Politics and War and the 2012 Strategy
The famed military theorist and author Carl von Clausewitz famously stated that "war is the continuation of politics by other means." However, the inverse is also true -- politics is war with fewer explosions but no less damage. Politics is, quite simply, how decisions are made about who lives and who dies, who eats and who starves, who prospers and who suffers. There is no more important pursuit than whether both individuals and entire peoples have liberty and safety, or nothing.
Politics is war.
Let's say that in war the enemy does something stupid. One can easily say that it's because the enemy is stupid. After all, they're stupid ignorant (insert epithet), and of course it's their nature to do something stupid. But that is a very, very dangerous assumption for any commander, or indeed for any thinking person, to make. It may look stupid, but sometimes stupid mistakes are stupid like a fox.
Right now one thing we are seeing is a rash of ballot measures on hot button social issues like immigration, gay rights, and abortion cropping up across the South, especially in swing states like my own North Carolina. These measures have two things in common -- they are about hot button issues that poll well with the Republican base, and they essentially do nothing. Either they attempt to have the state define something which is absolutely and decisively the purview of the federal government or which have repeatedly been declared unconstitutional, or they duplicate the effects of an existing law.
For example, putting a marriage amendment in the NC constitution at this point functionally does absolutely nothing. There is already a state DOMA law and a federal DOMA law. There is no reasonable attempt to repeal the state DOMA law, nor any grounds for challenging it under the state constitution. Change on that is going to come from a Supreme Court ruling in the next ten years requiring states to give full faith and credit to marriages performed in another state. That will overturn state DOMA laws and amendments alike. There is absolutely no functional reason to pass this ballot measure, as it does not change one thing for one single person, nor will it.
Another example is Alabama's potential referendum to say that children born in Alabama whose parents aren't citizens aren't citizens either. This is absolutely unconstitutional. It is a matter of federal law, enshrined for two centuries, that people who are born in the US are citizens. The state of Alabama has no authority whatsoever to decide otherwise, and if the measure passed it would be completely unenforceable.
A third example is Mississippi's personhood ballot measure, which gives full rights as a citizen to a fertilized egg. Likewise, this is also completely unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has held over and over in recent years as part of the stem cell debate that fertilized eggs are not people. Multicell blastocysts are not people. The state of Mississippi has no authority to alter this in any way, and the law will be held unconstitutional immediately.
So why are these ballot measures popping up? Why is the Republican party pushing them when they're quite simply stupid? They have absolutely no effect whatsoever. Because the Republicans are stupid? Stupid like a fox.
In 2003, Karl Rove and the Arlington Group, a coterie of Republican strategists, devised an extremely effective electoral tactic -- getting hot button social issues on the ballot as referendums in order to drive Republican turnout. That has been a surpassingly successful strategy throughout the decade, bringing panicked voters to the polls in droves to prevent the sky from falling as a result of gay marriage, immigration, and abortion. This year, Republican voters repeatedly say that they are lukewarm about all the candidates. Mitt Romney in particular is problematic, and the party elite can see that he is shaping up as the nominee. However, Romney has several persistent negatives with the socially conservative, older, evangelicals who make up the party base -- he is Mormon, and he is less extreme than Tea Party favorites. If he becomes the nominee, those voters won't vote for Obama, but they will stay home. They don't like Romney and they're not going to make an effort for him.
However, if there is a hot button social issue on the ballot like saving the world from gays and immigrants, they will hie out to the polls and along the way vote for Romney and the down-ballot candidates who are facing tough races, especially Tea Party freshmen who aren't faring well in their home districts. These ballot measures are about Republican turnout.
Nicely enough, they also effectively serve a second purpose -- they provide endless distractions for Democrats. The battle is this -- reelect Obama and continue to control Supreme Court nominations. That's the battle. That's the real deal. If we do that, then when the full faith and credit argument comes to the Supreme Court we will have gay marriage nationally. When the challenges to Roe v. Wade come to the Supreme Court, the ruling will be upheld. When states attempt to interfere with federal law about citizenship, those attempts will be overturned. And if we lose that battle, then we will potentially lose all the rest.
Each ballot measure, each referendum on a hot button issue, costs invaluable resources. It costs us time and money and attention and the hours of volunteers. Each feint makes us hare off chasing shadows, fighting measures that do nothing -- while neglecting the actual battle. Every penny donated to fighting one of these measures is a penny taken OUT of Obama's reelection campaign. Every boosting the bandwidth, every blog post, every minute of time that we spend talking about them and being outraged about them is time and energy taken away from the real, actual, decisive battle. This is a tried and true military tactic -- fake out the enemy by making them send troops and resources all over the place, fighting little ineffective skirmishes that accomplish nothing while weakening their main line of battle.
It is very difficult to be disciplined when you're under attack. It's difficult to be focused when you're frightened. These things are designed to scare and upset. They are designed to make people angry, because angry people charge the enemy looking for a fight rather than waiting in disciplined order to fight effectively. It's easy to overcome an enemy who are charging in ones and twos all over the map, ineffective and dispersed. That is what they want us to be -- angry, frightened, and ineffective.
What we must be is what every good commander strives for -- cool, thinking, disciplined, focused. We control the field. We control the presidency. We need to defend intelligently, to muster our resources wisely, to use every volunteer hour and every dollar effectively. If we do that, we can win. Romney is only a lukewarm candidate who is likely to be savaged in the next couple of months, and who is going to have significant problems raising money from the Republican base. Obama is, as he's said, a strong closer, and time is on his side. We can win. But we have to not fall for feints designed by Karl Rove and the Arlington Group. We have to maintain our focus, not spend our money fighting a dozen useless ballot measures, and more importantly not spend our time and energy doing so. We need to win the battle, not fight the skirmishes.
Politics is war.
Let's say that in war the enemy does something stupid. One can easily say that it's because the enemy is stupid. After all, they're stupid ignorant (insert epithet), and of course it's their nature to do something stupid. But that is a very, very dangerous assumption for any commander, or indeed for any thinking person, to make. It may look stupid, but sometimes stupid mistakes are stupid like a fox.
Right now one thing we are seeing is a rash of ballot measures on hot button social issues like immigration, gay rights, and abortion cropping up across the South, especially in swing states like my own North Carolina. These measures have two things in common -- they are about hot button issues that poll well with the Republican base, and they essentially do nothing. Either they attempt to have the state define something which is absolutely and decisively the purview of the federal government or which have repeatedly been declared unconstitutional, or they duplicate the effects of an existing law.
For example, putting a marriage amendment in the NC constitution at this point functionally does absolutely nothing. There is already a state DOMA law and a federal DOMA law. There is no reasonable attempt to repeal the state DOMA law, nor any grounds for challenging it under the state constitution. Change on that is going to come from a Supreme Court ruling in the next ten years requiring states to give full faith and credit to marriages performed in another state. That will overturn state DOMA laws and amendments alike. There is absolutely no functional reason to pass this ballot measure, as it does not change one thing for one single person, nor will it.
Another example is Alabama's potential referendum to say that children born in Alabama whose parents aren't citizens aren't citizens either. This is absolutely unconstitutional. It is a matter of federal law, enshrined for two centuries, that people who are born in the US are citizens. The state of Alabama has no authority whatsoever to decide otherwise, and if the measure passed it would be completely unenforceable.
A third example is Mississippi's personhood ballot measure, which gives full rights as a citizen to a fertilized egg. Likewise, this is also completely unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has held over and over in recent years as part of the stem cell debate that fertilized eggs are not people. Multicell blastocysts are not people. The state of Mississippi has no authority to alter this in any way, and the law will be held unconstitutional immediately.
So why are these ballot measures popping up? Why is the Republican party pushing them when they're quite simply stupid? They have absolutely no effect whatsoever. Because the Republicans are stupid? Stupid like a fox.
In 2003, Karl Rove and the Arlington Group, a coterie of Republican strategists, devised an extremely effective electoral tactic -- getting hot button social issues on the ballot as referendums in order to drive Republican turnout. That has been a surpassingly successful strategy throughout the decade, bringing panicked voters to the polls in droves to prevent the sky from falling as a result of gay marriage, immigration, and abortion. This year, Republican voters repeatedly say that they are lukewarm about all the candidates. Mitt Romney in particular is problematic, and the party elite can see that he is shaping up as the nominee. However, Romney has several persistent negatives with the socially conservative, older, evangelicals who make up the party base -- he is Mormon, and he is less extreme than Tea Party favorites. If he becomes the nominee, those voters won't vote for Obama, but they will stay home. They don't like Romney and they're not going to make an effort for him.
However, if there is a hot button social issue on the ballot like saving the world from gays and immigrants, they will hie out to the polls and along the way vote for Romney and the down-ballot candidates who are facing tough races, especially Tea Party freshmen who aren't faring well in their home districts. These ballot measures are about Republican turnout.
Nicely enough, they also effectively serve a second purpose -- they provide endless distractions for Democrats. The battle is this -- reelect Obama and continue to control Supreme Court nominations. That's the battle. That's the real deal. If we do that, then when the full faith and credit argument comes to the Supreme Court we will have gay marriage nationally. When the challenges to Roe v. Wade come to the Supreme Court, the ruling will be upheld. When states attempt to interfere with federal law about citizenship, those attempts will be overturned. And if we lose that battle, then we will potentially lose all the rest.
Each ballot measure, each referendum on a hot button issue, costs invaluable resources. It costs us time and money and attention and the hours of volunteers. Each feint makes us hare off chasing shadows, fighting measures that do nothing -- while neglecting the actual battle. Every penny donated to fighting one of these measures is a penny taken OUT of Obama's reelection campaign. Every boosting the bandwidth, every blog post, every minute of time that we spend talking about them and being outraged about them is time and energy taken away from the real, actual, decisive battle. This is a tried and true military tactic -- fake out the enemy by making them send troops and resources all over the place, fighting little ineffective skirmishes that accomplish nothing while weakening their main line of battle.
It is very difficult to be disciplined when you're under attack. It's difficult to be focused when you're frightened. These things are designed to scare and upset. They are designed to make people angry, because angry people charge the enemy looking for a fight rather than waiting in disciplined order to fight effectively. It's easy to overcome an enemy who are charging in ones and twos all over the map, ineffective and dispersed. That is what they want us to be -- angry, frightened, and ineffective.
What we must be is what every good commander strives for -- cool, thinking, disciplined, focused. We control the field. We control the presidency. We need to defend intelligently, to muster our resources wisely, to use every volunteer hour and every dollar effectively. If we do that, we can win. Romney is only a lukewarm candidate who is likely to be savaged in the next couple of months, and who is going to have significant problems raising money from the Republican base. Obama is, as he's said, a strong closer, and time is on his side. We can win. But we have to not fall for feints designed by Karl Rove and the Arlington Group. We have to maintain our focus, not spend our money fighting a dozen useless ballot measures, and more importantly not spend our time and energy doing so. We need to win the battle, not fight the skirmishes.