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Friday, November 9, 2012
OPINIONS
The Virgin Islands Daily News.25

Happy days, even with the cliff
Can Republicans adapt?

La Di Dah Di Dah...
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
laughing at us."
Actually Trump has no conceivable
impact on anything. I just wanted to
take this opportunity to reminisce about
the time he sent me an irate, handwrit-
ten message in which he misspelled the
word "too."
But look at Rep. 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 increases 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 raised 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
bis 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
Latino vote.
On election night, people were talk-
ing about the not-young male popula-
tion as if they were a dwindling tribe of
graybeards sitting around a sputtering
stove in Oklahoma. Republican strate-

gist John Weaver worried about
becoming "a shrinking 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.
"It'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. Still, it's unseemly to identify
the true 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 U.S.
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 not involve 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 contempt for many
of the people who occupy Capitol Hill.
Now it's a new day, and he needs to be
so perpetually 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.

[Cartoon of a donkey in a suit pointing forward with a speech bubble that says "FORWARD."]
STAHLER
GOCOMICS.COM
2012

This was one that the Republicans
really should have won.
Given the weak economy, American
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. One 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 primary
to burnish 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 nomince 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 right 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 I 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

Nicholas D. Kristof

issues liko immigration.
All this sound and fury cameshes
the Republican Party in an ideologi-
cal cocoon and impedes it from
reaching out to swing-state centrists,
or even understanding them. The vor-
tex spins ever faster and risks becom-
ing an ideological blackhole.
In 2002, a book was published
called "The Emerging Democratic
Majority." It argued that Democrats
would gain because of their 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.
But perhaps that book was ahead
of its time. This was the first election
in which Hispanic voters made up a
double-digit share of the electorate,
according to CNN exit polls — 10
percent, doubled from 1996 — and
more than 7 out of 10 Hispanic votETS
supported Obama.
That wasn't inevitable. In 2004,
exit polls suggested that President
George W. Bush received 44 percent
of the Hispanic vote. But Republicans
became obstructionist on immigra-
tion and then veered into offensive
demagogy in opposing the nomina-
tion of Sonia Sotomayor to the
Supreme Court. The Hispanic vote
tumbled by increasing numbers into
the Democrats' laps.
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-touch 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
Tirnes' Nate Silver. Many others were
women or young people. That's the
future of America, and if the
Republican Party remains a purist
cohort built around grumpy old white
men, it is committing suicide. That's
bad not just for conservatives but for
our entire country.
— Nicholas D. Kristof is a New
York Times columnist. Contact him
at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter:
com/NickKristof or by mail at The
New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave.,
New York, NY 10018.

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