“A Very Risky Plan To Rile Up The Base”: Republicans’ New Midterm Strategy; Obama Is A Lawless President
Last year, the Republican political strategy for the midterms was clear: Obamacare, Obamacare, Obamacare. In December, Representative Paul Ryan even promoted his bipartisan budget deal with Senator Patty Murray as a way to keep the heat on the Affordable Care Act: “We also don’t want to have shutdown drama so we can focus on replacing Obamacare.” A functioning website and eight million enrollees later, the law is no longer guaranteed to work in Republicans’ favor. So the party’s shifting to a new strategy that carries even greater risks: that Barack Obama is a lawless president.
Republicans are in excellent position to pick up Senate seats in November. They have the structural advantages of a favorable Senate map, stronger historical turnout in midterm elections, and the sixth-year curse. Obamacare will remain a potent issue in red states, but with all the good news lately about the law, the opposition has lost its bite. Senate Republicans were largely complimentary of Sylvia Mathews Burwell at her confirmation to become the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. When House Republicans invited insurers before them last week, they were disappointed to find that their testimony refuted the House GOP’s “study” that a large percent of Obamacare enrollees were not making payments. Both of these events went largely unnoticed—something that never would have happened if the law was still struggling.
What did make news last week was the Special Select Committee on Benghazi convened by House Speaker John Boehner. The impetus for the committee is the release of the previously-withheld memo from Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes that laid out the talking points for then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice before her infamous Sunday show appearances in 2012. The memo demonstrated that while the Obama administration was certainly intent on spinning the incident in the best political light, Rice did not lie to the American people and there was no cover-up. Nonetheless, Boehner has put this at the top of the agenda for House Republicans, Obamacare be damned.
This represents a shift in the Republican Party’s political strategy from a focus on Obamacare’s failures to Obama’s “lawless” presidency. Republican politicians have accused Obama of breaking the law and ignoring the Constitution countless times, but until now, it was not their top political strategy. This tactical change makes sense. Obamacare is no longer struggling and Democrats are putting Republican congressional candidates in difficult positions over the Medicaid expansion. Criticism of Obama’s lawlessness will rile up the base and bolster turnout.
But this strategy carries considerable risk as well: Republicans could lose control of it. It’s only a short step from calling Obama lawless to calling for his impeachment. Some conservatives have already called for it, in fact. Those voices are rare, but Dave Weigel noted last week that more people on the right are starting to make those calls, led by National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy with his upcoming book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment. As Republicans learned in the 1990s, impeachment trials are terrible politics. That should at least give GOP leaders pause as they plan their midterm strategy.
It’s a long time between now and November. If Republicans intend to campaign on Obama’s lawlessness, they shouldn’t be surprised to discover more of the base clamoring for impeachment. The Benghazi hearings will only exacerbate these calls. If President Obama takes executive action this summer to ease undocumented-immigrant deportations, as many expect, that will only lead to more calls. As 26 Senate Republicans wrote in a letter to Obama in April, “Our entire constitutional system is threatened when the Executive Branch suspends the law at its whim and our nation’s sovereignty is imperiled when the commander-in-chief refuses to defend the integrity of its borders. You swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. We therefore ask you to uphold that oath and carry out the duties required by the Constitution and entrusted to you by the American people.”
The letter doesn’t specify what the authors would do if Obama fails to uphold the constitution as they deem acceptable, but the broad implications of their words are clear: Republicans will not sit idly by if Obama takes executive action on deportations. They plan to make it a national issue. That’s a risky strategy, but it’s not like Republicans have many options. For far too long, they assumed that Obamacare was guaranteed to win them votes. That’s no longer the case, and their failure to develop a Plan B is on full display.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, May 12, 2014
“Converting A Phony Scandal Into Political Cash”: How Much Money Can Republicans Raise Off Benghazi? Ask Darrell Issa
House Republicans’ newly created Benghazi Select Committee has attracted attention to their penchant for using investigations of the Obama administration as a fundraising tool. Most of the criticism, thus far, has concerned the National Republican Campaign Committee’s effort to collect email addresses from those who want to “become a Benghazi watchdog” despite committee chairman Trey Gowdy’s plea that they not do so.
It is no surprise, though, that the NRCC would use Benghazi to the Republican Party’s financial advantage. To understand just how lucrative these scandals can be, look no further than Rep. Darrell Issa. He has offered Republicans a clinic in the science of converting phony scandal into political cash.
For most of his career, Issa was a lackluster fundraiser. But through the first five quarters of the 2014 election cycle, his campaign committee has raised $2,573,258. This is an impressive haul, considering he has not faced significant opposition in more than a decade. The two Democrats vying to challenge him this year together have raised less than $50,000 combined. If Issa’s fundraising continues at its current pace, he will raise more this cycle than in his first four terms in Congress combined.
To understand Issa’s success, you need to see how he has stealthily used his official position as chairman of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee to build one of the most successful and impressive direct mail operations in the House of Representatives. As chairman of the Oversight and Reform Committee, Issa is outraising colleagues who occupy traditionally more lucrative posts including Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarlin and Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, whose committee is known as one of the easiest perches in Congress to attract campaign contributions from the fossil fuel and healthcare industries.
From his post as chairman, Issa has incessantly beat the drum of Benghazi and other scandals. According to a search of Nexis, the terms “Issa” and “Benghazi” have appeared together in Fox News segments 221 times since September 11, 2012. On Sean Hannity’s show a year ago he proclaimed, “The administration has made a claim that for classified reasons they change the story. We believe right now that may be the biggest lie of all.” Encouraged by Hannity, Issa then stated, “Lying to Congress is a crime,” stoking the conservative fantasy of a lawless White House.
Issa’s campaign website does not contain the standard political pictures of constituents and community events. Instead it contains a panoply of press clippings primarily focused on the Congressman’s investigations of the White House and attacks on Obamacare. Currently the top two stories on DarrellIssa.com announce the subpoena of Secretary of State John Kerry and an article from Breitbart.com by his former aide and current consultant Kurt Bardella headlined “They Knew and They Lied About Benghazi.” (Breitbart.com notes that Bardella is a “former” aide to Issa but does not disclose that his company Endeavor Strategic Communications was on his campaign committee’s payroll as of his latest FEC filing.)
As a reward, the Republican grassroots have padded Issa’s coffers: The key ingredient to his miraculous fundraising turnaround has not been high-dollar gifts from PACs and lobbyists, but ordinary Republican voters thanking him, through their contributions, for being the president’s number one antagonist. Issa has nurtured this relationship with the GOP base by cultivating an enormous direct-marketing operation. Four of his top six campaign expenditures so far this year were to direct mail firms and his third largest expense was $70,684 paid to the Post Office.
Issa’s FEC reports further demonstrate the success of the program. In the first quarter of 2014, nearly 56 percent of his contributors listed their occupation as “retired”—an indicator, often, of a small donor reached through direct mailing. Previously, from the 2006 through 2010 cycle, the pharmaceutical industry was the largest source of donors to his campaigns. This change occurred only after Issa took over the Oversight Committee in 2011.
These donors are not simply responding to the letter they receive in the mail, but the image Issa has cultivated in the media. They see the congressman on Fox News portrayed as the leader in Congress investigating the scandals they feel have come to exemplify this White House and respond with open checkbooks.
Robert Spuhler, a retired community college president from Colorado, who gave $500 to Issa in 2013, explained to USA Today, “I contributed not so much because of him, but what the committee is working on. When you do things like that, you’re going to be targeted by the other party.”
A second donor, George Brandon, who also listed his occupation as retired on FEC forms, told the paper, “I want to see him survive and get to the truth on Benghazi, and I want to see the IRS destroyed.”
Pacific Political, a California firm contracted by Issa, brags on its website that it “has managed the growth of numerous direct mail campaigns, including that of Congressman Darrell Issa, whose house file… has grown from 2,600 donors to 26,000 donors.”
The front page of Pacific Political’s website features a sample direct mail piece whose visible text focuses on the purported attempts by “White House staff” to use “tax dollars to try and smear” Issa as a result of the scandals he is investigating.
Ultimately Issa’s small-dollar fundraising creates an incentive for him to make the wildest accusations possible and to continue investigations after their shelf lives have expired. The longer these inquisitions last, the more questions remain up in the air, the more time the media spend covering the alleged scandal, the more TV time Issa receives on Fox and the more money flows into his campaign coffers.
Accordingly after investigations by the Accountability Review Board, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Republicans have not given up investigating Benghazi. If the hearings end and the coverage diminishes, the money will stop rolling in.
By: Ari Rabin-Havt, The New Republic, May 11, 2014
“GOP Hypocrisy”: Outraged Over Benghazi, Silent On Iraq
When I heard that the House of Representatives has established a select committee to investigate the attack on Benghazi that left several Americans dead in 2012, I couldn’t help but wonder what these same legislators might have done had Barack Obama been president in 2003, and had the audacity of George W. Bush to attack a sovereign country that had no relevant connection to the 9/11 attacks with the result that nearly 5,000 Americans and well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians (many of them women and children) perished. Had Obama’s war in Iraq also cost American taxpayers $1.7 trillion, with another $490 in veteran expenses (thus far)—with a total cost of $6 trillion projected—I have no doubt that a select committee would long ago have sent him to the Hague for trial as a war criminal.
It’s sad to think how in our fury over Benghazi we’ve almost forgotten a recent war that destroyed so many families, nearly bankrupted this country (and may yet), and led to a hugely destabilized Iraq that no longer serves as a buffer to Iran. Needless to say, this terrible war was pursued under false pretenses, with huge amounts of government corruption—Houston-based company KBR alone (a spinoff from Halliburton, where Dick Cheney was chairman and CEO before becoming vice president) racked up charges of nearly $40 billion during the war, making it (by far) the winner in the Iraq sweepstakes. In most banana republics, this would be cause for serious investigation; but not so much here, where our politicians (or their friends) are allowed to profit from armed invasions. Can it possibly be so that the U.S. Congress has ignored such obvious corruption while investigating over and over whether Susan Rice was given some edited “talking points” on Benghazi? Really?
I’ve spent a good deal of time in the Middle East over the years, lecturing at universities in places like Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Morocco. Soon after the invasion of Iraq, I was staying at a hotel in Amman, when into the hot tub by the pool stepped a tall American with a closely shaved head. He seemed about my age, and we struck up a cheerful conversation. I explained I was in the country at the behest of the Department of State, as a kind of cultural ambassador. He liked this, and told me he was en route to Baghdad. He was a general in the army, a career officer with a specialty in intelligence. I asked him what he thought would come of the Iraq war.
He said, without pausing, that in ten years the U.S. would be out of Iraq, as the American people would never support an expensive war in an obscure country longer than a decade. He was right about that. He guessed that thousands would die. And he was more or less right about that, though his figures were a bit low. He predicted the region would be dangerously destabilized, and that sooner or later Iran would assert control over the Shia majority who would almost certainly take control, repressing the Sunni minority, which Saddam Hussein had led to power. Let’s say he was absolutely on the mark here, as Nouri al-Malaki was hiding from Hussein in Iran before assuming high office in Iraq, where he now has become a kind of dictator, supported strongly by Grand Ayatolla Kazim al Haeri, one of the most influential Shia voices in Iran.
I remember this general shaking his head bitterly, noting that we had turned Iraq into a magnet for all sorts of dangerous elements, drawing al Qaeda into a region where they had only a minimal presence before the war. He also pointed out that large numbers of Iraqi citizens had been displaced, and that the number would increase. Indeed, some four million Iraqis have been run out of their homes, and these wandering families–he said with a wry smirk–would never become our allies in the region (to put it mildly).
A few days after this conversation in Amman, I was giving a lecture on American poetry at a university on the Iraqi-Jordan border, talking to perhaps 800 students about Robert Frost. Afterwards, a young man came up to me with Frost’s poems in hand. He could recite reams of Frost, Dickinson, Whitman, and Lowell, and he did so while I stood there, amazed. He had just completed a degree, he explained, in American poetry, and I asked him if he were going to become a teacher one day. He said, indeed, it was his fondest hope. “But first,” he said, “I am crossing the border into Iraq, to fight against the American invader.” My jaw dropped. “And why is this?” I wondered. He said, “You must understand that, for my generation, this is like the Spanish Civil War. I must join in the fight for freedom. I must join the equivalent of our Lincoln Brigade.”
These encounters in Jordan stick with me, a decade later. Now Iraq lies in ruins, and the U.S. has tens of thousands of enemies with a right to their anger. Meanwhile, Americans mourn the loss of so many brothers, fathers, uncles, sisters, mothers. Many veterans lie in hospitals across the nation, dazed and confused. This war that somehow never found its way onto the books continues to drag on our economy. So why haven’t we brought Bush and Cheney to Washington to answer some very hard questions under oath? Well, I suppose we’ve got Benghazi to worry about.
By: Jay Parini, Professor at Middlebury College; The Daily Beast, May 11, 2914
“Divorced From Reality”: Fewer Debates Won’t Save The GOP From Itself
Jonathan Martin reports in the New York Times that the RNC has moved aggressively to reduce the number of debates Republican candidates for president will have to endure.
The Republican National Committee moved Friday to seize control of the presidential primary debates in 2016, another step in a coordinated effort by the party establishment to reshape the nominating process.
Committee members overwhelmingly passed a measure that would penalize any presidential candidate who participated in a debate not sanctioned by the national party, by limiting their participation in subsequent committee-sanctioned forums.
The move represents the party’s effort to reduce the number of debates and assert control over how they are staged.
In making the case for adopting the new rule, party officials repeatedly criticized the moderators and format of the 2012 primary debates, appealing to the suspicions that many Republican activists have about the mainstream news media. “The liberal media doesn’t deserve to be in the driver’s seat,” said the committee’s chairman, Reince Priebus, addressing committee members here at their spring meeting.
This means that underdog candidates will have to weigh the advantages of appearing in unsanctioned forums versus the disadvantages of being blocked from sanctioned forums. Of course, that’s an easy decision if you haven’t been invited to the sanctioned forums in the first place.
It’s smart for the Republicans to do this, but their distrust of the mainstream media is just one more manifestation of their divorce from reality, which really took place no later than Sarah Palin’s appearance on the national stage.
When being asked what papers you read is too hard of a question, mistrust builds up in a hurry. If the Republicans are hoping to go through debate season without anyone ever puncturing their right-wing media fantasy bubble, these reforms are not going to be fully productive. And, in any case, if the candidates are cheering the death penalty and talking about the sanctity of marriage and how “severe” their conservatism is, and the wisdom of a self-deportation immigration policy then it won’t matter who the moderator happens to be.
It’s true that the Republicans had too many debates, but so did the Democrats. And it didn’t appear to hurt the Democrats at all. It made Obama a better debater.
It says something that the GOP wants to have a primary season without allowing anyone to watch or question what they are doing.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 10, 2014
“Obama’s Transformational Presidency”: He Should Be In The “All-Time-All-World Politics Hall Of Fame”
Is it safe to say that Barack Obama’s presidency will be remembered as the most consequential since Ronald Reagan’s — a presidency that “changed the trajectory of America” and “put us on a fundamentally different path”?
That was the audacious goal Obama set for himself during his 2008 campaign. Now is a useful time to assess his progress because the sixth year of any president’s tenure tends to be seen as a low point. Familiarity breeds impatience and frustration — among commentators, at least, whose narrow focus on which party is perceived as “winning” the day or the week misses the bigger picture.
In both the domestic and foreign spheres, Obama has had transformational impact. And there is more to come.
Reagan’s great achievement at home was to shift the political spectrum to the right. People tend to forget how radical his ideas once seemed. Tax cuts and massive deregulation were somehow going to produce more revenue? Wealth would inevitably trickle down and benefit the middle class and even the poor? It was not a Democrat but a fellow Republican, George H.W. Bush, who mocked the whole concept as “voodoo economics.”
That’s what I’d still call Reagan’s program, but he altered the political debate to such an extent that what once were fringe ideas came to be seen as centrist. By the time Obama took office, the combination of Reaganite policies — taken to extremes the Gipper might never have contemplated — and globalization had produced a nation where the rich were becoming obscenely rich and everyone else was struggling to tread water.
Obama’s impact has been to bring the words “fairness” and “equality” back into the political lexicon.
His biggest legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, is a landmark because it establishes the principle that health care should be considered a right, not a privilege. Democrats such as Harry Truman — and Republicans such as Richard Nixon — sought for decades to move the nation toward universal care. The fact that Obama succeeded where others failed is, in itself, a huge achievement.
Perhaps as important, however, is the fact that while Republicans still claim they want to repeal Obamacare, the debate within the party centers on how best to expand health insurance coverage. Returning to the way things were before the ACA is not an option.
Health care is part of a larger suite of issues on which Obama has swung the pendulum back to the left. He made the case, for example, that more regulation of the financial sector was needed. Republicans were forced to give way. The president has been hammering away in speeches about the need for an increase in the minimum wage. Republicans haven’t caved on this yet, but in the end they almost surely will because of widespread public support for it.
Whether Democrats lose the Senate or not, Obama will have a tough time getting significant legislation passed in his final two years. Please don’t tell me he simply needs to be a better politician, like Bill Clinton. Obama ran rings around both Clintons in 2008. A black man with the middle name Hussein who gets elected president twice should be in the all-time-all-world Politics Hall of Fame.
But he can still have transformational impact. Working through the Environmental Protection Agency, Obama can take major steps to limit carbon emissions. I don’t know whether he’ll go as far as I believe he should, but whatever he does will be, by definition, a big deal.
In foreign policy, Reagan applied pressure to the weak points of the Soviet empire and helped break it apart. Obama has taken on an equally big and important task: redefining the U.S. role in a vastly changed world.
Obama is not the first president to endorse multilateralism, but he may be the first to mean it. He agreed to use force in Libya only after France and Britain nominally took the lead. He has kept the NATO allies together in cautiously dealing with the Ukraine crisis. He has refused to be drawn into Syria because he is unsure whether intervention would make the situation better or worse.
The president realizes that even the most powerful nation on earth cannot mediate every dispute, take sides in all wars, alleviate all suffering. He acknowledges our limitations and more narrowly defines our national interest. The public approves, even if some foreign policy sages are apoplectic.
Obama can be reserved and introspective. Usually, however, I find him energized, confident, determined — and fully aware that he is shifting the ground.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 8, 2014
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