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We've reached the sparse and arid part of the primary calendar, which means that instead of another multi-state Tuesday, the political world is now focused solely on the Badger State. This follows last week, when (gasp!) no state voted on Tuesday, and will be followed by another two-week gap, before New York weighs in.
President Obama made a big breakthrough in public opinion polling in March, one that is (for once) pretty obvious in his chart. For the first time since May, 2013, Obama's average job approval number for last month was higher than his average disapproval. Take a look at this month's new chart -- it's pretty easy to see how big a deal this is, even on the overall chart of his entire time in office.
That really should be "Copulating Rodents, Batman!" for full effect. Or it should just come right out and use the original term being euphemized. But somehow we couldn't quite bring ourselves to use either one of those in our title today.
That's a pretty ambitious subtitle, but we're not going to get to the deconstruction project until the talking points, we should warn everyone up front. And we could never hope to deconstruct all of the GOP's absurdities in one column, so we'll be focusing just on their all-over-the-map reasoning on why they're not going to do their constitutional jobs in the Senate on President Obama's Supreme Court nomination. So we'll have all that to look forward to. For now, let's quickly review the week just to see where things stand.
George Orwell would be proud of Senate Republicans. Or maybe he wouldn't be "proud," but he certainly wouldn't be surprised. This is because he coined the word "doublethink," which is precisely what these Republicans are now revealing to the world. In fact, the Republican position is fast becoming "triplethink," an even more jaw-dropping feat of mental contortion.
Although at the present time it's kind of hard to believe, there is a faction of the Republican Party which looks towards the future and sees some very problematic demographic shifts awaiting it. These forward-looking types tried to educate the rest of their party after they got shellacked in the 2012 presidential race, dissecting the festering corpse of Mitt Romney's campaign in an autopsy, and then issuing a post-mortem document pleading Republicans to begin instituting some basic changes. Mostly, these changes can be boiled down to: "Don't badmouth minorities so blatantly, because if you do so it is very hard to convince them to vote Republican." Also pointed out was the fact that young Americans are much more inclusive than the Republican Party as a whole, and losing an entire generation of voters is going to hurt for decades to come.
Another week of presidential primary season has slouched by, which means we personally have been watching way too many debates and staying up way too late watching election results come in, once again. Well, actually, that last one was really just a taunt, since living on the Left Coast means we don't have to stay up nearly as late to find out what happened in Hawai'i as everyone to our east. Heh. Every once in a while, being three hours behind works to our advantage!
It's been a wild and crazy week -- so much so, in fact, that we're going to start with a quote we never thought would become appropriate to use in a column about politics. It's from the movie Taken, where Liam Neeson's character utters the classic line: "Now's not the time for dick-measuring."
That title, of course, refers to the most recent Republican debate, where in a fit of frustration the caption writers at CNN just gave up and ran "Unintelligible yelling" as the caption. Yep, that about sums it up, doesn't it?
It's not often during a presidential election season that the campaigns get shoved aside in the political universe because something bigger happened, but that is what took place last week with the unexpected death of sitting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The implications for the future of America run deep, which is why it has already become a monumental and historical political fight.