Why young voters love Ron Paul - 2012 Elections
Why young voters love Ron Paul
It's not because they're potheads. It's because they're sick of America's militaristic misadventures
Despite a sustained campaign by the Washington media and political establishment to marginalize him, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, is still a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. That has a lot to do with the support he’s receiving from young voters. In almost every survey and activist straw poll, Paul draws big numbers from voters between the ages of 18 and 29.
The laziest way to explain the counterintuitive phenomenon of youth rallying around the GOP’s oldest candidate is to insist that it’s about kids’ silly college fling with unrealistic libertarianism or that it’s about kids’ affinity for drug use — and more specifically, Paul’s support for legislation that would let states legalize marijuana. This degrading mythology ignores the possibility that young people support Paul’s libertarianism for its overall critique of our government’s civil liberties transgressions (transgressions, by the way, now being openly waged against young people), nor does the narrative address the possibility that young people support Paul’s drug stance not because they want to smoke weed, but because they see the War on Drugs as a colossal waste of resources. Instead, Paul is presented as merely a fringe protest candidate, and the young people who support him are depicted as just dumb idealists, hedonistic pot smokers or both.
One problem with this fantastical tale, of course, is that it insults the intelligence and motivation of young voters. But another, even more troubling facet of this tale is how it uses speculative apocrypha and stereotyping about ideology and drugs to suppress concrete social survey data about the far-more-likely foreign policy motivations of young Ron Paul supporters.
Paul, of course, is one of the only presidential candidates in contemporary American history in either party to overtly question our nation’s invade-bomb-and-occupy first, ask-questions later doctrine and to admit what the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledges: namely, that our military actions can result in anti-Americanism fervor and terrorist blowback.
Predictably, Paul’s foreign-policy honesty has generated Washington media scorn (most recently and explicitly, as Glenn Greenwald points out, from CBS News’ Bob Schieffer). No doubt, that scorn has much to do with that media being disproportionately older, more establishment-worshipping and more hyper-militaristic than the general population. But far away from D.C. green rooms in Real America — and especially among younger voters — Paul’s foreign policy positions are generating the opposite of scorn. Indeed, as a new Pew Research Center report suggests, these positions are almost certainly a driving force behind the support for his candidacy.
The new study tracks how younger voters are now strongly rejecting traditional American hubris in favor of Paul’s more empirical views on foreign policy. For instance, it finds that while older citizens embrace American exceptionalism in insisting our culture is inherently superior, younger voters do not. But the key finding as it relates to Paul’s candidacy has to do with blowback, which Paul frequently discusses on the campaign trail. As Pew reports (emphasis mine):
Two-thirds of Millennials (66 percent) say that relying too much on military force to defeat terrorism creates hatred that leads to more terrorism. A slim majority of Gen Xers (55 percent) agree with this sentiment, but less than half (46 percent) of Boomers agree and the number of Silents who share this view is 41 percent. A plurality of Silents (45 percent) believe that using overwhelming force is the best way to defeat terrorism and 43 percent of Boomers share that view.
These findings have been largely ignored by the media and political establishment. That’s predictable. These poll numbers undermine the dominant fairy tale that Americans universally support status-quo militarism — and so they are largely omitted from the media discussion of the presidential election. It’s the same thing for Paul’s foreign policy positions in general — they are either ignored or mocked by a political and media culture that is ideologically invested in marginalizing them.
Nonetheless, there are two good pieces of news in all this.
First, whereas in earlier eras such establishment hostility to a politician’s position could prevent that candidate from making a serious run for president, polls show Paul’s foreign-policy message is likely getting through to a key demographic, giving him a genuine shot at his party’s nomination.
Second, whether Paul eventually wins the GOP nomination or not, the trends embedded in his current electoral coalition will affect our politics long after his candidacy is over — and even if you don’t support Paul’s overall candidacy, that’s a decidedly positive development for those who favor a new foreign policy. (A brief side note: This article is in no way a personal endorsement of Paul’s overall campaign — I have serious problems with some of his economic positions.)
With the defense budget bankrupting our budget and with our imperialist foreign policy making us less safe, the younger generation’s rejection of hubris and hyper-militarism — and that generation’s willingness to support candidates in both parties who similarly reject that militarism — provides a rare ray of hope in these political dark ages. And not just a fleeting hope — but a long-term one.
As the Pew data show, the younger generation, whose foreign policy views were shaped not by World War II triumphalism but by grinding quagmires like Iraq and Afghanistan, has a far more realistic view of America’s role in the modern world. While that position may shift somewhat over the years, the numbers are striking enough to suggest an impending cultural break from the past. As the younger generation assumes more powerful positions in society and more electoral agency in our democracy, the possibility of such a break gives us reason to believe America can create a new foreign policy paradigm in our lifetime.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota
And then there were two
With the Cain train off the tracks, Newt Gingrich emerges as the official Not Mitt Romney. Can he win?
Herman Cain’s campaign was already going down under the weight of sexual harassment charges, as well as his own foreign and domestic policy ignorance. But the news that an Atlanta woman says she had a 13-year affair with the married Cain officially makes him just a punch line, not a presidential candidate. (Yes, some people can be both, but not Cain.)
We’ve been waiting for months for the race to narrow itself to Mitt Romney and the not-Mitt candidate, and it looks like it’s going to be Newt Gingrich. His strong debate performance last week combined with the endorsement of the Manchester Union Leader this weekend means he’s unlikely to rise and fall in GOP polling as rapidly as Cain or earlier not-Mitt candidates Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann. No one else is likely to rise to challenge him. Huntsman is too moderate (and Mormon) to be not-Mitt, and Ron Paul is too eccentric for Tea Party Astroturf types to get behind. Rick Santorum is Rick Santorum.
So goodbye, Herman Cain. I said the minute Cain began to trash his accusers that it would backfire on him, and it did. White says she only came forward because she saw the other women being mistreated. “It bothered me that they were being demonized, sort of, they were treated as if they were automatically lying, and the burden of proof was on them,” White told Atlanta’s Fox5. “I felt bad for them.” I feel bad for Cain’s wife. It’s worth noting that while Cain denies the affair to CNN, his attorney basically didn’t, issuing this not-terribly-helpful statement:
This is not an accusation of harassment in the workplace – this is not an accusation of an assault – which are subject matters of legitimate inquiry to a political candidate.
Rather, this appears to be an accusation of private, alleged consensual conduct between adults – a subject matter which is not a proper subject of inquiry by the media or the public. No individual, whether a private citizen, a candidate for public office or a public official, should be questioned about his or her private sexual life. The public’s right to know and the media’s right to report has boundaries and most certainly those boundaries end outside of one’s bedroom door.
The fact that Cain’s womanizing is going to help Gingrich, the serial adulterer, is beyond ironic. But whatever people think of Gingrich’s cheating on his first two wives, at least he’s admitted it; in fact, it’s become part of his Catholic convert redemption tale. Just Monday he told an interviewer: “I think anybody who is honest about it knows that no person except Christ has ever been perfect. I don’t claim to be the perfect candidate. I just claim to be a lot more conservative than Mitt Romney and a lot more electable than anybody else.” It’s classic Gingrich, comparing himself to Jesus Christ with faux-humility. But it’s possible Gingrich’s redemption story will ease some voters’ concerns about his character.
The real question is, when will Romney begin to fight back? Early in the campaign I wrote about what I thought was an effective, if dishonest, Romney ad attacking President Obama for the nation’s high unemployment rate. Romney’s been ignoring his GOP rivals from on high, letting Rick Perry punch himself into exhaustion as the Cain Love Train goes off the tracks. But if the Tea Party right begins to coalesce around Gingrich, Romney may find himself in trouble. It’s been clear in every poll, since the beginning of the campaign, that the right-wing not-Mitt candidates had far more support than Romney, who tends to max out in the high 20s. As long as they fought among themselves, he seemed safe, but if one emerged, it was clear he’d have a battle on his hands.
It looks like one has emerged. With six weeks until the Iowa caucuses, no one else has time to heat up – or reheat. Will Romney go on the attack? There’s plenty for him to hit Gingrich on. He can neutralize Newt’s complaints about his flip-flops with the long roster of Gingrich’s own, from the individual mandate to the Paul Ryan budget to climate change. He’s got a lot to work with in Gingrich’s well-documented history enriching himself via crony capitalism, which Sarah Palin and the Tea Party purport to oppose.
This race is about to get interesting. I’ll be discussing the latest on Cain, Gingrich and Romney on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 ET.
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh
Newt Gingrich talks about inventive new ways to punish drug users
The GOP front-runner continues to tour America's bookstores, babbling away
The thing reporters always loved about Newt Gingrich — and the thing that led many of them to mistake his free-associative rambling for intellect — is that he will just babble, at length, on any given topic, to any reporter who’ll listen. So Yahoo’s Chris Moody chatted with the unlikely GOP nomination front-runner at a Books-a-Million in Florida, and Moody got Gingrich to go on for a while about drugs, for some reason, which I’m guessing is not at the top of the Gingrich campaign’s list of issues to hit in interviews. (At the top of that list is actually “The Battle of the Crater,” a powerful Civil War historical novel by Gingrich and William F. Forstchen, available now at fine booksellers everywhere.)
Here are Newt Gingrich’s nuanced, compassionate drug policy ideas: Constant drug testing for everyone (especially poor people) and stiff “economic penalties” for use. (Yes, obviously, what poor people need are more ways to incur economic penalties and more barriers to either aid or employment. Newt Gingrich has so many IDEAS.) Also, the U.S. should be more like Singapore, where people carrying enough drugs to qualify for “trafficking” charges are put to death.
I think that we need to consider taking more explicit steps to make it expensive to be a drug user. It could be through [drug] testing before you got any kind of federal aid. Unemployment compensation, food stamps, you name it.
It has always struck me that if you’re serious about trying to stop drug use, then you need to find a way to have a fairly easy approach to it and you need to find a way to be pretty aggressive about insisting — I don’t think actually locking up users is a very good thing. I think finding ways to sanction them and to give them medical help and to get them to detox is a more logical long term policy.
This self-contradictory word-salad leads Mike Riggs to call Newt Gingrich a “nitwit,” which seems unfair to perfectly harmless nitwits everywhere.
But Newt couched his explicit endorsement of incredibly punitive and draconian anti-drug efforts in the language of a reformer, so expect conservatives opposed to the Gingrich surge to paint him as a crazy heroin-loving fruitcake, as they have Ron Paul, and just as they painted his orthodox Republican immigration policy (let’s not deport literally everyone, right away) as unacceptable amnesty.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
DNC invokes Romney flip-flops in new video
Ad campaign blasts the candidate over political expediency
VIDEO
Try as he might, Mitt Romney just cannot escape his reputation as a flip-flopping candidate. To wit: The Democratic National Committee released a new ad campaign today — set to air in six states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that recalls several of Romney’s position reversals, on issues ranging from abortion to healthcare reform to Ronald Reagan, himself.
(You can watch the 30-second version of the ad here)
Highlights from the GOP national security debate
Catch up on all of last night's bold declarations, traded blows, and head-scratching gaffes
VIDEO
Last night, the major eight Republican presidential hopefuls gathered for yet another in a long line of debates — this time focused on national security. As expected, the evening was replete with hand-wringing over Barack Obama’s foreign policy decisions, particularly with regards to Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. More interesting, though, were the moments when the candidates set aim not at the president, but (in the finest of primary traditions) each other, over everything from defense cuts and nuclear proliferation, to racial profiling and illegal immigration. CNN has helpfully compiled some of the more memorable moments from the debate in the following highlight reel. We’ve also pulled together a list of additional debate happenings, which you can find beneath the video.
Other video highlights:
- Last night’s most immediate point of interest involves an answer Newt Gingrich gave on illegal immigration that tracks well to the left of what any other candidate has offered on the subject (Rick Perry notwithstanding). Salon’s Steve Kornacki has laid out the potential implications of Newt’s immigration gambit here.
- Rick Perry, meanwhile, committed no flagrant gaffes, and favors aggressive sanctions against Iran.
- Michele Bachmann may have inadvertently leaked classified intelligence information concerning terrorist threats to nuclear sites in Pakistan.
- Rick Santorum mistook Africa for a “country.”
- He also clashed with Ron Paul over the issue of TSA screening. He favors the use of targeted profiling as a means of potentially intercepting would-be terrorists. Paul disagreed, and invoked the ghost of Timothy McVeigh, who likely would have slipped past the screening procedures Santorum supports.
- The two found common ground, however, on a matter of War on Terror semantics.
- Mitt Romney incorrectly identified his own first name, as “Mitt.” (It’s Willard.) Herman Cain, for his part, shortened moderator Wolf Blitzer’s last name to “Blitz.” (Well, OK.)
- Finally, Jon Huntsman was reportedly present at the debate.
Newt: The ultimate Beltway swindler
Gingrich has taken money from everyone from Big Pharma to Freddie Mac. How is he leading the Republican pool?
You maybe should think twice when even Jack Abramoff thinks you’re beneath contempt. Not that Newt Gingrich cares.
Abramoff, America’s favorite convicted influence peddler, told NBC’s David Gregory that presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Gingrich is one of those “people who came to Washington, who had public service, and they cash in on it. They use their public service and access to make money.”
Newt, he continued, is “engaged in the exact kind of corruption that America disdains. The very things that anger the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement and everybody who is not in a movement and watches Washington and says why are these guys getting all this money, why do they go become so rich, why do they have these advantages?”
Why indeed? Granted, Abramoff’s in the middle of his promotion tour of confession and attempted redemption, a pot obscenely eager to call his kettle and former mentor black – especially if it sells books. But Casino Jack does have a point.
Gingrich personifies everything rotten about the ATM machine we call Washington: the merchandising of favors and votes; the conversion of past incumbency into insider information, making your contacts and the ability to play the system available to the highest bidder; the archetypal revolving door between government service and shilling for corporate America.
Yet there he is, suddenly riding at the top of the polls, his debate skills lauded, his churlish dismissal of the media praised, and infused with sufficient cheek to portray himself to gullible elements of the electorate as an outsider. It’s as if Kim Kardashian proclaimed herself American Housewife of the Year.
(Gingrich now is trying to play the inside-outside game both ways, proclaiming last week, “We just tried four years of amateur ignorance and it didn’t work very well. So having someone who actually knows Washington might be a really good thing.”)
In fact, a quick look at just a few of Newt’s activities since his GOP colleagues tossed him out of the speakership in 1998 is sufficient to expose him as the ultimate poster boy for inside-the-Beltway game playing — adherence to ideology often shoved aside in favor of expedience and the chance to make a buck.
You’ll remember hearing just this past spring about Mr. and Mrs. Gingrich’s revolving, no-interest credit line at Tiffany’s, a luxury store they treated like a diamond encrusted version of the Home Shopping Network, and Tim Carney’s report in the Washington Examiner that, “Christy Evans, formerly a top staffer to … Gingrich, is a registered lobbyist for Tiffany’s.”
Now Carney writes, “We know that Gingrich has been paid by drug companies and by the drug lobby, notably during the Medicare drug debate. A former employee of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (the main industry lobby) told me Gingrich was being paid by someone in the industry at the time. A spokeswoman for Gingrich’s healthcare consulting firm, Center for Health Transformation, told me that drug companies have been CHT clients. PhRMA confirmed in a statement that they had paid Gingrich. Bloomberg News cited sources from leading drug companies AstraZeneca and Pfizer saying that those companies had also hired Gingrich…
“Three former Republican congressional staffers told me that Gingrich was calling around Capitol Hill and visiting Republican congressmen in 2003 in an effort to convince conservatives to support a bill expanding Medicare to include prescription-drug subsidies. Conservatives were understandably wary about expanding a Lyndon Johnson-created entitlement that had historically blown way past official budget estimates. Drug makers, on the other hand, were positively giddy about securing a new pipeline of government cash to pad their already breathtaking profit margins.”
On Monday, the chair of Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation estimated its revenues over the past decade at $55 million. Fees are flexible, she said, with “charter memberships” going for an annual fee of $200,000. According to the Nov. 21 Wall Street Journal, “The health think tank also charges for consulting sessions with the former speaker and Mr. Gingrich’s speeches, according to two health care trade groups.”
More dynamically, the center’s P.R. materials promised “direct Newt interaction”(!) and as per the Washington Post, “The biggest funders, including such firms as AstraZeneca, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Novo Nordisk, were also eligible to receive discounts on ‘products and workshops’ from other Gingrich groups.” Sounds like the Potomac edition of “The Price Is Right.”
Another Center for Health Transformation charter member was Gundersen Lutheran Health System of La Crosse, Wis. The Nov. 17 New York Times reported that in July 2009, without reporting his connection, Gingrich praised the company in the Washington Post “for its successful efforts to persuade most patients to have ‘advance directives,’ saying that if Medicare had followed Gundersen’s lead on end-of-life care and other practices, it would ‘save more than $33 billion a year.’”
Advance directives means helping families determine future care for the terminally ill, but when Tea Partyers and others started yelling about “death panels” during the healthcare reform fight, Gingrich made a quick flip-flop to the right and changed sides.
Listening to Newt attack child labor laws this week, I thought one of his clients might be Miss Hannigan’s Orphanage. In reality, others who have anted up for his advice include GE, IBM, Microsoft, Growth Energy (a pro-ethanol lobby group that between 2009 and 2011 paid him $575,000) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Wall Street Journal notes that, “The Chamber, the largest lobbying organization in Washington, paid Mr. Gingrich about $840,000, according to people familiar with the arrangement, or about $120,000 a year for seven years, beginning in 2001, to serve on an informal board of advisers to its president and senior staff.”
And then, of course, there’s Freddie Mac, which triggered this recent tsunami of scrutiny when Gingrich claimed at the Nov. 9 candidates’ debate that it was for his expertise as an historian that the home mortgage giant had paid him $300,000. Bloomberg News then reported that the number was actually as much as $1.8 million, paid as consulting fees right up until 2008, when the failing agency was taken over by the government and such outside contracts were suspended. Gingrich claims he warned Freddie about “insane” loans and then told USA Today, “I was advising them over a period when they weren’t in crisis. I’m pretty happy to say, I gave these guys advice… on how do you build opportunity for the poor to learn to be non-poor?” Until caught, he hadn’t bothered to mention his own involvement, even as he attacked Barney Frank and others for taking Freddie Mac’s campaign contributions.
Through it all, Gingrich has denied being a lobbyist, apparently adhering to a very narrow definition – he’s not officially registered with Congress under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, as amended by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.
But you do the math: According to Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Kristin Jensen at Bloomberg News, “The former Georgia congressman reported assets in 1997 of between $197,000 and $606,000, according to his last House personal financial disclosure report, which permits lawmakers to record their wealth in broad ranges. According to his 2011 presidential disclosure report, the Republican primary candidate today is worth between $7.3 million and $31 million.”
Not bad for government work.
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Why young voters love Ron Paul - 2012 Elections - Salon.com
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