“It Takes A Party”: Personality-Based Political Analysis Is Always A Dubious Venture
So Hillary Clinton is officially running, to nobody’s surprise. And you know what’s coming: endless attempts to psychoanalyze the candidate, endless attempts to read significance into what she says or doesn’t say about President Obama, endless thumb-sucking about her “positioning” on this or that issue.
Please pay no attention. Personality-based political analysis is always a dubious venture — in my experience, pundits are terrible judges of character. Those old enough to remember the 2000 election may also remember how we were assured that George W. Bush was a nice, affable fellow who would pursue moderate, bipartisan policies.
In any case, there has never been a time in American history when the alleged personal traits of candidates mattered less. As we head into 2016, each party is quite unified on major policy issues — and these unified positions are very far from each other. The huge, substantive gulf between the parties will be reflected in the policy positions of whomever they nominate, and will almost surely be reflected in the actual policies adopted by whoever wins.
For example, any Democrat would, if elected, seek to maintain the basic U.S. social insurance programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — in essentially their current form, while also preserving and extending the Affordable Care Act. Any Republican would seek to destroy Obamacare, make deep cuts in Medicaid, and probably try to convert Medicare into a voucher system.
Any Democrat would retain the tax hikes on high-income Americans that went into effect in 2013, and possibly seek more. Any Republican would try to cut taxes on the wealthy — House Republicans plan to vote next week to repeal the estate tax — while slashing programs that aid low-income families.
Any Democrat would try to preserve the 2010 financial reform, which has recently been looking much more effective than critics suggested. Any Republican would seek to roll it back, eliminating both consumer protection and the extra regulation applied to large, “systemically important” financial institutions.
And any Democrat would try to move forward on climate policy, through executive action if necessary, while any Republican — whether or not he is an outright climate-science denialist — would block efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
How did the parties get this far apart? Political scientists suggest that it has a lot to do with income inequality. As the wealthy grow richer compared with everyone else, their policy preferences have moved to the right — and they have pulled the Republican Party ever further in their direction. Meanwhile, the influence of big money on Democrats has at least eroded a bit, now that Wall Street, furious over regulations and modest tax hikes, has deserted the party en masse. The result is a level of political polarization not seen since the Civil War.
Now, some people won’t want to acknowledge that the choices in the 2016 election are as stark as I’ve asserted. Political commentators who specialize in covering personalities rather than issues will balk at the assertion that their alleged area of expertise matters not at all. Self-proclaimed centrists will look for a middle ground that doesn’t actually exist. And as a result, we’ll hear many assertions that the candidates don’t really mean what they say. There will, however, be an asymmetry in the way this supposed gap between rhetoric and real views is presented.
On one side, suppose that Ms. Clinton is indeed the Democratic nominee. If so, you can be sure that she’ll be accused, early and often, of insincerity, of not being the populist progressive she claims to be.
On the other side, suppose that the Republican nominee is a supposed moderate like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. In either case we’d be sure to hear many assertions from political pundits that the candidate doesn’t believe a lot of what he says. But in their cases this alleged insincerity would be presented as a virtue, not a vice — sure, Mr. Bush is saying crazy things about health care and climate change, but he doesn’t really mean it, and he’d be reasonable once in office. Just like his brother.
As you can probably tell, I’m dreading the next 18 months, which will be full of sound bites and fury, signifying nothing. O.K., I guess we might learn a few things — Where will Ms. Clinton come out on trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership? How much influence will Republican Fed-bashers exert? — but the differences between the parties are so clear and dramatic that it’s hard to see how anyone who has been paying attention could be undecided even now, or be induced to change his or her mind between now and the election.
One thing is for sure: American voters will be getting a real choice. May the best party win.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 15, 2015
“Searching Her Own Soul”: Hillary Clinton’s Evolution On Marriage Equality Shows How Change Happens, And Why Parties Matter
Over the last few days, Chris Geidner of Buzzfeed has been documenting Hillary Clinton’s evolution on the issue of same-sex marriage, an evolution that may now finally be complete. First Geidner posted some interesting documents from the 1990s showing Clinton and her husband explaining their opposition to marriage rights, then he got the Clinton campaign on record saying that she now hopes the Supreme Court will rule that there is a constitutional right to marriage for all Americans, which is actually a change from what she was saying just a year ago, when her position was that this was an issue best decided state by state.
So does this all tell us that Hillary Clinton is a chameleon willing to shift with the political winds, lacking in any moral core? Not really. Like every politician, she’ll tell you that her shift on this issue was a result of talking to people and searching her own soul, not some political calculation. If that’s true, then it mirrors how millions of Americans have changed their own minds. But even if it isn’t true, it doesn’t matter. She is where she is now, and if she becomes president, her policies will reflect her current position, whether it’s sincere or not. That’s how change happens.
We spend a lot of time in campaigns trying to figure out if politicians are honest or authentic or real, and one of the supposedly important data points in that assessment is whether they’ve changed their positions on any important issues. “Flip-floppers” are supposed to be feared and hated. But most of the time, that judgment is utterly irrelevant to what they would actually do in office.
For instance, few party nominees had in their history the kind of wholesale ideological reinvention that Mitt Romney went through. But what does that actually mean for the kind of president he would have been? Does anyone seriously believe that had he been elected, Romney would have flipped back to becoming a moderate Republican, just because deep down he’s a flip-flopper? Of course he wouldn’t have. Romney changed when his sights moved from liberal Massachusetts to the national stage, which also happened during a period when his party became more conservative. He would have governed as the conservative he became.
When public opinion on an important issue is in flux, politicians are emphatic followers. They figure out what’s happening, particularly within their own party, and then accommodate themselves to that change. It often looks like they’re leading when what they’re actually doing is taking the change in sentiment that has occurred and translating it into policy change. For instance, Barack Obama has taken a number of steps to expand gay rights, like ending the ban on gays serving in the military and pushing the Supreme Court to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act. But he did all that after public opinion demanded it, not before.
In the end, what’s in a politician’s heart may be interesting to understand, but it doesn’t make much of a practical difference. Does it matter that Lyndon Johnson was personally a racist who spent his early career as a segregationist? No, it doesn’t: When his own party and the American public more broadly moved to support civil rights for African Americans, he passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and became an advocate for equality.
It’s possible that Hillary Clinton believed in marriage equality all along, but didn’t have the courage to advocate it publicly until she finally did so in 2013. Or maybe every shift in her public stance was a perfectly accurate reflection of her views at that moment. Either way, now that the Democratic Party is firmly in support of marriage equality for everyone in every state, that position is going to guide her if she wins.
And let’s not forget that almost every major Republican politician has gone through their own evolution on this issue as well. The first time it was a major issue in a presidential race, in 2004, Republicans advocated a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage everywhere. Most of them even opposed civil unions. But today, the opinion supported by every presidential contender who has been explicit on the topic is that the decision should be left up to the states, meaning it’s OK with them if some states have marriage equality while others don’t. A few do advocate a constitutional amendment—but not one to ban same-sex marriage nationwide, just one to preserve the ability of individual states to ban it if they choose.
That’s where the Republican Party is now, so that’s what the next Republican president’s policies will reflect. Until they evolve again.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, April 16, 2015
“Florida’s Rick Scott Files Bizarre New ACA Lawsuit”: Scott Only Wants A Check ‘That Doesn’t Have Obamacare Cooties’
It was just last week when Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) completed a rarely seen flip-flop-flip, denouncing Medicaid expansion, then embracing it, and then condemning it. The consequences matter: 800,000 low-income Floridians were poised to have access to medical care, but they’ll now go without.
And while the governor’s decision seemed like the end of the story, it was actually the start of a more ridiculous turn of events.
Republican Gov. Rick Scott announced Thursday that he will sue the federal government for allegedly coercing Florida to expand Medicaid.
“It is appalling that President Obama would cut off federal healthcare dollars to Florida in an effort to force our state further into Obamacare,” Scott said in a statement.
By late yesterday, the far-right governor was reduced to comparing the White House to the mafia. “This is the Sopranos,” Scott said. “[Administration officials] are using bullying tactics to attack our state. It’s wrong. It’s outrageous they are doing this.”
This is actually one of the more amazing political fights in the country right now, and it’s worth appreciating why.
Back in 2006, the Bush/Cheney administration created a Medicaid pilot project intended to provide funds to help hospitals treat the uninsured. The policy was called “Low Income Pools” (LIP) and Florida received some money through the initiative.
Not surprisingly, the Affordable Care Act made the LIP project unnecessary, and began phasing out the policy.
In Florida, Scott seized on this in the most bizarre way possible – if federal officials are willing to scrap LIP funding, the governor said, then maybe they won’t fund Medicaid. The Republican found a convenient excuse to reject billions in federal funds and a lifeline to 800,000 of his struggling constituents.
Yesterday, the governor took this one step further, announcing a lawsuit to force Washington to give Florida federal funds for a program that will no longer exist. Scott wants money from the Obama administration to help Floridians (through LIP), but at the same time, he also doesn’t want money from the Obama administration to help Floridians (through the ACA).
Joan McCarter joked that Scott only wants a check “that doesn’t have Obamacare cooties.” Greg Sargent added that the governor could very easily clean up this mess by re-embracing Medicaid expansion through the ACA and simply claiming “it isn’t Obamacare.”
Even the Republican president of the Florida state Senate acknowledged yesterday that Scott’s lawsuit doesn’t make any sense
The bottom line in this little farce is that Rick Scott is going to extraordinary lengths – embracing and rejecting money, pitting the GOP-led state House against the GOP-led state Senate, dividing his allies, ignoring the needs of hundreds of thousands of his constituents, undermining his own state budget, even turning down tax cuts – because he finds it necessary to be against “Obamacare.” There’s no real substance to any of this, so much as there’s a partisan principle that the Republican governor is choosing to put at the top of his priority list.
The consequences are predictably absurd.
Brian Beutler’s take on this is exactly right: Scott is “suing the federal government to bail him out of a self-made crisis.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 17, 2015
“An Attack On Retired Poor And Middle-Class People”: The Real Reason Social Security Is The Third Rail Of American Politics
Chris Christie still harbors hopes of becoming the Republican nominee for president, and in search of a way to convince conservatives that he’s one of them—and reinforce the idea that he’s a bold truth-teller who doesn’t care whose feathers he ruffles, and you might not agree with him but you’ll always know he’s telling it like it is—Christie has announced a plan to cut Social Security benefits. He would do it in two ways. First, he would means-test benefits, reducing them for those who have over $80,000 in income and phasing them out entirely past $200,000 in income. Second, he would raise the retirement age to 69 (it’s currently 66 and will soon rise to 67).
As Matt Yglesias explains, the cut in upper-income benefits is getting most of the attention, which works to Christie’s benefit because it sounds like his plan hurts rich people. But in fact, the number of people affected would be fairly small, while increasing the retirement age would be devastating to people of modest incomes. That’s particularly true of people who do manual labor, which in your late 60s becomes increasingly difficult. So Christie is proposing a plan that is actually an attack on retired poor and middle-class people, but it’s being described as an attack on the rich.
I should point out that even means-testing benefits can be a clever way to undermine the program as a whole. It eliminates the understanding that it’s a program for everyone and instead changes it to a program just for people of modest incomes, which then opens it up to further cuts and changes in the future. This is why most liberals oppose means-testing, even though it sounds like something they would support.
In any case, I want to return to this idea that Chris Christie is willing to tell the hard truths. Every story about Social Security mentions that it is the “third rail of American politics,” meaning you can’t touch it without being zapped. Anyone who would do so naturally deserves praise for their courage and for doing what’s right despite the risk. But why is touching Social Security dangerous?
It isn’t because of some magical incantation that FDR spoke over the bill as he signed it. It’s because, with the possible exception of Medicare, Social Security is the most successful and therefore beloved social program in American history. Before Social Security, aging was almost a guarantee of falling into poverty. If you’re below a certain age, you’ve probably never heard the cliché of old ladies eating cat food to survive, but at one time in America that was an actual thing.
But don’t we need to do something before Social Security goes broke? No. Social Security is not going broke, and if we want to fix the funding problems that we will confront a few decades from now there are relatively easy ways to do it; I discussed that years ago in this piece, and not much has changed since.
But back to Christie: Is it courageous to propose a policy change that would be tremendously cruel to millions of Americans? I guess it is in a way. But that doesn’t make it praiseworthy.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The Merican Prospect, April 16, 2015
“Demand A Higher Wage, People!”: The Status Quo Of Wage Injustice And Greed-Driven Inequality Relies On Our Complicity
Chasten Florence was on his lunch break when he decided to join a protest outside a McDonald’s in New York City on Wednesday. To be honest, Florence wasn’t really sure what he was helping protest. But as he lay his body down on the sidewalk at a die-in of low-wage workers demanding a $15 wage and a union, Florence simply explained, “These are my people.”
Didn’t Florence need to eat lunch? Sure, but he could spare five minutes. Working concrete on construction jobs, Florence earns more than $15 an hour and thinks everyone else should, too. “I don’t know how you can raise a household on less,” said Florence. And he’s right. You can’t.
On April 15, workers from McDonald’s, Walmart and other low-wage employers were joined by college students and adjunct faculty, domestic workers and leaders from the Black Lives Matter movement. In all, tens of thousands participated in protests in 200 cities across the United States to demand a $15 minimum wage and a union. The #FightFor15 is unconventional in that, instead of focusing on Congress to raise wages, workers and advocates are pressuring employers and also the general public—trying to foster awareness about dismal wages and working conditions and create a groundswell of support for change.
The nationwide protests were organized on Tax Day, April 15, because 4/15 is a short-hand for the campaign’s wage demands. But it was also meant to highlight the fact that the poverty wages paid by fast food restaurants and employers are so low that many low-wage workers are forced to rely on public assistance benefits to get by. In fact, almost three-quarters of Americans who depend on public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid are members of a family headed by someone who has a job.
In other words, in America today, many people are poor not because they don’t have a job but because they have a job that pays poverty wages. If the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as overall productivity since 1968, then the minimum wage would now be $18.50 an hour—instead of $7.25, the current federal minimum wage. In fact, adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum wage has actually dropped. In 2014 dollars, the 1968 minimum wage was equal to $9.54 an hour.
The stagnation of working class wages cannot be explained by a lack of hard work or skills. Low-wage workers have more education than their 1968 counterparts—and yet are still being paid less. And as this graph from Mother Jones shows, while worker productivity has steadily risen over the past several decades, overall wages have not grown at the same pace—even though the income of the top 1% has spiked dramatically.
As taxpayers, we foot the bill for greedy employers who pay poverty wages. For instance, because McDonald’s won’t pay its workers a living wage, taxpayers are paying $1.2 billion per year in food stamp costs and other public assistance just for McDonald’s workers alone. That’s like our tax dollars subsidizing McDonald’s profit—and greed.
Recently McDonald’s announced it would raise wages by $1.00 an hour for workers in its corporate-owned stores, which since most McDonald’s are franchise operations, means the raise will affect less than 10 percent of McDonald’s workers. Beth Schaffer, who works at a McDonald’s in Charleston, South Carolina, and came to New York for the protests, shrugged her shoulders about the raise. After all, every single McDonald’s in South Carolina is a franchise not covered by the $1.00-an-hour increase. “My customers show me more respect than my employer,” said Schaffer. As her tone made clear, that’s not saying much.
As I left the Fight for $15 protest, one of several staged throughout New York on Wednesday, Chasten Florence walked one way back to his construction site and I walked the other way. I passed the tony restaurants of New York’s Upper West Side, on what seemed like one of the first real days of spring, men and women in business suits sitting at tables on the sidewalk, taking in the sun. Most were probably spending more on lunch than the workers at the protest earn in a week. Myself included.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, with wealth and success and enjoying what comes with it. The question is, are we paying enough attention to the costs? I wondered whether the people eating their expensive lunches knew that the bussers taking their plates can barely afford to feed their own families, that the workers at their children’s daycares don’t have health insurance, that the cheap stuff they order conveniently on Amazon.com is definitely comes at a high cost to the workers who make and ship those goods.
The construction worker who joined the Fight for $15 protest didn’t know that much about the issues or the protest demands, either. But he was going out of his way to learn, and to be supportive. “These are my people,” he said. Yes, they’re all of our people. It’s time we all wake up, pay attention, be angry and stand with our fellow human beings to do something about it. The status quo of wage injustice and greed-driven inequality relies on our complicity, whether by silence or ignorance. But it cannot survive if we all stand up together and fight.
By: Sally Kohn,
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