Politics

It was a relatively cool 85 degrees in Houston on the August evening thirty years ago when Republicans gathered at the Astrodome to renominate George H.W. Bush for the 1992 presidential election. The opening session’s speakers included Senator John McCain, Stanford professor Condoleezza Rice, and re-election campaign co-chairman Ken Lay, later to gain fame as a major figure in the Enron scandals. But the speech that would be the most memorable by far was delivered by a television commentator, syndicated columnist and former Richard Nixon hatchet man — the fifty-four-year-old Irish Catholic Pat Buchanan, who delivered what came to be known as “The Culture War Speech.

Tabloid conservatism is the felicitous phrase that Sam Tanenhaus, one of our most astute analysts of the modern right, gave to the approach that Donald Trump, who faces various possible indictments, and Steve Bannon, who has just been sentenced to four months in prison and a measly $6,500 fine for failing to testify before Congress’s January 6 Committee, concocted as an alternative to the stuffy establishment mode that had prevailed in the GOP. A self-proclaimed populist, Bannon turned the website Breitbart.com into a juggernaut on the right and propelled the Trump campaign to victory. Absent his hard-edged approach, which included bringing various former Bill Clinton inamoratas to a debate with Hillary, it seems doubtful that Trump would have won in 2016.

Republican fortunes are again on the upswing as the 2022 midterm elections loom. A series of Biden administration legislative wins over the summer, along with the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, appeared to be mitigating projected Democratic losses in November. But persistent inflation, a recessing economy, a worsening national crime wave, a slew of foreign policy embarrassments, and other gaffes have combined to put the Republicans back in a decisive lead. A New York Times/Siena College poll published on Monday gave the GOP a four-point advantage over the Democrats among likely voters. In most categories, the breakdown by age demographic is about what one might expect.

Take a drive through Steubenville, Ohio, Patrick Deneen urged the crowd at the recent Restoring a Nation conference. In downtown Steubenville, he assured us, the “blessings of liberty” are on full display. I didn’t bother making the trip. I know what those blessings are. We have the same ones where I grew up, in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, less than an hour away: a population that’s dropped 50 percent since 1940, record fentanyl overdoses, crippling brain drain, hulking husks of abandoned steel mills, empty storefronts on main street, the steady decay of once-beautiful public spaces and everywhere the poisonous fallout of family breakdown. The people I grew up with are dying — and the best the libertarians can offer them is a U-Haul.

A secret hour-long recording of an October 2021 meeting of Los Angeles city politicos surfaced last week, as California’s midterm election ballots arrived in the mail. Taking the city and nation by storm, the leaked audio exposed the cutthroat racial politics and deceit of elected officials who pretend to be tribunes of diversity. Los Angeles city council president Nury Martinez, councilman Kevin de León, and Ron Herrera, head of the 800,000-member Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, were caught red-handed, plotting to increase Latino political power through proposed re-districting. Amid talking about who’ll help and hinder la raza, Martinez stated in Spanish that white, gay council member Mike Bonin’s adopted black child had acted “like a little monkey" at a parade.

I take a page from history. On Thursday, the Committee (you know which one) voted 9-0 to subpoena the former president. Of course, he might refuse to comply with the subpoena. What then? Here’s one scenario, per CNN: "Contempt. The full House, which is controlled by Democrats until at least January, could vote to hold him in contempt of Congress, something it’s done with several other uncooperative witnesses "Referral. After a contempt of Congress referral, the Justice Department could then prosecute, as it did with Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon and plans to do with his once economic advisor Peter Navarro "Prosecution. If found guilty, as Bannon was, Trump could theoretically face a minimum of thirty days in jail.

The Fetterman fuss about nothing This week, John Fetterman sat down for his first on-camera interview since he suffered a stroke just a few days before the Democratic primary in May. Fetterman’s circumstances — running for Senate while recovering from a major medical incident — are highly unusual. Dasha Burns and her NBC colleagues conducted an exemplary interview given these circumstances. They allowed Fetterman the use of closed caption software that he says he needs to overcome the auditory processing difficulties he has dealt with since the stroke. In questioning Fetterman about his health, Burns was tough but sympathetic.