“Rick Scott Gets An Earful In Florida”: Talking To Regular People Who Don’t Have A Script To Follow Could End Your Career
There’s a reason so many politicians embrace carefully managed, pre-scripted events: they never know what actual people are going to say. The spontaneity may be refreshing for the rest of us, but for politicians and their aides, it’s frustrating when the public goes “off-message.”
Almost exactly two years ago, this happened to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in Pennsylvania, when aides arranged for the candidate to chat with a group of regular folks about the economy. One voter said, “None of us like to pay more taxes, but sometimes that’s necessary.” Another added, “It’s a necessary evil.” “Right, right,” a third person said as the group nodded.
The Republican presidential hopeful didn’t do too many unscripted events after that.
This week, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) ran into similar trouble. The Republican governor, facing a tough re-election fight, is heavily invested in condemning the Affordable Care Act, so he visited a South Florida senior center for a roundtable chat with retirees he assumed would agree with him.
Oops.
The 20 seniors assembled for a roundtable with Scott at the Volen Center were largely content with their Medicare coverage and didn’t have negative stories to recount. And some praised Obamacare – a program that Scott frequently criticizes.
“I’m completely satisfied,” Harvey Eisen, 92, a West Boca resident, told Scott.
Eisen told the governor he wasn’t sure “if, as you say,” there are Obamacare-inspired cuts to Medicare. But even if there are, that would be OK. “I can’t expect that me as a senior citizen are going to get preferential treatment when other programs are also being cut.”
Ruthlyn Rubin, 66, of Boca Raton, told the governor that people who are too young for Medicare need the health coverage they get from Obamacare. If young people don’t have insurance, she said, everyone else ends up paying for their care when they get sick or injured and end up in the hospital.
Twisting the knife, Rubin added, “People were appalled at Social Security. They were appalled at Medicare when it came out. I think these major changes take some people aback. But I think we have to be careful not to just rely on the fact that we’re seniors and have an entitlement to certain things…. We’re all just sitting here taking it for granted that because we have Medicare we don’t want to lose one part of it. That’s wrong to me. I think we have to spread it around. This is the United States of America. It’s not the United States of senior citizens.”
The underlying point of Scott’s visit was to try to complain about Medicare Advantage reforms and how awful recent “cuts” must be for seniors. But when the governor asked one elderly woman if she’d seen any changes, she said, “Not really.” Another member of the roundtable said he’s “very happy” with the current coverage. A third person said he’s had “no problems.” A fourth said she and her husband are “very pleased.”
When Scott asked if they’ve found doctors opting out of Medicare, most said, “No.”
It was at this point that the governor probably decided he no longer wants to talk to regular people who don’t have a script to follow.
For the record, as Scott probably knows, these so-called “cuts” to Medicare Advantage aren’t really cuts to beneficiaries. At issue are Medicare cost-savings embraced by the Obama administration through the Affordable Care Act. The so-called “cuts” are changes to the way in which the government reimburses insurance companies, which have been overpaid in the Medicare Advantage program.
What’s more, congressional Republicans – not exactly a moderate bunch – have already endorsed and voted for these “cuts.”
It’s likely the governor understands this, but hopes to fool voters. If yesterday was any indication, his efforts aren’t going well.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 30, 2014
“So Much Stupid”: On Race, Meet Dumb And Dumberer
Oh, my Lord, where to begin?
You already know what this column is about. You know even though we are barely three sentences in. You knew before you saw the headline.
There are days in the opinion business when one story makes itself inevitable and unavoidable, one story sucks up all the air in the room. This is one of those times. One story.
Well … two, actually: the misadventures of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling.
Bundy, of course, is the Nevada rancher whose refusal to pay fees to allow his cattle to graze on public land made him a cause célèbre on the political right. They enthusiastically embraced his government-is-the-enemy ideology (Timothy McVeigh would be proud) and militia types flocked to his side, eager for an armed standoff.
Until the press conference where Bundy relieved himself of a few opinions regarding — ahem — “the Negro.”
“They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?”
And again: Where to begin? Black people “put” their sons in jail? Slavery promoted family life? And beg pardon, but what is free usage of federal land if not a government subsidy? There is so much stupid packed into those words you’d need a chisel to get it all out.
Small wonder that last week the extreme right treated its hero as the rats treated Titanic, shocked — simply shocked! — to learn that a guy who leads an army in refusing to recognize the existence of the federal government might be nuts.
Which brings us to Sterling, owner of the NBA team the Los Angeles Clippers. A leaked audiotape has Sterling telling a woman friend to stop publicizing her relationships with African-American people and bringing them to his games. Sterling also says of Clippers players: “I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars and houses. Who gives it to them?”
“Give.” Mind you, the man is talking about people who work for him.
So there you have it: frick and frack, the dumb and dumberer of American racial discourse, and predictably, dutifully, media figures, pundits and pols have come together to blow raspberries in their direction, to say all the right things in condemnation of them and their diarrhetic mouths. And yes, they deserve that. Still, there is something facile and dishonest in it, something that reeks of unearned righteousness and even moral cowardice.
The truth is, the idiocy of these men doesn’t mean a whole lot, doesn’t impact much beyond their immediate lives. We hyperventilate about it, yet somehow manage not to be overly concerned as black boys are funneled into prison, brown ones are required to show their papers, voting rights are interdicted, Fourth Amendment rights are abrogated and some guy has his job application round-filed when the hiring woman sees that his name is Malik.
We keep declaring our country cured of its birth defect of racial hatred. Indeed, that’s an article of faith on the political right.
It is only possible to think that so long as you don’t look too closely, so long as you are willing to ignore dirty deeds done largely out of sight and back of mind by collective hands — everyone guilty, so no one is. Then some guys who didn’t get the memo speak a little too stupidly a little too loudly and people condemn them and feel good about themselves for doing so.
But many of us don’t really understand what they purport to condemn. Otherwise, how could there be all this noise about that which doesn’t matter — and silence about that which does?
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, April 30, 2014
“The Rich, Still Different From You And Me”: We Still Treat Them As Though Their Feelings About Money Are Similar To Ours
When the news broke that Los Angeles Clippers owner and creepy racist misogynist billionaire Donald Sterling would be banned from the NBA for life (perhaps resulting in him selling the team) and fined $2.5 million, a lot of people probably said, “$2.5 million? The guy’s got a couple of billion dollars! Why not give him a fine that’ll hurt?”
Frankly, I think any fine at all is a little strange in this case. We usually think of fines as punishment for violations of some rule or law, not as a response to someone just being a horrible human being (though there could well be some clause in the the secret NBA owner bylaws about behavior that reflects poorly on the league). The ban, on the other hand, seems perfectly appropriate, even if when he sells the team he’ll net a few hundred million dollars on his original $12 million investment. But the fine—and the weird fact that he was about to get a “lifetime achievement award” from the NAACP for his contributions to the welfare of black people—remind us that although the super-rich have a fundamentally different relationship to money than the rest of us, we still treat them as though their feelings about money are similar to ours.
Here’s what I mean. Back in the day (and maybe still, I’m not sure), when the United Jewish Appeal was soliciting contributions, they used to tell people, “Give till it hurts.” The idea was that if your contributions hadn’t actually had an effect on your life that you could feel, you could still give a little more. But for someone like Sterling, it would be almost impossible to give till it hurts, whether it’s a contribution to the NAACP to get people off his back about those pesky discrimination lawsuits, or a fine from the NBA.
This reminded me of a memorial service I attended a few years ago with a few hundred other people for a billionaire who had just died. All the speakers discussed how moving and inspiring his generosity was, and he had indeed given away hundreds of millions of dollars to a variety of worthy causes. But all the encomiums to his extraordinary character as evidenced by his financial contributions had me shaking my head. He could have given away 99 percent of his fortune and still lived like a king. It wasn’t as though, when he signed a $10 million check, he said to himself, “Well, no going out to dinner this month.” He still had a bunch of homes, a staff to attend to his every need, and pretty much anything he wanted, even if he had parted with half his assets before he died.
To a billionaire, contributions that make people stagger with gratitude are meaningless, no different from tossing a quarter to a beggar. A billionaire who wanted to undertake a truly inspiring act of generosity would give away all but, say, $5 million of what they had. I don’t remember hearing of a single case in which someone did that. And as it happens, poor people actually donate a greater proportion of their income to charity on average than rich people do.
Of course, the NAACP wasn’t going to give Donald Sterling a lifetime achievement award because they were actually bowled over by his generosity and wanted his lifetime of service to inspire others, but because it’s good fundraising practice. When someone gives you a bunch of money, you have to flatter them, tell them how much you admire them, give them a handsome plaque. And lots of the super-rich are narcissistic or insecure enough that when they make a large contribution they want to see their names on the side of the building, so everyone knows how wonderful they are. Likewise, the NBA isn’t fining Sterling $2.5 million because that amount will make him reflect on what a jerk he is and lead to a change in his outlook on the common threads joining all of humanity, but because it sounds to the rest of us like a sizeable number, so they look like they’re serious about delivering a serious punishment. But Sterling won’t even feel it.
On the other hand, given that he is now one of the most (rightfully) hated men in America, he may have a slightly harder time finding women in their twenties who’ll agree to screw him if he buys them a car. Or at least we can hope.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 30, 2014
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