“The Republican Party Can’t Escape Its Past”: Trapped At The Center Of A Tug-Of-War Between Its Own Ego And The Conservative Id
A lot can happen through three hours of political debate, enough to carry multiple headlines and just as many different analytical perspectives. Even before the main-stage debate Thursday night, a consensus gelled that Carly Florina had distinguished herself among the also-rans, that Rick Perry continues to struggle to communicate extemporaneously, and that most of the seven candidates who didn’t make the top 10 didn’t make it for a reason.
But nothing that any individual candidate—including Donald Trump—said or did tonight stuck out as more significant than the thematic fact that Republicans are still tripping over the long tail of the 2012 election.
Part of what makes this process so awkward for them is that the GOP never really reached consensus about what it needed to do differently in 2016 to avoid the result it achieved four years ago. Some of them think the biggest error Republicans committed in the last election was racing to a rightmost position on immigration at the beck and call of xenophobes. Others think it was Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s breezy willingness to disparage “takers”—and Romney’s statements about the 47 percent specifically. Still more thought the party’s only error was nominating a candidate whom conservatives didn’t instinctively trust.
Every single opposing viewpoint in this dispute is represented in the current primary—and among the Fox News moderators and other conservative journalists who have the greatest access to the candidates—and the result is deeply unstable equilibrium between factions. The Republican Party is trapped at the center of a tug-of-war between its own ego and the conservative id.
Donald Trump personifies this dynamic more than any other candidate. Surrounded by Republicans who vowed not to run independent candidacies, he refused to take the same pledge, making explicit reference to the leverage his threat gives him against a cowering GOP establishment. He swatted away questions about his crude sexism by attacking political correctness and reiterated his view that the government of Mexico is sending rapists and murderers to the United States. And nobody was willing (or able) to take issue with any of the substantive claims he made, except insofar as he represented himself as a true Republican.
This isn’t the issue that most Republican Party leaders wanted center stage in the first 2016 primary debate. And it’s arguably only there because the party retreated from its tepid commitment to pass an immigration bill in 2013, and chose instead to pander to the same nativists, while surrendering their power to influence policy.
During the undercard debate, one moderator structured a question about labor market weakness in America around the premise that too many people are choosing to idle about on the dole rather than work for a living. She clearly believed everything Romney said in the 47 percent video and wanted the dark horse candidates to vouchsafe all of it. To their modest credit, none of them took the bait, exactly. They framed the issue instead as a problem with government spending fostering dependency—a slightly less dismissive, slightly more infantilizing way of describing the same, mostly imagined phenomenon. Certainly many of them still see the issue exactly the same way they did four years ago. And though nobody used the most damaging possible language in this instance, the 47 percent idea, and the fierce certainty many Republicans have that Romney was exactly right about it, litters the conservative mindshare like unexploded ordnance.
What you saw tonight—and the vastness of the field made this tension more vivid—are several candidates who want to hew to a new line of some kind, only to be pulled back, like the Godfather, into a morass they were trying to escape.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, August 6, 2015
“Zombies Against Medicare”: The Right Has Never Abandoned Its Dream Of Killing The Program
Medicare turns 50 this week, and it has been a very good half-century. Before the program went into effect, Ronald Reagan warned that it would destroy American freedom; it didn’t, as far as anyone can tell. What it did do was provide a huge improvement in financial security for seniors and their families, and in many cases it has literally been a lifesaver as well.
But the right has never abandoned its dream of killing the program. So it’s really no surprise that Jeb Bush recently declared that while he wants to let those already on Medicare keep their benefits, “We need to figure out a way to phase out this program for others.”
What is somewhat surprising, however, is the argument he chose to use, which might have sounded plausible five years ago, but now looks completely out of touch. In this, as in other spheres, Mr. Bush often seems like a Rip Van Winkle who slept through everything that has happened since he left the governor’s office — after all, he’s still boasting about Florida’s housing-bubble boom.
Actually, before I get to Mr. Bush’s argument, I guess I need to acknowledge that a Bush spokesman claims that the candidate wasn’t actually calling for an end to Medicare, he was just talking about things like raising the age of eligibility. There are two things to say about this claim. First, it’s clearly false: in context, Mr. Bush was obviously talking about converting Medicare into a voucher system, along the lines proposed by Paul Ryan.
And second, while raising the Medicare age has long been a favorite idea of Washington’s Very Serious People, a couple of years ago the Congressional Budget Office did a careful study and discovered that it would hardly save any money. That is, at this point raising the Medicare age is a zombie idea, which should have been killed by analysis and evidence, but is still out there eating some people’s brains.
But then, Mr. Bush’s real argument, as opposed to his campaign’s lame attempt at a rewrite, is just a bigger zombie.
The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful. But when they make their case to the public they usually shy away from making their real case, and have even, incredibly, sometimes posed as the program’s defenders against liberals and their death panels.
What Medicare’s would-be killers usually argue, instead, is that the program as we know it is unaffordable — that we must destroy the system in order to save it, that, as Mr. Bush put it, we must “move to a new system that allows [seniors] to have something — because they’re not going to have anything.” And the new system they usually advocate is, as I said, vouchers that can be applied to the purchase of private insurance.
The underlying premise here is that Medicare as we know it is incapable of controlling costs, that only the only way to keep health care affordable going forward is to rely on the magic of privatization.
Now, this was always a dubious claim. It’s true that for most of Medicare’s history its spending has grown faster than the economy as a whole — but this is true of health spending in general. In fact, Medicare costs per beneficiary have consistently grown more slowly than private insurance premiums, suggesting that Medicare is, if anything, better than private insurers at cost control. Furthermore, other wealthy countries with government-provided health insurance spend much less than we do, again suggesting that Medicare-type programs can indeed control costs.
Still, conservatives scoffed at the cost-control measures included in the Affordable Care Act, insisting that nothing short of privatization would work.
And then a funny thing happened: the act’s passage was immediately followed by an unprecedented pause in Medicare cost growth. Indeed, Medicare spending keeps coming in ever further below expectations, to an extent that has revolutionized our views about the sustainability of the program and of government spending as a whole.
Right now is, in other words, a very odd time to be going on about the impossibility of preserving Medicare, a program whose finances will be strained by an aging population but no longer look disastrous. One can only guess that Mr. Bush is unaware of all this, that he’s living inside the conservative information bubble, whose impervious shield blocks all positive news about health reform.
Meanwhile, what the rest of us need to know is that Medicare at 50 still looks very good. It needs to keep working on costs, it will need some additional resources, but it looks eminently sustainable. The only real threat it faces is that of attack by right-wing zombies.
By: Paul Waldman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 27, 2015
“Back To The Fuhrer”: Why Republicans Are Obsessed With Comparing Obama To Hitler
Say what you will about Mike Huckabee, the guy has a way with a quip. And when he responded to the Iran nuclear deal by claiming that Barack Obama “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven,” the only really surprising thing was that it took this long for Obama to go from being Neville Chamberlain on the subject of Iran to Adolf Hitler.
Because this wouldn’t be the first time — or the 10th, or the 100th — that a prominent conservative has compared Obama to Hitler. Given ample opportunity to admit that maybe he went too far in his remarks, Huckabee has been unrepentant. “The response from Jewish people has been overwhelmingly positive,” he said, making one wonder which Jews he’s talking to, since as a people we tend to be a little put off by glib Nazi analogies, particularly ones that are so vivid. But Huckabee has gotten plenty of support from fellow conservatives, who are practically lining up to say that, yes, Obama really is bringing about another Holocaust.
I’m not going to bother to argue with the absurd assertion that: 1) drastically curtailing and inspecting Iran’s nuclear program will actually do more to give Iran a nuclear weapon than just leaving the regime alone to do as it likes; and 2) the moment Iran has a weapon it will launch it at Israel in an act of national suicide. (Don’t forget that Israel has something like 100 nukes, and so could vaporize every square inch of Iran without much trouble.) But I do want to comment on the propensity of conservatives to go back to the Fuhrer time and again.
Let’s step back to Chamberlain for a moment before we move on to Hitler. Conservatives were calling the Iran deal the second coming of Munich even before any of its terms had been worked out. Which highlights something important about their beliefs on this topic: For all their talk of a fantasy deal in which Iran gives us everything we could possibly want and demands nothing in return, the whole point of the Munich analogy is that negotiation is useless by definition.
When conservatives said that Obama was like Chamberlain, they weren’t saying Obama is a bad negotiator and could have gotten a better deal. It isn’t the Red Sox selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000. The clear implication of the Munich analogy is that there shouldn’t have been any negotiations at all, and that war is inevitable so we might as well just get on with it. If your adversary is Hitler — and as far as many on the right or concerned, every potential adversary is Hitler — then war to save the world is the only option, and anyone who seeks a diplomatic solution to a dispute is a sucker.
But that was when they were being kind. Calling Obama Chamberlain suggests that his problem is naïvete, not malice. It accepts that he doesn’t actually wish for the extermination of the Jews, even if that is the inevitable result of his foolishness. But of course, conservatives have thought for a long time that Obama is absolutely brimming with malice — toward America, toward Christians, toward Jews, toward white people, toward just about anyone they like.
Which is why we’ve hardly gone a month throughout this presidency without someone comparing Obama to Hitler, on matters both weighty and mundane. He had only been in office a few weeks when Glenn Beck started comparing his program to that of the Nazi party. “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate,” said Rush Limbaugh in the summer of 2009, just a few months later. Conservative commentators saw swastikas in Obama’s push to register new voters in 2008, and even in his campaign slogans. Conservative favorite Ben Carson says the government under Obama is “very much like Nazi Germany,” because “[y]ou had the government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe.” And that’s not to mention all the times some billionaire has compared Obama to Hitler for such appalling things as proposing to close the carried-interest loophole.
Plenty of former presidents were compared to Hitler by their opponents from time to time, but I think it’s safe to say that none has been the target of so many Nazi comparisons, coming so often and from so many prominent people, whether they be politicians or media figures.
It’s more evidence that the opposition to Obama is qualitatively different than what came before it. Never in our recent history has either party been as adamantly opposed to any political compromise as today’s GOP is. Republicans hated Bill Clinton, like Democrats hated George W. Bush, but they were willing to work together fairly regularly — no more. No president has had his legitimate occupation of the Oval Office questioned as often as Obama has; the man even had to show his birth certificate before they’d believe he’s actually an American (and many still don’t).
From the beginning, the conservative argument against Obama from so many quarters has been that he’s not just wrong or misguided, but is actually trying to destroy America and turn it into something twisted and ugly. If you think I’m exaggerating, then you haven’t been listening to their radio shows, watching their TV network, or reading their books, because that’s what they’ve been saying since before he got elected.
And if you believe that, then of course Obama isn’t Chamberlain, because Chamberlain is just a fool. Obama is the really sinister one, the one who wants to snuff out liberty and crush those who love it under his boot. He’s Hitler.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, July 29, 2015
“The Free Market Failed”: Here’s Some More Good News About Obamacare. Too Bad It Won’t Dent The Debate
Whenever a health insurer announces that it will be requesting significant premium increases in the coming year, it’s guaranteed to generate news stories that are waved triumphantly by conservatives as proof that the Affordable Care Act is a failure and, just as they predicted, premiums are skyrocketing because the government is messing around in health care.
When a story like this one comes along, on the other hand, it seems to generate much less attention:
California’s Obamacare exchange negotiated a 4% average rate increase for the second year in a row, defying dire predictions about health insurance sticker shock across the country.
The modest price increases for 2016 may be welcome news for many of the 1.3 million Californians who buy individual policies through the state marketplace, known as Covered California.
California’s rates are a key barometer of how the Affordable Care Act is working nationwide, and the results indicate that industry giants Anthem and Kaiser Permanente are eager to compete for customers in the nation’s biggest Obamacare market.
Leading up to Monday’s announcement there had been a steady drumbeat of news about major insurers outside California seeking hefty rate hikes of 20% to 40% for Obamacare open enrollment this fall.
Keep in mind that before the ACA went into effect, annual premium increases of 10 percent or so had become the norm. California is only one state, and when you go across the country the picture is complicated — in some states premiums are rising more slowly than they did before the law; in other states they’ve jumped; and in some places they’ve declined. There are many reasons why. But what’s important to understand is that the predictions of the law’s critics — that both overall health spending and premiums would explode — were completely wrong.
The key word in this story comes in the first paragraph: “negotiated.” California is one of the states where officials running the health care exchange negotiate with insurers over rates, and when you have a negotiation, you can get better terms for the people you represent. Yet incredibly, we’re still arguing over whether what the health insurance market needs is less government involvement and more of that free market magic.
So for the millionth time: the reason we have the world’s most expensive health care system is precisely because the free market failed.
If conservatives were right and government is the problem, then in all the world’s other advanced nations, where there is much more government regulation of health care than we have, they’d be paying more for their health care than we do. But they spend far less, often with better health outcomes and usually with virtually no uninsured. And after watching this debate for the better part of a decade, I’ve yet to hear a single conservative explain why that’s the case, and how it squares with their beliefs about government and markets. How can it possibly be that government-heavy systems — whether you’re talking about a completely socialized one like Great Britain’s or a system like France’s that combines a basic government plan with heavily regulated private supplemental insurance — work so much better and cost so much less than ours? If you have a religious belief that markets are always right and government is always wrong, it’s just impossible to reconcile.
The point isn’t that the ACA is a perfect piece of legislation that has solved all our problems, because it isn’t and it hasn’t. The ACA is a gigantic kludge layered on top of what was already a terribly dysfunctional system. Health insurance in America remains incredibly complicated — for instance, if you’re on an exchange, in order to get the best rate you may have to shop around every year. Unfortunately, Republicans have made it impossible to fix the law’s weaknesses as we used to do with complex legislation, because they’ve fed their constituents a lie that any day now they’re going to repeal the whole thing, so there’s no point in trying to make it work better (and that doing so would be a compromise with evil, of course).
Fifty years ago this Thursday, Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law. At the time, Republicans predicted not only that the program would be a failure, but that it would send America hurtling toward a socialist nightmare of oppression. Ronald Reagan famously said that if the law passed, “we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” Yet this big-government, single-payer health insurance program for seniors turned out to be one of the most successful and popular pieces of legislation in American history. Not only that, due in part to the Affordable Care Act, the projected future cost of Medicare keeps going down — another conservative prediction about the ACA that has proven wrong by 180 degrees.
And today, Republicans pretend they love Medicare and only want to preserve it, while they present plans that would eliminate its guarantee of coverage and turn it into a voucher program, on the failed theory that whatever the private sector does in health care must be superior. These efforts always fail, because the program is just too popular.
The ACA isn’t politically bulletproof in the same way, in large part because it’s so many different things. No one “has” Obamacare in the way you have Medicare, with a card in your wallet; in fact, tens of millions of people are affected by the ACA, usually in positive ways, without ever realizing it. But here’s a crazy idea: What if we looked at where the law is succeeding and tried to build on that success, and looked at where it isn’t and tried to correct those shortcomings, doing it all with the best understanding of the actual facts we can gain?
Oh, who am I kidding.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 28, 2015
“Politicians Should Be Held To A Higher Standard”: For Gun Victims, The Prayers Of Conservative Politicians Are Not Enough
After the latest mass shooting by an anti-tax, anti-government, anti-feminist arch-conservative in Lafayette, LA, the reactions from Republican politicians were as predictable as they were empty and stale. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal had the usual reaction:
Gov. @BobbyJindal: The most important thing people can do now is to pray. Watch CNNgo: http://t.co/HAhU3MmiMf.
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) July 24, 2015
Frankly, that reaction is getting more than a little tiresome no matter what one’s religious beliefs might be. When terrorists used airplanes as missiles against the United States in 2001, we didn’t just pray for the victims: we changed our entire airline security system, spent billions on a new homeland security bureaucracy, and invaded not one but two countries at gigantic cost to life and treasure. When the ebola virus threatened to break out in the United States we didn’t pray for deliverance from the plague; we went into a collective public policy and media frenzy to stop it from spreading further. When earthquakes prove our building standards are inadequate to save lives, we don’t beg the gods to avert catastrophe and pray for the victims; we spend inordinate amounts of money to retrofit so it doesn’t happen again.
On every major piece of public policy in which lives are taken needlessly, we don’t limit ourselves to empty prayers for the victims. We actually do something to stop it from happening again.
But not when it comes to gun proliferation. On that issue we are told that nothing can be done, and that all we can do is mourn and pray for the murdered and wounded, even as we watch the news every day for our next opportunity to grieve and mourn and pray again–all while sitting back and watching helplessly.
For most of us, prayer and good vibes are all we can provide. It’s not in our power to prevent the next deranged killer from gaining access to a deadly weapon of mass violence. But politicians should be held to a higher standard. They do have the power to act. For them, prayers are empty and basically meaningless compared to the power they refuse to wield to actually solve the problem.
No longer should we accept the facade of devotional compassion Bobby Jindal and his friends use to mask their indifferent obedience to the NRA and its rabid voters. If they refuse to act, their prayers don’t mean a thing.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 25, 2015
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