POVs on various issues racist?

Take a matter so seemingly simple and innocuous as bi-lingual eduation. Yes, it's harder for someone who doesn't know English to understand the lessons and pass the exams. But it is also harder for someone who doesn't know English to assimilate into the larger society. And I'm not speaking culturally, I'm speaking economically.

To not require the learning of English is to doom the people you're trying to help with a severe economic disadvantage.

And for this, those who are against bi-lingual eduation are labeled racists and ignorant people who do not understand the value of multi-culturalism and diversity.

I mean really, do you want to help these folks or not?

My reaction to all this 'racist' baloney is simply to roll my eyes and vote Republican these days even though I voted Democrat for almost 40 years.

[DemFromCT]

Welcome to our Republican and conservative visitors. The polite conversation is appreciated.

republican man, there are none so blind as those who won't see. As Gallup points out:

Six months before Republicans try to hold on to control of Congress in the fall elections, a new poll shows President Bush has slid to the lowest approval rating of his presidency, and a majority of voters say they'll vote for Democrats in November.

A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday found Bush's approval rating at 34%, two points under his previous low. He also received the lowest ratings of his presidency on his handling of the economy, energy and foreign affairs. He tied his previous low on Iraq: 32%.

The poll showed Democrats leading 54%-39% among registered voters who were asked which party they would prefer in a congressional race.

As Colbert said to Bush, just the other night, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Syl, I wonder if you can point more specifically to your 'racist' comment as to what you're referring to. I have no qualms in pointing out the racist nature of the Minutemen or their well-documented ties to neo-Nazi and hate groups. But the debate on the whole does not boil down merely to that, nor did I say it did.

For many Americans, it's about establishing and controlling borders. That's a reasonable concern, widely shared from Hillary to Bush. The devil is in the details and what you do about it. And it's also in how the debate is framed.

But picking out the National Anthem and which language it is sung in is pure politics, and has nothing to do with such a lofty topic as borders and immuigration policy.

[Big River Bandido]

response to republican man:

"Un-American"? Wow, that's quite a badge of honor, and I'll wear it with pride. In the future, though, if you want to compliment me, at least please spell my handle correctly.

I must admit, I'm a bit confused as to just what I wrote that got you so off-kilter. The point of my post was twofold: 1) By pissing off immigrants in California with hate rhetoric in the 1990s, Republicans pushed CA squarely into the Democratic column for the foreseeable future, and 2) Republicans are now already embarked on a similar course, nationwide. Just how is it "un-American" to point out that voters have recoiled from Republican hate tactics in the past and are poised to do so again?

Of course, considering all the dogshit your party has stepped in (and not only on immigration), I can understand why you might react a little defensively to my contention that Republicans are going to get eaten alive on this issue.