Overthrowing the overthrowers of the Republican establishment
Is there such a thing as a Republican establishment? Yes, if you trust Ann Coulter, and she thinks she knows exactly who they are – “political consultants, The Wall Street Journal, corporate America, former Bush advisers and television pundits” – which is a sly way of boasting that she is a member of this select band of behind-the-scenes power brokers.
To the American Spectator’s Steve McCann, the GOP establishment consists of: top lawmakers past and present “whose livelihood and narcissistic demands depends upon fealty to Party and access to government largesse”; “the majority of the conservative media … whose proximity to power and access is vital to their continued standard of living”; conservative think-tank staffers “waiting to latch on to the next Republican administration for employment and ego-gratification”; and donors and consultants whose businesses would benefit from a Republican in the White House.
George Will, surely an archbishop in the GOP establishment if it exists, takes a suitably contrary line, declaring without cracking a smile that “the Republican establishment died at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964, when Goldwater was nominated against their frenzied wishes.” “Google the Republican establishment, you’ll get 20 million hits,” he explained. “Google the Loch Ness monster and you’ll get a whole bunch of hits. They’re both dead or never existed.”
But if the Republican establishment doesn’t exist, so many believe it does that it might as well. So let me suggest why the Tea Partyers and so many conservative pundits of all stripes agree it’s real. Like all parties, the GOP divides between those who sit atop the heap and those who aim to take their place. Since 1964, Republican Party moderate conservatives have endured a persistent, endless, aggressive assault from social conservatives and libertarians rallying behind such inspirational figures as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
Every radical movement needs a lost leader, like Goldwater, and an unimpeachable savior, like Reagan. There is a persisting myth among non-establishment Republicans that Reagan was not seduced by the Beltway and the comforts of office. Once in the White House, however, the Gipper often acted more like a conservative than a libertarian and, thanks to his tax cuts and borrowing for military spending, presided over, as J.K. Galbraith quipped, “involuntary anonymous Keynesianism.” But no matter.
The old corporatist conservative Republicanism of Big Businessmen like Nelson Rockefeller, who posthumously gave the last-gasp burst of the old-school establishment its name, has been defeated by successive waves of entryists such as the Christian Right, out-and-out libertarians, and the Tea Partyers, whose borrowers’ remorse transformed into a surprisingly potent political force. George H.W. Bush was the last Northeastern blue blood in the Oval Office, if you do not count his faux hick son George W., who talked the Hayekian talk with a Texas twang, but facing financial meltdown, smartly walked the Keynesian walk.
The distressing thing for the entryists is that no sooner do they manage to get one of their less frightening number into Congress than the once rebellious radical becomes a cozy establishment pussycat. Hence the solemn signed pledges, from not raising taxes to outlawing abortion, that bind the hands of Republicans and attempt to prevent them sliding into Washington’s wicked, wicked ways.
How everyone got the Right wrong
This essay is adapted from Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, published this month by Metropolitan Books. The views expressed are the author’s own.
After the disasters of the George W. Bush presidency had culminated in the catastrophe on Wall Street, the leading lights of the Beltway consensus had deemed that the nation was traveling in a new direction. They had seen this movie before, and they knew how it was supposed to go. The plates were shifting. Conservatism’s decades-long reign was at an end. An era of liberal ascendancy was at hand. This was the unambiguous mandate of history, as unmistakable as the gigantic crowds that gathered to hear Barack Obama speak as he traveled the campaign trail. You could no more defy this plotline than you could write checks on an empty bank account.
And so The Strange Death of Republican America, by the veteran journalist Sidney Blumenthal, appeared in April of 2008—even before the Wall Street crash—and announced that the “radical conservative” George W. Bush had made the GOP “into a minority party.” In November, Sean Wilentz, the erstwhile historian of the “Age of Reagan,” took to the pages of U.S. News & World Report to herald that age’s “collapse.” The conservative intellectual Francis Fukuyama had said pretty much the same thing in Newsweek the month before. That chronicler of the DC consensus, Politico, got specific and noted the demise of the word “deregulator,” a proud Reagan-era term that had been mortally wounded by the collapse of (much-deregulated) Wall Street.
The thinking behind all this was straight cause-and-effect stuff. The 2008 financial crisis had clearly discredited the conservative movement’s signature free-market ideas; political scandal and incompetence in the Republican Party had rendered its moral posturing absurd; and conservatism’s taste for strident rhetoric was supposedly repugnant to a new generation of postpartisan, postracial voters. Besides, there was the obvious historical analogy that one encountered everywhere in 2008: we had just been through an uncanny replay of the financial disaster of 1929-31, and now, murmured the pundits, the automatic left turn of 1932 was at hand, with the part of Franklin Roosevelt played by the newly elected Barack Obama.
For the Republican Party, the pundit-approved script went as follows: it had to moderate itself or face a long period of irrelevance. And as it failed to take the prescribed steps, the wise men prepared to cluck it off the stage. When the radio talker Rush Limbaugh made headlines in early 2009 by wishing that the incoming President Obama would “fail,” the former Bush speechwriter David Frum slapped him down in a much-discussed cover story for Newsweek. Judged by the standards of what would come later, of course, Limbaugh’s wish sounds quaint, even civil; at the time, however, it seemed so shocking that Frum depicted such rhetoric as “kryptonite, weakening the GOP nationally.” Venomous talk might entertain the party’s bitter-enders, Frum acknowledged, but the price of going in that direction was the loss of the “educated and affluent,” who increasingly found “that the GOP had become too extreme.”
The GOP’s strange drive toward self-destruction was a favorite pundit theme. When former vice president Dick Cheney announced that he preferred Limbaugh’s way to the route of moderation, the New York Times columnist Charles Blow laughed that Cheney was “on a political suicide mission. And if his own party is collateral damage, so be it.” When certain conservatives proposed a test to detect and punish heresy among Republican politicians, the Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker called it a “suicide pact.” The respected political forecaster Stu Rothenberg concluded in April 2009 that “the chance of Republicans winning control of either chamber in the 2010 midterm elections is zero. Not ‘close to zero.’ Not ‘slight’ or ‘small.’ Zero.”
What the polite-thinking world expected from the leaders of the American Right was repentance. They assumed that conservative leaders would be humbled by the disasters that had befallen their champion, George W. Bush; that Republicans would confess their errors and make haste for the political center. The world expected contrition.
Has no one not read RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT by the NY Times pulitzer prize-winning business reporter who reveals how the financial meltdown emerged from the toxic interplay of Washington, Wall Street & corrupt morgage lenders. Morgenson & her co-author draw back the ccurtain on Fannie Mae, the morgage-finance giant that grew, with the suport of the Clinton administration through the 1990′s becomintg a major opponent of government oversight even as it was benefiting from public subsidies. RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT exposes it all name names, politicians, places,& incidents to understand the complete analysis of the financial meltdfown. It takes the spin out of the narrative with hard cold facts of who made the millions & who lost the millions. Must reading for the Independents who will elect our President, & pay the taxes left by years of unfunded liabilities because we forgot the Kohima Epitaph
The Fox in the Tea Party
By Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson
The views expressed are their own.
Many observers of the role of U.S. media in politics as of the early twenty-first century are alarmed that partisanship has crept in. This rarely bothers very conservative pundits, of course, because (even if they constantly complain about “liberal media bias”) they know that the elephants in the room are on their side. Liberals and self-styled nonpartisan critics engage in constant tut-tutting about the horrors of partisan media. They forget that American democracy was born and flourished through the nineteenth century in an environment where major newspapers, the mass media of the day, were all closely aligned with political parties. “Objective news” was not to be found; nineteenth-century editors and reporters alike presented highly selective versions of the facts, often in luridly emotional ways.
Only in the twentieth century, as sociologist Michael Schudson explained in his ground-breaking book Discovering the News, did professional journalists gain a degree of autonomy. Journalists developed norms of objectivity and “balance,” which leading newspapers and, later, television networks tried to follow, more or less. Norms of objective journalism led to the convention of looking for quotes from sources on “both sides of the issue”—a practice more reflective of the fact that there were two major parties roaming the U.S. political tundra than of any law that major questions have only two possible answers. Social movements and protest efforts outside the two major parties found it harder to get a hearing in the objective-and-balanced media regime.
Given the impressive scope of conservative media, American democracy is, in an important sense, caught betwixt and between in the new media world. The frank, exuberant, all-around partisanship of the nineteenth century is not quite what we now have. True, there are both liberal and conservative bloggers, and on the tube, the Fox political slant is weakly countered by liberal-slanted shows on MSNBC. But mostly what America has right now is a thousand-pound gorilla media juggernaut on the right, operating nineteenth-century style, coexisting with other news outlets trying to keep up while making fitful efforts, twentieth-century style, to check facts and cover “both sides of the story.”
A few weeks after Rick Santelli’s tea party rant on CNBC, Fox News soon recognized a major conservative phenomenon in the making and moved to become cheerleader-in-chief. Fox began to cover the first major tea party rallies six weeks in advance, starting with a March 5, 2009 appearance by Newt Gingrich to talk up the protests on Greta Van Susteren’s show. Scarcely a trickle of Tea Party events occurred over ensuing weeks, but that did not prevent Fox News hosts and guests from speculating wildly about the likely huge size and impact of the forthcoming rallies. Viewers watching Fox News in early 2009 were told that “Tea Party protests are erupting across the country” and assured that “these tea parties are starting to really take off.” Newt Gingrich went on air to make the confident prediction that the April 15th rallies would have “over 300,000” attendees. By late March, Glenn Beck had not only attended a rally in Orlando, Florida. He had interviewed Tea Party activists from Houston and Indianapolis days before rallies occurred in those cities, featuring their plans and pitching their events. For the Tea Party in its vulnerable infancy, the mobilizing impact of such advance coverage in national prime time was invaluable. The Tea Party idea was presented as the “coming thing” to an audience primed for the message. Conservative Fox viewers across America heard that people like them were ready to stand up to Obama and the Democrats—and they were told when and where.
I enjoyed reading this article. The posts are good too.
Mindless tax slogans dominate our debate
By Robert Frank The opinions expressed are his own.
What do the following slogans have in common?
“All taxation is theft.”
“It’s your money and you know how to spend it better than any bureaucrat in Washington.”
“It’s unjust to tax some people more heavily than others.”
“Taxing the rich kills the geese that lay the golden eggs.”
Although each has been repeated so often by conservatives during recent decades as to have acquired an air of settled truth, each is also either clearly false or conveys no useful information. A more troubling shared feature of these slogans is that they are causing serious harm. Their enthusiastic embrace by Tea Party members and large factions of the Republican Party now threatens to transform the United States economy, once the envy of the world, into an economic backwater.
I don’t know if the numbers you cite are 100% accurate, and I don’t care, and don’t have a problem with the disproportionate distribution of wealth in the US. Would you prefer the top 1% to have 1% of the wealth and the next 19% have 19%, etc, etc.
I don’t have a problem with the various income disparity stats (the Gini Index, etc.) that people like to quote as I believe that the absolute income difference isn’t really a problem. If the ranks of the poor are growing over time or if incomes across the board are dropping, different story, but that’s not what the data shows.
Our economy works, in part, because we put a big, fat brass ring out there for motivated, talented, hard working people to aim for. People are not going to work ridiculous hours, take big risks, and make sacrifices for socialist wages. US businesses have developed lot’s of great stuff over the years—pc’s, iPhones, cures for cancer, etc, etc.—how many of these things came out of the old communist bloc? I can’t think of any.
The jobs proposal ignores economics
By David Callahan The opinions expressed are his own.
It’s a cruel fact for millions of unemployed Americans that the jobs plan President Obama unveiled last night will never be fully enacted by Congress. What’s even crueler, though, is that the least effective elements of the plan have the best chance of passage. New direct federal spending, the most powerful form of stimulus, is widely considered DOA on Capitol Hill – while weaker tax cut options will get a real hearing.
That’s not how things would go if mainstream economists were calling the shots. Economics is not an exact science, but economists do have pretty good models to predict what “fiscal policy multipliers” will be most effective at stimulating growth and new hiring. Just last month, for example, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi released an analysis of stimulus measures work. Zandi advised John McCain in 2008 and is anything but a committed liberal. But his study, supported by the full weight of Moody’s modeling expertise, clearly shows that spending is the best form of stimulus.
The single most effective form of stimulus, the study found, are increased outlays for food stamps — which create $1.71 in economic activity for each dollar in federal spending. The other top two boosters are spending on unemployment benefits and infrastructure. Earlier studies, including by the Congressional Budget Office, have found largely the same thing.
Now, in case you didn’t notice, President Obama did not stand up last night and call for massive new spending on food stamps. While he did call for new infrastructure investments and again extending unemployment insurance, these were not the largest elements of his plan. Instead, the biggest ticket item by far – estimated to cost $244 billion – is an expanded payroll tax holiday for both workers and employers.
The only reason Obama is putting so many eggs in this basket is that a payroll tax cut is said to have a fighting chance in Congress, given that Republicans backed a holiday last year. But make no mistake: the appeal here is political, not analytical.
According to the Moody’s study, each dollar lost by the Treasury due to a payroll tax cut to workers will create $1.27 in new economic activity and the cuts for employers will create just $1.05 in activity.
“robb1:
I called my television dish and got somebody in the Philippines.
I Called HP & got customers service from Costa Rica.
I called a major Credit Card company and talked to someone in India.
All those jobs, and they r thousands of them, could be better done by American Citizens and Legal Residents in the US, earning US $ and spending, paying taxes in the US.
Tax outsourcing.”
Have you ever considered the Unions have jacked the cost of wages to astronomical amounts and the Americans want more and more to do less and even less. I am an American working in Dubai. They have every nationalitie in the world working here and the nationals from India, Philippines, Pakistan and Sri lanka work for about $100 per week and most work 12 hour days. Please tell me how companies can afford to pay the Americans they amounts they demand without jacking up the costs? Until Americans lower their expectations on salary jobs will continue to be had abroad. Come join us, living in a foreign country sucks but I have a job!!!!!
Three reasons conservatives should oppose a balanced budget amendment
By James Ledbetter The opinions expressed are his own.
One of the crucial lubricants allowing Congress to resolve the debt-ceiling friction was, apparently, the inclusion of a provision to vote on a balanced-budget amendment. Assuming this version of the deal passes, then at some time between September 30 and December 31 of this year, both houses of Congress will be required to vote on a ‘‘joint resolution proposing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution of the United States.’’
Whatever the political expediency of this provision may be, a balanced budget amendment is a bad idea from a conservative point of view, for at least three reasons.
It won’t work. Historically, conservatives have opposed extending government authority in places where it is not effective. You can find all the evidence you need to conclude that balanced budget requirements are useless by simply investigating the oft-repeated claim that 49 states have laws requiring a balanced budget. Leave aside the falsity of the claim and just consider the logic: if so many states are required to balance their budgets, why are so many states in the red?
The answer is that requiring state governments to annually balance their books simply encourages them to find clever ways to disguise debt and deficits. For example: California has both a Constitutional and a statutory requirement that its budgets be balanced. Would any sane person maintain that the state’s books have been anything resembling healthy for at least a decade? This year, after some brutal spending cuts, the governor’s office found that the state still had a short-term deficit of more than $9 billion and $35 billion in long-term debt. The governor’s budget report noted that California’s “massive budget deficits for most of the past decade…have been largely the result of a reliance on one-time solutions, borrowing, accounting maneuvers, and cuts or revenues that were illusory and therefore did not materialize.”
If that sounds familiar, it may be because, as Richard Quest pointed out on CNN Sunday evening, we’ve witnessed numerous Congressional attempts in recent decades to rein in federal deficits—including Gramm-Rudman in 1985 and the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990—all of which fell victim to legislative legerdemain. Why would a federal balanced budget amendment be any different?
It won’t pass, because it’s bad for the states. In recent weeks, many Republicans have behaved as if a balanced-budget amendment is some kind of magic wand that need only be proposed in order to achieve its desired effect. And that might be true, if the desired effect is a vote that can then be used for demagogic purposes.
A balanced budget? Does that mean if your state has had a huge windfall like Bill Gates presenting it with a weeks profit from Microsoft, would the state have to find new ways to spend it, and balance the books?
In bad times, why can’t they borrow money like everybody else against future good times?
Does Gingrich actually want to be President?
By Ben Adler
The opinions expressed are his own.
There is a well-established template for a politician who has ascended to the pinnacle of national politics, tumbled off of it, and wants to return to run for president. You get out of Washington. You occupy yourself in private or charitable endeavors, maybe write anodyne books and studiously avoid making controversial proclamations that might come back to haunt you.
Richard Nixon, after losing his 1960 presidential bid and his ill-advised 1962 run for Governor of California followed this script and was elected in 1968. But former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who recently announced his candidacy for president, hasn’t merely detoured from this path in recent years, he’s gone completely in the other direction. In fact, everything he has done since he was Speaker suggests he never planned to run for president, and he hasn’t made the appropriate preparations.
After Gingrich famously miscalculated and cost his party seats in the 1998 midterms by impeaching Bill Clinton for a brief episode of philandering, Gingrich left his own wife — who had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis — for his mistress. That was his first mistake; well, actually his second, since he had previously left his first wife while she was in the hospital with cancer for his second wife. (Gingrich’s personal history was the subject of a devastating profile in Esquire last year.)
Gingrich had over a decade before his presidential run to come up with a plausible apology, defense, excuse or explanation for his behavior, and he doesn’t appear to have bothered doing so. Instead, when recently asked about his adultery Gingrich claimed that cheating was the inevitable consequence of working too hard because of “how passionately I felt about this country.”
His ineptitude at explaining his love life is but one example. Gingrich stayed inside the Beltway and sought influence through think tanks and political action committees. His American Solutions group has competed with major conservative groups for attention and donations, weakening his campaign’s base of support among them. “He burned a lot of bridges,” Richard Viguerie, a leading conservative activist and fundraiser told TPM on Monday.
Suggest you watch the Zero Mostel / Gene Wilder version of ‘The Producers’ to understand what Newt is up to. He will drop out after his book sales reach a predetermined amount. That is what he’s after not a job. That would cut into his time shopping at Tiffany’s.
Misreading the midterm tea leaves
By Cliff Young and Julia Clark
Yes, this was a Republican Year. From lowly dogcatcher to the venerable Senate and House, the GOP made significant gains. But how should the results of this electoral cycle be interpreted? Are we seeing the emergence of a “new Republican mandate” which will sweep away the Obama project because of his policy oversteps? Or is this merely the short-term expression of voter angst, precipitated by a dismal economy?
Pundits and politicos alike would have us believe that the Obama era is over, with the general elections in 2012 being a mere formality to an imminent Republican resurgence. Obama went too far left, or so the argument goes, and the Republican gains this year are a leading indicator of a re-adjustment.
In our view, this perspective is fundamentally wrong: the results of the present mid-term elections have little to do with the probable outcome of the general election in 2012. Obama, contrary to the expert opinion, is still very much in the driver’s seat. Here’s why.
First, most elections are about voter optimism (or lack thereof). Low optimism is usually the result of the economy doing poorly, and so people want to “throw the bums out.” We pollsters call such elections “change elections,” which favor the party out of power. In contrast, when optimism is high, voters want “more of the same,” or continuity. Continuity elections favor the party in power. Our own studies of hundreds of elections around the world show that about 80 percent of all elections can be classified according to this simple “change versus continuity” dichotomy, with the other 20 percent depending on the effectiveness of campaigns and the power of personalities.
The 2010 electoral cycle, with the poorest performing economy in a generation, was a change election which favored the party out of power – the Republicans. This means that there was no fundamental shift in American values, or a “new Republican mandate,” but instead that the election was the result of the natural ebbs and flows of voter sentiment, driven by larger economic forces.
Indeed, our polling shows that policy specifics tend to take on only secondary or tertiary roles in voter calculus compared to simple pocketbook issues and associated relative degree of optimism. Of course it isn’t always about the economy – events like wars, scandals, and other unforeseen wildcards do play a role in defining voters’ desire for change or continuity. The economy, though, typically is the most consistent factor, with the 2010 midterm elections being no exception.
“Pundits and politicos alike would have us believe that the Obama era is over [but]Obama, contrary to the expert opinion, is still very much in the driver’s seat.”
Wrong, but not for the reasons the experts give.
1) I agree that Obama is likely to solidly win re-election in 2012.
2) The Dems may well take back the House of Representatives at that time. But:
3) The Obama era is *still* over, in the sense that his chances of getting substantive Dem-leaning legislation through Congress are just about nil during the last six years of his Presidency.
Why? The Senate. Specifically, (a) the way the Senate seats are broken into three classes by the year they come up for re-election, and (b) the filibuster.
If you look at the class of 2012, there are only 2-3 pickup opportunities for the Democrats, and lots of pickup opportunities for the GOP. And the class of 2014 is even worse: there really aren’t any Dem pickup opportunities, unless Susan Collins gets knocked off by a wingnut in a primary.
So Obama will never again have anything remotely approaching a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. He’ll need votes from Senators like Lamar Alexander and Kay Bailey Hutchinson who have been unwinnable in the current Congress in order to break a filibuster.
And since the GOP now routinely filibusters everything, that means that unless the Senate Dems have the guts to change the filibuster rules (which is a longshot), no Democratic legislation will pass the Congress between now and 2017, even if Obama wins in a landslide with major coattails in 2012.
Seriously, look at the three classes of Senate seats, which can easily be found at senate.gov. What GOP-held seats do you think the Dems will pick up in 2012? Which remaining GOP Senators can be persuaded to vote for Democratic legislation? And then how do you get to 60?
Institutional failure week
-The opinions are the author’s own-
By the end of this week, the U.S. will face a government that is unable to act to aid the economy and a Federal Reserve that is unable to stop.
The stock market may well rise on this dysfunctional combination, only serving to prove that the economy and market are becoming fundamentally disconnected.
Tuesday’s election may well deliver a split Congress with the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives and the Democrats clinging to a narrow majority in the Senate. This means that there is no chance of further meaningful stimulus and that Democratic timidity will likely harden into an intransigence to match that of the Republicans.
Rather than building bridges, the next two years will be spent dickering over tax codes, and, as the 2012 election nears, fighting trade and currency wars.
Many will argue that this is right, that the election will freeze stimulative spending that is wasteful and unpopular.
Perhaps, but economic growth is extremely weak. The initial reading of third-quarter gross domestic product, released on Friday, showed the economy expanding at a faster 2.0 percent rate. Most of the growth, however, was from inventory rebuilding, a process that is very likely to slow. Actual growth in real final sales was an anemic 0.6 percent, making this the weakest such recovery on record, according to economist David Rosenberg of Gluskin, Sheff.
Ron Paul is trying to downgrade power of FED and in yesterdays interview said: ‘If we succeed in Congress/Senate to challenge the power of FED significantly (what he suspect is not possible right now) ANY president would veto such decision’. Scary conclusion about real FED power. People and their representative including president cannot stop harmful actions of private cartel in any ways? Good morning America.
The lucrative business of Obama-bashing
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
Four days before Barack Obama was sworn into office, a prominent radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, told his conservative listeners that a major American publication had asked him to write 400 words on his hopes for the Obama presidency.
“I…don’t need 400 words,” he said, “I need four: I hope he fails.”
The remark set the tone for a steady stream of unbridled and often bizarre criticism from Limbaugh and like-minded radio and TV commentators, several of them working for Fox News, the network owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Obama responded four days after his inauguration, telling a group of Republican congressmen they needed to break away from a mindset of confrontation.
“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”
What followed should have helped the new administration to reflect on the wisdom of singling out a media critic. But it didn’t. Limbaugh promptly portrayed himself as a man of such pivotal importance that the president of the world’s only superpower needed to pay personal attention to his tartly-worded opinion.
The controversy over his ill wishes for the president caused, as he put, his ratings to go “through the roof,” a reassuring development for a man who makes $38 million a year under an eight-year contract that runs through 2016. The score of that early skirmish: Limbaugh 1, Obama 0.
I’d say that all news networks in the US are pretty horrible. They all have their agendas, biases, and official lines of reporting. I do like Reuters as it seems more objective than the others. But just as the liberal media did with Bush bashing why would it be unfair for conservative media to bash Obama. The viewership for Fox is higher, because it’s normal that when the curent president is a liberal, the liberal media won’t report objectively on him. Same is true of conservative media and Bush… The sad part is that current administration is so vocal about their dissatisfaction with Fox. It makes them look petty. Especially during present times when people are eagerly expecting results, from a president who promissed so much.
Anyone who dreams a dream of there not being a Republican Establishment cannot read, or does not want to.
A simple biographical fact check can confirm the social class origins of prominent Republicans from the past. The Bush family all come from old money and power. So does Romney. Reagan was, in many, many ways, a Republican oddity. Compare the social origins of Obama and Clinton and Carter. The contrast is informative.
The rich take care of the rich and no one else. People who believe otherwise are just willfully blind, as peasants and serfs have been for millenia. The system depends on it.