Opinion pieces on 2012 election aftermath and fiscal cliff

Friday, November 9, 2012 OPINIONS Happy days, even with the cliff La Di Dah Di Dab... We have been through a lot, people. But now the presidential race is settled. Barack Obama won. People on both sides worked heroically, and, on Tuesday, their candidates behaved well. This should be a happy time. Oh, my God! There’s a fiscal cliff We're all going to fall over and go bankrupt! Did you just hear the cheerful rule? The fiscal cliff doesn’t happen until the end of the year when the Bush tax cuts expire and monster budget cuts auto- matically kick in. Now that the elec- tion’s over, everybody will certainly be ready to move forward and work some- thing out. Except possibly Gov. Rick Perry, who celebrated the president’s re-elec- tion by demanding the repeal of Obamacare. And then there was Donald Trump, who tweeted during the vote count: “Lets fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is taughing at us.” Actually Trump has no conceivable impact on anything. I just wanted to take this opportumity to reminisce about the time he sent me an irate, handwrit- ten message in which he misspelled the word “too.” But look atRep. John Boehner. On Wednesday, the House speaker gave a speech in which he vowed to be coop- erative. “Mister President, this is your moment. We’re ready. to be led,” he said. xcept for a few no-go areas, such as any ta incteases on “small busi- ness.” You may remember from previ- ous crises that the House Republicans oppose raising income ta es on the wealthy because it would impact strug- gling small businesses such as a hedge Gail Collins fund manager with an eight-figure annual income. Boebner also raised a whole new specter of political peril: “going over part of the fiscal cliff” That sounded less dire, as long as we all stay inside our dangling cars and refrain from making any moves until help arrives. But, by the end, it sounded as if the only cliff-avoidance Boehner was real- ly interested in was one that caised new revenue through “fewer loopholes, and lower rates for all.” We have already seen that plan. It was proposed by a man who, on Tuesday, lost the state in which he was born, the state in which he was gover- nor and the three states in which he owns houses. Thanks to a blog by Eric Ostermeier in Smart Politics, I am able to point out that the only candidate for president who lost his home state by a larger margin than Mitt Romney was John Fremont in 1856. And Fremont was coming out of a campaign in which the opposition accused him of being a cannibal While Boehner was explaining the importance of not going halfway over a cliff, or raising income taxes on the rich he looked somber and somewhat unhappy. This may have been because his Republican colleagues just lost the White House and the Senate. Or per- haps, it was simply because he’s an older white guy, and, therefore, part of the biggest loser demographic of the election, the flip-side of the insurgent Latmo vote. On election night, people were talk- ing about the not-young male popula- tion as if they were a dwinding tribe of graybeards sitting around a sputtermg stove in Oklahoma. Republican strate- gist John Weaver worried about becoming “a shnoking regional party of middle-aged and older white men.” On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly moaned that “the white establishment is now the minority.” O’Reilly, 63, added that the new majority was composed of people who “want stuff.” As opposed to older white men, all of whom have signed a pledge never to accept vet- eran benefits, Social Security or Medicare. “Tt’s not a traditional America any- more,” O’Reilly sadly concluded. Almost everybody thinks of the world of their youth as the traditional world. In the future, today’s teenagers will be looking back and mournfully declaring that traditional America was a place where folks really knew how to Twitter. Stull, it’s unseemly to identify the tue America as the one where your group ran everything. Cheer up, white men! You seem to be doing OK. Next year women will have 20 percent of the seats in the US. Senate, and we’re celebrating. And since it looks as if we’re not getting any downtime, we’ll have to get cracking on this latest congressio- nal crisis. Root for a bipartisan solution that does notinvolve the White House’s being hijacked by a guy who keeps babbling about going halfway over a cliff. In the past, when these things came up, the president’s big failing was his inability to hide his conternpt for many of the people who occupy Capitol Hill. Now it’s anew day, and he needs to be SO perpehially and visibly available that the negotiators beg to be left alone. If all else fails, strap John Boehner to the roof of a car. — Gail Collins is a New York Times columnist. . AINER 2atd Can Republicans ada This was one that the Republicans really should have won. Given the weak economy, Amencan voters were open to firing President Barack Obama. In Europe, in similar circumstances, one government after another lost re-election. And, at the beginning of this year, it looked as if the Republicans might win control of the U.S. Senate as well. Yet it wasn’t the Democrats who won so much as the Republicans who lost — at a most basic level, because of demography. A coalition of aging white men is a recipe for failure in a nation that increasingly looks like a rainbow. Schadenfreude may excuse Democrats’ smiles for a few days, but these trends portend a potential disas- ter not just for the Republican Party but for the health of our political sys- tem. America needs a plausible cen- ter-right opposition party to hold Obama’s feet to the fire, not just a collection of Tea Party cranks. So liberals as well as conservatives should be rooting for the Republican Party to feel sufficiently shaken that it shifts to the center. Ove hopeful sign is that political parties usually care more about winning than about purism. Thus the Democratic Party embraced the pragmatic center-left Bill Clinton in 1992 after three consecutive losses in presidential elections. That was painful for many liberals, who cringed when Clinton interrupt- ed campaigning in the 1992 pnmary to burmish his law-and-order creden- tials by overseeing the execution of a mentally impaired murderer. But it was, on balance, less painful than los- ing again. You would expect the Republican Party to make a similar lurch to the center. But many Republican leaders still inhabit a bubble. It was stunning how many, from Karl Rove to Newt Gingrich, seemed to expect a Mitt Romney victory. And some of the right-wing postmortems are suggest- ing that Romney lost because he was too liberal— which constitutes a def- inition of delusional. Imagine what would have hap- pened if the Republican nominee had been Gingrich or Rick Santorum. We surely would have seen a Democratic landslide. On the other hand, if the Republicans had nominated Jon Huntsman Jr., they might have been the ones celebrating ight now. But he had no chance in Republican prima- ries because primary voters are their party’s worst enemy. Part of the problem, I think, is the profusion of right-wing radio and television programs. Democrats com- plain furiously that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity smear the left, but | wonder if the bigger loser isn’t the Republican Party itself. Those shows whip up a frenzy in their audience, torpedoing Republican moderates and instilling paranoia on The Virgin Islands Daily Ne Nicholas D. K the Republican Party m an ideologi- cal cocoop-and impedes it from reaching out to swing-state cen trists, or even un ing them The vor- tex spins éver faster and rik? becom- ing an ideological blackhole. In 2002, a book was published called “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” It argued that Democrats _ would gain because of ther strength in expanding demographics such as° - Hispanics, Asian-Americans and working women. It seemed persua- sive until Republicans clobbered Democrats in the next couple of elections. Hs But perhaps that book was ahead of its time. This was the first election in which Hispani ic voters made up a double-digit share of the electorate, ” accordin gto CNN exit polls — 10 — percent, doubled from 1996 — and ore than 7 out of 10 Hispanic voters of the Hispanic vote. But Republicans became obstructionist on immigra- tion and ‘then veered into offensive opposing the nomina- a Sotomayor to the the Democrats” laps. « 3 Then there'are women. The pater- nalistic comments about rape by a few male Republican candidates res- onated so ‘broadly because they reflected the perception of the GOP as a conclave of out-of-tovch men. As Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri might put it, when a candidate emerges with offensive: views about rape, “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Namely, they vote Democratic. America is changing. After this election, a record 20 senators will be women, almost all of them Democrats. Opposition to same-sex marriage used to be a way for ‘Republicans to trumpet their morali- ty; now it’s seen as highlighting their bigotry. An astonishing 45 percent of Obama voters were members of minority groups, according to The Timnes’ Nate Silver. Many others were women or young people. That’s the future of America, and if the Republican Party remains a purist cohortbuiltaround grumpy old white men, it is committing suicide. That’s bad not just for conservanves but for our entire country. — Nicholas D. Kristof is a New York Times columnist. Contact him at Face book.com/Kristof, Twitter. com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York limes, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018870 |