“The Insanity Started A Long Time Ago”: Overheated Talk Against The Government Has Come Back To Bite The GOP
Julian Zeilzer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, isn’t buying the handwringing we’re seeing from David Brooks and the National Review about the presidential candidacies of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. In a case that others have made, but perhaps not so thoroughly, he says: GOP Establishment Deserves Trump, Cruz.
Going back to Reagan’s embrace of the Moral Majority, the racism Lee Atwater infused into George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign and the fact that it was McCain who chose Palin to be his running mate in 2008, Zeilzer demonstrates how GOP presidential candidates laid the groundwork for what is happening today.
He also captures how Boehner and McConnell initially embraced the election of tea party candidates like Ted Cruz back in 2010.
In the House of Representatives, Republican leaders were more than welcoming to the tea party revolution that took hold in 2010 — until it no longer suited their purposes. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell welcomed the energy and enthusiasm that tea party activists brought to the fight against President Barack Obama.
While the activists might have pushed the boundaries of acceptable partisan compact with threats like allowing the government to go into default, the discipline as a voting block and willingness to stand up to an ambitious President helped, in the leadership’s minds, to revitalize the standing of the party. Or at least that’s what Boehner thought before he felt he had to leave.
Zeilzer points out that conservative media has also played a role – echoing the warnings of conservative David Frum.
I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination…If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.
Finally, Zeilzer notes that overheated talk against the government has come back to bite the GOP establishment.
At the heart of the Cruz and Trump campaign is an essential message that has been a central theme of conservatism in the post-World War II period: that Washington is never good and career politicians are without virtue.
Their anti-politics rhetoric comes directly out of the “conservative establishment” politics that formed in the 1970s and 1980s. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Reagan said.
Once again today, David Brooks is pleading with Republicans to “stay sane.” His supplications completely ignore the path the GOP took that led them to where they are today. As Zeilzer notes, “the alliance, the ideas, the rhetoric and the style have all come from the heart of Republican politics.” In other words, there’s no “staying” sane. That’s because the insanity started a very long time ago.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 26, 2016
“Utopian Fantasy?”: Bernie Sanders’s Single-Payer Health Care Plan Failed In Vermont
When Sen. Bernie Sanders regales his campaign crowds with a portrait of The Way Things Are Going to Be, his “Medicare for All” program takes center stage. In a Sanders administration, the candidate promises, every man, woman, and child in America will share in a government-run, government-funded health-care system.
But the single-payer system that Sanders is evangelizing isn’t just a figment of progressive utopian fantasies. Single-payer health care has already been tried—and failed—in Sanders’s home state of Vermont, where the proposal collapsed under its own weight last year before it was ever implemented.
Deciding why it failed in Vermont is key to whether you buy into the candidate’s promise to extend the program nationwide.
According to critics, from The New York Times’ Paul Krugman to USA Today’s editorial board, Sanders’s single-payer plan is something between a well-intentioned fool’s errand and a political pipe dream, an unrealistic idea that has been proven not to work in the senator’s own backyard.
But closer to home, activists say Vermont’s failure even to implement its plan for universal health care was a failing of political will, not the policy itself. In better hands, they say, the policy can still work. To know the difference, it’s important to understand how Vermont got so close to single-payer in the first place.
In 2011, the state’s Democrat-controlled legislature approved a government-run, government-financed health-care system for all Vermonters. The state’s new Democratic governor, Peter Shumlin, signed the bill into law after campaigning on a pledge to enact single-payer himself. A cost estimate of the program, known as Green Mountain Care, was ordered, but long delayed.
Elections came and went, including Shumlin’s own 2014 reelection, which was so close Vermont law required the final decision to go to the legislature after Shumlin failed to win a majority of the vote in November. As the state waited for the legislature to take up the election results, Shumlin announced that he would not pursue single payer after all when the long-awaited financial projections showed “the promise and the peril” of a single-payer system. The promise, of course, was a chance to give nearly every Vermonter reliable access to quality health care.
But the very real peril came in the cost for the program, an estimated $4.3 billion a year, almost the size of the state’s entire $4.9 billion budget. To make up for the $2 billion shortfall, taxes would have to go up, a lot. Businesses would see an 11.5 percent payroll tax increase, on top of whatever they chose to provide for employee health care, while individual income taxes could jump by up to 9 percent. The report recommended against moving forward “due to the economic shock and transition issues,” and Shumlin agreed.
“I wanted to fix this at the state level. And I thought we could,” Shumlin said in a statement issued with the financial report. But he called implementing single-payer health care in 2015 “unwise and untenable.”
Despite the ominous budget projections at the time, single-payer advocates now say they believe Shumlin’s decision was purely political.
“Right up to the last gubernatorial election, Gov. Shumlin was saying he was going to do everything he could to make single-payer health care a reality in the state. That was quite frankly why we didn’t run a candidate against him,” said Kelly Mangan, the executive director of the Vermont Progressive Party. “Almost immediately, he turned around and said, ‘Oh, yeah, we can’t afford single-payer health care. It’s not going to happen.”
Mangan described single-payer advocates today as “fatigued and very disheartened.” As Vermont’s state budget continues to be squeezed by Medicaid costs, she said the possibility of returning to the issue any time soon seems unlikely. She also worries that Vermont’s example will damage future prospects nationally. “I think it will have a ripple effect. People will use it as an excuse to do nothing by saying, ‘If they couldn’t do it there, then it can’t be done,’” she said.
Dr. Gerald Friedman, an economics professor at UMass-Amherst and a part-time Vermonter, has worked with Sanders to develop and calculate the cost of his plan and says the budget wasn’t the problem for the Vermont proposal. The governor was the problem.
“On the economics, it would have been cheaper, but the governor just lost the political will,” Friedman said.
But the professor acknowledged that any national health care proposal from Sanders would face the same political headwinds that Shumlin ran into. “It’s going to be a tough road, and Vermont is a lesson,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that it happened the way it did.”
Even with the Vermont debacle in the rearview mirror and Friedman’s own projections that Sanders’s “Medicare for All” would cost north of $14 trillion over 10 years, the politics of single-payer are still working for Sanders. The latest Kaiser poll showed 81 percent of Democrats favor a “Medicare for All” proposal, while 60 percent of independents favor it, too.
Clinton has dismissed Sanders’s proposal as unrealistic and a danger to the reforms that have already been enacted through the Affordable Care Act. That argument seems to be falling flat in New Hampshire, where the latest WMUR poll showed Sanders trouncing Clinton by nearly 30 points. But at least Clinton can count on some support when the campaign gets to Vermont. Gov. Shumlin, who will not run for reelection, has announced he’s with her.
By: Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast, January 25, 2016
“It Ain’t Gonna Happen”: No, There Won’t Be A Major Third-Party Candidacy In 2016 — From Bloomberg Or Anyone Else
Let’s face it: we in the media are suckers for any kind of political story that offers something unpredictable. And like clockwork, every four years someone suggests that there might be a viable third-party presidential candidacy in the offing, spurring legions of reporters and commentators to lick their lips in anticipation. At the moment the attention is focused on former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, but there is also discussion of whether conservatives might rally around a third-party candidate if Donald Trump, no true conservative he, becomes the GOP nominee.
I have some bad news: It ain’t gonna happen.
Not only is Bloomberg not going to run, but if Trump wins the Republican nomination, every last prominent Republican will line up behind him like good soldiers.
Let’s start with Bloomberg. Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that he is thinking about running because he’s distressed at the thought of a race between the vulgarian Donald Trump and the socialistic Bernie Sanders. They made it sound like he’s really on his way to a bid:
Mr. Bloomberg, 73, has already taken concrete steps toward a possible campaign, and has indicated to friends and allies that he would be willing to spend at least $1 billion of his fortune on it, according to people briefed on his deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss his plans. He has set a deadline for making a final decision in early March, the latest point at which advisers believe Mr. Bloomberg could enter the race and still qualify to appear as an independent candidate on the ballot in all 50 states.
He has retained a consultant to help him explore getting his name on those ballots, and his aides have done a detailed study of past third-party bids. Mr. Bloomberg commissioned a poll in December to see how he might fare against Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton, and he intends to conduct another round of polling after the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 9 to gauge whether there is indeed an opening for him, according to two people familiar with his intentions.
You might read that and say, Holy cow, he’s doing it! But the thing about having $36.5 billion is that you can explore lots of things without being serious about them. Bloomberg has political consultants who work for him, and he can open the paper one morning, decide he’s troubled by today’s news, then pick up the phone and say to one of those consultants, “Write me up a report on what it would take for me to run for president.” Then they go off and do a poll, conduct a little research on ballot access, and put together a “plan” in a couple of weeks. Maybe it costs $100,000 all told to satisfy the boss’s curiosity, but that’s nothing to Bloomberg.
And he’s done it before. Here’s an almost identical article in the New York Times from eight years ago, about how he was laying the groundwork for a third-party run. Practically the only thing that’s different is the date.
You might say, “Hey, nobody thought Trump was going to run, either!” Which is true. But Trump found an opening in one of the two parties, and Bloomberg hasn’t suggested running as a Democrat. While I’m sure Bloomberg thinks he’d be an excellent president, he’s also smart enough to know that unlike in New York, where he could swamp the field with money and circumvent the Democratic Party’s dominance in the city, running a national third-party campaign is a different matter altogether.
It’s no accident that there hasn’t been a successful third-party presidential candidacy in modern American history. The closest anyone came was Teddy Roosevelt’s run in 1912, when he got 27 percent of the vote. In 1992, Ross Perot managed 19 percent of the vote — and zero votes in the Electoral College.
Perot offers us a hint as to why the talk from some Republicans about a third-party run is just that, talk. It has come most notably from Bill Kristol, who has been toying with the idea in public for a couple of months now, on the theory that if Donald Trump is the nominee, true conservatives would simply have to find an ideologically true standard-bearer to promote. Given the horror many conservatives are expressing at the prospect of a Trump nomination, you might be tempted to think they’d sign on to any conservative who decided to run.
But don’t believe it for a second. Are those conservatives heartfelt in their anguish about Trump being the GOP nominee? Absolutely. It’s not just that he’d probably lose, it’s that he obviously has no commitment to their ideals; he’s just saying whatever his current audience wants to hear, and once that audience changes (as in a general election), he’ll say completely different things. And who knows how he’d actually govern.
And yet, if he is the nominee, Republicans will be faced with a choice. They could launch a third-party bid, but that would almost certainly guarantee that the Democratic nominee would win. Republicans long ago convinced themselves that Perot delivered the 1992 election to Bill Clinton (even though the evidence makes clear that Perot took votes equally from Bush and Clinton, who won easily and would have done so with or without Perot in the race), so they’d be extremely skittish about repeating that outcome.
Far more importantly, if they have to choose between supporting their party’s nominee and mounting an almost certainly doomed third-party run, their feelings about Donald Trump will be far less critical than their feelings about the Democratic nominee, who will probably be Hillary Clinton — for whom they’ve nurtured a passionate loathing for two and a half decades now. We live in an era of “negative partisanship,” in which people’s hatred for the other party has become more central to their political identity than their love for their own party. Faced with the imminent possibility of Clinton sitting in the Oval Office, virtually every Republican will race to get behind Trump. Those now writing articles about what a nightmare a Trump nomination would be will be writing articles touting his virtues.
They won’t be dissembling — rather, they’ll just be trying to make the best of a bad situation. Once the point of reference is not a more preferable Republican but Hillary Clinton, Trump will look to them like a hero in the making. So as fun as a three-way presidential race in the fall might be, we in the media won’t be so fortunate. But don’t worry — it’s still going to be an interesting election.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, January 25, 2016
“A Master Class In Surrealist Poetry”: Sarah Palin Takes The GOP Campaign To A New Low
I love poetic justice. This wild and wacky Republican presidential campaign deserved Sarah Palin, and now it’s got her.
Palin’s endorsement of front-runner Donald Trump at an Iowa rally this week was a master class in surrealist poetry. Geniuses of the Dada movement would have been humbled by her deconstruction of the language and her obliteration of the bourgeois concept we call logic.
The GOP candidates have been competing to see who can spew the most nonsense, but they’ll never top Palin. Not when she offers gems such as this: “Believe me on this. And the proof of this? Look what’s happening today. Our own GOP machine, the establishment, they who would assemble the political landscape, they’re attacking their own front-runner. . . . They are so busted, the way that this thing works.”
Or this further excoriation of the party leadership: “And now, some of them even whispering, they’re ready to throw in for Hillary [Clinton] over Trump because they can’t afford to see the status quo go. Otherwise, they won’t be able to be slurping off the gravy train that’s been feeding them all these years.”
Or this elaboration of the same theme: “How ’bout the rest of us? Right-wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns, our God, and our religions, and our Constitution. Tell us that we’re not red enough? Yeah, coming from the establishment. Right.”
Or this exercise in random word choice: “Well, and then, funny, ha ha, not funny, but now, what they’re doing is wailing, ‘Well, Trump and his, uh, uh, uh, Trumpeters, they’re not conservative enough.’ ”
Actually, I think the wailing from Republican grandees is more of a wordless primal scream. Palin claimed that “media heads are spinning” at her decision to campaign for Trump, but it would be more accurate to say that “media feet are dancing” at having such a rich source of new material.
I could quote Palin all day, but there are two substantive points about her dazzling intervention that I feel duty-bound to make. The first is political: Someday we might look back and say she was the one who pushed Trump over the top to win the nomination.
That’s not a promise, just a possibility. But Trump’s campaign draws strength from its own momentum. If he can somehow manage to sweep the early primary states, “outsider” support may coalesce behind him — and the establishment candidates may be too shellshocked to effectively respond.
Polls show Trump holding big leads in New Hampshire and South Carolina. But first comes Iowa, where he’s running neck and neck with Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.). Given his overall strength, Trump could finish second in the Iowa caucuses and still capture the nomination. A win there, however, could boost his support in the subsequent contests and make it much harder for anyone to stop him.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 21, 2016
“Trump’s Conversation With God”: I’m A Great, Great Christian. Got A Bible And Everything!
An absolutely true news item: In an interview with CNN, Donald Trump said, “I have a very great relationship with God.”
God responds: What relationship? I haven’t heard from you in, like, 40 years.
Trump: Look, I’ve been busy becoming fabulously successful. Making business deals, banking billions of dollars, hosting my top-rated reality show, buying and selling beauty pageants, marrying and divorcing amazingly gorgeous women.
My life’s fantastic, almost as good as Yours!
God: And now you’re running for president of the United States.
Trump: That’s right, and I’m totally killing it in the polls! Everybody loves me, especially the evangelicals.
God: You have got to be kidding.
Trump: Don’t act so shocked. Who else could these people vote for? Huckabee’s a total zero, Cruz is a nasty Canadian, Jeb is a low-energy loser, and Rubio’s a punk.
They’re pathetic, and I say that with all due respect.
God: And this is how you think a devout Christian talks?
Trump: Hey, I’m a great, great Christian. Got a Bible and everything!
God: Yeah, I heard. The one your mother supposedly gave you.
Trump: I carry it everywhere. Actually, somebody on my staff carries it for me. But it’s an unbelievably great, great Bible. I spend all my spare time on the jet reading it.
God: I saw the YouTube clip from Liberty University. ‘Two Corinthians’? Really?
Trump: Two Corinthians, Second Corinthians, what’s the big deal? Those kids knew what I meant.
God: They were laughing, Donald.
Trump: Sure, because they love me. Everybody loves me. Have you seen the crowds at my rallies? Unbelievable! Ten thousand people showed up in Pensacola!
God: Ten thousand white people. I was there.
Trump: Look, we ran out of tickets for the others. It happens.
That doesn’t mean African-Americans don’t love me. Hispanics love me, too. Even Muslims love me, and by that I mean the good Muslims, which I assume some of them are.
God: I’m just curious. Are you remotely familiar with the concept of tolerance? Compassion? Humility?
Trump: That’s the problem.
We’re too nice. Why do you think America is such a disaster? We’ve gotta stop being so nice. The rest of the world thinks we’re weak.
Your son Jesus, with all due respect — he was way too nice.
God: Excuse me?
Trump: In one of those gospel blogs, I forget which, they quote Jesus saying, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Seriously? Because, frankly, my neighbors in Palm Beach are a pain in the a–. And, even if they weren’t, I couldn’t love anybody as much as I love myself.
God: That was Matthew, FYI.
Trump: McConaughey? Where? He’s amazing. Did you see “The Dallas Buyer’s Club?”
God: No, I’m talking about the disciple Matthew. That’s the gospel you were citing. He was one of the original evangelicals.
Trump: I knew that. Everybody knows that. Matthew was a great, great disciple. He would have been absolutely fantastic on The Apprentice.
God: Know what? We’re done here.
Trump: What I was saying before? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge, huge fan of Jesus. An incredible guy, and a helluva carpenter.
If he ever comes back, I’d hire him in a heartbeat. Tell him I said so.
God: I’m sure he’ll be thrilled.
Trump: But, frankly, all that stuff he preached about turning the other cheek, not hating your enemies — it didn’t work out so great for him, did it?
That’s my point. Being nice doesn’t cut it. Being nice gets you crucified.
God: Do me a favor, Donald — quit dropping my name in your speeches and interviews. Just knock it off.
Trump: I will, I will. Right after the South Carolina primary.
God: No, stop it right now.
Trump: But what about Iowa? And New Hampshire? Please, Lord — can I call you Lord? — I really need that Christian vote.
God: I still can’t believe they’re buying this lame act.
Trump: Oh, they’re totally eating it up. Amazing, right?
God: The Bible’s not supposed to be a political prop. Put it away.
Trump: Oh, come on. You know how long it took my staff to even find that thing? How many of my warehouses they had to search?
I’ll make you a deal. If You let me keep using the Bible in my campaign appearances, just for a few more weeks, I promise not to quote from it.
No more Corinthians. No more McConaugheys.
God (sighing): See you in church, Donald. You can Google the directions.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, January 25, 2016
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