“It’s All Academic Governor”: Chris Christie’s Debate Phobia Won’t Win Him GOP Support
“We are not a debating society. We are a political operation that needs to win.”
Thus did Chris Christie offer one of the most pregnant statements yet in the ongoing Republican argument over the party’s future. At the risk of sounding like one of those “professors” the New Jersey governor regularly condemns, I’d argue that these 15 words, spoken at a Republican National Committee meeting in Boston last week, raise more questions than they answer. Here are a few.
How do you decide on a winning strategy without debating it first? What is wrong with debating differences on policy and philosophy that people in political parties inevitably have? Don’t the voters expect to have some idea of what a party and a candidate believe before they cast their ballots — and doesn’t that imply debate? Doesn’t the phrase “political operation” risk implying that you are seeking power for power’s sake and not for any larger purpose?
There is also this: Isn’t Christie himself engaged in an important debate with Sen. Rand Paul over national security issues? There’s nothing academic about that.
One of two things is going on here: Either Christie knows he’ll need to have the debate he claims he wishes to avoid but doesn’t want to look like he is questioning fundamental conservative beliefs, or he really believes that the “I can win and the other guys can’t” argument is enough to carry him to the 2016 Republican presidential nomination he shows every sign of seeking. The latest signal came Friday when, under pressure from pro-gun activists, he vetoed a weapon ban he once advocated.
His target audience, after all, is an increasingly right-wing group of Republican primary voters who are unforgiving of ideological deviations. The last thing Christie needs is the sort of debate that casts him as a “moderate.”
Let’s stipulate that Christie is far less “moderate” than either his fans among Democrats and independents or the hardest-core conservatives seem to believe. Simply because Christie was nice to President Obama after Hurricane Sandy — at a moment when New Jersey needed all the federal help it could get — lots of people forget how conservative the pre-Sandy Christie was.
In 2011, he went to the summer seminar sponsored by the Koch brothers in Colorado, heaped praise on them and said, among other things: “We know the answers. They’re painful answers. We’re going to have to reduce Medicare benefits. We’re going to have to reduce Medicaid benefits. We’re going to have to raise the Social Security age. We’re going to have to do these things. We’re going to have to cut all type of other government programs that some people in this room might like. But we’re gonna have to do it.”
If I were on the right, I’d be taken with Christie’s skills at making conservative positions seem “pragmatic” and “practical.” Candidates who are perceived as dogmatic or highly ideological rarely win elections.
But here’s the problem: You can’t run as a pragmatic candidate if your party won’t let you. For Christie to win, he will have to convince the grass-roots Republicans who decide nominations that the party’s steady march rightward is a mistake.
Surely Paul, Ted Cruz and others among Christie’s potential opponents won’t let him slide by without challenging him hard — yes, “debating” him — about what he really stands for. Christie needs something more substantial than “You guys are losers,” even though he would relish saying it.
Mitt Romney’s experience in 2012 is instructive. He was a relatively pragmatic governor, especially on health care, and could have been a more attractive candidate than he turned out to be. Yet the dynamics of a Republican primary electorate that is short on middle-of-the-roaders pushed Romney away from his old self and toward positions that made him less electable. Faced with opponents to his right, he was reactive and drifted their way. In the end, it wasn’t clear who Romney was, other than the candidate who spoke derisively about the “47 percent.”
Those who understand how a “political operation” works know that genuine pragmatism requires a defeated party to engage in rethinking, not just repositioning. Bill Clinton laid out a detailed program and a set of arguments as a “New Democrat.” George W. Bush spoke of “compassionate conservatism” and challenged at least some of the most reactionary positions held by congressional Republicans.
Winning reelection this November by the biggest possible margin will buy Christie time. But eventually the debating society will beckon. He’ll have to be very clear, if not professorial, about the argument he wants to make.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 18, 2013
“An Inconvenient Truth”: The Big Republican Lie That Congress Is Exempt From Obamacare
Many lies persist simply because they sound plausible, or because they appear to confirm details of a broader trend that may well, in fact, be true. Decades ago, an upstate New York black teenager named Tawana Brawley was found in a trash bag, smeared with feces and with racial epithets written on her. She said she had been raped by six white men, and the charges – while horrifying – had the ring of truth.
It appeared to be a racist attack; why else would she be in such a condition? A grand jury found otherwise, and a prosecutor who was among the accused successfully sued her for defamation.
When Anthony Weiner at first denied he had sent photos of himself in his underpants to women on the Internet, suggesting his Twitter account had been hacked, it seemed plausible. His very name invited junior high school-level jokes, and people’s email and Twitter accounts are getting hacked all the time (not counting anything done by the NSA). Also, it just seemed insane that a sitting member of Congress, someone who had made no secret of his plans to seek the office of New York City mayor, would do something so categorically stupid and reckless. And yet, he did, and now he’s paying the price for it in the polls.
Everybody, or almost everybody, hates Congress these days, and there’s a determined group which really hates President Obama. So when conservatives and media types and even actual members of Congress –who should know better – make a claim about Congress getting special treatment under the new health care law, it seems like it would make sense. Congress and the Obama administration? Sparing the government from rules and regulations the rest of us have to follow? Well, doesn’t that sound like just the sort of thing those entitled rascals would do!
Except that it’s untrue. The Obama administration indeed made a fix to the way congressional employees will get their health care, but it was a fix that brought the workers back into the mainstream, putting them in the same category as the rest of us.
When Obamacare was being debated, opponents did everything they could to peel away support by raising issues ranging from “death panels” (a lie) and abortion (an issue sure to aggravate people on all sides). One item that did pass was a provision that required Congress and its employees to use the health care exchanges created for people who are uninsured or individually insured.
The exchanges might save a lot of people money; they might not. We’ll see. But people who work for large employers don’t have to think about it, since their employers are required to provide health insurance to full-time workers under the law.
The federal government, being quite a big employer, falls into this category. But Obamacare opponents, either out of spite or a desperate effort to kill the overall bill once and for all, stuck in a provision that requires congressional workers to use the exchanges anyway. This, in effect, is a special exception – except that the special exception didn’t benefit Congress; it punished it. It would have created a situation under which every full-time employee of a large company in the country would get coverage through work except for Congress and its employees. Obama’s recent edict ensures that the federal government will continue to make payments towards congressional employees health care – just as big employers must do across the country.
The amendment was petty and absurd. It was meant to flip a couple of votes, and it didn’t work. The Obama administration directive doesn’t fit into the convenient lie that government big-wigs are “exempting” themselves from the law. But we should all expect the government to live by the same laws the rest of us do – and that’s what the directive does.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, August 19, 2013
“Religious Zealotry”: In God’s Name Or Baby Messiah, Competing Claims Of Religious Freedom
Last week, when a Tennessee judge forcibly changed an infant’s name from Messiah to Martin, it was hard to decide which was more noteworthy, the parents’ grandiosity in naming their child for the one they consider their Savior or the judge’s religious zealotry in prohibiting the name.
“The word ‘Messiah’ is a title, and it’s a title that has only been earned by one person and that one person is Jesus Christ,” said Magistrate Lu Ann Ballew.
The American Civil Liberties Union has offered to appeal the ruling for the child’s mother, Jaleesa Martin, of Newport, Tenn., who did not return a phone call. The ruling came in a hearing after Ms. Martin and the baby’s father could not agree on a last name for the boy, but the judge took issue with his first name.
The case of little Messiah — or Martin, for now — raises two interesting questions, one legal and the other religious. Both are trickier than they seem.
States put all sorts of restrictions on parental naming rights, from the length of first names to what punctuation marks are permissible. But the restrictions cannot, for the most part, be justified by an appeal to religion. It therefore seems likely that Magistrate Ballew’s ruling against “Messiah” will be overturned as a violation of the First Amendment.
On the other hand, last year a New York judge refused to allow a couple to change their family name to ChristIsKing. The judge argued that allowing certain names could infringe on the religious liberties of others, and he offered the example of a court employee forced to call out a name with a religious message.
“A calendar call in the courthouse would require the clerk to shout out, ‘JesusIsLord ChristIsKing’ or ‘Rejoice ChristIsKing,’ ” wrote Judge Philip S. Straniere, of Richmond County. He was alluding to the daughter’s first name, Rejoice, and a name they had sought for their son, although no court would allow them to change it to “JesusIsLord.”
Judge Straniere’s decision is not binding in Tennessee, but it reminds us that whenever religious language is involved, whether etched into public buildings or slapped onto a Social Security card, there are competing claims of religious freedom.
The Tennessee magistrate might have argued that “Messiah” would infringe on the religious liberty of those who did not want to call this boy the messiah — or did not believe there was even such thing as a messiah. She could have been the defender of atheists’ rights! That argument might have stood a better chance on appeal.
Last year, there were 762 American baby boys given the name Messiah, putting it right between old standbys Scott and Jay for popularity, according to the Social Security Administration database. As currently formulated, the magistrate’s reasoning would be a problem not only for all of them, but also for all the Americans, primarily of Hispanic ancestry, who have named their sons Jesus. There were 3,758 Americans given the name Jesus last year, putting it way ahead of Messiah.
Now, one could argue that Jesus does not necessarily refer to Jesus Christ, the one believed to be the Messiah (“Christ” is one Greek-derived translation for “messiah”). But surely that’s whom most parents have in mind. Jesús finds particular favor among Roman Catholics in Mexico and Central America, where so many recent immigrants come from. It is less popular in Spain.
“My impression,” said Ilan Stavans, who teaches Spanish literature at Amherst College, “is that there is an identification in Latin America with characters of the Passion that you don’t find in other parts of the world, including Spain.”
Yet as Mr. Stavans points out, the tradition of religious naming in Latin America goes beyond those involved in the events, known as the Passion, leading up to Jesus’ crucifixion. Many Latinos are happy to name their children versions of the word “God.”
“Adonai is also a common name among Latinos, especially Mexicans,” Mr. Stavans said. “And so is Elohim.” Those are both Hebrew versions of the word for the deity. “But neither of them,” he added, “matches the ubiquity of Jesus, closely followed by Maria, Jose and Guadalupe.”
Hebrew-derived names are particularly popular among Latinos who have become Pentecostal Protestants, according to Arlene Sánchez-Walsh, a historian at Azusa Pacific University, in Azusa, Calif. As Pentecostalism has spread in Latin America, new adherents have a “desire to connect to Old Testament prophets, Jewish dietary laws and sometimes Sabbath keeping,” Ms. Sánchez-Walsh said. It “gives Latino Pentecostals a stake in their religious heritage as non-Catholics — which is what a lot of this is about.”
For some, that stake in non-Catholic Christianity is achieved by picking the names of patriarchs or prophetic figures, like Jacob or Eliezer, both names given to Hispanic Pentecostal boys I know. Adonai or Elohim ups the Old Testament ante.
Jews don’t name children versions of God, generally sticking to human beings in the Hebrew Bible. It is forbidden for Muslims to name a child Allah or God. For reasons that are unclear, much of the English-speaking world has tended to avoid Jesus as a name.
And all of these rules, quasi rules and traditions are subject to change, notes Stephen Butler Murray, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Boston and a lecturer at Harvard Divinity School.
“Mary was considered simply too holy for secular use until the 12th century,” Mr. Murray said. Yet today Mary, along with cognates like Maria and Marie, are popular throughout the Christian world.
Finally, Mr. Murray added that we use God-names for institutions all the time, without anyone being accused of blasphemy. “Messiah College in Pennsylvania seems to go on without being struck by the lightning of divine wrath too often,” he said.
By: Mark E. Oppenheimer, The New York Times, August 16, 2013
“One Reform, Indivisible”: Republicans Who Deluded Supporters Into Believing Obamacare Wouldn’t Happen Will Pay Personal Price
Recent political reporting suggests that Republican leaders are in a state of high anxiety, trapped between an angry base that still views Obamacare as the moral equivalent of slavery and the reality that health reform is the law of the land and is going to happen.
But those leaders don’t deserve any sympathy. For one thing, that irrational base is a Frankenstein monster of their own creation. Beyond that, everything I’ve seen indicates that members of the Republican elite still don’t get the basics of health reform — and that this lack of understanding is in the process of turning into a major political liability.
On the unstoppability of Obamacare: We have this system in which Congress passes laws, the president signs them, and then they go into effect. The Affordable Care Act went through this process, and there is no legitimate way for Republicans to stop it.
Is there an illegitimate way? Well, the G.O.P. can try blackmail, either by threatening to shut down the government or, an even more extreme tactic, threatening not to raise the debt limit, which would force the United States government into default and risk financial chaos. And Republicans did somewhat successfully blackmail President Obama back in 2011.
However, that was then. They faced a president on the ropes after a stinging defeat in the midterm election, not a president triumphantly re-elected. Furthermore, even in 2011 Mr. Obama wouldn’t give ground on the essentials of health care reform, the signature achievement of his presidency. There’s no way he would undermine the reform at this late date.
Republican leaders seem to get this, even if the base doesn’t. What they don’t seem to get, however, is the integral nature of the reform. So let me help out by explaining, one more time, why Obamacare looks the way it does.
Start with the goal that almost everyone at least pretends to support: giving Americans with pre-existing medical conditions access to health insurance. Governments can, if they choose, require that insurance companies issue policies without regard to an individual’s medical history, “community rating,” and some states, including New York, have done just that. But we know what happens next: many healthy people don’t buy insurance, leaving a relatively bad risk pool, leading to high premiums that drive out even more healthy people.
To avoid this downward spiral, you need to induce healthy Americans to buy in; hence, the individual mandate, with a penalty for those who don’t purchase insurance. Finally, since buying insurance could be a hardship for lower-income Americans, you need subsidies to make insurance affordable for all.
So there you have it: health reform is a three-legged stool resting on community rating, individual mandates and subsidies. It requires all three legs.
But wait — hasn’t the administration delayed the employer mandate, which requires that large firms provide insurance to their employees? Yes, it has, and Republicans are trying to make it sound as if the employer mandate and the individual mandate are comparable. Some of them even seem to think that they can bully Mr. Obama into delaying the individual mandate too. But the individual mandate is an essential piece of the reform, which can’t and won’t be bargained away, while the employer mandate is a fairly minor add-on that arguably shouldn’t have been in the law to begin with.
I guess that after all the years of vilification it was predictable that Republican leaders would still fail to understand the principles behind health reform and that this would hamper their ability to craft an effective political response as the reform’s implementation draws near. But their rudest shock is yet to come. You see, this thing isn’t going to be the often-predicted “train wreck.” On the contrary, it’s going to work.
Oh, there will be problems, especially in states where Republican governors and legislators are doing all they can to sabotage the implementation. But the basic thrust of Obamacare is, as I’ve just explained, coherent and even fairly simple. Moreover, all the early indications are that the law will, in fact, give millions of Americans who currently lack access to health insurance the coverage they need, while giving millions more a big break in their health care costs. And because so many people will see clear benefits, health reform will prove irreversible.
This achievement will represent a huge defeat for the conservative agenda of weakening the safety net. And Republicans who deluded their supporters into believing that none of this would happen will probably pay a large personal price. But as I said, they have nobody but themselves to blame.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 18, 2013
“It’s The Kids’ Fault”: Why Women Still Earn Less Than Men
As thousands of high school graduates head off to college in the next few weeks, they’ll see a lot more women than men on campus — specifically, they’ll see three female students for every two male students they spot. These scenes are dramatically different from the ones their grandparents would have seen in the 1960′s when the percentages were reversed.
The surge in women’s college enrollment appears in their graduation figures.While only about 30 percent of women (and men) older than 25 have a college degree, in recent years, women have earned about 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees. Mark J. Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that there are now about 4.35 million more women with college degrees in the United States than men.
That’s some progress.
Yet, progress in college degrees received (women also earn a larger share of master’s and doctor’s degrees than men do) has not turned into progress in paychecks received.
In 2011, women working full-time earned about 77 cents for each dollar that a man earned, according to data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.The gap has narrowed over time, which is good news. But, as President Obama said on the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Equal Pay Act making it illegal to discriminate in pay on the basis of sex, “does anybody here think that’s good enough?”
I sure don’t.
So, after all these years, why does the pay gap still exist? Is it because women choose to become social workers rather than rocket scientists, as some have noted? Or is it because they have decided to stay home with the kids and stop working or to work part time, as others have noted?
On the first point, rocket scientists certainly do make more than teachers. The median wage for an aerospace engineer in 2012 was $103,720, almost double the $53,400 a typical elementary school teacher could expect to make that year. It’s also true that only about 14 percent of architects and engineers are women, while more than 80 percent of elementary and middle school teachers are women. Over all occupations, women’s wages would be lower than men’s wages due to differences in occupational choices.
On the second point, fathers are more likely to work full-time than mothers. Nearly 40 percent of mothers worked part-time or not at all compared with 3 percent of fathers, according to a study by the American Association of University Women. Women who leave the labor force don’t gain much work experience so that when they return to work, they’re likely to make less than another person, male or female, with the same qualifications who has an unbroken career record.
Again, the data support this assertion. Judith Warner recently wrote for the New York Times Magazine about the cost to mothers when they leave their careers to spend more time with their families. Warner found that the women she interviewed who had returned to the work force a decade after leaving their jobs to take care of their kids were generally in lower paying, less prestigious jobs than the ones they left.
A separate study found that women who returned to work after an extended time off were paid 16 percent less than before they left the work force, while another study Warner cites found that only one-quarter of women who returned to the work force took a traditional hard-driving job, such as banking, compared with the two-thirds of women who were employed in such jobs before taking time off.
One final factor helps explain the pay gap: kids. In a paper published in the late 1990s, Columbia University professor of social work and public affairs Jane Waldfogel showed that having children has a negative impact on a woman’s wages, while it has no or even a positive effect on a man’s wages. The fact that the pay gap between women without children and women with children is larger than the pay gap between men and women further highlights the negative impact of kids on earnings. Waldfogel noted that it’s as true in 1998 as Victor Fuchs reported a decade earlier, that “the greatest barrier to economic equality is children.”
The research shows that having kids is bad for your paycheck. What the research doesn’t seem to show, however, is that many moms may actually not care.
By: Joanne Weiner, She The People, The Washington Post, August, 13, 2013
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