“Utterly The Same”: Change, Learn, Compromise, Grow? Not These Republicans
Hearing so much chatter about “change” in the Republican Party, the innocent voter might believe that the Republicans had learned important lessons from their stinging electoral defeat. On closer examination, however, the likelihood of real change appears nil, because the party’s leaders and thinkers can cite so many excuses to remain utterly the same.
At the Republican Governors Association conference last week, for instance, the favored explanation for the voting public’s emphatic rejection of Mitt Romney had nothing to do with issues or ideology, but only with more effective Democratic Party organizing and communicating. According to Wade Goodwyn, the National Public Radio reporter who covered the GOP governors’ meeting, their post-election mood was not one of shock, but complacency.
“It was widely agreed that nothing needed to be changed except perhaps the tone,” he found. “For example, the idea that more than 70 percent of Hispanics voted for the president because of Republican positions on illegal immigration was rejected by the Republican governors.”
That would be hard to believe if Goodwyn were not such an excellent and experienced journalist, because it is so stupid, so insulting, and makes so little sense. Could it really be true that the nation’s Republican governors — one of whom is quite likely to be the party’s next presidential nominee — are so obtuse and so obstinate that they would reject change even on immigration?
Republican leaders also seem inclined to ignore voter sentiment on the issue of taxes, despite majorities of 70 percent or better that agree the rich should pay more (including many voters who identify with the GOP). Rep. Mike Pence, who will become the governor of Indiana next January, told the Republican governors that he remains firmly opposed to any tax increase, especially on “those in the best position to put hurting Americans back to work,” which is GOP code for mega-millionaires and above.
Clearly the Republicans in Congress too feel free to ignore public opinion on this question, since Speaker John Boehner and his caucus have offered a “compromise” on fiscal policy that represents no change whatsoever from their earlier positions and the Romney platform. Government can accrue fresh revenues from growth, they say; nothing new or even meaningful there. And government can close unspecified loopholes and deductions to increase revenues, too. Where have we heard that before?
Meanwhile, the consulting geniuses who predicted a Romney victory — a landslide, even! — are peddling alibis about why their party lost despite billions spent. Fox News expert Dick Morris says it is because their voter machinery failed, the Romney campaign didn’t fight back, and Hurricane Sandy persuaded all of the undecided voters to back Barack Obama.
By the way, Morris now predicts that the economy will suffer a ruinous decline over the coming year or two, so Republicans can just sit back and watch the Democrats sink with it. Which is another way of saying no need for change on any front. Given his record as an oracle, both Democrats and Americans more generally now have great reasons for optimism.
Karl Rove, who squandered vast sums of his generous donors’ money, has lots of explaining to do. But he always has lots of explanations. This time, having reluctantly acknowledged electoral reality, Rove agrees with Morris that the Romney campaign’s failures were mostly to blame. He is full of advice for the party leaders, urging them to change the date of the convention, try to avoid “sounding judgmental and callous” on social issues, and “do better — much better” with Hispanics, younger voters, women, and middle-class families.
How should Republicans “do better” with those voter groups? On that question, Rove resorts to clichés about “reframing” messages and “re-engineering” voter turnout efforts, as though issues and policies have nothing to do with motivating actual voters.
Finally, Rove insists that his donors will continue to pour good money after bad into the coffers of American Crossroads, his SuperPAC. His current bleating sounds nothing like his confident bluster a decade ago, when he looked forward to a Republican realignment and unchecked power for decades to come.
Reality has changed, but Republicans won’t. They insist on creating their own reality, like Rove and his friends at Fox News always did — but fewer and fewer Americans will still pretend to live there.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, November 18, 2012
“Just Get Out Of The Way”: Obama’s Electoral Mandate And Where It Leaves Republicans
Sunday’s morning shows featured some astoundingly stupid comments from Republicans who claim to believe that on Election Day voters gave them a “mandate” to continue their attempts to obstruct President Obama’s agenda.
Apparently some Republican pundits are still living in the same parallel universe that allowed them to convince themselves that by now, President-elect Mitt Romney would be organizing his transition.
It really is mind-boggling. Notwithstanding all of the available evidence, they still believe that the American people want them to stand in the way of increases in taxes for the wealthiest 2 percent and to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits for future retirees.
Who got a mandate for his policies on Election Day?
The presidential campaign focused like a laser on the question of whether tax rates should be increased for the top 2 percent of Americans or whether we should adopt Romney’s proposal to lower tax rates for the wealthy by another $5 trillion, and inevitably increase taxes on the middle class.
The campaign centered on the Ryan-Romney budget that would have slashed spending on critical services for the poor and middle class, reduce funding for education, do away with Medicare and replace it with a voucher program that would increase out-of-pocket costs for seniors by $6,500 per year.
And it was clear throughout, that the Republicans continued to favor privatizing Social Security.
- The Republican presidential ticket lost by 332 electoral votes to 206 electoral votes.
- Obama got 50.6 percent of the popular vote and Romney got 47.6 percent of the popular vote.
- Democrats took two additional seats in the Senate and now hold a 55-45 edge.
- The Senate Democratic caucus now includes more Progressive members and fewer Conservative members.
- Democrats picked up at least 7 and probably 8 seats in the House, and nationwide got over a half a million more votes for their House candidates than did the Republicans — even though the Republicans continued to control the chamber.
And the verdict that was rendered at the ballot box could be seen in virtually every national opinion survey.
The election was a battle over the future of the middle class, and Obama won that battle.
A Greenberg-Quinlan Research poll found that by 51 to 42 percent the voters said Obama would do a better job restoring the middle class.
They found that by almost two-thirds, voters believed Social Security and Medicare should not be cut as part of a deficit reduction deal.
A November 15, 2012 Hart Research poll for Americans for Tax Fairness found that:
- By a strong 17-point margin, voters favor ending the Bush tax cuts on incomes over250,000 (56 percent) rather than extending the tax cuts for all taxpayers (39 percent).
- President Obama now holds a commanding position in the debate over tax policy. When voters hear President Obama’s position on the Bush tax cuts — that he will sign a bill continuing them for 98 percent of Americans but will veto a bill continuing them for incomes over 250,000 — fully 61 percent agree with this stance. By contrast, when voters are read congressional Republicans’ position — that they will pass a bill continuing the cuts for all income levels, but will block any bill ending the cuts for those making over 250,000 — only 42 percent agree while a 53 percent majority rejects its plan.
NBCNews.com’s First Read, November 15, 2012 — more autopsy 2012— additional analysis of exit polls in battleground states:
- Support for raising taxes for 250K+ earners or everyone — Nevada 64 percent, Wisconsin 64 percent, Virginia 63 percent, Iowa 63 percent, New Hampshire 61 percent, Ohio 57 percent, Florida 57 percent — national average 60 percent.
Greenberg-Quinlan found in a November poll that Americans reject austerity in favor of investment that creates jobs. They were asked to choose between two statements:
We should avoid immediate drastic cuts in spending, and instead, we need serious investments that create jobs and make us more prosperous in the long-term that will reduce our debt, too.
Or…
The only way to restore prosperity and market confidence is to dramatically reduce government spending and our long-term deficits.
The statement favoring investments was chosen by 51 percent compared to 42 percent for the statement favoring cuts.
In fact, there is little question that voters understand better than many commentators and pundits that the budget battle in Washington is not mainly about ratios of revenue to cuts, or “reining in entitlements” — it is about who pays.
Will the wealthy, who have siphoned off all of the economic growth of the last 15 years, be asked to pay to fix the deficit that resulted from the Bush Tax cuts, and two unpaid-for wars? Or will the middle class — whose income has been stagnant or declining — be asked once again to foot the bill?
Voters get it. Time for D.C. pundits to get it as well.
Voters did send a mandate to Republicans on November 6th — a mandate to wake up and smell the coffee.
Here are a few of the mandates the voters gave Republicans:
- Bad idea to be viewed as a party who mainly represents the interests of the 1 percent and has candidates that were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
- Bad idea to insult almost half of the voters with comments about the 47 percent who can’t be convinced to “take responsibility for their lives.”
- Bad idea to insult the fastest growing ethnic group in America with your plans for “self deportation” and vetoing the Dream Act.
- Bad idea to patronize American women — who incidentally represent about 52 percent of the electorate — by telling them that government must intervene in the reproductive choices that should be left entirely to them and their doctors.
- Bad idea to believe you can any longer win national races in America by insulting and alienating people of color.
- Bad idea to ignore the persistent march of demographic changes that are transforming the American electorate. In addition to the growing proportion of people of color, the millennial generation — the most consistently progressive generation in recent American history — is becoming a larger portion of the overall electorate with every passing day.
Finally, the voters sent a loud and clear message that it is a bad idea for the GOP to continue to be the party that opposes traditional progressive American values.
They voted to confirm their view that they want a society where we have each others’ backs — where we’re all in this together, not all in this alone. They voted for a society where everyone does his or her fair share, gets a fair shake and plays by the same rules. They want a society that is hopeful and vibrant and celebrates its diversity — a society where it doesn’t matter whether you are a man or woman, gay or straight — a society where it doesn’t matter where you were born, or how much money your parents had when you grew up.
In short the voters showed once again that they want the kind of a society that Barack Obama described in his first major national speech — to the Democratic Convention in 2004 — a society where there are no blue states or red states — just the United States.
Now it’s time for the Republicans to lead, follow or get out of the way.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, November 19, 2012
“The Twinkie Manifesto”: Economic Growth And Economic Justice Are Not Incompatible
The Twinkie, it turns out, was introduced way back in 1930. In our memories, however, the iconic snack will forever be identified with the 1950s, when Hostess popularized the brand by sponsoring “The Howdy Doody Show.” And the demise of Hostess has unleashed a wave of baby boomer nostalgia for a seemingly more innocent time.
Needless to say, it wasn’t really innocent. But the ’50s — the Twinkie Era — do offer lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century. Above all, the success of the postwar American economy demonstrates that, contrary to today’s conservative orthodoxy, you can have prosperity without demeaning workers and coddling the rich.
Consider the question of tax rates on the wealthy. The modern American right, and much of the alleged center, is obsessed with the notion that low tax rates at the top are essential to growth. Remember that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, charged with producing a plan to curb deficits, nonetheless somehow ended up listing “lower tax rates” as a “guiding principle.”
Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.
Nor were high taxes the only burden wealthy businessmen had to bear. They also faced a labor force with a degree of bargaining power hard to imagine today. In 1955 roughly a third of American workers were union members. In the biggest companies, management and labor bargained as equals, so much so that it was common to talk about corporations serving an array of “stakeholders” as opposed to merely serving stockholders.
Squeezed between high taxes and empowered workers, executives were relatively impoverished by the standards of either earlier or later generations. In 1955 Fortune magazine published an essay, “How top executives live,” which emphasized how modest their lifestyles had become compared with days of yore. The vast mansions, armies of servants, and huge yachts of the 1920s were no more; by 1955 the typical executive, Fortune claimed, lived in a smallish suburban house, relied on part-time help and skippered his own relatively small boat.
The data confirm Fortune’s impressions. Between the 1920s and the 1950s real incomes for the richest Americans fell sharply, not just compared with the middle class but in absolute terms. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, in 1955 the real incomes of the top 0.01 percent of Americans were less than half what they had been in the late 1920s, and their share of total income was down by three-quarters.
Today, of course, the mansions, armies of servants and yachts are back, bigger than ever — and any hint of policies that might crimp plutocrats’ style is met with cries of “socialism.” Indeed, the whole Romney campaign was based on the premise that President Obama’s threat to modestly raise taxes on top incomes, plus his temerity in suggesting that some bankers had behaved badly, were crippling the economy. Surely, then, the far less plutocrat-friendly environment of the 1950s must have been an economic disaster, right?
Actually, some people thought so at the time. Paul Ryan and many other modern conservatives are devotees of Ayn Rand. Well, the collapsing, moocher-infested nation she portrayed in “Atlas Shrugged,” published in 1957, was basically Dwight Eisenhower’s America.
Strange to say, however, the oppressed executives Fortune portrayed in 1955 didn’t go Galt and deprive the nation of their talents. On the contrary, if Fortune is to be believed, they were working harder than ever. And the high-tax, strong-union decades after World War II were in fact marked by spectacular, widely shared economic growth: nothing before or since has matched the doubling of median family income between 1947 and 1973.
Which brings us back to the nostalgia thing.
There are, let’s face it, some people in our political life who pine for the days when minorities and women knew their place, gays stayed firmly in the closet and congressmen asked, “Are you now or have you ever been?” The rest of us, however, are very glad those days are gone. We are, morally, a much better nation than we were. Oh, and the food has improved a lot, too.
Along the way, however, we’ve forgotten something important — namely, that economic justice and economic growth aren’t incompatible. America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share; it gave workers the power to bargain for decent wages and benefits; yet contrary to right-wing propaganda then and now, it prospered. And we can do that again.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 19, 2012
“Forgotten History”: No, Conservatives, Benghazi Is Not Worse Than Watergate
On Friday, I got into a little Twitter tete-a-tete with Jim Treacher of the Daily Caller over this post I wrote last week, which argued that the reason conservatives are acting as though the aftermath of the events in Benghazi is the scandal of the century is that they’re frustrated that Barack Obama hasn’t had a major scandal, so they’re making as big a deal as possible out of whatever’s handy. What ensued opened my eyes to something I found surprising, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been so naïve. It turns out that many conservatives not only believe Benghazi is far, far more serious than Watergate was, they seem to have no idea what Watergate was actually about or how far-reaching it was. After the number of Treacher’s followers tweeting me with “How many people died in Watergate? Huh? Huh?” reached triple digits (each tweet no doubt considered by its author to be a snowflake of insight), I decided that since the story broke 40 years ago, we all might need a reminder of why Watergate was, in fact, a really big deal.
The first and most important thing to remember is that when we say “Watergate,” we aren’t referring only to the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate hotel. The break-in was merely the event that triggered the investigations that would eventually reveal the full magnitude of Richard Nixon’s crimes and the crimes committed by many of the people who worked for him. As Jonathan Bernstein has written, for starters, imagine if Barack Obama were suspicious of some former Bush administration officials now working at the American Enterprise Institute and repeatedly ordered Rahm Emanuel to get people to break in to AEI in order to steal files that could be used to embarrass or blackmail those officials. Nixon did that (the Brookings Institution was the think tank in question). Bernstein goes on:
The president’s men, sometimes at Nixon’s instructions, sometimes with his knowledge, and sometimes perhaps without his direct instructions or knowledge but always in keeping with his general orders to his top staff, also planted spies in the camp of Democratic campaigns; broke into Democratic headquarters, photographed documents, and planted bugs; broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to learn things that could be used to destroy his image in the press; attempted to plant left-wing materials in the home of the guy who shot George Wallace; planned to (and perhaps did) selectively leak classified materials about foreign policy in order to hurt the Democrats; forged materials about foreign policy (the death of South Vietnam’s President Diem) in order to plant false stories in the press that would hurt the Democrats; wiretapped government officials; paid a private investigator to tail Ted Kennedy; performed other dirty tricks such as forged letters intended to manipulate the Democratic presidential nomination process (efforts that may indeed have been successful); and other illegal, abuse and unethical actions — this is not a comprehensive list.
Those were the original crimes. What followed was obstruction of justice as the White House, with the active leadership of the president, lied to FBI investigators and grand juries, destroyed evidence, suborned perjury by prearranging false testimony; suborned perjury by paying off witnesses and either promising or at least hinting at the promise of presidential pardons in exchange for false testimony, and using the authority of the presidency to derail and undermine FBI investigators and prosecutors. Again, the president was personally actively involved in all of those things.
The scandal also revealed so many repugnant statements and acts, some of them illegal and some of them not, that I suppose it’s hard to keep them all in your head. For instance, Judeophiles that conservatives have become, they may like to forget that the White House tapes showed Nixon to be a vicious anti-Semite (“The government is full of Jews. Second, most Jews are disloyal”) who ordered his staff to assemble lists of Jews working within the executive branch so he could identify his enemies (the aide who carried out a Jew-counting operation in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fred Malek, is to this day a major Republican fundraiser). Of course, there was also the “enemies list” of Nixon opponents targeted for harassment; one memo detailed “how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” Among the crimes planned but never executed, the most colorful has to be G. Gordon Liddy’s plan to murder columnist Jack Anderson. Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping; today he is a popular conservative radio host. Among those who ended up going to prison for their crimes in the Watergate scandal were the attorney general, the White House chief of staff, and the president’s chief domestic policy adviser. The scandal was so damning that facing impeachment and almost certain conviction, the president of the United States resigned.
The point is “Watergate” was not just a break-in. It was a panoply of government malfeasance and outright criminality the likes of which the country had never seen before and will probably never see again.
It is true, as my conservative friends point out, that no one actually died in Watergate, while there were four deaths in Benghazi. Those deaths were a terrible tragedy. But unless some evidence emerges that President Obama or somebody else in his administration, through some act of corruption or misconduct, actually caused those deaths, the deaths don’t raise the magnitude of the “scandal” past that of other scandals that weren’t related to any deaths. For instance, 241 service members Ronald Reagan sent to Beirut were killed in the bombing of Marine barracks in October 1983, but I’ll bet that not one of my angry Twitter correspondents considers that a “Reagan administration scandal” (nor, by the way, did almost any Democrats at the time, rightly or wrongly).
For the record, I agree with Kevin Drum on this point: Let’s go ahead and investigate what happened in Benghazi. If that investigation helps us improve security for our personnel operating in dangerous places, that would be a positive outcome. But let’s be honest: Republicans aren’t worked into a lather about this because of their long-standing passionate commitment to security at our embassies and consulates. They’re hoping that if we keep digging, some kind of nefarious behavior will be discovered, and they’ll be able to use it to embarrass the administration. That’s politics, of course, so it isn’t all that surprising. But that’s all it is. And the idea that Susan Rice going on television and delivering some slightly inaccurate talking points constitutes a “cover-up” on par with the Nixon administration suborning perjury, paying hush money, and obstructing justice in a whole variety of other ways? That’s just insane.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 19, 2012
“It’s Galling Season Again”: The GOP’s Phony New Compassion
When someone in any social cohort decides to act like Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s easy and quite natural for everyone else to fall into the role of Bob Cratchit. This is what several Republicans are now doing in reaction to Mitt Romney’s remarks about Barack Obama and his “gifts” to his core constituencies. But Republicans allegedly competing for the loyalties of the 100 percent is a movie we’ve seen. It doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work for a straightforward reason: free-market solutions to many of the problems faced by the 47 percent simply don’t exist. The GOP has no answer to these problems, and it really doesn’t want to have any. But, boy oh boy, are we about to enter a galling period of hearing them pretend otherwise.
In fact, it’s already started. Bobby Jindal kicked this off by saying in response to Romney, “We need to continue to show how our policies help every voter out there achieve the American dream.” Marco Rubio weighed in with the reassuring news flash that, in fact, he does not think there are “millions and millions of people in this country that don’t want to work.” Fellow Floridian Rick Scott—bless him, the Rick Scott who ripped off Medicare before he became governor and has tried to block Democrats from voting since occupying the office—says Republicans have to say that “we want to take care of every citizen of our state.” Scott Walker, Haley Barbour, Michael Steele, Susanna Martinez, and others have made similar remarks. All well and good. So now, let’s match this lovely rhetoric to the Republican record of the past decade or so.
Let’s start with health care, a big problem in the lives of many 47 percenters. True, the GOP, when George W. Bush was president, passed the Medicare prescription drug-coverage bill. That was mostly a good thing, although the bill didn’t pay for the program and it created the famous doughnut hole problem that is finally being solved by Obamacare. What else beyond that? Most obviously, they opposed the subsidized coverage for millions of working poor that is at the heart of Obamacare, defenestrating their own proposal (the individual mandate) while doing so.
And how about S-CHIP, the health plan for poor children? Children! They fought it tooth and nail. It was supposedly an imposition on private insurers who were positioned to offer similar coverage. Yet of course, they did not do so. If they had, there’d have been no need for S-CHIP in the first place.
The one health care idea they’ve come up with, health savings accounts, are widely known to be riddled with problems. They work fine until people really need ongoing care, kind of like a car that gets you where you’re going on normal days but won’t start during emergencies. Yet they tend to have very high deductibles, and people can still be thrown off if they get really sick. This is the GOP’s great contribution to addressing the health needs of the working class.
What other problems do the 47 percent face? Hardship in old age surely ranks up there. It’s they, after all, who depend wholly or mostly on their Social Security checks (which average about $1,400 a month) to get by. And what did they see Republicans try to do on this front? Privatize it—a proposal so unpopular that it died with almost no support in Congress from even the GOP, and this after Bush spent weeks barnstorming for it. People clearly don’t want Social Security privatized—just as they don’t want Medicare voucherized.
What else? Paying for college? Oh, the GOP record here is particularly stellar. Republicans in Congress spent loads of political capital fighting the Democrats’ effort in 2010 to lower student-loan interest rates. The Obama student-loan reform has been widely hailed—in addition to helping students by offering lower interest rates, it actually saves taxpayers money by eliminating the middleman (private lenders). This year’s GOP platform called for undoing the reform and going back to the old system, which, wouldn’t you know it, is the position of the big banks.
Believe me, I could go on and on and on for pages. The bottom line is this. These private-sector “solutions” Jindal and others invoke to the problems faced by people of limited means already exist. They have either been implemented and been seen to fail (or at least create big new problems), or they’ve not been implemented because a wary public knows better and has risen up to say no.
Government programs were created for a reason: needs arose that the private sector wasn’t responding to. There was no profit to be made, or not enough, or too much risk to be assumed, in providing health coverage to working-class people and their children, who were more likely to have health issues and be expensive to care for; in offering student loans to people who might not be able to pay them back; et cetera. There just were not and are not practical free-market solutions to these problems. That’s why government stepped in.
If the entire Republican Party were made up of nothing but David Frums and David Brookses, maybe well-designed and good-faith market-based attempts to address some of these problems could have a chance. But the actually existing Republican Party is more accurately represented by another David—Vitter, the Louisiana senator—who dismissed S-CHIP as “Hillarycare.”
And it’s Vitter rather than the other Davids who typifies the party because that is how the party’s voting base wants it. The darkly amusing thing about all this distancing from Romney is that in truth, all he was doing was expressing the views of the overwhelming majority of the party’s conservative base, which rose up in a mighty rage in 2009 against these “moochers” and their “gifts.”
I wish Jindal and the rest of them luck, in spite of it all. If they’re sincere and serious, we’ll have a very different Republican Party five years from now from the one we’ve known. In the meantime, permit me my skepticism. They don’t have good solutions to working people’s problems because the record shows that at bottom, they don’t really want to solve them.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 18, 2012
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