“One Of The Starkest Ideological Divides Facing Voters”: GOP Candidates Range From Hopeless To Hapless On Climate Change
The vast majority of scientists who have devoted their professional lives to studying the Earth’s climate believe human-induced warming is an urgent problem requiring bold action. Republican candidates for president insist they know better.
With one possible exception — Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who barely registers in the polls — GOP contenders either doubt the scientific consensus on climate change or oppose attempts to do anything about it. This promises to be one of the starkest ideological divides facing voters next year.
No pressure; it’s only the fate of the planet hanging in the balance.
Before President Obama could even announce his administration’s tough new curbs on carbon emissions from power plants, Republican hopefuls launched pre-emptive attacks. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who flat-out denies that climate change is taking place, accused scientists of “cooking the books” and Democrats of choosing “California environmentalist billionaires and their campaign donations” over “the jobs of union members.” Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida charged that the new rules “will make the cost of electricity higher for millions of Americans.” Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush called the regulations “unconstitutional” and claimed they would cost jobs.
These comments came at Sunday’s Freedom Partners forum, organized by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch to give GOP candidates a chance to strut their stuff. In that setting, I suppose, reality-based rhetoric would be too much to hope for.
For the record, let’s take a moment to deal with the above-quoted blather, which is typical of the lines of “argument” from the multitudinous GOP field.
To claim there is no atmospheric warming, Cruz cherry-picks one set of satellite measurement data — paying no attention to other data sets, which show continued warming — and chooses 1998 as a starting point. But that year was an obvious outlier; temperatures took a huge and anomalous leap, likely because of an unusually strong El Niño phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean.
Any graph of yearly global temperatures forms a saw-tooth pattern, but the overall trend is unambiguously upward. Cruz and other climate-change deniers ignore the fact that nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since the turn of the century — the one exception being 1998. The deniers also pretend to be unaware that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by a stunning 40 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humans began burning fossil fuels in large quantities. Unless Cruz has rewritten the fundamental rules of physics, such an increase has to cause warming.
Rubio claims the new carbon rules will be too expensive for consumers, but he seems not to know that utility companies are already moving away from coal, which releases more carbon dioxide than other fuels such as natural gas. The Obama administration has estimated that electricity prices might rise 4.9 percent by 2020 — a small price to pay given the stakes.
As for Bush’s claim that the regulations are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled last year that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions by power plants, factories and other polluting facilities. The 7-2 decision was written by Justice Antonin Scalia. Enough said.
The rest of the GOP field ranges from hopeless to hapless on the issue. Front-runner Donald Trump — I can’t believe I wrote those words, but that’s what he is — firmly belongs in the former camp. He has called global warming a “hoax” and once tweeted thatthe whole idea “was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.” Trump has also cited cold winter weather in the United States as “evidence.”
These Republicans seem to forget that the Earth is really, really big — so big that it can be cold in one place, such as Manhattan, and hot in other places. At the very same time.
Of the other candidates, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former New York Gov. George Pataki and businesswoman Carly Fiorina have all at times acknowledged the scientific consensus on climate change but hemmed and hawed about what, if any, action to take. Rick Santorum joins Trump and Cruz in full denial. The rest — Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal, Ben Carson and Jim Gilmore — either aren’t sure warming is taking place or don’t know if humans are causing it.
Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both promise even tougher action against climate change than Obama has taken. This is a very big reason why elections matter.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 3, 2015
“Emerging From The Ferment”: The Real Irony Of Scott Walker’s Messy Personal Finances
The finances of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker got a rather stern once-over from National Journal on Monday.
“Walker has two credit-card debts of more than $10,000 apiece on separate cards and is paying an eye-popping 27.24 percent interest rate on one of them,” the Journal harrumphed, before quickly lasering in on the irony. “The Republican presidential candidate has cast himself as both a fiscal conservative leader and a penny-pinching everyman on the campaign trail, often touting his love of Kohl’s, the discount department store.”
Walker isn’t the first Republican presidential hopeful to get this treatment either. Back in June, The New York Times took Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida to task for a “strikingly low savings rate” and some household purchases of questionable wisdom.
This is a deeply silly genre of journalism. It treats troubles the vast majority of Americans grapple with as vaguely scandalous. And it implicitly assumes the same rules of thumb that should guide household budgets should also guide the federal budget, which is catastrophically wrong.
More to the point, other details in the Journal piece offer a brief look at a presidential candidate of relatively modest means.
“Walker listed only six investments worth between $1,000 and $15,000, a whole life insurance plan worth between $15,000 and $50,000, and a deferred compensation plan from Milwaukee County worth between $15,000 and $50,000,” the Journal continued. Walker received a $45,000 advance for a book in the last year, and it looks like his annual salary since assuming the governorship in 2011 has been around $140,000. That’s certainly a lot of income compared to most Americans — it puts Walker just below the threshold for the top 10 percent — but it’s obviously nothing compared to the fortunes Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton have amassed.
This gets at something poignant about Walker the politician, and by extension Walker the man. While most all presidential candidates and politicians have a significant amount of socioeconomic distance from the median American, Walker has less than most. Besides his income and wealth, Walker came from modest beginnings as a preacher’s kid in a small Wisconsin manufacturing town. He attended Marquette University in Milwaukee, but didn’t finish his degree — passing on one of the key status symbols that American elites use to separate themselves from the pack.
And yet few Republicans, and certainly no other Republican presidential candidate, has been so ferociously focused on grinding everyday workers into the ground.
Like any good conservative, Walker pushed massive tax cuts for the well-to-do through Wisconsin’s state budget, creating a hole he’s now trying to fill by slicing education spending. But he also drove a blistering and brutally successful push to crush Wisconsin’s public-sector unions, followed by “right to work” laws that will likely cripple the state’s private unions as well.
Nor does it look like Walker did this because Republican and business interests were demanding it — he did it because he wanted to, as a matter of ideology.
An explanation probably lies in the unique and poisonous way the history of race and class intersected in the Milwaukee political milieu Walker came from. In the early 20th century, large numbers of black Americans migrated from the South to northern urban centers. But no sooner had they put down roots than the mid-century collapse of manufacturing arrived, sucking away jobs and bringing poverty to the cities.
Black Americans had never been permitted to build up the wealth that white Americans had: Along with the aftereffects of slavery and the social consequences of segregation, they were initially excluded from policies like Social Security and the G.I. Bill, which helped build the white middle class. And racist policies like redlining and the construction of the highway system destroyed many of their neighborhoods and prevented them from accessing areas of economic vibrancy.
So when the white middle class fled to the suburbs, the poorer black populations could not follow. That set up Reaganite white suburbs, which surrounded and disdained the urban interiors of impoverished African-Americans, and all the vicious politics that followed. The funny thing, as Alec MacGillis laid out in a 2014 profile of Walker, was that this process came a few decades late to Milwaukee. The future governor cut his political teeth as a member of Milwaukee’s fleeing white upper-middle class, just as this conflict was reaching its apex.
So it should come as no surprise that those public-sector jobs Walker helped crush have also been one of the great economic havens where black Americans can actually earn a decent living.
For decades, American macroeconomic policy has done a terrible job providing enough work to keep everyone employed. That’s introduced a bottom-up desperation that’s trickled higher and higher over the years. On top of that, while America has a hidden welfare state for the rich and the upper-middle class, its explicit social safety net is skimpy and targeted at the poorest Americans. This creates a perverse circumstance in which many Americans in the middle of the pack feel left behind, while they see people with different skin colors and alien cultural habits — habits often shaped by poverty — receiving aid (however grossly inadequate).
More and more, American society is becoming a brute contest, in which the groups of varying power must trample one another for the scraps that fall from the elite table. This sort of divide-and-conquer effect, in populations that should be uniting over common interests and common foes, has a long history in U.S. labor struggles.
When people find themselves outside the elite inner circle, and see themselves as in a zero-sum economic game with impoverished subcultures that look and act different from them, the likes of Scott Walker is often what emerges from the ferment.
By: Jeff Spross, The Week, August 5, 2015
“Let’s Not Get Carried Away Here”: Get Ready For The Raw Lunacy Of The Media’s 2016 Debate Coverage
If you live in Washington, where herds of journalists and pundits lope across the landscape in search of political events to opine on, you’ve probably noticed a tingling in the air. Yes, Thursday night is the first primary debate of the 2016 election, when the answers to so many burning questions will come into focus.
So I want to plead with my fellow denizens of the media: Let’s not get carried away here.
I say that not because I don’t think this debate will matter, but because I fear it might matter too much. If history is any guide, a relatively small number of political junkies will actually watch the thing — after all, who in their right mind tunes into a primary debate 15 months before the election? The potential problem isn’t in what happens during the debate, but what happens after.
This debate has been the source of even more speculation than the first of previous elections, for one important reason: Not everyone gets to come. The Republican field currently contains a remarkable 17 contenders (more actually, if you count some people you’ve never heard of and who haven’t held elected office before but have declared themselves candidates). Since a debate with that many participants would barely give each of them a time to talk, Fox News decided to limit the number to 10.
By my count, there have been approximately three zillion articles and TV news stories on the question of which candidates will make the cut. And the presumption is always that if they don’t make it into that debate, then they’ll be forever consigned to second-tier status, ignored by the media as their campaigns sink even lower than they already are.
Which might well be true. But it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s a product of choices that we in the media will make about who we pay attention to. There’s no law that says we have to ignore somebody because they didn’t appear in that first debate. (Fox will be airing a kind of consolation debate with the other seven, which is being referred to as the “kids’ table.” Unless one of them strips naked and performs a sword-swallowing act, don’t expect reporters to care much about what goes on there.)
Let’s look at the candidates who didn’t make the top-10 cutoff: Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, and Jim Gilmore. One sitting governor, one sitting senator, three former governors, one former senator, and a former corporate CEO. As a liberal, the thought of any of them becoming president might fill me with dread, but you can’t say they’re not a serious group. Nor can you say they’re any less qualified than the ones who did make the top 10. Is Perry, who was governor of the country’s second-largest state for 14 years, less of a real candidate than Ben Carson, a retired doctor who has never held public office? Is Jindal, who has been an executive branch official, a member of Congress, and a governor, less of a genuine contender than Mike Huckabee, who spends most of his time these days hawking biblical cancer cures?
Choosing the candidates who will be on the stage may have been a problem with no good solution, because any means of deciding between the guy at number 10 and the guy at number 11 would seem unfair. But that’s exactly why reporters shouldn’t assign any meaning at all to the lineup of this debate.
And they ought to take as measured an approach as possible to what actually occurs during the debate itself. Debate coverage is seldom all that enlightening, and it usually has the function of creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Journalists pick out one or two key moments (a screw-up, a particularly creative zinger) and say, “This is what will have an impact.” Then they proceed to replay and repeat those moments over and over, to the point where they’re all anyone remembers — and for most people, they’re all anyone ever saw. Then they say, “Candidate Smith couldn’t escape his debate gaffe when he picked his nose on camera” — and of course he couldn’t escape it, because you kept talking about it.
So by all means, let’s report on this debate, as we will on the others that will be coming up later. Let’s analyze what happened there, and try to determine what was interesting or revealing or edifying — I certainly will. But let’s try to keep it in perspective. There’s lots of time left, many other debates to come, and plenty of opportunities for these many candidates to rise and fall — so long as we let them.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 6, 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
“The Undercard”: What Will Be The Fate Of The GOP Candidates Who Didn’t Make The Cut?
So the hammer finally dropped on seven Republican presidential candidates who did not make Fox News’ top ten national polling threshold for the first official debate of the cycle: Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Jim Gilmore. They have been relegated to a 5:00 PM “forum” on Fox tomorrow that will last an hour; the top ten will rumble for two hours at 9:00 PM.
One of the story-lines for the next couple of weeks will be the fate of the candidates who didn’t make the cut. Will the media start treating them like the Walking Dead? Will donors and previously committed activists abandon them? Will any of them see the handwriting on the wall and just drop out? Or could this whole make-the-top-ten obsession of the last couple of months turn out to have been a chimera?
You’d have to figure that three of the leftover candidates have a survival advantage. Perry has gotten off to a good start substantively and in terms of early Iowa impressions. He also has a lifeline to Texas and Christian Right money. Fiorina remains a candidate other Republicans want to push in front of cameras to savage Hillary Clinton without the appearance of male pigginess. And Lindsey Graham is this cycle’s clown prince, beloved by media for his jokiness, his moderation on some domestic issues, and his mad bomber hawkiness on foreign policy, making him a nice matched set with Rand Paul.
As long as Rick Santorum has Foster Friess willing to finance his Super-PAC, however, he can probably stick around. And what else does Bobby Jindal have to do? Govern Louisiana? Hah!
In the wake of not making the Fox cut, Team Jindal has settled on an interesting reaction: predicting Bobby will overwhelm the field with his Big Brain (per Buzzfeed‘s Rosie Gray):
The Bobby Jindal campaign likewise responded with a certain level of disdain for its fellow undercard debaters.
“Unlike other candidates, Bobby has a tremendous bandwidth for information and policy,” said Jindal spokesperson Shannon Dirman. “He’s smart, has the backbone to do the right thing, and his experience has prepared him well for debates on any number of policy topics. If anyone thinks they can beat him in a debate I’d love to learn about it.”
Bobby used the term “bandwidth” himself a couple of times during Monday’s Voters First Forum in NH. It’s apparently the new term for “smartest guy in the room,” which will probably be etched on Jindal’s political tombstone. He’s got all the arrogance of Donald Trump, but without the poll numbers.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 5, 2015
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