“Contempt For Poor People”: Scott Walker Wants To Drug Test Food Stamp Recipients. That Shows Why He’ll Never Be President
Sixteen years ago, George W. Bush presented to America his vision of “compassionate conservatism,” and in response he received an absolute torrent of glowing articles in the media calling him a “different kind of Republican” — conservative, to be sure, but not so mean about it.
Well those days are long past. In the 2016 GOP primaries, it’s compassionless conservatism that’s in fashion.
Or at least that’s what Scott Walker seems to think, because among other things, he is hell-bent on making sure that anyone who gets food stamps in Wisconsin has to endure the humiliation of submitting to a drug test. First the Wisconsin legislature sent him a bill providing that the state could test food stamp recipients if it had a reasonable suspicion they were on drugs; he used his line-item veto to strike the words “reasonable suspicion,” so the state could test any (or all) recipients it wanted. And now, because federal law doesn’t actually allow drug testing for food stamp recipients, Walker is suing the federal government on the grounds that food stamps are “welfare,” and welfare recipients can be tested.
This is why Scott Walker is never going to be president of the United States.
First, some context. The drug testing programs for welfare recipients are usually justified by saying they’ll save money by rooting out all the junkies on the dole, but in practice they’ve been almost comically ineffective. In state after state, testing programs have found that welfare recipients use drugs at lower rates than the general population, finding only a tiny number of welfare recipients who test positive.
But this hasn’t discouraged politicians like Walker, any more than the abysmal failure of abstinence-only sex education discourages them from continuing to advocate it. The test is the point, not the result. Walker isn’t trying to solve a practical problem here. He wants to test food stamp recipients as a way of expressing moral condemnation. You can get this benefit, he’s saying, but we want to give you a little humiliation so you know that because you sought the government’s help, we think you’re a rotten person.
To be clear, there is no inherent connection between drug use and food stamps. There’s a logical reason to drug test people who have other’s lives in their hands, like airline pilots. You can make a case that employers should force ordinary employees to test for drugs, since workers who are high on the job would be less productive (though whether that actually works is a matter of some dispute). But what exactly is the rationale behind forcing people on food stamps to pee into a cup? It seems to be that we don’t want to give government benefits to someone who is so morally compromised as to smoke a joint. But you’ll notice that neither Walker nor any other Republican is proposing to drug test, say, people who use the mortgage interest deduction and thereby have the taxpayers subsidize their housing.
What does this have to do with Walker’s chances of winning a general election? What George W. Bush understood is that the Republican Party is generally considered to be somewhat, well, mean. It’s not welcoming, and it spends a lot of energy looking for people on whom it can pour its contempt. You can argue that this is an inaccurate representation of the party’s true nature, but it is nevertheless what many, if not most, voters believe.
So when Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative” and did things like objecting to a Republican plan in Congress by saying, “I don’t think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor,” he wasn’t actually trying to get the votes of poor people and the minorities with whom he posed for innumerable pictures. He was sending a message to moderate voters, one that said: See, I’m different. I’m a nice guy. The fact that there was almost no substance to “compassionate conservatism” didn’t really matter in the context of the campaign. It was about his attitude.
And Scott Walker’s attitude is nothing like George W. Bush’s. He practically oozes malice, for anyone and everyone who might oppose him, or just be the wrong kind of person.
Proposing to force people who have fallen on hard times to submit to useless drug tests has an obvious appeal for a certain portion of the Republican base: it shows that you’re tough, and that you have contempt for poor people. But I doubt that Walker is too worried about how moderate general election voters might view something like that. As Ed Kilgore has noted, Walker’s theory of the general election is a decades-old conservative idea that if you motivate Republicans enough with a pure right-wing message, there will be so many hidden conservatives coming out of the woodwork that you won’t need moderates to win.
This theory persists because of its obvious appeal to hard-core conservatives. It says that they’re right about everything, and compromise is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. So the path to victory is to become even more conservative and even more uncompromising.
The trouble is that this theory has no evidence to support it. Its adherents, of whom Scott Walker is now the most prominent, believe that the reason Mitt Romney and John McCain lost is that they didn’t move far enough to the right (or that they were the wrong nominees in the first place). And they learned nothing from the one Republican in the last two decades who actually won the White House.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 16, 2015
“A One-Man Off-Key Greek Chorus”: A Hard Spring Brings Hard Days For Jeb Bush
With a lush spring came cruel days. The Philadelphia train wreck happened only a hundred miles up the tracks from the Baltimore riots. Is the wind of history, the zeitgeist, on the job as we face the 2016 presidential race?
If so, it’s worth noting that Jeb Bush, the Republican frontrunner, spent days defending older brother George W. Bush, the former president, and the long war he started in Iraq. The younger brother was a one-man off-key Greek chorus.
In defending the decision to go to war based on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — a claim proved false — the former Florida governor kept saying, “my brother.” Like we the folks are all in with the Bush family? It’s not as if we enjoy fond memories of a presidency defined by 9/11.
To return to the Baltimore and Philadelphia scenes, equidistant from the Mason-Dixon line. Those shocking sights, from April to May, told us that business as usual is taking a tragic toll. The Northeast infrastructure is old, getting older. So are Baltimore’s sad-sack slums, visible from a moving Amtrak window as a train zips up to New York. Lives are on the line. Stressed rails reach a breaking point. And if we let things languish in policing and income inequality, heat will rise on the streets. Plain as that.
But Jeb Bush, the leading Republican candidate (all but declared) had nothing nice to say, no sympathy note to send from his alternate universe. He astonished even friendly media at Fox News and conservative pundits by a doomed defense of “my brother” and his administration’s aggression in starting the Iraq War — still playing out. But as we know from previous Bush family dramas, loyalty to the tribe comes first. Nearly all Jeb Bush’s foreign policy advisors were on his brother’s A list, too.
After several stumbles on whether he would have invaded Iraq as president in 2003, Jeb Bush finally conceded that would be a bad idea. Yet he’s echoed his brother’s bluster and blunder by speaking to the issue with the veneer of a sneer. Why “re-litigate” the past? Many were puzzled at how little thought Jeb Bush gave to the biggest question facing his quest — and bedeviling his brother’s legacy. (If his brother started it, hey, how bad could it be?)
By nature, the busy Bushes don’t spend a lot of time lost in thought or looking back: “No regrets” could be the family coat of arms. Now we know Jeb Bush is no exception. Contrary to claims he’s his own man, he often invokes his last name, stating his brother is his “closest advisor.” Oh brother.
When war goes wrong, it’s in the distance. Here at home, something strange went awry seven miles north of Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. A Northeast Regional train came around a bend, speeding at over 100 mph. The derailment devastated and bewildered swaths of the East Coast and beyond. Philly is a handsome city — with the Victorian zoo, the river boathouses, the Museum of Art. The city responded with great compassion and care to the injured and the dead that night. Brotherly love.
Eight beating hearts on that train were gone in a split second, torn from their plans, dreams, loved ones. All eight bodies were found in the wreckage. One victim, Rachel Jacobs, and I are alumnae of Swarthmore College in Philadelphia. She was 39. Somehow she seemed a long-lost friend.
Everyone knows safety improvements and infrastructure investment are overdue (except Congress.) Those old railway bridges over the bountiful, wide Susquehanna River? Sure, it’s easy on the eyes, crossing over the river. The most peaceful way to travel is now freighted with anxiety.
Here’s the thing this spring asks, starkly. Did our country get derailed at a reckless speed? Was Iraq akin to the curve in North Philadelphia?
The next president should address buttressing transportation, income inequality and beleaguered cities with fresh imagination and ideas. Whether a President Jeb Bush could do all that and regain our moral stature in the world community is a bridge too far. He’s failed the test of character.
The younger Bush is not the one to lead us out of our predicament, safe toward home.
By: Jamie Stiehm, The National Memo, May 22, 2015
“The George Costanza Defense”: George W. Bush Didn’t Just Lie About The Iraq War. What He Did Was Much Worse
None of the conservatives running for president want to be associated with the last Republican president — not even his brother (for whom stepping away is rather complicated). After all, George W. Bush left office with an approval rating hovering in the low 30s, and his grandest project was the gigantic catastrophe of the Iraq War, which we’re still dealing with and still debating. If you’re a Republican right now you’re no doubt wishing we could talk about something else, but failing that, you’d like the issue framed in a particular way: The war was an honest mistake, nobody lied to the public, and anything bad that’s happening now is Barack Obama’s fault.
For the moment I want to focus on the part about the lies. I’ve found over the years that conservatives who supported the war get particularly angry at the assertion that Bush lied us into war. No, they’ll insist, it wasn’t his fault: There was mistaken intelligence, he took that intelligence in good faith, and presented what he believed to be true at the time. It’s the George Costanza defense: It’s not a lie if you believe it.
Here’s the problem, though. It might be possible, with some incredibly narrow definition of the word “lie,” to say that Bush told only a few outright lies on Iraq. Most of what he said in order to sell the public on the war could be said to have some basis in something somebody thought or something somebody alleged (Bush was slightly more careful than Dick Cheney, who lied without hesitation or remorse). But if we reduce the question of Bush’s guilt and responsibility to how many lies we can count, we miss the bigger picture.
What the Bush administration launched in 2002 and 2003 may have been the most comprehensive, sophisticated, and misleading campaign of government propaganda in American history. Spend too much time in the weeds, and you risk missing the hysterical tenor of the whole campaign.
That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of weeds. In 2008, the Center for Public Integrity completed a project in which they went over the public statements by eight top Bush administration officials on the topic of Iraq, and found that no fewer than 935 were false, including 260 statements by President Bush himself. But the theory on which the White House operated was that whether or not you could fool all of the people some of the time, you could certainly scare them out of their wits. That’s what was truly diabolical about their campaign.
And it was a campaign. In the summer of 2002, the administration established something called the White House Iraq Group, through which Karl Rove and other communication strategists like Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin coordinated with policy officials to sell the public on the threat from Iraq in order to justify war. “The script had been finalized with great care over the summer,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan later wrote, for a “campaign to convince Americans that war with Iraq was inevitable and necessary.”
In that campaign, intelligence wasn’t something to be understood and assessed by the administration in making their decisions, it was a propaganda tool to lead the public to the conclusion that the administration wanted. Again and again we saw a similar pattern: An allegation would bubble up from somewhere, some in the intelligence community would say that it could be true but others would say it was either speculation or outright baloney, but before you knew it the president or someone else was presenting it to the public as settled fact.
And each and every time the message was the same: If we didn’t wage war, Iraq was going to attack the United States homeland with its enormous arsenal of ghastly weapons, and who knows how many Americans would perish. When you actually spell it out like that it sounds almost comical, but that was the Bush administration’s assertion, repeated hundreds upon hundreds of time to a public still skittish in the wake of September 11. (Remember, the campaign for the war began less than a year after the September 11 attacks.)
Sometimes this message was imparted with specific false claims, sometimes with dark insinuation, and sometimes with speculation about the horrors to come (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” said Bush and others when asked about the thinness of much of their evidence). Yet the conclusion was always the same: The only alternative to invading Iraq was waiting around to be killed. I could pick out any of a thousand quotes, but here’s just one, from a radio address Bush gave on September 28, 2002:
The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq. This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.
What wasn’t utterly false in that statement was disingenuous at best. But if there was anything that marked the campaign, it was its certainty. There was seldom any doubt expressed or admitted, seldom any hint that the information we had was incomplete, speculative, and the matter of fevered debate amongst intelligence officials. But that’s what was going on beneath the administration’s sales job.
The intelligence wasn’t “mistaken,” as the Bush administration’s defenders would have us believe today. The intelligence was a mass of contradictions and differing interpretations. The administration picked out the parts that they wanted — supported, unsupported, plausible, absurd, it didn’t matter — and used them in their campaign to turn up Americans’ fear.
This is one of the many sins for which Bush and those who supported him ought to spend a lifetime atoning. He looked out at the American public and decided that the way to get what he wanted was to terrify them. If he could convince them that any day now their children would die a horrible death, that they and everything they knew would be turned to radioactive ash, and that the only chance of averting this fate was to say yes to him, then he could have his war. Lies were of no less value than truth, so long as they both created enough fear.
And it worked.
By: Paul Waldman, The Week, May 20, 2015
“Jeb Bush’s Brotherly Bind”: There Are More Important Issues Here Than Family
Am I the only person outside the Bush family who has a smidgen of empathy for Jeb Bush’s roller-coaster ride in trying to answer a straightforward question: Was going to war in Iraq the right thing to do?
It’s hard to go much beyond “smidgen” because it remains astonishing that Bush hadn’t worked out long in advance how he’d grapple with an inevitable query about the invasion his brother launched. Jeb’s responses over four days were, as The Post’s Philip Rucker and Ed O’Keefe wrote, “wavering, uncertain and incongruous.”
The saga began when Fox News’s Megyn Kelly asked Bush if, knowing all we know now, he would have gone to war. “I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody,” Bush replied. “And so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”
Bang! The political world, including conservatives who had strongly supported George W.’s foreign policy, came down on him hard. After going this way and that, Jeb admitted defeat on Thursday. He mixed the first-person singular and plural with the second person in, finally, responding to Kelly’s original question. “Knowing what we know now, what would you have done? I would have not engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq.”
So why have any sympathy for him at all? The main reason is very old-fashioned: His apparent reluctance to cast his own brother into the darkness. In justifying his initial answer, Bush later used his own reframing of Kelly’s words as an excuse, explaining he hadn’t understood the “know now” part. But it’s just as possible that he knew perfectly well what Kelly had asked — Jeb Bush is not stupid — and hoped he could get away with answering a different question to avoid being disloyal to George W.
Loyalty is a virtue in rather short supply in our culture, so I admire it when I see it. Of course it can be misplaced. There are times when other virtues should trump it. But loyalty does matter, and I have some respect for Jeb for trying to stay true to his family ties over four utterly miserable days.
Still, there are more important issues here than family. Bush’s agony isn’t over because Iraq raises profound questions not only for him but also for all of his GOP opponents. If Bush’s initial answer about the war was wrong and his most recent answer was right, this means that opponents of the war were also right. They included a young Illinois state senator, Barack Obama, who predicted in 2002 that “even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”
Many of the war’s staunchest supporters understand that they can never concede that Obama was right because doing so would undermine their ongoing defense of a hyperinterventionist foreign policy. That’s why some of them remain unrepentant. “I believed in it then,” former vice president Dick Cheney said of the war to Politico’s Mike Allen last July. “I look back on it now, it was absolutely the right thing to do.”
Bill Kristol, one of the war’s leading promoters, told CNN last June: “I’m not apologizing for something that I think was not wrong. I think going to war to remove Saddam was the right thing to do and necessary and just thing to do.” Donald Rumsfeld, George W.’s first secretary of defense, said that it would have been “immoral” not to go to Iraq.
But other hawks would rather see the was-the-Iraq-War-right question magically disappear because they know it’s a no-win for them. Most Americans now think the war was ill-advised. Why remind them that most of the same people who are super hawks now brought them an adventure they deeply regret? Thus did the Wall Street Journal editorial page on Friday come out firmly and unequivocally in favor of — evasion. “The right answer to the question is that it’s not a useful or instructive one to answer, because statesmanship, like life, is not conducted in hindsight.”
Sorry, but inquiring minds will want all the candidates to offer straight answers. This means that Bush’s Republican opponents will have to do more than trash his botched dodging. Bush at least had the excuse that he didn’t want to speak ill of his brother. The rest of them still need to explain how their own views of the past relate to where they’ll take us in the future.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 17, 2015
“What A Marvelous Historical Anomaly”: How Dubya Is Winning 2016 For Hillary
What a delightful week, watching Republicans not Democrats sink in the foreign policy quicksand. For most of my adult lifetime—come to think of it, all of it, and pretty much all of my entire lifetime—to the extent that foreign policy has mattered in presidential campaigns, it’s been brandished by Republicans to accuse the Democrats of being soft on whatever the supposed threat was at the time. To think that we might have a presidential campaign in which the Democrats are the ones playing foreign policy offense, forcing the Republicans to profess that they are not war-mongering psychopaths, would be a thing to behold—as well as a measure, eight long years later, of how much damage George W. Bush and his co-belligerents did to the Republican Party.
It surely caught Jeb Bush by total surprise, the shitstorm that kicked up after his first answer about invading Iraq. Yes, he’s rustier than a 1970s Plymouth; yes, he appears not to have been really quite listening to Megyn Kelly; and yes, it’s beginning to dawn on all of us, God help us, that Dubya may have been the smart one.
But all those factors are subordinate to the main one, which is this: History instructs that if you’re a Republican running for president and you’re asked about a war, you probably can’t go wrong by saying you’re for it. A past war, a current war, a future war (perhaps these most of all!), it doesn’t matter. Be pro-war, accuse the Democrats of wanting the United States to suckle at the teat of the UN and the new global order; and if it’s a current war that’s not going swimmingly, blame the Democrats and the anti-war elements at home. These are can’t lose propositions.
Or were. This week, Bush learned otherwise. I know, specifically it had to do with the “knowing what we know now” language, which is what really cranked up the media’s chainsaw. But public anti-war sentiment is even more blunt than that. Here for example is a question from a Quinnipiac poll last summer: “Do you think the result of the Iraq War was worth the loss of American lives and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?” This does not say “knowing what we know now,” which would clearly prod the respondent to think, “Oh, yeah, no WMD,” and would be more likely to produce a higher “not worth it” result.
But even keeping the WMD lie out of the conversation, not worth it won by 75-18 percent. Even Republicans said not worth it by 63-27.
It has created a new and perhaps not un- but let’s say little-precedented default foreign policy position in the American electorate: Now, the cowboys have to prove their solution to every problem isn’t to invade it or bomb it. This may have been true for the 1976 election, during the Vietnam hangover. But even if so, concerns about Vietnam were a distant second to unease about Richard Nixon’s rape of the Constitution and Gerry Ford’s pardon of him for doing it. Today, though, this question of reflexive Iraq hawkery is enough of a no-no that some people think Bush might already be sunk and should just quit now.
And this is why we saw Marco Rubio also reverse himself last week (although he would deny that) on the Iraq War. He used to defend the war, but now, with the new Kelly Standard in play, he decided he’d better come out and say: “Not only would I not have been in favor of it, President [George W.] Bush wouldn’t have been in favor of it and he said so.”
Rubio, of course, has neo-conned himself to the gills, and there will be plenty of time for him during this primary season to come out swinging on Iran, once he figures out that Iran and ISIS are not allies. But that even he “clarified” his position in the anti-war direction says something.
Now I should note: It may not play out the way I’m describing during the primary campaign. Yes, as we saw above, rank-and-file Republicans said the Iraq War wasn’t worth it by 63-27. But in the context of a primary season, that 27 can be as loud as or louder than the 63. It’s probably the 27 who are more likely to vote or attend caucuses, which means the minority would have inordinate influence over the shape of the candidates’ rhetoric.
But in a general-election context, the GOP nominee will probably have to tack back pretty quickly toward the anti-war position. This will give Hillary Clinton a great opportunity. For one thing, it’ll weaken the salience of the whole “she can’t defend the country cuz she’s a girl” line of attack, which will come, however subtly. It will allow Clinton to define the terms of what constitutes a sensible foreign policy, and the Republican man will likely have to agree with her.
And most of all it will be a lot better for the world than if the situation were reversed. Contrary to liberals’ deepest suspicions about her, she is not a neo-conservative; she is not going to have regime change in Iran on her mind, which any of the Republicans as president would, except for Rand Paul.
Poor Republicans! Crime is down; they can’t scream law and order. And now war is unpopular, so they can’t say the Democrats are soft on whomever. Their economic theories are increasingly discredited. I guess that leaves the old standby: race-baiting. But we may have reached a point where that doesn’t work anymore either. Should be an interesting race.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 18, 2015
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