“McCain’s Descent Into Self-Pity”: Oh Please Mr. President, Say To Me, You’ll Let Me Hold Your Hand!
At a fundraiser this week, President Obama told supporters, “I’d love nothing more than a loyal and rational opposition, but that’s not what we have right now.” Apparently, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) wasn’t amused.
“The self-pity that Obama continues to exhibit is really kind of sad, really,” McCain said on Wednesday during Fox News’ “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.” […]
“You know, I can’t work with him at all,” McCain said. “When is the last time he really called leaders of both parties together over at the White House, say, for a dinner, a social event.”
The failed presidential candidate added that Obama “does not have this desire to have social interface with people.”
I don’t mean to be picky, but when a politician accuses a rival of “self-pity,” and then in the next breath, he whines that the rival hasn’t invited him over for dinner, the politician probably hasn’t thought his argument through.
As Jed Lewison joked, “If President Obama would just call me up for dinner or a social event, and ask me to have social interface with him, then everything would be better and the world would be a fantastic place, but he won’t do that, so please excuse me while I go drown myself in a pool of tears shed over his self-pitying ways.”
But let’s go a step further with this, because McCain isn’t just confused about the nature of self-pity; he’s also wrong on the merits.
I’m reminded of an anecdote from last year when Obama invited several congressional Republicans to the White House for a private screening with the stars of the movie “Lincoln.” The president extended the invitation in secret, so the GOP lawmakers wouldn’t face any pressure from the right to turn Obama down.
It didn’t matter. None of the Republicans accepted the invitation to go and watch the movie at the White House.
Indeed, as we’ve discussed before, Obama has hosted casual “get-to-know-you” gatherings; he’s taken Republicans out to dinner on his dime; he’s taken House Speaker Boehner out golfing; and he’s held Super Bowl and March Madness parties at the White House for lawmakers.
Now, reasonable people can debate whether this outreach should have been even more aggressive, but for McCain to tell a national television audience the president “does not have this desire to have social interface with people” is obviously ridiculous.
But let’s go a step further still. If the lack of schmoozing isn’t the problem, what is? As we’ve discussed many, many times, traditional governing dynamics are largely impossible given that the Republican Party has reached an ideological extreme unseen in modern American history. It’s a quantifiable observation, not a subjective one.
The result is a situation in which GOP lawmakers refuse to compromise or accept concessions, partly due to partisan rigidity, partly out of fear of a primary challenge, partly out of their contempt for the president, and in many instances, all of the above.
Indeed, the parties sharply disagree with one another – there is no modern precedent for partisan polarization as intense as today’s status quo – and presidential outreach won’t change that. Congressional Republicans tend to fundamentally reject just about everything the White House wants, believes, and perceives as true. “Social interface” changes nothing.
Let’s return to the thesis presented a while back by Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein: “[W]e have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
The notion that schmoozing will lead to progress rests upon the assumption that congressional Republicans are responsible officials, willing to negotiate and work in good faith, and prepared to find common ground with Obama. All they need is some face-time and presidential hand-holding. Once they can get along on a personal level, a constructive process will follow.
It’s a pleasant enough fantasy, and I wish it were true, but everything we’ve seen points in the opposite direction.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 25, 2014
“How Did The GOP Turn Into Such A Bunch of Clowns?”: Lurching From One Strategic Screw Up To The Next
For a lot of reasons, the current era will probably be seen as unusually consequential in the history of the two parties, particularly the GOP. For Republicans, it has been a time of ideological hardening and bitter infighting. But one aspect of the Republican dilemma hasn’t gotten as much attention as those: This is a time of unusual, even stunning, Republican political incompetence.
Let me back up for a moment, to put what I’m saying in context. As the 2012 election approached, liberals began to understand just how deluded many conservatives were about empirical reality, and in ways that could do them serious political damage. It’s one thing to deny climate change (a denial that may benefit you and your allies), but if you convince yourself that you’re going to win when you’re actually going to lose, you’re hurting no one but yourself. When they began to rally around a guy claiming to “unskew” the 2012 presidential polls that showed Barack Obama heading for a victory, liberals had a great time ridiculing them. But then it turned out that even within the Romney campaign—including the candidate himself—people who were supposedly hard-nosed political professionals had convinced themselves that it was just impossible they could lose, whatever the polls said. As seen in an unforgettable bit of election-night television, Karl Rove, the party’s most celebrated strategist, refused to believe that Romney had lost even when Fox News called the race for Obama.
Once the race was over, there was some soul-searching within the GOP about their loss, but most of it concerned the party’s image as a bunch of unfeeling, out-of-touch white guys who couldn’t appeal to young voters and Hispanics. (Needless to say, this is a problem they’ve yet to solve,) There was some discussion about the conservative information bubble and the distorting effects it can have, but nothing changed—lots of conservatives still get their news from Fox and Rush Limbaugh, and assume that everything in the New York Times is a lie.
There seems to be little question that the alternative media universe they built, which was once a strength for the right, has become a liability. But their biggest problem now isn’t the things so many conservatives believe about the world that aren’t true, or what they think will happen that won’t. It’s about the strategic decisions they make, and where those decisions come from. Think about it this way: Has there been a single instance in the last few years when you said, “Wow, the Republicans really played that one brilliantly”?
In fact, before you’ll find evidence of the ruthless Republican skillfulness so many of us had come to accept as the norm in a previous era, you’ll need to go back an entire decade to the 2004 election. George W. Bush’s second term was a disaster, Republicans lost both houses of Congress in 2006, they lost the White House in 2008, they decided to oppose health-care reform with everything they had and lost, they lost the 2012 election—and around it all they worked as hard as they could to alienate the fastest growing minority group in the country and make themselves seem utterly unfit to govern.
In fact, in the last ten years they’ve only had one major victory, the 2010 midterm election. But that didn’t happen because of some brilliant GOP strategy, it was a confluence of circumstance; the natural tendency for the president’s party to lose significant numbers of seats two years after he’s elected, and the stagnant economy would have meant a big GOP victory no matter what they did.
Since then they’ve lurched from one strategic screw-up to the next, the root of which is almost always the same: It happens because they’re deluded into thinking that the country shares their particular collection of peeves and biases.
In fairness, this is a challenge for both parties and, indeed, for everyone involved in politics. When politics is your life, it’s hard, if not impossible, to think like an ordinary, inattentive voter thinks. When you’ve spent so much time convincing yourself that you’re right; the idea that anyone else who’s even remotely fair-minded wouldn’t agree can seem nothing short of absurd. It can be hard to persuade people when you can’t put yourself in their shoes.
But again and again, Republicans seem shocked to find out that Americans aren’t on the same page with them. They’re flummoxed when the public doesn’t rise up in outrage to demand more answers on Benghazi. They’re befuddled when shutting down the government turns into a political disaster. They’re gobsmacked when the electorate doesn’t reject Barack Obama for saying “you didn’t build that,” and even more amazed when he gets reelected. And in between, they can’t come up with any strategy to accomplish their goals, whether in policy or elections. Again and again, they think the American public is going to see things their way, and when the public doesn’t, they never seem to learn anything from it.
It isn’t always pure bumbling; there are times when the GOP follows an unwise strategic path not because of miscalculation, but because of unavoidable internal dynamics within the party. For instance, they’ve failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform not because party leaders don’t understand the political necessity of doing so, but because most members of the House come from conservative districts where comprehensive reform is unpopular, and therefore it makes sense for them to oppose it.
It would be too simple to put the GOP’s recent string of missteps and disasters down only to the struggle within the party, which yields a course ultimately determined by its radical wing. It is important that Tea Partiers, while being very good at figuring out how to make life miserable for the rest of their party, are abysmal when it comes to devising strategies for appealing to the country as a whole. But it’s equally relevant that the supposedly more pragmatic and experienced conservatives haven’t found a way to handle the snarling beast on their right flank and turn the whole ghastly mess into something that can fight Democrats with any modicum of success.
This shows no sign of changing. They’re going to win seats this November, but once again it won’t be because they came up with some brilliant strategy. If they win the Senate it will be because Democrats are defending more seats this year, many of which are in conservative states. (Two years from now when that situation is reversed, Democrats will almost certainly take back the Senate if they lose it this year.) Republicans will probably gain a few seats in the House, but don’t forget that in 2012, they retained their sizeable majority despite getting fewer votes nationwide than Democrats: Their advantage there is baked into the distribution of congressional districts.
And look at the people lining up to run for the White House in 2016. Does any one of them seem like the kind of brilliant politician who can navigate the deadly obstacle course of a two-year long presidential campaign and win over a majority of American voters, including millions who aren’t already on board with his party’s agenda? Who might that be? Ted Cruz? Rand Paul? Bobby Jindal? Rick Perry? Facing that collection of political samurai, Hillary Clinton must be positively terrified.
There are still plenty of smart Republicans out there. But the days when Republicans would run circles around Democrats, outdoing them in fundraising, messaging, organizing, and every other aspect of campaigning and politics, are a fading memory. The 2010 election may have blinded us to how long it’s really been since they set out to achieve a political goal and made it happen through their acumen and judgment. I’m sure that one day the GOP will get its strategic mojo back. But it could be a while.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 24, 2014
“A Collective GOP Orgasm”: Today’s Conservative Obamacare Baloney Debunked
If you were perusing the conservative twitter-sphere this morning, you would have witnessed a kind of collective orgasm, as it was discovered that back in 2012, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber gave a talk to a small group in which he seemed to support the analysis of the two judges on the D.C. Circuit who ruled this week in Halbig v. Burwell that the subsidies for buying health insurance under the Affordable Care Act should go only to people who live in states that set up their own insurance exchanges. Since Gruber advised Mitt Romney on the creation of Massachusetts’ health reform (which became the model for the ACA) and then advised the White House and Congress during the preparation of the ACA reform, conservatives are now convinced they have their smoking gun: The law, they contend, was always designed to deprive millions of Americans of subsidies, and was in fact never meant to achieve that “universal coverage” that everyone involved said was its goal.
Up to the point where the Supreme Court rules on Halbig, those conservatives will be citing Gruber’s 2012 comments. A lot. But the idea that something Gruber said in response to a question in front of what looks to be around 20 people is more relevant than literally everything else that happened during the drafting and debate over this law’s passage is, to put it plainly, insane.
Let me provide a partial list of people who spent over a year between the beginning of the debate over health-care reform and the passage of the law talking about the ACA, but never mentioned what was supposedly the intent of Congress that people in states using the federal exchange would be deprived of subsidies:
- Barack Obama
- Kathleen Sebelius
- Harry Reid
- Every other Democratic senator
- Nancy Pelosi
- Every other Democratic House member
- Every health-care analyst in America
- Every health-care reporter in America
- Every Republican in the Senate
- Every Republican in the House
- Every conservative opponent of the law
Ezra Klein, who wrote as much about health-care reform during this period as anyone, tweeted this morning that he interviewed Gruber dozens of times, and not only did Gruber never mention this issue, “[t]he same is true for literally everyone else I interviewed. I never heard a single person say subsidies don’t work in federal exchanges.”
As for Gruber himself, this morning he spoke to Jonathan Cohn, and here’s what he told him:
I honestly don’t remember why I said that. I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake. People make mistakes. Congress made a mistake drafting the law and I made a mistake talking about it.
During this era, at this time, the federal government was trying to encourage as many states as possible to set up their exchanges. …
At this time, there was also substantial uncertainty about whether the federal backstop would be ready on time for 2014. I might have been thinking that if the federal backstop wasn’t ready by 2014, and states hadn’t set up their own exchange, there was a risk that citizens couldn’t get the tax credits right away. …
But there was never any intention to literally withhold money, to withhold tax credits, from the states that didn’t take that step. That’s clear in the intent of the law and if you talk to anybody who worked on the law. My subsequent statement was just a speak-o—you know, like a typo.
There are few people who worked as closely with Obama administration and Congress as I did, and at no point was it ever even implied that there’d be differential tax credits based on whether the states set up their own exchange. And that was the basis of all the modeling I did, and that was the basis of any sensible analysis of this law that’s been done by any expert, left and right.
I didn’t assume every state would set up its own exchanges but I assumed that subsidies would be available in every state. It was never contemplated by anybody who modeled or worked on this law that availability of subsidies would be conditional of who ran the exchanges.
Cohn, too, says he never spoke to anyone who mentioned this before the Halbig lawsuit. If this was actually what Congress thought the law would do, then liberals would have been freaking out about this provision for years, because it would mean that millions of people wouldn’t be able to get coverage. And conservatives would have been crowing about it for years, for the same reason. But nobody on either side was, because it was never part of Congress’s intent. It was a mistake, and one contradicted by multiple other provisions in the law.
I have no doubt that when the Halbig case is re-argued before the full D.C. Circuit, either the plaintiffs’ attorneys or one of the conservative judges will bring up Gruber’s 2012 comments. Let’s just hope it gets shot down like the baloney it is.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 25, 2014
“Doomsday Prepper Economics”: The Weird Obsession That’s Ruining The GOP
Call it doomsday prepper economics. For more than five years, many Republicans and conservatives have warned that catastrophe is nigh. Washington’s deficit spending and the Federal Reserve’s excessive money printing will lead to a financial crisis worse than the Great Recession, they prophesied. Inflation will skyrocket, the dollar will collapse, and the Chinese will dump treasuries, they swore. As Ron Paul, the libertarian former GOP congressman and presidential candidate, said back in 2009: “More inflation is absolutely the wrong way to go. We’re taking a recession and trying to turn it into a depression. We’re going to see a real calamity.”
Many GOP politicians have since echoed Paul’s prediction. But the Next Great Inflation never happened. The Consumer Price Index, including food and energy, has risen by an annual average of just 1.6 percent since 2008, below the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target. During the Great Inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s, by contrast, prices rose five times faster.
This information isn’t a secret. The Labor Department releases inflation data monthly on its website. Yet inflation fears still rage on the right. Those concerns are a big reason why Republicans continue to push for a balanced budget ASAP. They’re why the GOP wants to saddle the Fed with restrictive new rules.
Regardless of the potential merits of those policy ideas, the inflation alarmism driving them is taking a weird turn. Some Republicans and conservatives now argue that Washington is figuring inflation all wrong, maybe even intentionally. Better, they say, to trust independent outside sources such as the website ShadowStats, which “exposes and analyzes flaws” in government economic data. According to one set of ShadowStats calculations, the true inflation rate is nearly 10 percent today. The inflation truth is out there.
In a recent National Review Online article, conservative author Amity Shlaes approvingly cites ShadowStats as supporting her thesis that “inflation is higher than what the official data suggest.” Others fans include conservative intellectual Niall Ferguson, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), and a good chunk of the conservative blogosphere.
ShadowStats’ popularity on the right is crazy — because the site’s methodology has been roundly ridiculed by both economists and business journalists. Critics also note that the subscription price for the ShadowStats newsletter has remained unchanged for years. Inflation for thee, but not for me. Beyond that, MIT’s Billion Price Project, which tracks prices from online retailers every day, puts U.S. inflation at just over 2 percent. And consider this: If inflation were really 10 percent, that would mean the real economy, adjusted for inflation, has been sharply shrinking — yet somehow still adding 2 million net new jobs a year.
If GOP inflationistas had their way, the weak U.S. recovery would almost surely be even weaker. Just look at Europe. Unlike the Fed, the inflation-phobic European Central Bank sat on its hands despite weak growth. The result has been an unemployment rate nearly twice America’s and a nasty double-dip recession. Of course, inflation is lower than in America — so low, in fact, that the region risks a dangerous deflationary spiral of falling prices and falling wages.
Why this GOP inflation obsession? Maybe it’s a legacy of how rapidly rising prices in the 1970s swept conservatives into power in both America and Great Britain. Maybe it’s how many conservative talk radio shows are sponsored by gold companies who stand to benefit from inflation hysteria. Maybe it’s a belief that every single economic metric must be a nightmare under President Obama.
But whatever the reason, the GOP’s preoccupation with phantom price increases is distracting it from the actual problems afflicting the U.S. economy — such as low social mobility, stagnant wages, and the decline of middle-class work. The price of not addressing those issues is rising every year. And that is the kind of inflation worth obsessing over.
By: James Pethokoukis, DeWitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute: The Week, July 23, 2014
“It’s Not A Game, It’s People’s Lives”: What Today’s Obamacare Ruling Reveals About The GOP
Today in a two-to-one decision a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit delivered Republicans perhaps their biggest victory yet in their ongoing legal battle to destroy the Affordable Care Act. This case is far from over — it will probably be appealed to the full appeals court (where today’s decision is likely to be reversed) and then to the Supreme Court. But it demonstrates just how willing Republicans are to lay waste to Americans’ lives if it means they can strike a blow at Barack Obama and his health law.
In some of their challenges to the ACA, there was a legitimate philosophical or practical point Republicans were making. You or I might think the idea that a mandate to carry insurance constitutes the death of liberty is ridiculous, but at least it was a substantive objection. Not so in this case, Halbig v. Burwell. Here, Republicans literally found a legislative drafting error in the ACA that they hoped could be used to deal a near-fatal blow to the law, and two Republican-appointed appeals court judges agreed with them.
In a section of the ACA concerning the subsidies given to low- and middle-income people to buy insurance on the exchanges, the legislation refers to subsidies provided through “an Exchange established by the State.” Since over half the states didn’t create their own exchanges and ended up with the federal exchange, the plaintiffs argue that no one in those states should be eligible to receive subsidies. If they’re successful, it would mean that if you live in Kentucky, which has a state exchange, you can get federal subsidies to buy insurance, but if you live next door in Tennessee, which uses the federal exchange, you can’t.
Now pause for a moment and consider what it is Republicans are asking the courts to do here. They want millions of Americans to lose the subsidies they got this year, in many if not most cases making health insurance completely unaffordable for them, and their justification is this: We found a mistake in the law, so you people are screwed. As far as the Republicans are concerned, it’s like spotting that a batter’s toe missed second base as he was trotting around for his home run, and therefore claiming that they won the game after all.
But it’s not a game, it’s people’s lives. If they succeed at the Supreme Court, people will die. That’s not hyperbole. Millions of Americans will lose their health coverage — 6.5 million by one estimate — and many of them won’t be able to afford to go to the doctor, and many of them will have ailments that go untreated. People will die.
If you want to read a comprehensive analysis of how legally and logically absurd this decision was, I’d recommend this one by Ian Millhiser. Cases like this often turn on Congress’ intent in writing legislation, and in this case there is no question about that intent — at no point in the debate or drafting or voting did anyone say that if a state chose to use the federal exchange then the people in that state wouldn’t get subsidies. But if you read the majority’s decision, you can see the two Republican judges positively luxuriating in the drafting error for page after page, exploring every possible way in which it could trap the government into denying subsidies to people.
Most ridiculously, they assert that there’s just no way to know whether Congress actually intended that people in states using the federal exchange should get subsidies, so their intent can only be inferred by the phrase “established by the State.”
As I said, this is a temporary victory for the ACA’s opponents — the whole D.C. Circuit court is likely to reverse this decision, though what will happen at the Supreme Court is less than clear. But when you see Republicans raising glasses of champagne to congratulate themselves on how clever they are, remember what it is they’re celebrating. It isn’t that conservatism won some meaningful philosophical victory, or that they’ve managed to make the country a better place. All that’s happening is that they may have succeeded in taking health insurance away from millions of Americans.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prsospect; Published at The Plum Line, The Washington Post, July 22, 2014
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