“Rand Paul’s ‘Youth’ Snow Job”: Why He’ll Never, Ever, Ever Win Over Young Voters
With a Chris Christie comeback looking less likely and a Jeb Bush shadow campaign only just now entering its preliminary stages, the political media that isn’t tethered to the Hillary Clinton beat — where news of no news is treated as news — has turned its eyes to Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul, the man who will singlehandedly bring his party into the 21st century by referencing modern cultural touchstones like Pink Floyd, Domino’s pizza and Monica Lewinsky. The narrative, pushed by Paul’s office and accepted by bored, middle-aged members of the press, is that the 51-year-old libertarian is just what Republicans needs to win over millennial voters and reclaim the White House in 2016.
To be blunt: This is a stupid narrative and everyone who isn’t being paid by the Republican Party to promote it needs to stop.
Before getting into why the idea of Millennial Man Rand Paul is nonsense, it’s worth unpacking the argument. To be fair, it’s a bit more sophisticated than what I’ve described above. As Joe Gandelman put it in a deeply unpersuasive article for the Week, the curly-haired lover of liberty “has appeal to millennials disillusioned by intrusive government surveillance and aggressive drone strikes,” and that means he “could really boost his numbers in GOP contests if he’s able to mobilize young voters…” This could “snowball,” Gandelman writes, so long as Paul can convince the kids that he’s “truly a candidate of change,” a proposition made all the more likely by the fact that “Paul would be the first GOP nominee whose ideology is genuinely anchored in libertarianism, with positions that often can’t be neatly categorized.”
Putting those last two assertions aside — I’d say Barry Goldwater’s ideology was quite clearly “anchored in libertarianism” and that libertarian positions can, in fact, be “neatly categorized” as, well, libertarian — Gandelman’s argument boils down to the following: Young people don’t like the NSA and drones, so they might vote for Paul, who is also a skeptic of the post-9/11 national security paradigm. Yet while he’s right that millennial voters are far less comfortable with spying and drone strikes than the rest of the electorate, Gandelman exaggerates the intensity of their disaffection.
On spying, for example, it’s true that young voters are more concerned with civil liberties; but as a 2013 Washington Post poll found, 18- to 39-year-old Americans still think investigating terrorist threats is more important than preserving civil liberties, by a breakdown of 52 to 45 percent. On drone strikes, meanwhile, a 2013 Fox News poll finds the conventional wisdom to be even more out of touch: by a score of 65 to 32 percent, respondents under the age of 35 said they approve of the U.S. using drones to kill suspected terrorists on foreign soil. In fact, the only scenario for which a majority of the under-35 crowd disapproves of drone strikes is if the suspect is an American citizen and the strike takes place on U.S. soil. Even then, it’s hardly a blowout, with 44 percent registering their approval.
So Gandelman’s pretty wrong, any way you slice it. But a better argument for Paul’s appealing to young voters is possible, and was indeed offered by Ross Kaminsky in the American Spectator. Instead of leaning so heavily on the assumption that kids these days hate Big Brother, Kaminsky notes that on issues where millennial voters really stick out from the rest — marriage equality and immigration reform — Paul has tried to “thread the needle” by adopting positions that are slightly more nuanced than the GOP norm. Paul’s against same-sex marriage, yes, but he thinks it’s an issue best “left to the states” and has argued that a reform of the tax code, “so it doesn’t mention marriage,” would save the country from having to “redefine what marriage is…” On immigration reform, too, Paul ultimately votes with the rest of his party, but does so while leaving some wiggle room for expanding the work visa program and legal immigration in general.
Better is a relative term, however. While it’s true that Paul doesn’t usually sound like an unreconstructed homophobe on the issue of gay marriage, it’s also true that Paul has jokingly compared same-sex marriage to polygamy and bestiality, putting himself in the same company as that noted champion of individual rights, Rick Santorum. Moreover, while nuance is nice, the fact remains that Paul is, objectively, against marriage equality. Why would a millennial voter who cares about LGBTQ issues support the guy who opposes marriage equality, and compared same-sex partnerships to bestiality, over a candidate who doesn’t do either of those things? Because nuance? Further, why would a millennial voter who wants to see immigration reform happen in this country support a candidate who doesn’t? Because he’s willing to accept immigrants as a source of labor, even if he doesn’t think they deserve a path to citizenship? Because, again, nuance?
Granted, Kaminsky and his fellow travelers would probably say that while Paul won’t win millennials over on these issues, his “balanced” approach might be enough to keep them from dismissing him before listening any further. There’s probably something to that. But there’s still a problem: It’s not like millennials are exactly in sync with Paul’s views on economic issues, either. Kaminsky’s implication that younger voters would thrill to Paul’s doctrinaire laissez faire approach to the economy, if they could only look past social issues, just doesn’t withstand even a little bit of scrutiny.
It’s true that millennial voters are not nearly as enthusiastic about the positive role government can play in promoting social and economic equality as they were in the early days of the Obama era. Back then, according to a 2009 report from the Dem-aligned Center for American Progress, as much as two-thirds of young voters said that government should provide more services, while three-fourths said there were more things the government could and should be doing. A half-decade of Democratic incompetence and Tea Party obstruction has definitely taken its toll.
Nevertheless, a Pew Research Center report put out earlier this month found that the majority of millennials still want to see their government do more, not less, to even the playing field. Asked to choose between smaller government with fewer services and bigger government with more services, 53 percent of millennials chose the latter while only 38 percent picked the former. And even though 54 percent of them oppose Obamacare, only 44 percent agree with Paul that it’s not the government’s job to ensure health insurance coverage for all. Perhaps the most telling finding of the whole report in this regard concerns Social Security, that longtime bugaboo of Paul and libertarians like him. Despite the fact that a whopping 51 percent of millennials believe they’ll receive no Social Security benefits by the time they’re eligible, and despite the fact that 53 percent of millennials think government should focus spending on helping the young rather than the old, a remarkable 61 percent of young voters oppose cutting Social Security benefits in any way, full stop.
Persuasive as they can be, though, polls can’t tell us everything. As mentioned earlier, History happens, and people’s views can change. Demography may be a more reliable metric, then (even if too many Democrats have succumbed to the fallacious “demography is destiny” belief that a more racially diverse rising electorate will guarantee Dems a permanent majority). Paul certainly appears to be thinking about the country’s demographic changes; he seemingly can’t go 10 minutes into an interview or public statement without noting that his party must be more “inclusive” and “welcoming” to what Republicans like to call, in a triumph of euphemism, “non-traditional” voting blocs.
But as his much-discussed speech last year at Howard University — and his recent decision to chide Obama for failing to remember how Martin Luther King was spied upon — can attest, Paul’s version of outreach is not without its blemishes. He deserves some amount of credit for recognizing that non-white voters matter, too, I guess. But as is the case with immigration and same-sex marriage, Paul’s attempts at nuance are more than outweighed by his concrete policy stances. Simply put, I doubt that a young voter of color is going to look sympathetically at the image of a white, Southern conservative whitesplaining Martin Luther King to the first African American president — especially if that voter happens to know that Paul supports modern versions of the voter suppression tactics King and other civil rights heroes risked their lives to end. And what do you think the chances are that a Democratic presidential candidate would bring up Paul’s infamous attack on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 during a national campaign? I’d say they’re pretty, pretty, pretty good.
To recap, here’s the case for Rand Paul, millennial hero: He’s against surveillance and drone strikes, two issues on which the millennial vote is divided; he’s against comprehensive immigration reform and same-sex marriage, two things that millennial voters strongly support; he’s against big government and universal health care, two more things a majority of millennial voters back; and he likes to talk about getting people of color to vote for him, despite supporting voter suppression and the right of businesses to engage in race-based discrimination. Oh, and he’s comfortable telling the first black president, the one who “surrounds himself with Martin Luther King memorabilia in [the] Oval Office,” how he’s failing to live up to King’s legacy.
So can we stop with this nonsense now? Please?
By: Elias Isquith, Assistant Editor, Salon, March 22, 2014
“Religion Is No Excuse for Bigotry Against Women”: Corporations Have No Soul, And They Certainly Don’t Have A Relationship With God
This Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in two consolidated cases, Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius, on the government’s authority to require employers to provide health care coverage that includes birth control and other pregnancy-related services under the Affordable Care Act.
The owners of two for-profit corporations, Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., claim their Christian religious beliefs justify withholding contraception coverage from their employees, never mind what their employees believe.
Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialities are not the only employers seeking the legal right to restrict their women employees’ access to birth control. Some 100 companies or nonprofit organizations — NOW calls them the Dirty 100 — have sued the United States Government for that same power.
Two issues raised by these lawsuits are receiving a lot of attention: First, can a corporation claim religious freedom under the First Amendment? Second, can a corporation block its employees from at least some forms of contraception on the grounds they are abortifacients? I’ll comment on those in a moment, but first I want to pause over a third issue: Can a corporation use its supposed Christian religion to justify discriminating against its women employees?
I want to propose that we lay to rest, once and for all, the tired old I’m-a-bigot-because-God-wants-it argument. Think about it. Proponents of discrimination have routinely used religion to justify their hurtful policies: two shameful examples are slavery in the United States and segregation in the Deep South.
More recently, religious claims were the driving force behind California’s Proposition 8, which sought to prohibit same-sex marriages. But these arguments have been thoroughly discredited. We have progressed as a society to the point where the use of religion to justify excluding, demeaning or discriminating against whole groups of people is roundly condemned, and rightly so. The idea of Hobby Lobby Stores, Conestoga Wood, or any of the Dirty 100 using religion as an excuse to block women’s access to birth control should be no less condemned.
As to whether Hobby Lobby Stores or Conestoga Wood can claim religious freedom SCOTUSblog summarized what’s at stake.
At the level of their greatest potential, the two cases raise the profound cultural question of whether a private, profit-making business organized as a corporation can “exercise” religion and, if it can, how far that is protected from government interference. The question can arise — and does, in these cases — under either the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause or under a federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress in 1993.
In a manner of speaking, these issues pose the question — a topic of energetic debate in current American political and social discourse — of whether corporations are “people.” The First Amendment protects the rights “of the people,” and the 1993 law protects the religious rights of “persons.” Do profit-making companies qualify as either?
As an aside, I have to wonder, if the Supreme Court decides that a corporation is a “person” with religious freedom under the First Amendment, where might that leave the status of women as “persons” with the right to equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment? In any event, Caroline Mala Corbin, a law professor at the University of Miami, succinctly rejected the idea of corporations as having the capacity for religious belief. As she said, “For-profit corporations do not and should not have religious rights. They have no soul, and they certainly don’t have a relationship with God.”
So, what about the claim that Hobby Lobby Stores and others in the Dirty 100 are making, that some forms of contraception are actually abortifacients? Two summaries by the National Partnership for Women & Families (here and here) are worth reading, and I’d be interested to know if you have the same reaction that I did when I read them.
These arguments would be laughable if the men running the Dirty 100 entities weren’t so deadly serious about blocking women’s access to life-saving health care. Because that’s what contraception is: life-saving. Unintended pregnancy is highly associated with infant and maternal mortality. Unintended pregnancy is also a significant risk factor for domestic violence.
So when these guys start saying that they have to, just have to, block women’s access to safe and effective contraception because they’re worried about the “lives” of the zygotes, I want to say: Seriously?
You are going to claim to be pro-life but ignore infant mortality? And maternal mortality? You are going to claim to be confused and worried about the fertilized egg, and the implantation, and the uterine wall, but ignore the intimate partner violence that accompanies unintended pregnancy? What business do you have talking about women’s bodies — as if we are not in the room — in the same way one might talk about, say, whether robots are more like androids or more like appliances? Seriously.
Let’s review some facts. Some 99 percent of sexually active women, including 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women, use contraception at some point. According to the National Partnership, an estimated 17.4 million women need subsidized services and supplies because they are unable to access or purchase contraceptive services and supplies on their own. And more than half of young adult women say cost concerns have led them to not use their birth control method as directed.
The Guttmacher Institute has found that about half (51 percent) of the 6.6 million pregnancies in the United States each year (3.4 million) are unintended. What’s more, the 19 percent of women at risk who use contraception inconsistently or incorrectly account for 43 percent of all unintended pregnancies.
Yet, in the face of these facts, Hobby Lobby and the others in the Dirty 100 want to restrict women’s access to this essential preventive care because of the claim that “zygotes are people too.”
If that’s the best they can do, they should surely lose this appeal. Of course, the case is before Chief Justice John Robert’s Supreme Court, which ushered in the era of corporations as people with the Citizens United case, and is widely considered the most politically active since the earliest days of our republic. So never say never. But whatever the Supreme Court does, I know what I’m not going to do: give my business or my money to Hobby Lobby or any of the other Dirty 100 that practice similar gender bigotry.
You can take action too: Click here to sign our petition telling them their bias is not acceptable.
By: Terry O’Neil, President, National Organization for Women; The Blog, The Huffington Post, March 21, 2014
“David Vitter, God Bless The Koch Brothers”: The Most Patriotic Americans In The History Of The Earth
It stands to reason that Republican politicians are going to celebrate Charles and David Koch. After all, the billionaires’ generosity is critically important in conservative politics right now and may ultimately be the deciding factor in which party has power in Congress.
But Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) is willing to take his appreciation for the Koch brothers to a pretty extraordinary level, as evidenced by a town-hall event in Shreveport this week. American Bridge posted the above video (http://youtu.be/-7mStFMk6og), and for those who can’t watch clips online, the conservative senator told constituents:
“I think the Koch brothers are two of the most patriotic Americans in the history of the Earth. […]
“God bless the Koch brothers. They’re fighting for our freedoms.”
Sure, Republicans are bound to be grateful to the billionaires for saturating the airwaves with anti-Democratic attack ads, but Vitter’s effusive praise seemed a little over the top.
Burgess Everett saw an even longer version of the clip and reported that Vitter, as part of the same discussion, said he’s “not defending big money in politics.”
No, of course not. He’s just grateful that the most patriotic Americans in the history of the Earth are fighting for our freedoms.
It’s worth noting that Louisiana will host two major elections in the next two years: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) is running for re-election this year, and she’s already facing attack ads from the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity, and Vitter is running for governor next year, and likely hopes the Kochs’ operation will support his candidacy.
But there’s an even larger context to this: what is it, exactly, the most patriotic Americans in the history of the Earth hope to receive in exchange for their political investments?
The New York Times reports today on the bigger picture.
As [Americans for Prosperity] emerges as a dominant force in the 2014 midterm elections, spending up to 10 times as much as any major outside Democratic group so far, officials of the organization say their effort is not confined to hammering away at President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. They are also trying to present the law as a case study in government ineptitude to change the way voters think about the role of government for years to come.
“We have a broader cautionary tale,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity. “The president’s out there touting billions of dollars on climate change. We want Americans to think about what they promised with the last social welfare boondoggle and look at what the actual result is.”
Leaders of the effort say it has great appeal to the businessmen and businesswomen who finance the operation and who believe that excess regulation and taxation are harming their enterprises and threatening the future of the country. The Kochs, with billions in holdings in energy, transportation and manufacturing, have a significant interest in seeing that future government regulation is limited.
Indeed, Wonkblog reported just yesterday that a Koch Industries subsidiary is the biggest lease owner in Canada’s tar sands, covering an area of 1.1 million acres. The piece added, “Separately, industry sources familiar with oil sands leases said Koch’s lease holdings could be closer to 2 million acres.”
This helps bring into sharper focus why the Democratic fight with the Koch brothers has become so important. The dispute isn’t about some misleading AFP attack ads about health care reform; this is about a broader agenda.
As Greg Sargent explained this morning, “The real purpose of the Dem strategy is to create a framework for a broader argument about the true goals and priorities of the actual GOP policy agenda. It’s about tapping into a sense that the economy is rigged against ordinary Americans, and in favor of the one percent, and dramatizing that the GOP’s economic agenda would preserve that status quo, blocking any government policies designed to address stagnant mobility and soaring inequality. Or that, as Jonathan Chait puts it, the GOP has ‘built a policy agenda around plutocracy,’ and its primary ‘organizing purpose is to safeguard the economic interests of the very rich.’”
And it’s against this backdrop that David Vitter proclaims, “God bless the Koch brothers. They’re fighting for our freedoms.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 20, 2014
“The Real Truth About ObamaCare”: Conservatives Need To Help Fix It, Or Face Their Worst Nightmare!
Despite the worst roll-out conceivable, the Affordable Care Act seems to be working. With less than two weeks remaining before the March 31 deadline for coverage this year, five million people have already signed up. After decades of rising percentages of Americans’ lacking health insurance, the uninsured rate has dropped to its lowest levels since 2008.
Meanwhile, the rise in health care costs has slowed drastically. No one knows exactly why, but the new law may well be contributing to this slowdown by reducing Medicare overpayments to medical providers and private insurers, and creating incentives for hospitals and doctors to improve quality of care.
But a lot about the Affordable Care Act needs fixing — especially the widespread misinformation that continues to surround it. For example, a majority of business owners with fewer than 50 workers still think they’re required to offer insurance or pay a penalty. In fact, the law applies only to businesses with 50 or more employees who work more than 30 hours a week. And many companies with fewer than 25 workers still don’t realize that if they offer plans they can qualify for subsidies in the form of tax credits.
Many individuals remain confused and frightened. Forty-one percent of Americans who are still uninsured say they plan to remain that way. They believe it will be cheaper to pay a penalty than buy insurance. Many of these people are unaware of the subsidies available to them. Sign-ups have been particularly disappointing among Hispanics.
Some of this confusion has been deliberately sown by outside groups that, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, have been free to spend large amounts of money to undermine the law. For example, Gov. Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, told Fox News that the Affordable Care Act was “the biggest job killer ever,” citing a Florida company with 20 employees that expected to go out of business because it couldn’t afford coverage.
None of this is beyond repair, though. As more Americans sign up and see the benefits, others will take note and do the same.
The biggest problem on the horizon that may be beyond repair — because it reflects a core feature of the law — is the public’s understandable reluctance to be forced to buy insurance from private, for-profit insurers that aren’t under enough competitive pressure to keep premiums low.
But even here, remedies could evolve. States might use their state-run exchanges to funnel so many applicants to a single, low-cost insurer that the insurer becomes, in effect, a single payer. Vermont is already moving in this direction. In this way, the Affordable Care Act could become a back door to a single-payer system — every conservative’s worst nightmare.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, March 22, 2014
“Authored By Reagan”: It’s Worse Than Paul Ryan, The Right Has A New Ugly, Racial Dog Whistle
While attention focuses on Paul Ryan’s remarks about inner city culture, another dog-whistle theme continues its slow roil: food stamp abuse. More even than Ryan’s twisting narrative, the brouhaha around food stamps helps make clear that conservatives seek to conjure a much bigger bogeyman than “lazy” minorities.
Ostensibly worried that too many people prefer welfare to work, House Republicans this January stripped $8.6 billion from the food stamp program. This threatened to reduce monthly food assistance by an average of $90 per family — from households that are barely hanging on, with average gross monthly incomes of just $744. Yet far from conceding defeat, states are joining battle by adjusting their programs in ways that evade the cuts, bringing the food stamp debate back.
Just last week, House Speaker John Boehner warned that “states have found ways to cheat, once again, on signing up people for food stamps,” and he implored his colleagues “to stop this cheating and this fraud from continuing.” Cheating and fraud constitute stock themes in the conservative assault on food stamps — tropes applied indiscriminately to both recipients and government. And therein lies a clue to the real target.
To see the actual agenda clearly, though, it helps to reach back to Ronald Reagan, for he perfected today’s conservative assault on food stamps.
Reagan frequently stumped by sympathizing with the anger of voters waiting in line to buy hamburger, while some young fellow ahead of them used food stamps to buy a T-bone steak. With this tale, Reagan invoked the stereotype of the welfare recipient who abuses government benefits to live in luxury (Reagan’s other version: welfare queens).
The comedian Jon Stewart recently compiled a montage of contemporary conservative talking heads spinning just these sorts of yarns about food stamps. It would have been funnier if people weren’t actually being pushed into hunger.
Going to the racial dimensions of these hackneyed fictions, when Reagan initially told the T-bone steak story, he identified the food stamp abuser as a young “buck,” a term then commonly used among Southern whites to refer to a strong black man. This veered dangerously toward open racism, and in any event proved unnecessary. Even after Reagan dropped that term from future renditions, the racial element continued just below the surface, with welfare recipients implicitly colored black.
But this was not a simple plot to demonize minorities. Rather, Reagan had another scapegoat in mind, and here we come to the heart of dog-whistle politics. Ostensibly, even more than grasping minorities, the greatest enemy of the middle class was liberal government. After all, it was government that was reaching into taxpayer’s pockets and wasting their hard-earned dollars.
By “darkening” government itself, Reagan provided the kindling for a taxpayer revolt that ostensibly would cut off funds to the lazy and irresponsible — but that in fact generated enormous windfalls for the very rich. In the 1980s, by one estimate, the top 1 percent of Americans reaped tax cuts worth a trillion dollars, and they’ve received a further trillion dollars from the Reagan tax cuts in each ensuing decade.
Tax cuts for the very rich were just the beginning. By trashing safety-net programs as massive giveaways to undeserving minorities and thereby engendering a general hostility toward government, the right has systematically attacked New Deal programs across multiple domains — from education and housing to marketplace and workplace regulation — undoing in area after area the policies that once promoted an equitable distribution of wealth.
Perhaps to understand the full devastation wrought by modern racial politics, we should bring forward another figure from the shadowed background of the T-bone steak story: the cashier. In the 1970s, she was more likely to be unionized and relatively well-paid, with good benefits. Today, whether white or black or some other race, she is likely working without union protection for a minimum wage whose value has sharply fallen and that cannot sustain a small family above poverty. Indeed, like many Wal-Mart employees, it’s the cashier who today is on food stamps.
When House Republicans war against food assistance, just as when Ryan tilts at government poverty programs that don’t work because of a tailspin of culture in our inner cities, their real target is progressive government. Yes, race-baiting superficially aims at minorities and hits nonwhite communities hard, including the 24 percent of food stamp recipients who are black. But just as cuts to food aid also afflict the 38 percent of program participants who are white, dog-whistle politics savages Americans of every race.
And it devastates every class, too, for this sort of racial politics doesn’t just slam the poor, it imperils all who are better off when government protects the broad middle rather than serves society’s sultans. When conservatives blow that dog whistle, government is the target, and you’re a likely victim.
By: Ian Haney-Lopez, Salon, March 22, 2014
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