“What Jeb Bush’s ‘Gaffe’ On Women’s Health Really Tells Us”: Congress Picking Health Providers Women Can Use Based On Politics
It must have been at least a week since we’ve had a major campaign “gaffe” (really, who can keep track?), so into that breach Jeb Bush bravely stumbled yesterday, seeming to dismiss the notion of spending too much on women’s health care, when he said “I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.” Naturally, Hillary Clinton was all over him, guaranteeing that there would be many stories written about it.
As regular readers know, I take a broadly anti-gaffe position. The assumption of gaffe coverage, that a single extemporaneous remark reveals something fundamental and true that the candidate who uttered it was trying to hide until it slipped out, is ridiculous. If a candidate says something and then later explains that it wasn’t what he meant — as Bush has done — he ought to be forgiven, since all of us say things the wrong way all the time.
But there may still be something we can learn from any particular gaffe — in this case, about the dynamics of controversy and the way presidential candidates can get swept by their party’s currents to places they might or might not want to go.
Let’s start by putting Bush’s statement in context. In an appearance before the Southern Baptist Convention, Bush was asked whether, when it comes time to fund the government with a continuing resolution, Congress should “say, ‘Not one more red cent to Planned Parenthood’?” Here’s his response:
“We should, and the next president should defund Planned Parenthood. I have the benefit of having been governor, and we did defund Planned Parenthood when I was governor. We tried to create a culture of life across the board. The argument against this is, ‘Well, women’s health issues are going to be — you’re attacking, it’s a war on women, and you’re attacking women’s health issues.’ You could take dollar for dollar — although I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues — but if you took dollar for dollar, there are many extraordinarily fine organizations, community health organizations that exist, federally sponsored community health organizations to provide quality care for women on a wide variety of health issues. But abortion should not be funded by the government, any government in my mind.”
I shouldn’t have to point this out, but I guess I do: abortion is not funded by the government, by law. Saying “abortion should not be funded by the government” as an argument for forbidding women to get health services from Planned Parenthood is like saying that because some supermarkets sell beer, food stamps shouldn’t be able to to be used at supermarkets, even though food stamps can’t be used to buy beer. I promise you that Jeb Bush knows this perfectly well.
I went over this yesterday, but briefly: Most of the federal money Planned Parenthood gets is in the form of Medicaid reimbursements for health services, things like gynecological exams, cancer screening, the provision of contraception, and so on. So “defunding” the organization means telling women that they can’t go to Planned Parenthood clinics, but have to go somewhere else. Whether Congress ought to be picking and choosing the health care providers women can use based on politics is at the heart of this issue.
Now on the dollar amounts involved: For the record, between Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and other programs, the federal government spends well over a trillion dollars a year on health care, so it’s a little puzzling that Bush would find half a billion dollars for women’s health, or a fraction of a fraction of a percent of that total, to be some kind of extravagant amount. But maybe he was just thinking it’s a lot for one health care provider. Maybe he thinks Planned Parenthood is a smaller operation than it actually is. Maybe he has bought the Republican propaganda that Planned Parenthood is an abortion operation that does a few other things on the side, when the truth is that abortion services make up only three percent of their activities.
Whatever the case, this much is clear: Bush is now aboard the “defund Planned Parenthood” train in a serious way. This isn’t a new position for him, but he probably wasn’t planning on making a big deal out of it before some anti-choice activists released secretly recorded videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing the transfer of fetal tissue for research. Once that ball got rolling, talk among conservatives quickly turned to whether Republicans would actually shut down the government to defund the group. That’s forcing the presidential candidates to take a loud, emphatic position to show primary voters that they’re good conservatives. Bushs comments also seemed to endorse shutting down the government over this issue, but that’s not quite clear, so we’ll have to wait for him to get asked that question more specifically — which he probably will before long.
To be clear, I’m not saying Bush was forced by events to take a position he didn’t want to. He has a long and strong record of opposition to women’s reproductive rights in general and to Planned Parenthood in particular. But it does show that the campaign agenda isn’t in the candidates’ hands, and I’m sure there’s someone working for him who suspects that this could be a problem if he becomes the Republican nominee. After all, in 2012 President Obama hammered Mitt Romney (see this ad, for instance) for taking exactly this position on defunding Planned Parenthood, and ended up beating Romney among women by 11 points.
Bush’s position now is both similar and different from the one Romney found himself in four years ago. Romney had been a moderate Republican governor, then had to convince primary voters he was a hard-right conservative, then struggled to convince general election voters he wasn’t a hard-right conservative. Bush, on the other hand, was a genuinely hard-right governor who now has to convince primary voters of that truth, and many of those voters don’t yet believe it. But in the general election, he’ll face the same problem Romney did. And if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, you can bet there will be more ads like the one I linked to, where women look into the camera with a mixture of sadness and anger and describe how Jeb Bush just doesn’t get them and isn’t on their side.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, August 5, 2015
“They Really, Really, Really Don’t Get It”: ‘Heritage Not Hate’? Sorry, White South, They Go Together
On the grass where I sat and played with my friends and family in the Atlanta suburbs, the second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915. At the time I was none the wiser.
As a child, I would regularly retreat with my family and friends to the comfort of Stone Mountain Park to escape the city life. We’d climb the gigantic quartz rock mountain, and we’d lounge on the grass and gaze at the carvings of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis on the mountain’s face. I still have fond memories of watching the celebrated laser show held every Fourth of July at this Southern Mount Rushmore. It was an event that everyone wanted to attend: The fireworks are supposedly the best in the state!
Over the weekend, a pro-Confederate Flag rally was held at Stone Mountain Park and promoted the slogan “Heritage not Hate.” Yet despite the organizer’s best efforts, hatred showed up. A KKK member decided to attend and spew his racist bile, and the pro-Confederate Flag supporters promptly booed him and told him to leave. Likewise, anti-Confederate Flag supporters desecrated the flag, and the “Heritage not Hate” crowd asked them to leave or instructed other supporters to ignore them. Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson, an African American, even attended the event with the intent of learning more about the perspectives and values of some of his constituents.
“It challenges me to have a deeper appreciation for people who think differently than I,” said Johnson, as you hear someone yell “racist” in the background of the video. “We may think differently, but as long as we are not hating on each other I think we’re good.”
There were no arrests, and most in attendance said that the event was more peaceful than they anticipated. Yet the relative tranquility is nothing that merits excessive celebration. First of all, a quick browse through Facebook for Confederate Flag rallies will lead the visitor to a volume of hatred and bigotry that we would hope was confined to the past. But second, we’ve already condoned and accepted organized violence and hatred, as long as white Americans are the source, and this is a serious problem.
However, if progress is our aim, we should examine the inherently (yet possibly unintended) oppressive nature of the “Heritage not Hate” message.
The choice of Stone Mountain as the venue shows how celebrating “Heritage not Hate” is impossible. In 1915 the second Ku Klux Klan was founded at Stone Mountain. (The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by veterans of the Confederate Army and existed until 1870, when the federal government passed the Force Acts, which protected African-American liberties, and suppressed Klan activities.) A year later the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) began carving Jackson, Lee, and Davis on the face of the mountain. The UDC’s primary objective may have been to celebrate their forefathers, but to believe now that these women did not hold bigoted beliefs that would be frowned upon today is delusional. Southern heritage and hatred are so interwoven that entertaining the idea that the two can be separated borders on lunacy.
This rally purported that within the Southern context, heritage and hate can be separated, and that collectively we can celebrate a history of white supremacy while ignoring that history’s hatred of non-whites. There is no evidence that this argument holds any water, and it only represents a sad attempt at saving face and perpetuating a false, idyllic narrative of constant white ascension in the United States.
Yet the most offensive aspect of the “Heritage not Hate” argument is how it continues the social standard of limiting Southern black voices with the attempt of reducing us to irrelevancy. Southern culture arose when black Americans were not considered people, and the social norm has always been one in which blacks have had limited agency over their lives. This argument sustains this structure because a Southern heritage must remain about white existence, and nothing else.
I’m not white, and I am as Southern as they come, and in no way does my heritage incorporate a support of white supremacy, racism, or the purity of white existence. My family’s presence in the South has been documented to the late 1700s. I’m from Georgia, my mother’s family is from Charleston, South Carolina—I’ve discussed this ancestry in a previous Daily Beast piece—and my father’s family is from Alabama, but we know his ancestors were bought in Savannah, Georgia.
My family’s Southern heritage more closely echoes the shooting at Emanuel AME Church and the recent vandalism at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—where Martin Luther King Jr. was baptized and became co-pastor—where four Confederate battle flags were found on Thursday.
“This is the same as placing a swastika on the campus of a Jewish temple. Whatever the message was, clearly is not about heritage, but about hate,” said Raphael Warnock, senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. “It was disturbing and sickening, but unfortunately not terribly surprising. We’ve seen this kind of ugliness before.”
This is the Southern heritage that black Americans are acquainted with, but this perspective is missing in the “Heritage not Hate” argument. This absence perpetuates the continuation of a society and a narrative where black lives and black voices hold no agency and are pushed to the borders of irrelevancy. They encourage our expunging from the past and the present.
Southern black congressmen are welcomed to attend “Heritage not Hate” rallies at the location of the second founding of the KKK, but the idea is that they have an obligation to learn about the struggles and complexity of whiteness in the South. There is an assumption that no one in attendance wants to hear the narrative of a black Southerner because it is known that this story will contradict and erode the foundations of the rally and the entire movement.
I’m black and a Southerner and my heritage is one filled with hate—and not a hatred that emanates from my family. The hatred could have originated from the Confederacy, the KKK, and/or nondescript white Southerners who attacked and vandalized churches, spewed racial epithets, murdered black Americans or prevented us from finding housing and employment. All of these actions are spawned from the same notion of white supremacy, but with different names. They are constantly interwoven and inseparable from one another. This is not a discussion about semantics, but one about a society that has condoned hatred, terror, and black irrelevancy.
I’m not irrelevant. I do not terrorize those who are different than I am, and I do not hate the South, despite the horrors of Southern life inflicted upon black Americans. I’m as Southern as they come regardless of how comfortable that makes me feel.
By: Barrett Holmes Pitner, The Daily Beast, August 5, 2015
“Decades Later, GOP Still Sees Value In Sex Scandal”: The Party’s Tactic Is Almost Certainly A Mistake; People Just Don’t Care
There were plenty of interesting moments in last night’s forum in New Hampshire for the Republican presidential candidates, but by some accounts, this was the moment that sparked some chatter in the audience.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) missed the Planned Parenthood vote to attend the forum, where he turned heads with an attack on Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s honesty that referenced her husband’s affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky, while in office.
“I’m fluent in Clinton speak,” Graham said. “When Bill says ‘I didn’t have sex with that woman,’ he did….”
Graham, you’ll recall, was in the U.S. House during the Lewinsky scandal, and served as an “impeachment manager” when the Senate weighed whether to remove then-President Clinton from office.
What does the ’90s-era controversy have to do with the 2016 presidential race? Not a whole lot, but Lindsey Graham’s rhetoric wasn’t completely out of the blue, either. Stepping back, this seems to be an area of preoccupation for some of the Republican Party, despite the fact that the initial affair happened 20 years ago, and despite the fact that Bill Clinton won’t be on the ballot.
Just three weeks ago, when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) launched his presidential campaign, he was introduced by television personality Rachel Campos-Duffy, who told attendees, “Scott has been married to Tonette for 24 years; 24 is Bill Clinton’s favorite age.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), meanwhile, has made so many references to the Lewinsky story that it became a little creepy.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, meanwhile, told msnbc’s Andrea Mitchell last year that, as far as he’s concerned, the decades-old sex scandal is one of many issues that are “on the table.”
Is this really going to continue intermittently for the next 15 months?
Part of this may very well be a GOP strategy to make Bill Clinton less popular. The former president remains a very popular national figure, so much so that even some Republicans have been caught up in recent years in what Robert Schlesinger calls “Clinton Nostalgia Syndrome.”
It’s entirely possible that Republicans hope to bring Bill Clinton down a peg so that Hillary Clinton can’t fully exploit the familial advantage.
But if this is the strategy, it’s unlikely to work. Remember, Bill Clinton’s approval rating actually climbed as the Republicans’ impeachment crusade dragged on. The day the House GOP actually impeached him – Dec. 19, 1998 – Gallup put Clinton’s approval rating at a stunning 73%.
In the years since, Americans have had plenty of time to consider the Clinton presidency, and by most measures, he remains well liked and respected. As we’ve discussed before, the public is well aware of the sex scandal – people just don’t care. And unless the right has an idea as to how any of this is relevant to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, it’s not at all clear what voters are supposed to think of the entire line of criticism.
So, whether Republicans are coordinating their message on Lewinsky rhetoric or this is just an unfortunate coincidence, either way, the party’s tactic is almost certainly a mistake.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 4, 2015
“The Attitude Is The Thing”: Donald Trump, The Swaggering Blond Supervillain Of The GOP
Back in 1957, when Donald Trump and I were both in middle school, I used to have this running argument with my grandfather, Bill Connors. A retired railroad worker and a drinking man, Pop lived in Elizabethport, New Jersey, a couple of blocks from where the tracks running down Broadway ended at the harbor.
When visiting grandchildren proved too much for the old man, he’d retreat to his linoleum-floored front room and watch pro wrestling on his little black-and-white TV. As long as I’d keep still and fetch his beer, he’d let me stay. Sitting there with a spittoon at his feet and a cold one in his hand, Pop sometimes got agitated at the choreographed antics on the screen.
See, like millions of Republicans seemingly enchanted by Donald Trump’s updated impersonation of Dr. Jerry Graham, the swaggering blonde supervillain of the old World Wide Wrestling Federation, the old man believed the contests were for real.
If I wanted to keep watching—and I was already what Trump would call a HUGE fan of the Graham Brothers, Johnny Valentine, Ludwig von Krupp, and the other posturing bleach-blonde villains of the era—I had to be careful how I acted.
In his day, the old man had been a legendary brawler.
“Grandpa,” I’d say, “you’ve been in fights. A guy gets slammed over the head with a chair, it’s over.”
The old man would growl something about the cheating SOBs and the damn referees, as if my smart-aleck attitude would spoil all the fun. Back home, my pals and I had constructed our own wrestling ring, and actually dyed our hair to impersonate our bombastic heroes. We worked on our Atomic Elbow Smashes, Flying Drop Kicks, and personalized submission holds.
To us, WWWF wrestling was the most vivid thing on TV—totally unreal as an athletic event, but entirely dramatic in what it symbolized.
See, quite like Trump’s presidential campaign, 1950s-style pro-wrestling was all about ethnicity and race. I’d bet anything that young Donald Trump was also a fan of the broadcasts from Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, quite close to his childhood home. He appears to have adopted the entire Dr. Jerry Graham playbook as his signature style: the boasting, the strutting, the insults, and the elaborate blonde pompadour too!
Graham was the WWWF showman of the era, masterful at inciting crowds. He’d enter the ring for a tag-team match in a sequined cape accompanied by a mouthy manager and his “brother” Eddie, another bleached-blonde poser.
“I have the body that men fear and women adore,” Graham would say, posing with flexed biceps and his head thrown back haughtily. Never mind that he also had a watermelon belly and comparatively skinny legs to carry it on. The attitude was the thing. He exuded sheer superiority.
Why losers like “Golden Boy” Arnold Skaaland even showed up was beyond Graham’s power to imagine. Billed on TV as “the Jewish Champ,” who the Golden Boy beat to earn that title was unclear. (Skaaland was apparently of Norwegian descent. So what? “Bobo Brazil” came from Little Rock; Hans Schmidt, “The Teuton Terror,” was really Guy Larose of Quebec.)
Dr. Jerry Graham’s gimmick was that he supposedly had a PhD from the University of Arizona, which back then might as well have been on Saturn. See, also like Donald Trump, he was smarter than you.
What kind of doctorate, an announcer once asked?
“He’s a tree surgeon,” Graham’s manager said.
Often on those Sunnyside Gardens TV cards, some more formidable opponent such as Antonino Rocca, the barefoot “Bull of the Pampas,” would be in the audience. Indignant at the Graham Brothers’ dirty tricks, Rocca would leap into the ring to defend their hapless opponents, whereupon the previously supine referee would spring into action, restraining the hero while the bad guys went to work with beer pitchers, blades concealed in their trunks, whatever.
Theatrical blood flowed freely.
However, if you wanted to see Antonino Rocca get his revenge, you had to buy a ticket to Madison Square Garden. One of the great grudge matches of the era took place there in November 1957, when Dr. Graham and Dick the Bruiser took on Rocca and Édouard “The Flying Frenchman” Carpentier. A riot erupted. Hundreds of fans got arrested. Several cops got hurt by flying chairs. Order was restored only after Rocca stood on the ring ropes saluting the “Star Spangled Banner.” It made the front page of the New York Times.
So you bet I’m looking forward to Thursday’s Fox News debate, featuring Trump versus a bunch of Koch brothers marionettes, as he recently dubbed them. Would anybody be astonished to see The Donald enter wearing a sequined robe?
If he voted at all, my Grandfather Connors certainly never voted Republican. But he’d never have missed the show.
It’s sure to be HUGE!
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, August 5, 2015
“The GOP’s Recipe For Disaster”: A Highly Emotional, Politically Toxic And Take-No-Prisoners Agenda
Many people have noted that Republican candidates have completely abandoned the recommendation on reaching out to Hispanics about immigration reform in the autopsy they completed following their loss in the 2012 presidential election. But the autopsy also included statements like this:
When it comes to social issues, the Party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming.
If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues…
The RNC must improve its efforts to include female voters and promote women to leadership ranks within the committee. Additionally, when developing our Party’s message, women need to be part of this process to represent some of the unique concerns that female voters may have. There is growing unrest within the community of Republican women frustrated by the Party’s negative image among women, and the women who participated in our listening sessions contributed many constructive ideas of ways to improve our brand with women throughout the country and grow the ranks of influential female voices in the Republican Party.
The prospect of shutting down the federal government in an effort to defund Planned Parenthood is probably not one of the recommendations they heard from women in those listening sessions. And yet that is becoming a very real possibility.
Stan Collender at Forbes puts the odds of a government shutdown at 60% (up from his previous prediction of 40% ). Here’s his wonderfully descriptive way of saying what happened.
But the biggest change from last week in the odds of a government shutdown is because of the emergence of the one big thing that has been missing so far from the appropriations debate: a highly emotional, politically toxic and take-no-prisoners issue.
There are two ways that this is a political nightmare for Republicans. Previous to the emergence of the push to defund Planned Parenthood, they were making very little progress on putting together a budget to meet the October 1st deadline. Given that, the most likely scenario would have been the passage of a “continuing resolution” – which would have simply extended the current budget. That would have kept all their actual “governing” issues quiet.
But it’s not likely that will happen now. Instead, Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz – joined by the House Freedom Caucus – will do everything they can to cause a government shutdown over funding for Planned Parenthood. If they are successful, it will probably end the same way their similar effort did in 2013 over defunding Obamacare. That means that Boehner and McConnell will have to negotiate with Democrats on a budget – likely a continuing resolution. All Republicans will gain in the process is having to shoulder the responsibility for causing another government shutdown and the chaos that ensued. The one difference this time is that they now control both Houses of Congress (in 2013 Democrats controlled the Senate).
But this will also be a nightmare for Republicans when it comes to the presidential election. Simply note that last night the front-runner in that contest right now – Donald Trump – declared his support for a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood. Any candidate who had doubts about whether or not a government shutdown would be good for their campaign will now have to weigh in with that in mind.
We’ve already seen one example of a candidate making a mess of that when, in commenting about Planned Parenthood funding, Jeb Bush said yesterday that he was “not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.” His campaign pretty immediately tried to walk that one back. Overall it’s very likely that, in order to win the GOP primary, these candidates will all wind up taking positions that their own autopsy suggested were one of the causes of their defeat in 2012.
The spectacle we’re now witnessing is that a candidate who is leading the field by polling at 20-25% with Republicans has insulted Mexican Americans, called for a government shutdown over funding for women’s health care, and – in the midst of the #BlackLivesMatter movement against police killings – suggested that the police don’t have enough power. And yet he is driving the Republican agenda on the campaign trail. According to their party’s own analysis, that is a recipe for disaster.
By: Nancy Le Tourneau, The Political Animal Blog, The Washington Mnnthly, August 5, 2015
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