Hookers, Clowns and “Government Run Amok”: But For The Rest Of The Story
By any objective measurement of newsprint or bandwidth devoted to the topic, the dominant “news” story of this week is the scandal involving Secret Service agents hiring hookers while advancing a presidential trip to Colombia. It seemed at first that the preoccupation with this small, sordid drama was just another example of the tabloidization of the MSM, and would disappear from the national radar screen the minute some entertainment celebrity did something even dumber.
But lo and behold, it seems that the conservative media apparatus is huffing and puffing to blow this up into a meaningful moment in the presidential campaign. At the tip of the spear, naturally, is Sarah Palin, who has exploited the fact that one of the agents in the case was assigned to her protection in 2008 and has allowed as how he “checked her out.” Since she’s now part of “the story,” she has zero inhibitions about explaining to Americans why this is another talking point in the case for firing Barack Obama:
“Well, this agent who was kind of ridiculous there in posting pictures and comments about checking someone out,” Palin told Greta van Susteren on her FOX News program. “Well check this out, bodyguard — you’re fired. And I hope his wife sends him to the doghouse. As long as he’s not eating the dog, along with his former boss. Greta, you know, a lot of people will just, I guess say that this is boys being boys. And boys will be boys, but they shouldn’t be in positions of authority.
“It’s a symptom of government run amok, though, Greta,” Palin said on the Thursday broadcast of “On the Record” on FOX News. “Who is minding the store here? And when it comes to this particular issue of Secret Service, again, playing with the taxpayer’s dime and playing with prostitutes and checking out those whom they are guarding….”
“The president, the CEO of this operation called our federal government, has got to start cracking down on these agencies. He is the head of the administrative branch and all of these different departments in the administration that now people are seeing things that are so amiss within these departments. The buck stops with the president. And he’s really got to start cracking down and seeing some heads roll. He has to get rid of these people at the head of these agencies where so many things, obviously, are amiss,” she said.
Palin is apparently alluding, as many other hostile commentators have done in connection with the Secret Service brouhaha, to the other Lite Scandal in the news recently, the GSA conference in Las Vegas that involved clowns, fortune tellers, a rap video and other wasteful expenditures. As it happens, of course, heads did roll at GSA, whose top three officials were fired or quit very soon after the Vegas extravaganza came to light. Heads appear to be rolling at the Secret Service as well; indeed, the dude who “checked out” Sarah Palin is no longer employed, and it’s certain some of his superiors will soon be cleaning out their desks as well.
What Palin and others like her have in mind is something very different: “cracking down” on “government run amok” in the form of the Affordable Care Act, the Violence Against Women Act, the Medicaid program, the food stamp program, and all sorts of public policies, services and investments that have zero to do with GSA, the Secret Service, or with clowns and hookers. It’s a “story-line” run amok, and even Sarah Palin knows enough about government to understand that.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 20, 2012
“Inherited Privilege”: Romney Moves From Defending Inequality To Defending Inequality Of Opportunity
The political debate — the broader debate between the two parties, not just the campaign between President Obama and Mitt Romney — has largely hinged on inequality. Republicans have defended high (and growing) levels of inequality as the just rewards accruing to hard work and genius, while Democrats have argued for a role for government in limiting inequality. For weeks, Romney has fused his party’s defense of inequality with a defense of his own personal wealth — any suggestion that Romney’s regressive policies are tinged by self-interest, he has charged, is an attack on success itself.
Yesterday, Romney took that argument in a different direction. He moved from defending inequality to defending inequality of opportunity. The occasion was Obama noting that he had not been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. This is a standard rhetorical gambit, evoking log cabins and hard cider, and one Obama (as Alec MacGillis points out) has been using since long before Romney emerged as his opponent. Romney took it as a personal affront, and issued this sharp rejoinder:
“I’m certainly not going to apologize for my dad and his success in life,” Romney said Thursday morning on “Fox and Friends.” “He was born poor. He worked his way to become very successful despite the fact that he didn’t have a college degree, and one of the things he wanted to do was provide for me and for my brother and sisters. I’m not going to apologize for my dad’s success.”
Since Romney couched his defense of his wealthy upbringing in the same terms he has used to defend his own business success, nobody seems to have noticed the difference. But if you take conservative rhetoric seriously, it’s all the difference in the world. The conservative line, articulated by such figures as Arthur Brooks and Paul Ryan, makes a sharp distinction between equality of outcome, which is thoroughly evil, and equality of opportunity, which is the highest ideal. (Almost everybody opposes equality of outcome — what they oppose is virtually any steps by government to reduce inequality of outcome.) “Equal opportunity versus equal outcomes, very different political philosophy,” says Ryan.
In practice, the attempt to draw a distinction between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity collapses immediately. The number one thing parents try to do with their money is to buy better opportunities for their children. A new Brookings paper this week describes how having a more expensive home translates to better schools. The mere fact of being surrounded by richer, better-prepared students is itself an advantage. This is something we all know, of course. When you have kids, your goal is either to live in an expensive neighborhood with good public schools, or to be able to spend directly on expensive private schooling. It’s one of the things Romney himself knows — hence his comment that “one of the things [George Romney] wanted to do was provide for me and for my brother and sisters.”
Of course he did! And that is the point. The advantages George Romney transmitted to Mitt Romney include not just intelligence, height, good looks, and a stable upbringing, but a fancy private education at Cranbrook and a lot of money.
The conservative rhetoric about inequality has been attempting to sustain the pretense that Romney is merely defending his business success and the larger principle of merit. But of course, he’s also defending his own upbringing and the larger principle of inherited privilege. The fact that he did so without anybody noticing shows the degree to which, far from being “very different” things, these are one and the same.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, April 20, 2012
“Tax Shifting And Political Power”: Why Romney Loves The States And Hates The Feds
One of the main goals of Mitt Romney’s domestic program, to the extent that it can be discerned, is to transfer programs from the federal government to the states. Just which programs Romney wants to ship to the states, he does not say. But the goal is on his mind, and he has touted it both in private remarks to donors and in his recent speech to a tea-party group last Friday. Perhaps not coincidentally, economist and Romney adviser Greg Mankiw wrote a New York Times column this last weekend touting the virtues of pushing more policy toward the states.
Sometimes, locating policy at the state level can result in some kind of progressive policy innovation. Romney’s Massachusetts health-care plan offers one example. But this was a relatively rare event, brought about by the combination of its being a highly Democratic state that happened upon a large federal windfall unavailable to other states. In most cases, moving a policy to the states will tend to make it more conservative — less generous to the poor and vulnerable, and less burdensome upon the rich and powerful.
How do state programs differ from federal programs? For one thing, they’re paid for differently. Federal taxes charge the rich a higher rate than the poor. State taxes tend to charge a higher rate on the poor than the rich. So even if nothing at all changes about the program, simply breaking one federal program into 50 programs of the same cumulative size amounts to a lump sum transfer payment to the rich from the non-rich.
But making something a state program almost certainly means it will not stay the same size. State governments, unlike the federal government, must balance their budgets every year. When the economy contracts, this forces state (and local) governments into austerity mode. That’s why you’ve seen lots of laid-off teachers and police officers but not many laid-off Marines or IRS agents.
Finally, and most important, states are competing with each other. Every government has a general incentive to provide the best services for the lowest cost. But when you’re a state, you have an additional incentive. You don’t merely want to provide the best general environment, you also want to provide an environment that specifically appeals to business owners and rich people, and repels the poor and sick. After all, rich people may pay a lower average tax rate but they still pay more tax dollars than the non-rich. And poor and sick people suck up tax dollars.
So suppose a state decides it wants to provide really generous services for poor people — say, good medical care (that is, better than your standard Medicaid package) along with child care to help single parents work and scholarships so that any talented but poor kid can go to college. And the voters decide to pay for it by taxing the rich at higher rates. At some point, it will dawn on the voters that, however attractive this arrangement sounds, they may run the risk of driving rich voters into neighborhood states, and, worse still, serve as a magnet for poor and sick people who want to enjoy the comfort and opportunity denied to them elsewhere. All this would make this plan more costly, and possibly altogether unworkable. Indeed, exactly this consideration comes into play all the time when states debate their tax and spending policies.
Interestingly enough, Mankiw makes this argument in his Times column. He does not mention the possibility that offering more generous provisions to the poor and sick may attract more of them to a state. But he does note that, “Because capital is more mobile than labor, competition among governments significantly constrains how capital is taxed.”
In other words, locating more programs at the state level essentially gives the rich and powerful political power disproportionate to their numbers. The voters may agree on a given level of redistribution, but the ease of moving between state lines imposes a constraint that doesn’t exist at the federal level. (Well, it exists in theory — you can move to a different country, but it’s harder, and given that the United States has a less redistributive tax and transfer system than any other advanced country, the option doesn’t really come into play.)
As Mankiw points out, “redistribution is harder when people and capital are free to move to other jurisdictions that offer better deals.” If your goal is to reduce the amount of money that the government takes from the rich and gives to the non-rich, then sending programs to the states makes a lot of sense. And pretty much all the evidence we have suggests this is in fact the Republican Party’s main goal.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, April 20, 2012
“Just Close Your Eyes”: The Right’s 2012 Solution While Systematically Taking Away Your Rights
Last month, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett offered a solution for women who were going to be forced by the government to undergo a completely unnecessary ultrasound against their wills: “You can’t make anybody watch, okay? Because you just have to close your eyes.” The governor’s suggestion would be almost comical, if it weren’t for the tragic fact that forcing women to watch was the whole point of the legislation Corbett supported.
But it seems that Corbett’s suggestion doesn’t just apply to women seeking abortions in the Keystone state. It is, in essence, what the GOP is telling to every woman turned off by the party’s attacks on reproductive rights, equal pay and domestic violence protections: “You just have to close your eyes.”
Mitt Romney’s campaign is banking on the fact that voters of both genders are concerned about the economy in these uncertain times. Polls show that they’re right. But just because you’re concerned with the economy doesn’t mean you ignore it when a group of people are systematically taking away your rights for their own short-term political gain.
Sadly, this is the new normal. The Tea Party’s success has been based on this “just close your eyes” formula. Swept into power on a wave of economic dissatisfaction, Tea Party legislators in Washington and the states asked the country to “close its eyes” as it did everything but fix the economy. “Pay no attention while we roll back decades of progress everything else you care about. Just close your eyes while we bash immigrants, cut essential services, make it very hard to vote, and take away collective bargaining rights”. Many minorities have been affected, particularly in the last two years, but arguably and amazingly, no group has been under attack more than the American majority — women.
A new report from People For the American Way investigates the new landscape that the Tea Party is creating for American women. Mississippi is set to become the only state in the country without a legal abortion clinic. Texas is on the path to denying reproductive health care to 130,000 low-income women. Wisconsin repealed its enforcement mechanism for equal pay lawsuits. Senate Republicans are fighting to stop the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Following an all-male panel speaking on women’s health, a woman who dares speak in front of Congress about the importance of affordable contraception is called a “slut.”
Even with closed eyes, these things are very hard to miss.
The Romney campaign has attempted to distract voters from this train wreck of anti-woman policies by claiming that a second Obama administration will hurt women economically. Last week, they hammered hard on the claim that women have accounted for 92 percent of job losses under President Obama — a mangled statistic that ignores, among other factors, that many of those losses were the result of Republican-led layoffs of teachers and other government employees. Then they decided to accuse Democrats of waging a “War on Moms” — forgetting, perhaps, the candidate’s history of aggressively pushing low-income women to work outside of the home when their children are very young.
Women haven’t bought it. In polls, Romney still trails Obama among women voters by double digits. And in an under-reported fact, among women ages 18 to 29, he’s losing by an astounding 45 points. You don’t need a political science degree that know that that spells disaster.
Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans seem to think they can get away with almost anything because, in the end, their Election Day hopes will be saved by a bad economy. The problem is, the people they attack on a regular basis — women, gays, Latinos, Muslims, you name it — know the Tea Party’s record on the economy and its history of cynical, culture-war attacks that deeply affect the lives of real people. We have our eyes wide open.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way, Published in The Huffington Post, April 18, 2012
“Tantruming Toddlers”: President Romney And The Republican Congress
As we’ve discussed here many times, there a number of factors that make it more likely than not that Barack Obama will win re-election in November. But it’s also quite possible that Obama will lose, and Mitt Romney will become president in January. If Romney does win, chances are that he’ll come into office with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress. That’s because whatever conditions produce a Republican win at the top will also probably allow Republicans to hold on to the House and take the Senate. It’s even possible that Obama could win and Republicans wind up with both houses, since Democrats right now hold only a 53-47 lead in the upper chamber, and they are defending 23 seats in this year’s election, while Republicans are defending only ten.
There’s an outside chance that a big Obama win could allow Democrats to hold the Senate and take back the house, but for now let’s focus on the possibility of a Romney win, which will probably leave him with the benefit of total Republican control. This is an eventuality that we really need to start thinking about, since a Romney presidency would be shaped in large part by his relationship with Congress.
The thought of finding ourselves nine months from now with a President Romney, Speaker Boehner, and Majority Leader McConnell is … let’s say unsettling. But I’m sure they’ll greet their newfound power with humility and restraint, not moving too quickly to roll back regulations, cut taxes for the wealthy, or dismantle social programs. Hah! Kidding, of course—the only question is whether they’ll be literally firing their guns in the air on the floor of the House and Senate, leaving holes in the ceiling that will be a testament in plaster to their triumph for years to come. At that point, Democrats will discover that the filibuster is a really, really good thing.
But there’s only so much they’d be able to stop, and congressional Republicans will be sending a stream of reactionary bills to President Romney’s desk. And let’s be honest: He’s going to sign every one of them. You will not see Romney veto a bill passed by a Republican Congress because it went too far in achieving conservative goals. Not gonna happen.
Which is why, if Democrats are smart, they’ll start a discussion now about how Romney is going to deal with the congressional nutballs in his party. They’ve already started tying Romney to Paul Ryan’s budget plan, but the larger question is how he’ll handle this unruly collection of extremists, who have shown themselves quite happy to hold the government hostage and bring America to the brink of default to serve their agenda.
The White House is now warning Republicans not to renege on the deal they made last year on the budget (which they are showing signs they want to do, by cutting domestic spending more than they agreed to); if they do, there could be a government shutdown in September. That would put all kinds of pressure on Romney to show he can rein in his party’s extremists. If he handles it well, he can demonstrate that he’s a responsible adult who is capable of restraining the collection of tantruming toddlers that is the Republican caucus in the House. If he doesn’t, he’ll show everyone just how chaotic and dangerous a government with Republicans in control of all three branches could be.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, April 19, 2012
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