Today, with our increased polarization and a political discourse more and more defined by cultural cleavages, those groups whose participation drops off are more strongly Democratic than they were twenty years ago, while the groups whose voting rate stays high—elderly white voters, notably—are more Republican than they were. This means that the decline that was bad for Democrats two decades ago could be catastrophic for them now. ...MichaelTomasky,NYRB
Yesterday there were “Impeach Obama” sign-ups outside our local post office. I stayed away from the (busy!) signers, but noted a t-shirt on one portly lady read “uber alles.” The top line was invisible. Who or what was uber? A poster of Obama showed the president wearing a Hitler mustache.
This is Texas. But reading Michael Tomasky on the Democrats’ chances in 2014 (not to mention ’16), it’s hard to avoid thinking that we may be up against increasing extremism right across America. Whatever else happens, the Republican right is determined to make Obama’s final two years in office even worse than what he’s experienced already.
If there’s a Supreme Court vacancy, it seems possible to many observers that Republicans simply wouldn’t permit any nominee named by Obama to get a hearing. Nominations to lower courts and executive branch positions will meet a similar fate. Then there’s the prospect of the pretended threat of impeachment, a ploy to distract the president and strip him of authority. Obama’s final two years as president would almost surely be a tougher grind than the previous six. Perhaps far tougher, difficult as that might be to imagine. ...MichaelTomasky,NYRB