State Rep. Keiko Orrall (R-Lakeville) would like you to know two things: She’s endorsing Donald Trump, and she has no choice in the matter.
Orrall told State House News Service reporter Andy Metzger that she’s endorsing Donald Trump, but not condoning his actions, which doesn’t make a lick of sense. It got worse from there:
Orrall hinted at some reluctance in her endorsement of Trump. After an initial interview outside the House chamber, she approached the News Service to say, “I’m a member of the Republican National Committee. I’m bound to support the Republican nominee.”
Asked if that meant she would not support Trump were it not for her position, Orrall said, “Gotta go. See ya,” and left.
Orrall is trying to appease the Republican Party and its base, while also pleading for understanding that she no longer has control of her own fate. As Rust Cohle said in True Detective, “Time is a flat circle. Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over again—forever.”
It’s clear that the GOP’s national crackup over Trump is running all the way down to the state legislative level. It’s going to scar an entire generation of Republican leaders.
Gov. Charlie Baker made the best possible move by dumping Trump from the start, but even he may not escape unscathed – he still needs to win GOP nominating contests. Sure, the conservatives could realize they have a good thing going in Baker. But with Trump trying to pin the blame for his loss on a not-supportive-enough GOP establishment and Baker already fighting conservatives on the state committee, would you bet against a self-defeating civil war?
You neglect to mention that he won his civil war for control over the state party and he is still polling substantially higher than either Trump or Clinton. He disavowed Trump more swiftly, more passionately, and more consistently than just about any other major Republican elected official in the country. He resisted entreaties to embarrass himself by voting for Johnson and endorsing Clinton would’ve likely caused the civil war he has worked to avoid.
Orrall kneecapped herself for future statewide or Congressional runs, which she has clearly been tapped to consider. She isn’t loved by the Tea Party wing either and they have a stronger presence in that part of the state. She put her short term commitments ahead of her long term future. That said, if a DNC member from our state refused to endorse our nominee diehards like Kate and Christopher would be calling for his head. Like it or not, the grassroots of their party will also commit moral and political seppuku. And the more partisan among us here have to recognize a kindred spirit when they see one.
…until you inaccurately called me out. DNC members absolutely should not endorse somebody they cannot stomach, but DO risk losing their seats if they publicly endorse the opposition, donate to them, or actively campaign against our nominee. They are always welcome to focus their energies on races in which they feel more comfortable. Orall could have maintained both her integrity and RNC seat by not commenting and likewise directing her energies elsewhere, as long as she didn’t say she was FOR Clinton, Johnson, or Stein. Of course, it is ultimately always each person’s prerogative to choose to put principle over partisanship if the principle is worth political loss.
She’s still officially required to endorse Trump, just like so many Democrats fell in line behind unacceptable nominees like King and Silber in the last. I give Barney Frank a ton of credit for endorsing progressive Republicans against conservative Democrats throughout his career.
They can SUPPORT the nominee, but not ENDORSE the nominee.
Pretty much the same shit. In light of that, this is a pretty scummy attack IMO.
Both of you seem to not understand. At least if the GOP has the same rules Dems do she is NOT required to endorse (or support) Donald Trump.
Representative Orrall back in 2015: “I take great offense to the things he’s said about women and minorities, and it is a very unfortunate position that he’s put us in,” she said of Trump. “I find it unbelievable that he is out in front because he is saying things that are not Republican; they’re not Republican values.”
Trump is saying things OUT LOUD that Republicans only say in private; they’re not Republican values….in public, just in private”
Almost every Republican I know doesn’t talk like Trump.
and they are Trump supporters. They may not like him, but they despise her and they are willing to ignore just about anything about him.
….SOME in front of Republicans.
Seems like we’re zeroing in on “half of … are deplorable”.
I think what jtm is getting at is what SNL covered months ago in the guise of Mitt Romney (about 4:45 in).
This debacle may have a multi-generational effect.
The GOP did move back to the middle for a time, under Nixon and Ford, but Nixon employed the Southern Strategy when he saw how many states Goldwater picked off from the Solid South and the threat Wallace posed to Humphrey in traditional Democratic constituencies. Reagan was able to build on both of these developments with the Goldwater landslide of 64′ turning into the Reagan landslide of 84′ and the Overton Window moved decidedly to the right.
Using that as a model, Trump’s politics and ideology today could be mainstream 20 years from now under a more competent, more optimistic sounding, and less personally scandalized avatar. And that is truly frightening.
The country and world are different places from 50 years ago, so I wouldn’t draw conclusions from ’64. BTW (as you know) Reagan carried MA in 1980 and 1984, so not sure Reagan’s success was solely built on the Goldwater?Nixon model.
Goldwater and Reagan were very different. Reagan was a much better salesman and a lot vaguer on policy specifics. Goldwater was still going up against a solid New Deal coalition while it had already defected to Nixon so defecting to Reagan wasn’t as far as a leap. East Cambridge loved Tip and still came out got is atagonist twice, something that confounded the old New Dealer.
America has never had a national candidate like Donald Trump. It is not just Donald Trump, though. As Mr. Obama said so eloquently, the GOP is now reaping what it has been sowing for decades.
It is an insult to Barry Goldwater to compare Donald Trump to him, as I recall his widow said so recently.
No modern American political party has put itself in the horrific bind of today’s GOP. The time to renounce the horrific politics of Donald Trump was early in the primary season, when he should have been sent back into oblivion under whatever rock he crawled out from. Instead, America’s GOP made him their candidate.
Neither Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, nor Ronald Reagan is remotely comparable to Donald Trump.
The GOP process was hijacked by a combination of GOP votes plus energized (possibly independent) Trump supporters in the primary. The GOP did set itself up for this.
One was structural with the winner-take-all primaries, and no super-delegates. A second was Ted Cruz. The fact that he was the #2 choice screwed everything. How he manages to exist is beyond me.
But beyond that the continued strong embrace of the conservative social agenda, failure to get behind an immigration policy (even if you don’t like them, you still have to have one) and the obstructionist Congress, you’ve got to have a vision (and not “lower taxes for the rich”).
It’s hard for me to blame “the GOP” when Trump’s not the establishment GOP (who I identify with) candidate, but I can certainly see why everyone lumps them together, and certainly Trump did have some establishment supporters early on.
One wonders what would have happened had George Wallace not been shot and gone on to win the ’72 Democratic nomination. There would have been some real hand wringing then I bet.
I mostly agree with you.
Where I quibble is that, like it or not, the GOP has benefited from its “Southern Strategy” for decades. The pandering to racism, sexism, prejudice, xenophobia, and everything else was exploited, not invented, by Mr. Trump. The GOP plowed and fertilized the ground and made sure it was well-watered, then scattered the seeds. The seed that flourished most strongly was Mr. Trump, but the rest were just as bad (though perhaps not as publicly vocal).
In my view, George Wallace never had a realistic shot at the presidency even if he had not been shot. America was far more liberal in 1972 than it is today, and most Americans rejected his explicit racism and hate-speech.
I think it needs to be said that “obstructionist Congress” is a euphemism for outright racism. The GOP was not ready for a black president. The obstructionism was clearly personal, since Mr. Obama bent over backwards to establish common ground with GOP proposals — and was rudely rejected each and every time.
In my view, much of the toxic energy that is destroying today’s GOP is a backlash to the election (with overwhelming black support) of a black President.
But then again I don’t live in the south. I have never heard any racism in Republican circles in MA or NH, though I have heard nonpartisan racism in Lawrence. If it had been HRC in 08 I bet the Congressional response would have been similar. We’ll get to test that theory next year.
If the Dems somehow pull off a trifecta and land slim majorities in Senate and House, you can be sure they’ll lose seats in the midterms.
I agree about testing the theory next year.
We should, however, bear in mind that sexism is even more fundamentally ingrained in our humanity than racism. In the US, for example, the civil rights movement discriminated against women long after it won its legal battles against racism. American blacks were granted suffrage long before American women.
The inauguration of Hillary Clinton, if and when it happens, will be every bit as radical as the inauguration of Barack Obama. Sexism motivates at least some of the resistance against and hostility towards Ms. Clinton.
hostility towards Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Joni Ernst, and so on? Just curious. Does it?
Note that I said that “Sexism motivates at least some of the …”. I think that statement holds true for the hostility against the women you mention — some of it is motivated by sexism.
I also think that Ms. Bachmann, Ms. Palin, Ms. Coulter, and Ms. Ingraham have, in their public utterances, made their offensive and insulting ideas so clear that whatever sexism might be present is accompanied by legitimate outrage against outrageous statements.
I might add that the sexist comments I heard from fellow progressive men about Ms. Palin were more along the lines of “I hate her politics and love how she looks”.
Here is the difference I anticipate between the reaction to the women you cite and reaction to Ms. Clinton. While senator, Ms. Clinton was famous for her ability to establish excellent personal and professional relationships with her GOP colleagues in the Senate. I know of no such references made regarding, for example, Ms. Bachmann.
If Ms. Clinton is elected, then the question will be how the GOP responds to her attempts to offer compromises to the GOP. The GOP rejected each and every attempt by Barack Obama to find common ground with them, even when Mr. Obama offered proposals that originated in the GOP. I will not be surprised if the GOP does the same with Ms. Clinton.
My interpretation is that this rejection is motivated by spineless political operatives who pander to the same basket of deplorables that today are half of the “base” of Donald Trump. In the case of Mr. Obama, those deplorables reject his race. In the case of Ms. Clinton, they reject her gender.
Mr. Trump has spent the last week proudly shouting explicitly sexist (and just plain offensive) attacks on his accusers and on women everywhere. He actually cited the appearance of his accusers as a reason to discount them. The basket of deplorables that form at least half of his base eat up his sexist garbage.
I suggest that this offensive sexism will continue to be a significant part of the GOP electorate after the general election in November. I suggest that when Hillary Clinton is elected, as she almost certainly will be, that same offensive sexism will be an irresistable magnet to the spineless cowards that constitute today’s elected GOP.
So yes, I think sexism plays at least some part of the dynamic that drives both parties.
There’s also a tendency to assume women are Democrats, which is in itself sexist.
Really we need more attention on Republican men who are, shall we say, outside the mainstream.
I’m very surprised Tom gives this question some consideration. Those women are extreme in their own right and would not sound any better if they were men.
… no. In fact, the opposite may be true: a studied unwillingness to refuse counsel on the basis of a a double X may have allowed the whack-a-doodle part of the thinking (sic) of the aforementioned women to come forward. The very fact that the left is not all that sexist allowed these women to open their mouths. That’s when the hostility started.
Anne Coulter is probably the first, and the clearest, example of this: her early ubiquity (she was everywhereon cable news in the 90’s) was precisely because she practically dared people to dismiss her for appearing to be deliberately trading upon her (purported) sex appeal. I’ve actually heard people say, back in the nineties, things along the order of “I’m not going to dismiss her just because she’s a stick thin blonde who wears a cocktail dress 365 days of the year.” Ok. Then she opened her mouth. That’s when people started to dismiss her.
Few remember how different politics was before New Gingrich and how much, to the extent of his speakership in fact, New Gingrich himself was given the benefit of the doubt that existed a priori. The same was true for the early days of Rush Limbaugh. Honest, earnest and sober-minded liberals and centrists would tune in to his show on the theory that broad minded people could engage civilly. That notion seems quaint, today.
And, in fact, a large part of that hostility on the right, Newt Gingrich and the bomb-throwing Congress of ’94, the rise of such pundits as Anne Coulter and Fox News in general was in direct opposition to Bill Clinton who appointed the first female AG (Janet Reno, after some other female nominees had been Borked), named only the second female ambassador to the UN (Madeleine Albright, whom he would later make the first Secretary of State) and nominated the notorious RBG to the Supreme Court. Here’s the thing though… for all the sturm-und-drang on the Right over Bill Clintons female appointments there was little more than yawns on the left. And, let us recall, in ’92 Bill Clinton was married to a strong women who flatly proclaimed that she had a choice between ‘baking cookies and having teas’ and being a committed professional and had the further temerity to choose the latter. Those of you under 24 weren’t alive when she said that, so you have no idea the kerfuffle that ensued and the truth she was signalling about how she would be as a ‘first lady’… It drove the right frothing mad, and they’re not over it, to this day.
I think, most of the people who were on the left and outright sexist then are in the middle and sexist now, or have gone all the way to the right. I think what sexism remains on the left results from unexamined archetypes and, in fact, Hillary Clinton suffers from this kind of sexism most egregiously: she’s running a campaign that is unlike any campaign any male candidate ever ran and she’s being uniformly compared unfavorably for it. She tried running the male campaign in 2008 and that fit even less well. Martha Coakley was no different in the CommonWealth, running a campaign of qualifications and effort on the job. Many voters (male and female) have a notion of what makes a good candidate and it’s based, largely, on our shared notions of masculinity, gender roles and tropes as well as choice of topics. In the end, however, it is often as ridiculous as Donald Trump. When women try to run that kind of campaign, it rings false but when they try to run their own kind of campaign, choosing their own topics, they are compared unfavorably.
Many antebellum suffragettes argued that if they got the vote they would vote in ways unfriendly to black people.
But the overwhelming majority of GOP voters. That’s why the GOP establishment denounced him, and is now cravenly crawling back to support him. These are the same folks who have decided they can control Trump after he wins, which doubtless will reduce the sway he holds over them. The remaining establishment with spine, like Romney, are utterly isolated.
The only ones to reach December more comprehensively defeated than Trump is the GOP establishment.
sore knees crawling back and forth, to him and away.
I get that the Southern Strategy definitely existed, and also fits nicely into Democratic post facto rationalization, but it always seemed to me that the rise of the western state libertarian conservative fairly dramatically exceeds the Southern Strategy in explaining the GOP run. The tax revolt started in California and swept the entire country, and but for the 1976 fluke, every election from 1968 through 1988 were blowouts. I recall the sense that CA was simply unwinnable for Democrats– who therefore started each game down about 5 touchdowns.
Events in UK are making me think that the evolution of the future GOP may depend somewhat on the evolution of the Democrats. In UK, Labour has really rejected their Clinton, Tony Blair, and rushing hard to the Old Left, in the “Proletariat Cast Off Your Chains and Seize the Means of Production!!” sense. In the wake of Brexit, the Tories may now moving into the vacated space with suggestions of increased taxes on the wealthy, increased government intervention in the economy, and increased protection for British workers, and to the right on everything else, meaning that the British workers to be protected are ethnically English/Welsh/Scot white mean, only, and none of these filthy foreigners and Pakis and none of this diversity shit that makes it mean nothing to be British anymore. Trumpy, without the Donald. Maybe a little less rapey.
The Clintons, including HRC, are the American Blairs. If they are seen off in the same way he was, then that leaves the GOP room to Trump. The difference is, however: (i) the pool of red-flag-waving International Socialists here is probably quite a bit smaller, BernieBros notwithstanding and so I am not sure that a purge of centrist Dems is plausible here; and (ii) the diversity of the USA makes the diversity of the UK look like the diversity of Wellesley, MA. Here the Trumpy coalition is a minority one on its best day.
I do think that in UK, and in the US if it follows a similar path, things will be unstable for a time. That’s because in both UK and the USA, left-of-center on cultural/social issues; right-of-center on economic issues probably describes the overwhelming majority of the voting electorate. In UK, those folks are literally unrepresented right now.
Though maybe its because I wrote a substantial part of my BA on One Nation Conservatism. And think it is healthy to see both parties move towards the economic center-left. May has no choice but to embrace Brexit, her predecessor messed up the referendum. Though theoretically the Lib Dems are that option for the socially liberal/fiscally conservative voter.
I think the Democrats are a lot less fiscally liberal than you think they are, hence the horror of the majority of the Congressional delegation at the prospect of Sanders winning the nomination. Gilibrand, Kamala Harris, and a few others will be waiting in the wings as the Obama/Hillary mold not the Warren/Sanders mold.
It is sort of lost in the fog of 70 years of political denunciations of opponents, but the particular economic left/cultural hard right combo presently espoused by the Tories is more of s step toward national socialism than it is toward “the economic left” which is a pretty crummy precedent.
Republican Town Committee members, State Committee Members, and National Committee Members can be removed from office if they publicly endorse a non-Republican candidate WHEN THERE IS A REPUBLICAN IN THE RACE.
DOES the Democratic Party establishment have a similar clause in their rules?
That is what I am hearing from Keiko – she cannot ENDORSE anyone else, she cannot publicly state she is voting for anyone else, and of course that is what the media presses for. Baker can, because he is not a party official but an elected official. We lesser lights in the party establishment can say things link – isn’t it interesting that Johnson is doing so well, if he gets a percentage of the POPULAR vote the Libertarians get FEC funding and recognition, etc. as long as we DON’T say Vote for Bill Weld!
IF you have the same rule, you are hypocrites for pillorying Keiko in this way. If you do not, this may serve as an explanation as to why she is speaking like she is.
As far as I know. Granted, she could’ve resigned her position rather than vote for Trump, which would have been the morally correct and politically smart move to make in the long term.
….she said she is voting for Trump.
… the word, and the deed, ‘endorsement’ means anything whatsoever, if she is not…
I’ve only heard once of someone being threatened with removal from a party position, and at the moment I can’t remember who, and I’m not even sure the person carried out the threat.
And I bet it is for you too.
And we HAVE removed people.
…but it’s not automatic and requires a supermajority vote to take effect. If there are extenuating circumstances such as supporting a family member of the other party, people generally understand that. Also, given the supermajority requirement if others sympathize with your struggles about the nominee they aren’t likely to kick you out.
campaign. (It was actually quite a contest). Her primary opponent, now on the DSC, lost. She endorsed the unenrolled opposition. No one did anything. But she wasn’t a party leader.
(Data point)
Can she say “no comment?” Can she say “As a member of the GOP Nat’l Committee, I’m required to support …?”
Yeah, she mostly did just that. She did the last bit a bit after the fact, suggesting that she wasn’t really ready for the question, but meh, she’s a state rep not a US Senator.
I guess the question is: does she “deserve” this ration of crap because all GOP Nat’l Cmte members deserve it because they built a set of rules and run an organization that chose Trump, so they “own” it more than most? Seems like pretty thin gruel.
..”I have enough significant concerns about our nominee that I will be focusing my energies on other races this cycle.” If she is pressed about her own vote in the privacy of the voting booth she has as much right as anyone else to say no comment, just as long as she doesn’t announce she is voting for Hillary.
Orrall saw an opportunity for a job that would bring a higher profile and opportunity, and she was willing to go back on her word and ignore her principles to keep it. Some people here are saying “other politicians do it too!” — the type of politicians they so dislike outside this post.
Hey, Orrall has the right to decide to do or say whatever she needs to in the service of her political career. Fine. But it says very clearly that she’ll do the same for the rest of her career, and anyone who votes for her based on her promises or principles is a fool.
Michigan GOP vice-chair ousted for refusal to support Trump.
In MA, at least on the Dem side, our two vice-chairs are elected by the DSC and cannot simply be fired by the Chair.