Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 27
January 18, 2011
How many Reince Priebuses are there? | Michael Tomasky
Slate comes through with the goods I've been waiting for, on the name of the new GOP chairman:
You aren't going to meet a lot of Priebuses. The Social Security Administration's death index, which records U.S. deaths back to 1962, includes just four people named Priebus. To put that into perspective, 880,661 Smiths and 483,864 Joneses have passed on during the same period. In addition, the index lists 38,739 Reids, 31,591 Steeles, 15,692 McConnells, 518 Pelosis, and 294 Boehners. (Eight of the Boehners were named John.) There is only one Obama.
Reince is a very rare first name, although a few immigrants from Flemish Belgium have brought Reince to the United States as a last name. Forty-one people with the last name Reince have died in the United States since 1962. When he passes on, Chairman Priebus could become the only person with the first name Reince in the death index. But it's not clear that Reince is, in fact, his given name. His name sometimes appears as Reince R. Priebus, and other times as Reinhold R. Priebus.
Fred Priebus, the family patriarch, came to the United States near the turn of the 20th century. In census interviews, family members alternately reported their country of origin as Russia or Germany, although they consistently stated that they spoke German in their homeland. Today, there are more Priebuses in Germany than in any other country, with the largest number inhabiting the Thuringia region.
The less authoritative whitepages.com backs this up. You usually use that site to find the address or phone number of an aunt or cousin: you know their name, you know they live in Sheboygan, and you put in name, city and state and up they come.
But if you just put in the last name and leave the city and state fields blank, it'll search the whole country (actually, the US and Canada). So I entered "Priebus" and lo and behold it returned just 10 results. Two of them live in Vancouver. So there are only eight of them, at least with listed telephone numbers.
And Reince is the only Reince of the eight, even though whitepages.com spelled it "Reinice." And his phone number is still listed, if you're interested in that sort of thing.
There are 88 Tomaskys, which is up from the last time I checked. We're propagating. And needless to say there have to be thousands of Ann Wagners. So maybe the GOP did right after all.
As a point of comparison and of interest on their own terms: there are 34 Stalins in America, just two of them Joes. And there are, get ready, 25 Hitlers. But seven of these were Adolph Hitlers, so those were probably sick or bad jokes. But even so: 18 Hitlers. I guess I might live with the name Stalin. Actually, no, I'd rather not. I'd change it. But keeping the name Stalin somehow seems within the realm of the conceivable. But Hitler? Wouldn't you do something about that immediately if that were your name?
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Healthcare and divided government | Michael Tomasky
I'm intrigued by this new poll on attitudes toward healthcare reform, as we gear up for tomorrow's big (not actually so big) repeal vote. AP via HuffPo:
As lawmakers shaken by the shooting of a colleague return to the health care debate, an Associated Press-GfK poll finds raw feelings over President Barack Obama's overhaul have subsided...
...The poll finds that 40 percent of those surveyed said they support the law, while 41 percent oppose it. Just after the November congressional elections, opposition stood at 47 percent and support was 38 percent.
As for repeal, only about one in four say they want to do away with the law completely. Among Republicans support for repeal has dropped sharply, from 61 percent after the elections to 49 percent now.
Also, 43 percent say they want the law changed so it does more to re-engineer the health care system. Fewer than one in five say it should be left as it is.
Passions have subsided, I suspect, because conservatives are less enraged now that they feel they have a voice in the government. Independents repeatedly say in polls that they are fine with divided government. So that leaves only liberals who are really unhappy, witness the 43% who want more changes.
I wasn't happy on election night, Lord knows, but I guess in many ways Obama is better off with a divided government. If the Democrats ran everything, the Republicans, so expert at whining in opposition and ginning up phony accusations, could continue blaming every single bad thing that ever happened on the Democrats. And now, in independent voters' minds, the suspicion that Democrats are going to try to jerk the country to the left are null and void. They know it can't happen. The president and the GOP House have to fight over the middle, which is how the middle likes it, and which is probably on balance good for the country.
The problem is that the middle is way to the right of where it once was, even 15 years ago. Remember, just 15 plus three years ago, Republicans were solidly behind a healthcare plan pretty much just like the one they're going to vote to repeal tomorrow.
Divided government has its upsides, and seeing Obama fighting harder for the middle, as we'll see this year and next, will be good. But at some point, the Democrats have to think of something to do about the fact that the middle keeps moving right.
And no, it is not because the country keeps moving right. Yes, on the level of political philosophy, comparatively few people are willing to call themselves liberal. But people like Social Security. They love Medicare. They want environmental protection. They want higher taxes on the upper brackets. As we see above, 43% of them want more aggressive healthcare reform, not less. In many polls we could all Google in five seconds, they even say they back things like a carbon tax. As the old saying goes: theoretically conservative, operationally liberal.
So it's not the country that keeps moving right. It's this town, sauced up in right-wing rhetoric and buried by corporate money. At some point, Democrats have to arrest that movement, or some day soon the middle is going to a be place that even Barry Goldwater thought was a little crazy.
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Adventures with our new governors | Michael Tomasky
Governors are an odd lot in America. There are 50 of them. The jobs are incredibly powerful, typically: you control lots of jobs, contracts; who gets to do business with the state and who doesn't. The honest ones don't dig their mitts too deeply into these matters, while the less honest ones are usually felled by some instance of corrupting the state police or the state department of highway paving, where they've steered business to their pals.
The thing that most people don't know is that being a governor is generally pretty easy. The machinery of the state works whether there's a governor or not. State legislatures work only part time. Besides putting together a budget and giving speeches, there isn't a whole lot you have to do. If the economy seems okay and there hasn't been a scandal, the people will probably reelect you.
Finally, most governors, whatever their actual ideology, become technocrats in office, because every state depends on billions from Washington.
Since they drink up almost all the largesse from Washington they can get, most of them have to find other ways to be ideological. Like this, from new Maine governor Paul LePage:
LePage has declined invitations from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The organization has already expressed its displeasure with the governor's plans to not attend the events.
"They are a special interest. End of story...and I'm not going to be held hostage by special interests. And if they want, they can look at my family picture. My son happens to be black, so they can do whatever they'd like about it," said LePage.
LePage has an adopted son who is from Jamaica.
When a reporter from another television station asked LePage if his non-participation is more than one instance, and rather a pattern, he replied, "Tell 'em to kiss my butt. If they want to play the race card, come to dinner and my son will talk to them."
And like this, from new Alabama Governor Robert Bentley:
''I was elected as a Republican candidate. But once I became governor ... I became the governor of all the people. I intend to live up to that. I am color blind," Bentley said in a short speech given about an hour after he took the oath of office as governor.
Then Bentley, who for years has been a deacon at First Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa, gave what sounded like an altar call.
"There may be some people here today who do not have living within them the Holy Spirit," Bentley said. ''But if you have been adopted in God's family like I have, and like you have if you're a Christian and if you're saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister."
Bentley added, ''Now I will have to say that, if we don't have the same daddy, we're not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother."
It takes some..what, courage...some fortitude for a white couple to adopt and raise a black son. That's to be applauded. It's a little hard to square that with talking that way about a prominent black group, even if you don't like their politics. As for Bentley, well, that's the south.
I suppose these things just ebb and flow with the times. Back in the 1930s, there were lots of liberal and even radical governors, like Floyd Olson, who was fond of saying of his state that "Minnesota is a left-wing state." Even southern states back then had governors who, while reactionary on race, were pretty radical on economics.
Last year, many states chose right-wingers, largely as a reflection of who bothered to show up at the polls. A couple of them have head starts as national figures: Nikki Haley of South Carolina, most notably. LePage in particular is making a good run at challenging her in the rankings though. Conservatives will adore him for that childish outburst at a group they loathe, and they'll never tire of waving his adopted son in liberals' faces.
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January 17, 2011
What's up, baby doc? | Michael Tomasky
Were you, like me, shocked to read that Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier is just 59? If I ever knew he was just 19 when he took control of the machinery of state the first time around, I sure forgot.
One fears, of course, that in a quarter century's time and in the face of current turmoil, the people will have forgotten the little inconveniences like the Tonton Macoute and shifted their memories in the direction we've seen so often in history, along the things-weren't-really-so-bad lines.
I will always remember how my late and highly esteemed history professor Dennis O'Brien told the story of Napoleon's return to Paris after the first exile, which went something like this.
On the day Bonaparte left Elba, the newspapers in Paris blared: The Scoundrel Has Escaped!
As he entered Marseilles, they said: The Defeated One Dares to Come Ashore!
When he reached Lyon: The Little Corsican Marches On!
When he hit Orleans: Army Rallies to Bonaparte!
And when he arrived in Paris: The Great Emperor Returns!
I would, alas, look for a similar progression in the coming days and weeks.
More seriously, this is an important challenge for the Obama administration. It won't rank up there with Iran and North Korea, they cannot let Haiti slip back into the old Duvalierisme. Is there a chance he would govern differently? I suppose if the guy wins an election, he wins an election, and there's not much we can do about that. But surely we can find ways to direct that poor country to a better future.
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The King holiday | Michael Tomasky
Today is the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in the states, and as you might well guess this is one I celebrate, so there won't be much blogging today, maybe one more post later, unless big news happens.
As my Americans readers know, today is that special day when conservatives try to make absurd claims about what King might have supported today as a way of sticking the knife to liberals. You know, if King were alive today (he'd be 82), he would: oppose affirmative action, back a harsh crack down on illegal immigration, support the Iraq war, endorse the Dick Cheney view of enemy combatants, and so forth and so on. Keep an eye out for examples of the genre, they can be quite comical.
If you're interested in something that is about the actual man rather than perverse and fantastical ideology-driven polemics, you might take the time to read this, which is the full Time magazine article from January 1964 naming King its Man of the Year (not Person, yet) for 1963. It's a fascinating curio of its time.
Stylistically and structurally, it's not very different from today's magazine journalism, really, almost 50 years later. Which is kind of an astonishing thing: Surely the magazine journalism of 1963 was radically different from the magazine journalism of 1910. I mean, we know it was. Yet here is something that, with a few updates to language ("Negro") and social attitudes, could have been published last week.
It's interesting politically too. It appeared at a moment when Johnson had committed himself to civil rights - he endorsed its passage just five days after he became president in November 1963 - but had not yet begun the public full-court press. So there was still a little guessing going on as to his level of commitment. Here's a brief excerpt:
So far, the President's resolute support of the civil rights bill has been encouraging. Says the Rev. L. Sylvester Odom of Denver's African Methodist Episcopal Church: "Personally I wouldn't be surprised if President Johnson gets more out of Congress than President Kennedy could have. He may not get as deeply into the hearts of the people, but he may do pretty well with the Congress, and after all that is what counts." Agrees Virginia-born Social Psychologist Thomas Pettigrew: "Johnson will be tougher with the South. He knows them. Kennedy treated the South as if it were South Boston. As a Southerner, I know damn well you don't treat the South that way. Johnson won't play patty-cake with them."
Martin Luther King Jr. has already met with President Johnson, and he is similarly optimistic. "I've had a good deal of contact with him in the past several years," says King. "He means business. I think we can expect even more from him than we have had up to now. I have implicit confidence in the man, and unless he betrays his past actions, we will proceed on the basis that we have in the White House a man who is deeply committed to help us." Thus the support of the President for a strong civil rights bill provides a basis for high Negro hopes. Though Negro leaders acknowledge that laws do not change people's hearts, they want the satisfaction of knowing that a federal law supports them in, for example, their demands for equal voting rights and the right to share public accommodations with white men. If the civil rights bill circumvents these specifics, or if it should fail to pass altogether, the leaders are determined to push their revolution all the more strongly in 1964.
The article has some surprising facts. It notes that about 1,110 southern school districts had integrated, while nearly 1,900 had not. I admit that's a higher level of integration than I'd have guessed. Still unlawful, nine years after Brown, but not as bad as I would have thought. Elsewhere, though, I think the writer paints an overly optimistic picture:
Often the changes in attitudes are tiny in scope but broad in meaning. No longer do the starters at Miami's municipal golf courses ask a trio of white men if they will accept a Negro fourth; they merely assign the Negro, and the foursome heads onto the course.
Uh, I bet the writer heard of that happening once and turned it into a general thing. Or maybe it happened at a course frequented mostly by Jews.
In any case, it's a good day to take a moment to reflect on King's life. And listen to the amazing Bobby Kennedy Indianapolis speech. And share memories here, if you were alive. I hope against hope that the moderators aren't busy scrubbing comments that aren't quite in the spirit the rest of us intend.
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January 14, 2011
RNC proves me wrong | Michael Tomasky
Well, they're not quite done voting for Republican Party chair, but we can already say that my experiment has gone down to crashing defeat. You'll recall that I argued that we could predict who'd be elected the next RNC chair based solely on the candidates' photos. And I, and several of you, thought Ann Wagner of Missouri looked the most Republican. I mean, have a look.
Well, through five ballots, it looks like this:
Reince Priebus: 67
Maria Cino: 40
Saul Anuzis: 32
Ann Wagner: 28
Dead last. Incredible.
Do you think our support actually hurt her? Maybe it was that time she answered the question about her favorite book by describing her favorite bar (her kitchen table). Maybe it was her ambassadorship to Luxemborg; you know, being in Europe made her soft on socialism. Maybe it was that sneaky Laura Ingraham.
I suspect subterfuge. In any case, the Steele era is over. Hail Preibus. He looks a little green to me, but as we noted earlier, he did chose The Reagan Diaries instead of "my kitchen table," so maybe there's more horsepower under that hood than first blush would suggest. So congratulations.
Since it's 5 o'clock Friday, let's make this a weekend post. Sorry no quiz this morning. Still a tad under the weather. Next week for sure. And meanwhile, does anyone give the Jets a chance Sunday? I can't believe the spread is nine points. That seems absurdly high.
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Gun control after Tucson | Michael Tomasky
It occurs to me that some of you may have been wondering why I haven't written a post on gun control after Tucson. I haven't because I don't see much chance of anything happening on that front with a Republican Congress. An NYT story today reaches much the same conclusion:
Gun control advocates said that they hoped the circumstances of this attack — including the facts that the suspect obtained his weapon legally and that one of the victims was a member of Congress — would help their cause.
Josh Horowitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said, "People have really had it, and this whole magazine clip issue, and the mental health issue, is something that people can get their heads around."
But lawmakers seeking even modest limits on gun rights seem almost resigned to failure. Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, said in a telephone interview that since he proposed a bill this week that would outlaw having a firearm within 1,000 feet of a member of Congress, his office had received "100 calls an hour from people who think I am trying to take away their Second Amendment rights."
"This kind of legislation is very difficult," Mr. King said, noting there had been "no enthusiasm," even among Democrats, for the renewal of the assault weapon ban of 1994 in 2004. "The fact is Congress has not done any gun legislation in years," he said, adding, "Once you get out of the Northeast, guns are a part of daily life."
I'm not entirely sure about King's memory of the renewal of the assault weapons ban. Surely some Democrats wanted to extend it (it banned exactly the kind of extended magazine allegedly used by Jared Loughner). There was really one person more than any other who wanted it to expire. From Mother Jones:
If the Federal Assault Weapons Ban had been renewed in 2004, there's a good chance that its restriction on high-capacity gun magazines would have prevented the Tuscon shooter from killing so many people. So who's to blame for allowing this common sense law to lapse?Certainly not the American public. During the 2004 debate on renewing the ban, the Annenberg Election Survey at the University of Pennsylvania released a poll showing that 68 percent of the public—including 57 percent of all gun owners and even 32 percent of all NRA members—wanted the ban extended.
Enacted in 1994 with the support of Ronald Reagan, the Assault Weapons Ban was politicized during the contentious 2004 presidential race. "I don't understand the philosophy that says you're making America safer when you take cops off the streets and put assault weapons back on them," John Kerry said at a rally in Missouri. Though Bush was chastised by Kerry for siding with "powerful friends in the gun lobby," he had claimed he'd sign the assault weapons ban extension if it crossed his desk.
Yet the bill never made it that far. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) dismissed the ban as "a feel good piece of legislation" and flatly told the New York Times that it would expire even if Bush made an effort to renew it. "If the president asked me, it would still be no," he said. "He knows, because we don't have the votes to pass the assault weapons ban. It will expire Monday, and that's that."
Tom's had a rough week on other fronts; I wonder how he's feeling about his role in changing the law that enabled Loughner to buy a 32-bullet clip.
King's proposal seems silly to me, and frankly political. New York state is losing congressional districts, and some people think his district is going to be combined with that of Carolyn McCarthy, the Democrat whose husband was killed by a mass-murdering gunman on a commuter railroad back in the 90s. So, aware that he might have to run in a somewhat more Democratic district, he's flogging a plan. But it doesn't sound like a proposal aimed at preventing anything, merely at being able to bring another count against someone who's already done something.
The gun lobby is far more powerful today than public opinion, which typically supports tighter controls on automatic and semiautomatic weapons. But this is one more example of conservative absolutism. On taxes, on certain social issues and on guns, no compromise is permitted. The small silver lining is that you choose to live in a part of the country where more sensible laws prevail, but the Supreme Court is taking its axe even to that.
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Major environmental ruling on coal | Michael Tomasky
Yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency vetoed the largest mountaintop removal mining permit in the history of West Virginia, and one that has been at the heart of these new coalfield wars for a decade.
As usual, Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette is the go-to guy here:
The move is part of an Obama administration crackdown aimed at reducing the effects of mountaintop removal coal-mining on the environment and on coalfield communities in Appalachian — impacts that scientists are increasingly finding to be pervasive and irreversible......EPA officials this morning were alerting West Virginia's congressional delegation to their action, and undoubtedly preparing for a huge backlash from the mining industry and its friends among coalfield political leaders.
In making its decision to veto the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' approval of the 2,300-acre mine proposed for the Blair area of Logan County, EPA noted that it reviewed more than 50,000 public comments and held a major public hearing in West Virginia. EPA officials said their agency is "acting under the law and using the best science available to protect water quality, wildlife and Appalachian communities who rely on clean waters for drinking, fishing and swimming."
The site is called the Spruce Mine, which became controversial in 1999 when the late federal district judge Chuck Haden, a Republican, issued an injunction that blocked mining there on environmental grounds. Readers with ridiculously sharp memories will recall that I knew Chuck pretty well - he and my father were close friends, and he was one of the eulogists at Dad's funeral.
What seems to have happened here, according to Ward, is this. After Haden's ruling, Arch, the operator, scaled the site back by 700 acres (the current 2,300 acres is still about the size of downtown Pittsburgh) and got a new permit from the Army Corps of Engineers in 2007. The Obama administration came in and signaled its intention to review the matter. A full year was spent in negotiation between the EPA and the company trying to find a compromise that would let the mining go ahead but with stronger safeguards, according to Ward. But no deal could be reached.
This is a big big deal, folks. It's the first time the EPA has ever vetoed a project that was previously granted a permit.
You all know which side I'm on here. I give money every year to the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, and I might well recommend that you do the same, or at least visit their web site to read up on things.
I'm sympathetic to the jobs argument. There's no black and white here. It's a struggle that's full of anguish. I feel for the people who depend on these jobs, and I am aware that we're going to be relying on coal for electricity for a long time to come.
But if you study this issue closely, you see repeated instances of the moneyed interests winning: regulators not enforcing regulations, laws being flouted, negotiations undertaken in questionable faith, and so on and so on. Someone has to level out the playing field.
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January 13, 2011
Gabby Giffords' eyes | Michael Tomasky
We have entered the hall of mirrors. From Media Matters:
...several conservative websites - including Fox Nation and MRC arm CNS News - suggested that President Obama lied last night when he said that Rep. Giffords had opened her eyes for the first time shortly after his Wednesday night visit to the hospital.
In a recently-completed press conference, Giffords' doctor Peter Rhee explained that what Obama said last night about Giffords opening her eyes was "true."
In response to a question from a reporter about previous statements that Giffords could open her eyes, Rhee and Dr. B Michael Lemole, Section Chief of Neurosurgery at University Medical Center in Tuscon, explained the important distinction. Namely, Giffords previously opened her eyes in response to "stimulus," and yesterday she opened them spontaneously, which represented a "major milestone" in her recovery.
In addition to this, other conservatives, like that zany and fun-lovin' Tammy Bruce, objected to the t-shirts made for last night's event, which bore the words "together we thrive." This is supposed to be an abomination of some kind. Don't ask me.
They will never stop. They know Obama had a good night last night. At first, some conservatives applauded the speech because it seemed to them that Obama had chastised liberals for making a connection between right-wing rhetoric and the Loughner shooting. But now they see that this is playing out differently: that Obama rose to this occasion very well, and that he actually made news (and heartwarming, inspiring news at that) by saying that Giffords opened her eyes for the first time. So now they're back in attack mode. They can dump their toxic effluent even on to a benign and uplifting story like the one about her opening her eyes.
In related news:
Mark DeMoss, director of the Civility Project, a two-year-old effort launched at the beginning of the Obama presidency to prompt legislators across the nation to cool political rhetoric, decided to shut the campaign down earlier this month -- even before the latest resurgence of debate about "vitriol" and rhetoric sparked by the events in Arizona over the weekend.
DeMoss, an evangelical conservative with ties to some big-name Republicans, cited a general lack of interest, as well as pervading signs that the nature of political discourse appeared only to be deteriorating during Obama's first two years as president, as justifications for halting his program.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, DeMoss provided a little insight about how his project was received by some on the right.
"The worst e-mails I received about the civility project were from conservatives with just unbelievable language about communists, and some words I wouldn't use in this phone call," DeMoss told The Times. "This political divide has become so sharp that everything is black and white, and too many conservatives can see no redeeming value in any liberal or Democrat. That would probably be true about some liberals going the other direction, but I didn't hear from them."
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The contrast couldn't be clearer | Michael Tomasky
Expat Scotsman wondered last night why I bothered to throw in to my post on Obama's speech a seemingly (to him) gratuitous mention of the former half-term governor.
I didn't think it was gratuitous, that's why. On the very day that was designated the official day of mourning and remembrance, she made a speech that was about her. Now her defenders can say well, it was just those two words, but that's a non-defense. Those two words always generate screaming headlines. Always. It'd be like stringing together a list of superlative adjectives to describe someone and then throwing "child-molester" in there. You ought to have the sense to know that that's the one that is going to attract attention.
So, including those two words ensured that the focus would be on that section of the speech, which in turn ensured that the thing that the chatter would be about Palin herself, not about Gabby Giffords or Christina Green or anyone else. Her.
In contrast, read the coverage this morning of the president's speech. It was maybe a good speech, maybe a great one, depending on whom you're reading. But it was not about him. It was about the victims, the heroes and the country. We had one leader yesterday, and one sulker. And I am sure that the sulker will only be reinforced in her sulking - the reaction to her speech is all the fault of the media, etc.
The lack of moral imagination and empathy for people who don't see the world as she does is total and it is stunning.
Expat, I'm hardly the only one to make the comparison. Everyone is making it today, and they are all saying in essence what I said last night. Here's the Politico's take:
In the span of a single news cycle, Republicans got a jarring reminder of two forces that could prevent them from retaking the presidency next year.
At sunrise in the east on Wednesday, Sarah Palin demonstrated that she has little interest—or capacity—in moving beyond her brand of grievance-based politics. And at sundown in the west, Barack Obama reminded even his critics of his ability to rally disparate Americans around a message of reconciliation.
Palin was defiant, making the case in a taped speech she posted online why the nation's heated political debate should continue unabated even after Saturday's tragedy in Tucson. And, seeming to follow her own advice, she swung back at her opponents, deeming the inflammatory notion that she was in any way responsible for the shootings a "blood libel."
Obama, speaking at a memorial service at the University of Arizona, summoned the country to honor the victims, and especially nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, by treating one another with more respect. "I want America to be as good as Christina imagined it," he said.
It's difficult to imagine a starker contrast.
Deed it is. By the way I notice on realclearpolitics this morning that Obama's job approval number is +3. He's back near 50. An AP poll gives him 53%. Something is turning around. The numbers will bump up after last night, too.
Meanwhile, the Republicans have a real problem on their hands. Palin thrives where she can persuade her people that the establishment is against her. Usually that's been the liberal establishment, but in 2011, that's going to be the Republican Party establishment, which wants to block her. Let them see what kind of demagogue they've unleashed. Nothing would be more fitting than for this most expert retailer of conservative victimhood politics to bring down her own party because of it.
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