One item I didn’t have much trouble with was a bill called the Computer Safety and Protection Act. I mean, who isn’t in favor of having a safe computer? In addition to the rather innocuous title, there were several rather vague provisions in the bill, authorizing the funding of an agency to consider potential dangers to American computers and the Internet, and determine the best way to respond to any such dangers. No additional funding was requested beyond an initial few hundred million, peanuts to the budget, although the agency was authorized to accept funding from other government agencies if they could assist existing efforts.
We had tried this a year ago, but the Democrats had stomped on it, not so much because they didn’t like computer safety, but because it was an easy and cheap way to bust my balls. They still wanted to bust my balls, but during the ’06 election, the Democratic National Committee’s computers were hacked! They started by pointing fingers at the Republicans, and Brewster McRiley and his bunch, and the FBI Cybercrime Unit got involved, but it turned out to be a hacking outfit in Kiev. The Ukrainians had done it. This year we had no problems slipping it through.
The Computer Safety and Protection Agency, or CSPA for short, was a brand new cyberwarfare agency. It was charged with defending America’s computers and networks from foreign threats, and since the best defense is a good offense, they also were responsible for that. Criminal hackers were an issue, but they were the least of our problems. Much more worrisome were the Chinese, who had rampaged through our defense contractors’ networks under Bill Clinton, and were still probing us relentlessly. In addition, we had been engaging in a low level cyberwar, allied with the Israelis, against the Iranians, aimed at shutting down their nuclear weapons program. We stuck to software and programming; the Israelis had added some ‘biological interference’, a cute euphemism for targeted assassinations of Iranian scientists.
In any case, CSPA was going to be the new cyberwar office. The initial public funding was simply to get them started and into some offices. The real money was in the funding from other agencies. The Pentagon, CIA, and NSA were all going to shovel some serious money, as in billions, from various ‘black’ accounts that didn’t get scrutinized by Congress, and they would get first take on whatever was discovered and have massive input into the CSPA. In fact, the CSPA’s first director was a Deputy Director at the NSA, and his deputy was an Air Force three star.
As for the 2008 elections, immigration was a sticky issue, but not quite as bad as it could have been. The DREAM Act had brought in a lot of Hispanic voters, many of whom went Democratic, but not all of them; on social issues many Hispanics are quite conservative. The overall effect had been a positive one for the economy, but it had not ended illegal immigration. As long as the U.S. economy showed more growth than Mexico’s we would continue to get illegals. Some of the provisions in the DREAM Act, calling for strengthening the borders for instance, were not all that productive, but we had to do them. Some time was spent on this legislation in 2007.
I could sense that things were getting difficult for the Republican Party. The Republican Party was beginning to fracture along the various fault lines of the groups that made it up. We had always had a conservative base and, if anything, it was now getting more religious and conservative. It didn’t matter what I said, but the average Republican Congressman was being pushed to the extremes by the hard right base of the party.
At its very root, gerrymandering was to blame for this. Gerrymandering is the process where Congressional districts are drawn so that it becomes very uncompetitive to run, for one party or the other. For instance, let’s say that the area around a particular city has enough population for four Congressional districts. If you simply draw a ‘+’ sign through the middle of the city, and carve up the area into four equally populated districts, then you probably have four fairly competitive districts. But let’s suppose that the Republicans have managed to get control of the State House. They can carve the districts up so that you still have four districts, but now, one district in the heart of the city is overwhelmingly black and 95 % Democratic, and the other three snake around through the white and Republican suburbs, creating three mostly (70 %) Republican districts.
This had been going on for thirty years plus, and with modern computing power, the district maps could be drawn so that individual streets would be in one district or another, based on income levels. As a result, states that might vote 55 % Democratic based on statewide voting might have 75 % of the districts being Republican! (When they could get away with it the Democrats did the same thing. It had really started out in the court ordered Voting Rights Act battles in the 1960s. There weren’t any angels in this stuff on either side.)
The ultimate effect was that many districts in the nation, well over 80 %, were completely uncompetitive. One party owned them, lock, stock, and barrel. The primary was the real election, not the later general election. Primaries have lower turnouts, and tend to go towards the extreme branches of either party. In Republican terms, as Brewster had told us many times, if he wanted to win in a Republican primary all he had to do was turn loose the Jesus freaks and the gun nuts and it was a lock. The average Republican district was over 75 % white and English speaking. With the Democrats, they had a lot darker complexion in the electorate, and a lot more non-native English speakers.
The party was priming itself for irrelevance. Senate races were statewide contests, and the Senate was slowly becoming Democratic. The older Republicans, mostly business Republicans like myself, were either retiring or being forced out by far right types who managed to make it through the primaries with little voting, only to lose in the general election. Some of these candidates were just incredible losers, but they believed in Jesus, guns, and ending abortion. On my first go we had people like Christine O’Donnell, who was so wacky that she had to preface her campaign ads with statements like, “I’m not a witch,” and some other mouth-breathers who thought rape was okay since you couldn’t get pregnant that way. They would make it through the primary and be destroyed in the general election. This time it was just really beginning, but the trend was gaining speed.
By mid-2007 John McCain was in full-blown primary campaign mode. He was generally flying out to various states at least every other weekend. The economy was fairly strong, the deficit was under control, and we weren’t in combat. He had a number of primary opponents, but not as many as might be expected. I knew some of these guys were going to run, because they had been flapping their gums ever since the last election. Rudy Giuliani was trying to parlay his credibility from 9-11 into a nationwide campaign, but that wasn’t flying with the hard core base of the party, who were not about to vote for a twice-divorced pro-choice New York liberal, no matter that he was a Republican. Mike Huckabee, the Governor of Arkansas, was the darling of the religious right wing of the party. Otherwise, nobody else in the party could stand him, since he could be all sorts of sanctimonious. The only other major contender was Mitt Romney, the Governor of Massachusetts. The fact that a Republican was smart enough to get elected to state-wide office in one of the most liberal and Democratic states in the country should have been read as proof that he could appeal across the country; To the hard core right it meant he was just another damn liberal, and besides, he was a Mormon, and not really a Christian.