Friday Funday: Dinner With Friends

As our regular readers know, we usually enjoy using our commentary to celebrate a bit on Fridays. Today is a fantastic day to celebrate, whether your favored candidates and issues won or lost this week, because it's the first Friday after the election!

For those of us involved deeply in politics or political media, this is the first weekend in months (or, for some, years) when we can sleep in, not pick up the newspaper, leave the computers, tv, and phones off, - and not feel guilty or worried about our disconnecting from the world. We're even having a celebratory dinner tonight with other members of our staff - and we're turning off our cell phones for the night.

That moment of disconnection for us won't mean the world will stop. Already, the inauguration for the President is moving forward, and our plans for the new year are moving ahead with it.

President Obama and Congressional Democrats have their weekend schedules full of both domestic and foreign issues, including work on issues surrounding the "fiscal cliff." Congressional Republicans are getting back to work too - or as the rest of the world calls it, "being obstructionists".

Speaker Boehner is already claiming he's willing to be bipartisan about the fiscal cliff, but his partner in the House Republican leadership, Rep. Eric Cantor, is already threatening to hold the debt ceiling negotiations hostage in January - as Republicans did in the Summer of 2011.

To that kind of conduct, we simply say to Congressional Republicans, "Shut up and eat your peas."

That's the same message, by the way, that the President gave to Congressional Republicans during that summer of 2011, when Mr. Obama first offered the 'Grand Bargain' to Speaker Boehner on the debt ceiling. In case you've forgotten, the 'Grand Bargain' was an agreement that would have allowed for an increase in taxes - especially on the rich and corporations - while still forcing some sharp cuts to government programs.


As the CBO confirmed this week, a tax hike on the wealthy might actually be a positive sign, and it certainly won't kill America's slow but steady economic growth. In fact, if letting taxes on the rich go back up, as they are scheduled to do when the Bush tax cuts end, allows a compromise to be made in Congress, having the wealthy pick up their fiscal responsibility may actually prevent the economy from going over the so-called "fiscal cliff"

It was a lot easier for Republicans to get out of their responsibility to move the nation forward over the last two years when they held many of the political cards. Now, with the sweeping wins by progressive Democrats this week, and with the re-election of President Obama, it's the President and the political left that holds all the cards - and they will likely make those on the right "eat their peas" and take responsibility. That would be much like President Obama and Congressional Democrats did with ObamaCare during his first two years in office.

As we pointed out yesterday, thanks to this week's elections, there are a slew of moderate Republicans who finally seem to no longer to be afraid of stepping up and speaking out, now that so many Republican extremists have been defeated.

We know of more than a few locations this evening where some Republicans who've been afraid to be seen with their Democratic friends over the past few years will be getting together for the first time in a very long while, for dinner, drinks - and maybe even planning some real compromise.

If that's not a reason to celebrate, we don't know what is.

Coaching Advice For The Defeated

It's been an interesting day or so since the announcement that President Barack Obama was re-elected for his second term.

To start with, we've received some great praise from readers like you, both in writing and verbally, for our work guiding you and others through the tumultuous election period. We're proud that we can make you laugh with Paul's cartoons, while guiding you to the sage advice of our friends and media colleagues, like Nate Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight. We are immensely humbled by your words of praise, and are even more motivated to deliver to you the best journalism that we can.

Motivating people to improve is a key ability of those in self-sacrificing jobs like politician or coach. The best coaches and politicians are usually those individuals who aren't in it for their own selfish benefit, and who aren't blinded by their own propaganda telling them how great they are.

For our friends in the Republican Party, they found that out the hard way on Tuesday night - so we've got a few important pieces of advice they may want to pay attention to, if they don't want their political party to become the next relic of history.

Our first nugget of wisdom is to look at the calendar. This is 2012, a dozen years into the 21st century. As writer Ta-Nehisi Coates pointedly noted this week, this isn't 1968 - the hippies punch back now. As conservative writer Ross Douthat admitted in a similar if stunned fashion, the age of Reagan is now officially over.

Other than rich old, white men - and those white men who think that "someday" they'll be rich too - the Republican Party has driven everyone else away. That group of 'everyone else' includes women, gays and lesbians, minorities including blacks and latinos, and the working class - who all had a pretty incredible night on Tuesday.

If Republicans continue to focus on satisfying rich, old, extremist conservative white, men, they will be extinct as a political party in another dozen years. As Meghan McCain said again on Wednesday, the Republican Party must change or die.

The second big piece of advice we have to give to our friends on the right is that it's time to get rid of the right-wing media echo chamber.

On election night, the propaganda network that poses as news, Fox, had a complete meltdown. Karl Rove, the man once touted as George W. Bush's political brain literally could not face the facts of the election as they were being presented to him. Many of the other members of the Fox election team seemed to be having similar problems with reality. In short, the Republicans on Fox believed their own propaganda - and got humiliated with the facts. Conservative radio on the day after the election wasn't much better.

You cannot win the long-term political war by simply screaming louder, or simply throwing more money at the problem without actually changing your approach to it. If anything, the 2012 election proved that.

Our final piece of advice to those on the political right is a simple reality check, though nothing like the walloping Republicans received this year: If you're in the Republican Party, it's long past time for you to clean house.

We have said for years that not all Republicans are bad, just as all Democrats and Independents aren't good. There are bad Republicans though, and they have been leading your party. They are the kind of people sports coaches call "juicers." They get amped up on their own fake substances, lie to themselves, lie to everyone else, and do flashy things for a short time.

They are also the kinds of players who burn out easy - and get blown out of the game forever, when they're finally caught.

Take the advice we've offered here, Republicans: It's time you looked forward too.

Heavenly Outcome, For Some

Today, for the first time in almost a year-and-a-half, the business of politicking, for the most part, is done - at least for a little while. President Obama won his second term, soundly - and we are very grateful for that.

We're also grateful for these things: No more political rallies. No more campaign stops. No more robocalls, or calls from politicians and their surrogates. No more political ads in your newspaper, or on your television, radio, or online either - which we know is the one thing that all Americans, from every political background can agree on. The sound of no more political ads is, frankly, heavenly to all of us.

The final results last night were also heavenly to our staff, in the Presidential race, and in House and Senate races in many places across the country. Tea Party favorites fell like diseased trees in a storm. Some of the candidates we preferred didn't win - like Bob Kerrey. Sadly, the blind, stupid partisans in rural Nebraska continued to vote against their own best interests. At least the people in rural Indiana and rural Missouri showed more sense, voting in Joe Donnelly and returning Claire McCaskill to Congress, as they rejected the misogynists Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin.

Most of our favorite candidates and issues did win last night, and we were not all that much surprised.

That wasn't because of the exit polls. We weren't watching them much last night, as exit polls have a notorious history of inaccurately reflecting final results. Instead, on some sage advice from Nate Silver, we watched specific counties that votes were coming in from, in each state, and in what numbers.

As the results continued piling up, in state by state, it become increasingly clear that the state polls taken from before the election were matching the outcomes that were officially being released. What's more, poll aggregators like Nate Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight.com appear to have been more accurate than most of the aggregators - which is the main reason we've relied on Nate's wisdom and insight for more than four years now.

Some of our favorite ballot measures also won in different places across the nation. In all four states where marriage equality issues were on the ballot - Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington - the people overwhelmingly voted in favor of the idea of letting Americans have the legal right to be with whomever they want. Many of our gay friends are now legally equal to every other American, as they should be - and we're already planning to attend a few of their weddings next spring.

In Colorado and Washington state, the use of recreational marijuana is now legal, as we believe it always should have been. While none of our staff currently uses the substance, we see no reason that its responsible use should be treated any differently from prescription drugs or in a similar fashion to alcohol. Marijuana can also be taxed now - and we hope Coloradans and Washingtonians are smart enough to do just that.

The overall story of the election may seem like an oversimplification - one we're certain that many in the political media will be hashing over the rest of the week - but it actually broke down very simply. In short, if you were already rich, white, old, male, and conservative, you probably voted for Romney and the Republicans. Virtually everyone else voted for President Obama and the Democratic candidates, to some degree.

This shouldn't surprise anyone either. While the Republicans did keep control of the House, the Democrats kept - and strengthened - their control of the Senate. In both the House and Senate, Democrats broadened the demographic nature of their coalition. In fact, this is now the first time in history that the House Democratic caucus has white males as a minority.

Our nation is maturing, changing, and growing. The future of America is as a melting pot - as it's always been. That at least one of our two major political parties continues to embrace this most fundamentally American idea remains music to our ears.