“Ted Cruz Cannot Be Serious”: With Ill-Conceived Fantasies, Cruz Is Entirely Unsuited To Be President
The big news of the day is that Senator Ted Cruz is officially running for president. Not setting up an exploratory committee or any of that perfunctory foreplay, but actually running. “It is a time for truth. It is a time for liberty,” he said in a 30-minute speech at, yeah, Liberty University. “It is a time to reclaim the Constitution of the United States.” Cruz’s address was full of red meat for the conservative crowd. But other than his oratorical skills, Cruz is entirely unsuited to be president. Luckily for America, his candidacy is likely doomed to fizzle.
Cruz recapped his life story, focusing on the role faith plays in his life, before diving into his traditional conservative talking points. He asked the crowd to imagine “millions of young people coming together and standing together, saying, ‘We will stand for liberty'” and “instead of economic stagnation, booming economic growth.” He asked people to imagine the next president repealing Obamacare, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, implementing a flat tax and “finally, finally, finally secur[ing] the borders.” The crowd cheered each time.
The rest of the Republican field, whenever they officially announce their candidacies, will probably make similar promises; it’s hard to picture a candidate winning the Republican nomination without vowing to repeal Obamacare. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent writes, the Republican primary will reveal whether Cruz’s policy positions are extreme within the GOP or whether he differs mainly in his tactics.
His positions, regardless of where they fall within the Republican Party, are ill-conceived fantasies. Take taxes. A flat tax may appeal to the conservative base but it entirely misrepresents the actual problems with the U.S. tax code. The tax code is complicated not because of its progressive structure but because it is full of deductions, exemptions and credits that make it hard to calculate your taxable income. Cruz promotes the flat tax by saying it “lets every American fill out his or her taxes on a postcard.” But the exact same could be said about a progressive tax system. Senator Marco Rubio, another presumptive presidential candidate, didn’t propose a flat tax in his recently released tax plan (although he did say he wants to get there someday) because doing so is just not feasible. A flat tax would need to be set at a high enough level to fund critical government programs, requiring a massive tax increase on the middle class and poor. That’d be a political nightmare.
On Obamacare, Cruz wants to repeal the law … and then basically see what happens. This is, of course, the Republican Party’s position as well. But it’s unacceptable as a presidential candidate’s health care agenda. If you want to repeal the health care law, you better have a replacement plan. The same goes with abolishing the IRS. A Cruz government would eliminate the agency but it would still collect taxes—somehow. Cruz has never said how that would work. Would there be a new agency to replace the IRS? Would it have employees? Who, after all, would collect all those postcards? All unanswered questions.
Yet above all, one particular position should disqualify Cruz—or anyone else who holds it—from the presidency: using the debt ceiling as a hostage device. Breaching the debt ceiling would be disastrous. It’s hard to forecast exactly what would happen, but we can somewhat forecast day one after default. The government would have to prioritize its payments. Do you withhold food stamps from low-income Americans? Delay Social Security checks? Maybe we should stop payments on infrastructure projects. Those missed payments would harm millions of Americans and cause mass disruptions around the country as cash flow problems cause companies to become insolvent. Over the long term, it would permanently raise our borrowing costs, making our interest payments more expensive. In short, it would be self-inflicted economic Armageddon. Cruz considers his willingness to risk that catastrophe a selling point, touting his role in opposing the debt ceiling hikes on his website.
Beyond his policy positions, Cruz has demonstrated himself to be particularly un-presidential. During the 2013 government shutdown, for one, he demanded that President Barack Obama defund Obamacare in return for keeping the government open and avoiding a default on the national debt. It was a ridiculous demand that elevated Cruz’s national profile and ended with Republican approval ratings cratering. In the process, he infuriated much of the Republican establishment—not the only time he has done that.
That episode wasn’t an outlier. Throughout his time in the Senate, Cruz has shown a distinct lack of interest in policymaking or governing. Instead, he has calculated every move to prepare for a 2016 run. Every politician considers the optics of their positions, of course, but Cruz has taken it to the next level, with little care for how his actions affected the Republican Party or his colleagues. In doing so, he probably doomed his candidacy. On Monday, Five Thirty Eight’s Harry Enten convincingly argued that Cruz’s extreme views and his few friends within the Republican Party make it highly unlikely that he will win the nomination.
And that means Cruz’s role in the Republican primary will likely benefit Democrats. He’ll pull the rest of the party to the right on immigration, taxes and health care. Moderates such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush may have to resist the urge to adopt more conservative positions. In December, for instance, Bush said that the GOP candidates had to be willing to “lose the primary to win the general without violating your principles.” But that position is easy to hold 23 months before the general election and more than a year before the first primary. It will become harder to sustain as Cruz and others repeatedly hammer the moderates.
In Cruz’s speech Monday, he never mentioned Hillary Clinton. Instead, he painted a bleak picture of America and its role in the world, saying that the American dream “is slipping away from our hands.” He sees a desperate need for a conservative president to “restore that shining city on a hill that is the United States of America.” Implied throughout: Democrats are ruining America. Yet his actions are only making a Hillary Clinton presidency more likely. The Senator who would hold the government hostage has become the candidate doing the same to his party.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, March 23, 2015
“Doing Real Vetting Should Be Part Of The Job”: Why Conservative Media Should Be Tough On Republican Candidates
When the RNC announced a few weeks ago that conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt was going to moderate a primary debate, many liberals ridiculed it as evidence that they wanted to shield their candidates from anything but softball questions. I argued that it was a good thing, first because the journalists (mostly from TV) who have moderated primary debates in the past have done such a terrible job, and second because primaries should be about what people within the party think. Someone with an interest in picking the best nominee might actually be tougher on the candidates, and would certainly have a better sense of what will matter to primary voters.
I don’t listen to Hugh Hewitt, so I can’t make any detailed assessment of his oeuvre, but though he’s certainly a partisan Republican he has a reputation as one of the better interviewers on the right. Yesterday, he interviewed Ben Carson and seemed to expose some gaps in Carson’s knowledge. This is being touted in some quarters as Carson showing his ignorance, but I actually think it’s an example of what partisan media ought to do during a primary.
I don’t know if Hewitt thinks of his mission this way, but if I were a conservative media figure like him, the last thing I’d want is a repeat of the nincompoop parade that was the 2012 GOP primaries. So doing some real vetting should be part of the job: asking difficult questions, exposing the areas of weakness that will eventually come up anyway, not to mention illuminating the real areas of distinctions that separate the candidates.
So did Hewitt ambush Carson? Maybe a bit, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with what he asked. In this case, it was about what might draw us into a war with Russia. Yes, Carson displayed some momentary confusion about NATO and the Baltic states, but candidates have done far worse (see here, for instance). And running for president ought to be hard. The job is hard. If we’re going to give someone that kind of power, there’s almost no question too tricky or detailed for them to be asked.
Now I’m no fan of Ben Carson, not by a long shot. But Hewitt asks him exactly the right question about being an amateur in politics, and Carson’s answer isn’t so terrible. Here’s the exchange:
HH: And so what I worry about as a Republican, as a conservative, is that because you’ve been being a great neurosurgeon all these years, you haven’t been deep into geopolitics, and that the same kind of questions that tripped up Sarah Palin early in her campaign are going to trip you up when, for example, the gotcha question, does she believe in the Bush doctrine when it depends on how you define the Bush doctrine. And so how are you going to navigate that, because I mean, you’ve only, have you been doing geopolitics? Do you read this stuff? Do you immerse yourself in it?
BC: I ‘ve read a lot in the last six months, no question about that. There’s a lot of material to learn. There’s no question about that. But again, I have to go back to something that I feel is a fundamental problem, and that is we spend too much time trying to get into these little details that are easily within the purview of the experts that you have available to you. And I think where we get lost is not being able to define what our real mission is, and not being able to strategize in terms of how do we defeat our enemies, how do we support our allies? I could spend, you know, the next six years learning all the details of all the SALT treaties and every other treaty that’s ever been done and completely miss the boat.
HH: Well, that’s possible, and I want to be respectful in posing this. But I mean, you wouldn’t expect me to become a neurosurgeon in a couple of years. And I wouldn’t expect you to be able to access and understand and collate the information necessary to be a global strategist in a couple of years. Is it fair for people to worry that you just haven’t been in the world strategy long enough to be competent to imagine you in the Oval Office deciding these things? I mean, we’ve tried an amateur for the last six years and look what it got us.
BC: Well, if you go to, let’s say, a very well-run hospital, you’re going to have a president of the hospital or chief administrator. He probably doesn’t know a whole lot about cardiac surgery, probably doesn’t know a whole lot about neurosurgery or pediatric infectious disease. But he knows how to put together a structure where the strength of all those departments work effectively. And as far as having an amateur in the Oval Office in the last six years, I would take issue with that. I would say that this man has been able to accomplish a great deal. It’s maybe not the things that you and I want accomplished, but in terms of fundamentally changing this nation and putting it on a different footing? I think he’s done quite a masterful job.
Ben Carson obviously isn’t going to be the GOP nominee; his run for the White House is part of a media strategy whose end point is a Fox gig or a talk radio show, supplemented by revenue from books revealing the shocking story of how liberals are destroying America. But you have to give him credit for pushing back on the idea so common in conservative circles that Barack Obama is some kind of incompetent dolt (he can’t give a speech without a teleprompter, ha ha!).
In any case, this is how interviews from conservative talk show hosts ought to go. Carson can go on Sean Hannity’s show and get a bunch of softball questions, and the answers will make the viewers nod their heads in agreement. But that doesn’t do them any good. They’ll be much better served if all their candidates get the toughest interviews possible now, and conservatives are the ones to do it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 19, 2015
“Jeb Bush’s Minimum Wage Radicalism”: The Abolition Of A Federal Minimum Wage Of Any Sort Is Now A Mainstream Republican Position
Every so often I feel the need to write the column that says: The one thing our political system needs more than any other single feature is a strengthened moderate wing of the Republican Party. I say this of course as a liberal, whose party registration is Democratic, which means you might think I’d say we need more liberals; and while I think that, I believe without question that having a strong moderate faction within the GOP would do far more to change our politics for the better than—yes—even having more Americans who think exactly as I do!
Having more liberals would if anything merely deepen the intensity of our civil war and produce more stalemate. The presence of a more muscular moderate Republican wing, however, would change everything. Then, there would be pressure on Republicans to adopt some sensible moderate positions, instead of what we have today, which is unceasing pressure to play this game of one-upmanship to see who can take the most reactionary, ignorant, and borderline racist position imaginable. Then, you’d have some Republicans from blue districts and states who would find it to be in their electoral self-interest to compromise with Democrats and vote for a Democratic president’s bill once in a while. Then, our political culture really would change.
And, then, people like Jeb Bush, the alleged moderate in the GOP presidential field, wouldn’t say jaw-dropping things like this, about the minimum wage, which he said Tuesday in (where else, somehow) South Carolina:
“We need to leave it to the private sector. I think state minimum wages are fine. The federal government shouldn’t be doing this. This is one of those poll-driven deals. It polls well, I’m sure—I haven’t looked at the polling, but I’m sure on the surface without any conversation, without any digging into it, people say, ‘Yeah, everybody’s wages should be up.’ And in the case of Wal-Mart, they have raised wages because of supply and demand and that’s good.
“But the federal government doing this will make it harder and harder for the first rung of the ladder to be reached, particularly for young people, particularly for people that have less education.”
Now it’s great that Wal-Mart and McDonald’s and Target and the others are voluntarily raising their minimum wages. One might argue that we’ve come to a particularly sad pass when the Walton family is doing more for its beleaguered workers than Congress can rouse itself to, but however you want to spin it, good for Wal-Mart.
But to take this little boomlet from what is still a small number of employers (although of course they do employ millions of people) and say that’s it, we should now have no federal minimum wage, is logical sleight of hand, and it’s a very radical position. A little background.
We first got a minimum wage in 1935. Then the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional (which could happen again, with this lot). Then it was passed again in 1938. We’ve had it ever since, although, as you probably know, it hasn’t gone up since 2009. That rise was the third and final phase of a 2007 law that raised the wage in increments. We haven’t had a new law to that effect in those eight years since.
It is true that in the 1980s, economists debated whether a federal minimum wage was desirable. Even The New York Times once editorialized against it, in 1987. At the time, economists thought it had deleterious effects on low-wage employment. Then, in the mid-1990s, the economists David Card and Alan Krueger studied this question in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (the former had increase its minimum wage, while the latter had not), and they found no employment impact.
That changed the academic consensus. An increase was passed in 1996. Some conservative economists continued to spoon out the “job-killer” Kool-Aid, as indeed they still do, but evidence continues to support the idea that there is no serious job-killing effect.
The parties disagreed strongly about how much the wage should be increased, but at least they agreed on increasing it—the 2007 increase, for example, passed the Senate 94-3, and the House by 233-82. John McCain, the GOP’s 2008 standard bearer, voted for the 2007 increase. And Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee, ran on supporting a modest increase and even indexing the minimum wage to inflation, which Barack Obama also supported and which would prevent Congress from having to pass legislation on the question ever again—a pretty progressive position, really.
So the last two mainstream, establishment GOP candidates—the last three, counting George W. Bush—supported an increase. But now, the mainstream, establishment candidate is against it. And if the mainstream, establishment candidate is against it, where are the others going to line up?
And so, one more hard-right pirouette by a party that keeps finding new ways to radicalize itself. But this one is particularly shocking coming from Bush, because it means that the abolition of a federal minimum wage of any sort is now a mainstream Republican position. And remember: The minimum wage, if it had kept pace with inflation, would be around $13 today, so it’s already insanely low at $7.25.
Which brings me back to how I opened this column. If there were a moderate wing of the GOP, this is most certainly an issue on which we’d have bipartisan agreement. The position Bush has just embraced would be seen across party lines for exactly the radical pandering that it is. Indeed he would not have taken it. That would be a nice world, but the world we have is the one we have. And if Bush can take this position, completely out of step with his party’s conservative mainstream in recent history, then what else will he prove himself capable of?
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 20, 2015
“Another Math Problem For The 2016 Hopeful”: Bobby Jindal’s Budget Doesn’t Fund Presidential Primary
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is learning the hard way that presidential primaries aren’t free. As of now, his state hasn’t budgeted for one.
To fill a $1.6 billion budget shortfall, Jindal proposed hundred of millions in spending cuts in a budget plan earlier this month, slashing the budgets of several offices. Secretary of State Tom Schedler was one of several state officials who testified to the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday that the budget underfunded his department and was lacking $3.4 million for a presidential primary next spring.
“I have no funding for elections past the fall elections,” Schedler told lawmakers Wednesday, later adding, “I want to hold a presidential preference primary if you want to pay for it.”
Jindal’s office and the Department of State lay the blame with the other party. According to the Washington Post, Jindal’s office said they gave Schedler’s office a “target savings number” to hit, and that cuts are at his discretion. Schedler’s spokeswoman said the Department of State informed the governor that primaries would be one of the first objectives to go if the budget was cut.
And so, the governor’s office has been aware of the primary election shortfall for weeks, and the gap is only just now becoming an issue. Officials are now working with the legislature to figure out how to come up with the extra funds, while Democrats are using the story to call attention to Jindal’s low placement in recent presidential polls, according to Reuters.
If Louisiana can’t afford a primary, it might set up a party-run caucus or convention, which might work in Jindal’s favor. “He wants to convince his own core group of people to rig it for him so he doesn’t come out looking so bad,” Stephen Handwerk, executive director of the Louisiana State Democratic Party, told Reuters.
It’s just as likely that Jindal was hoping the Department of State would cut funds somewhere a little less relevant to his political ambitions.
By: Arit John, Bloomberg Politics, March 2015
“He’s Really Running For Vice-President”: Why Haven’t Republicans Caught On To Marco Rubio?
When you try to assess candidates from the other party, even the most unsentimental among us can have a hard time separating our emotional reactions from our level-headed assessment of who’s a strong contender and who isn’t. For instance, to me, Scott Walker radiates a kind of unpleasant meanness that I suspect wouldn’t wear very well among the general electorate. But that’s hard to quantify, and I can’t be sure that I don’t feel that way only because I disagree with his policy positions and with what he has done in Wisconsin.
As a liberal, Walker scares me, because among the serious Republican presidential candidates, I suspect he’s the one who would govern with the most intense combination of recklessness and malice. But he doesn’t strike me as the most formidable general-election candidate. That would probably be Marco Rubio. Although that judgment is subject to change (we’ll have to see how they all perform in the rigors of the primary campaign), Rubio’s appeal is undeniable. He’s extremely conservative, but wears his ideology lightly—unlike someone like Ted Cruz, he doesn’t seem eager to smack voters in the face with how much of a right-winger he is. He’s obviously smart, and of course the fact that he’s Latino means he could cut in to the Democrats’ advantage among that increasingly important group (though by how much, we really have no idea). If I were a Republican, I’d be amazed that more of my compatriots weren’t flocking to him.
Amy Walter points out that according to some recent poll results, Walker and Rubio are the only candidates whom every sector of the Republican electorate finds appealing. Yet at the moment, he seems to be barely anyone’s first choice, and she doesn’t have much of an explanation as to why:
Yet, if Rubio’s got such obvious advantages, why is he stuck in the low single digits while Walker has become a “co-frontrunner” with Bush? First, don’t underestimate the power of Walker’s profile as a conservative governor of a blue state. Furthermore, for a party that’s ambivalent at best about the idea of the idea of a “legacy” candidate like Bush, Walker’s understated Midwestern-ism is appealing.
Rubio backers, however, aren’t worried about his low standing in the polls. If anything, they like where he sits today. Rubio gets to go about his work without the same level of scrutiny that Walker and Bush get. They also see Rubio as a candidate who can endure for the long-haul thanks to his natural political talent. Where Bush struggles on the stump, Rubio shines. Where Walker fails to engage, Rubio connects emotionally.
So, when can we expect to see Rubio’s poll numbers catch up with his potential? A high-profile stumble by Bush or Walker could give the Florida senator an opening. The debates could be another place for Rubio to break out. His allies, meanwhile, aren’t convinced they need those things to happen for him to succeed. Instead, they say, he just needs to keep doing what he’s doing and the voters will catch on to his appeal.
That could be true. It’s still very early, and now that we’ve gone through the “Hey, check out this Scott Walker guy” stage of the campaign, there could be a Rubio boomlet on its way. If there’s anything that will hold Rubio back, it may be his youth. Not only is he young, he seems young. In November 2016, he will only be two years younger than Barack Obama was in November 2008 (45 versus 47), but Obama looked like a grown-up while Rubio has a baby face that makes it hard to imagine him at the top of the ticket. That’s why I still think he’s really running for vice-president, which would set up a second try for the presidency in 2020 or 2024. It isn’t such a bad idea.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 20, 2015
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