“This Just Shouldn’t Be Possible”: Job Creation Trips Up GOP Message Machine
The more America’s job market improves, the tougher it is for Republicans to explain what’s happening. According to GOP talking points, tax hikes, regulations, and “Obamacare” are dragging down the economy, making it impossible for employers to create jobs.
And yet, the unemployment rate is at a six-year low, we’re on track for the best year for jobs since the Clinton era, and we just broke the record for the most consecutive months of private-sector job gains. For the right, this just shouldn’t be possible.
So how do Republicans reconcile the reality and their rhetoric? At least at Fox News, the answer is to ignore the inconvenient truths. Dylan Byers noted:
We won’t do the screen shots this time, but per usual FoxNews.com is the one major news site downplaying Thursday’s positive employment report. CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post are all leading their sites with the news (in large fonts, no less). Fox News has it buried in fine print on a sidebar.
It’s hard to argue that such a decision is a matter of unbiased editorial judgment.
Ya think?
Given recent history – good news is ignored, bad news is trumpeted – it’s probably safe to assume the right’s not-so-subtle approach is intended to keep the bubble intact for conservative audiences.
But even funnier was House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) unintentionally hilarious statement in response to the new jobs report.
The headline clearly says the press released relates to the “June 2014 Unemployment Report,” but remarkably, the Speaker of the House managed to issue a statement that ignores the June 2014 Unemployment Report.
“The House has passed dozens of jobs bills that would mean more paychecks and more opportunities for middle-class families. But in order for us to make real progress, the president must do more than criticize. From trade to workplace flexibility, there’s no shortage of common ground where he can push his party’s leaders in the Senate to work with us. Until he provides that leadership, he is simply part of the problem. For our part, we will continue to listen to and address the concerns of Americans who are still asking ‘where are the jobs?’”
Look, it’s the day before a major national holiday. It’s quite possible that Boehner never even saw the job numbers and this statement was written days ago and released to the media by some poor intern stuck in a largely empty office.
But given the importance of jobs to the American public, is it really too much to ask that Boehner put a little effort into this? Let’s unpack the response to jobs data that managed to ignore jobs data:
* “The House has passed dozens of jobs bills.” Actually, it hasn’t. If you look at Boehner’s list of “jobs bills,” it’s primarily a bunch of bills written for and by the oil industry, encouraging drilling everywhere. Here’s the challenge for the Speaker’s office: put together a jobs bill, subject it to independent scrutiny, find out how many jobs it would create, and get back to us. We’ve been waiting for three years. It hasn’t happened.
* “[T]he president must do more than criticize.” Well, he has. Obama has sent real, independently scored bills that would create jobs. The House Republican majority has so far failed to even vote on them.
* “Until he provides that leadership, he is simply part of the problem.” Boehner is practically allergic to leadership, unable to convince his own far-right caucus to listen to him on most issues, making this a curious line of attack. Regardless, the president, unlike the hapless Speaker, has lowered unemployment and has presented real plans to expand on this progress. Can Boehner say the same?
* “For our part, we will continue to listen.” To whom? I can think of a whole lot of measures that Americans have urged Congress to pass, which Boehner has ignored entirely. Who exactly does the Speaker think he’s listening to?
* “[A]ddress the concerns of Americans who are still asking ‘where are the jobs?’” They’re right here. If the Speaker’s office looked at the jobs report before commenting on the jobs report, this would have been obvious.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 3, 2014
“Battleground 2014”: Better Not Gloat Too Much Over Hobby Lobby, Republicans
At TNR John Judis reminds us that the last time Republicans embraced a Supreme Court decision restricting reproductive rights, it bit ’em in the butt:
In July 1989, the court handed down Webster v. Reproductive Health Services upholding Missouri’s right to restrict the use of state funds and employees in performing, funding, or even counseling on abortions. It was the first court decision restricting the rights bestowed under Roe v. Wade.
The nation, of course, was divided on the issue of abortion. How the issue played politically depended on which side of the debate saw itself under attack, and in this case the Webster decision mobilized pro-choice supporters. The right to abortion became a hot issue in the 1990 elections, and in the final results, abortion-rights supporters came out ahead. There were several telltale races. In Florida, Democrat Lawton Chiles defeated incumbent Republican Governor Bob Martinez, who, in the wake of Webster, had championed restrictive laws for Florida.
In the Texas governor’s race, Democrat Ann Richards defeated Republican incumbent Clayton Williams. According to polls, Richards, who made opposition to Webster a centerpiece of her campaign, garnered over 60 percent of the women’s vote, including 25 percent of Republican women. In the final tally, abortion-rights supporters, running against or replacing anti-abortion candidates, secured a net gain of eight seats in the House of Representatives, two Senate seats, and four statehouses.
What was also striking was the overall size of the gender gap. According to the National Election Studies survey, there was no gender gap between male and female supporters of Democratic congressional candidates in 1988. In 1990, gender gap was ten percentage points—the highest ever. All in all, 69 percent of women voters backed Democratic congressional candidates that year. Of course, there were other issues than Webster that were moving votes, but there is no doubt that the court ruling played an important role that year.
Now it’s true Webster turned on state abortion retrictions and thus was directly relevant to state election battles. But on the other hand, Hobby Lobby involves the elevation of corporate rights over reproductive rights, which is not exactly alien to the political battleground of 2014.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, Jul7 2, 2014
“Contraception Is Not Controversial”: The Last Time The Supreme Court Meddled In Women’s Health, It Was A Big Setback For The GOP
By ruling that family-owned businesses can deny contraceptive coverage to their employees, the Supreme Court handed a victory to a handful of businesses whose owners equate contraception with abortion. But the conservative justices may have dealt a blow to Republican political chances in 2014 and even in 2016.
Polls show, of course, overwhelming public support for contraception, even among Catholics. A Gallup poll in May 2012 found that 89 percent of all respondents and 82 percent of Catholics believed that contraception was “morally acceptable.” If Democrats can paint their Republican opponents as supporters of the Roberts Court and its decisions, they could help their cause significantly, especially among women who might otherwise vote for Republicans or not vote at all.
One can look at the effect an earlier court decision regarding women’s rights had on Congressional and gubernatorial elections. In July 1989, the court handed down Webster v. Reproductive Health Services upholding Missouri’s right to restrict the use of state funds and employees in performing, funding, or even counseling on abortions. It was the first court decision restricting the rights bestowed under Roe v. Wade.
The nation, of course, was divided on the issue of abortion. How the issue played politically depended on which side of the debate saw itself under attack, and in this case the Webster decision mobilized pro-choice supporters. The right to abortion became a hot issue in the 1990 elections, and in the final results, abortion-rights supporters came out ahead. There were several telltale races. In Florida, Democrat Lawton Chiles defeated incumbent Republican Governor Bob Martinez, who, in the wake of Webster, had championed restrictive laws for Florida.
In the Texas governor’s race, Democrat Ann Richards defeated Republican incumbent Clayton Williams. According to polls, Richards, who made opposition to Webster a centerpiece of her campaign, garnered over 60 percent of the women’s vote, including 25 percent of Republican women. In the final tally, abortion-rights supporters, running against or replacing anti-abortion candidates, secured a net gain of eight seats in the House of Representatives, two Senate seats, and four statehouses.
What was also striking was the overall size of the gender gap. According to the National Election Studies survey, there was no gender gap between male and female supporters of Democratic congressional candidates in 1988. In 1990, gender gap was ten percentage points—the highest ever. All in all, 69 percent of women voters backed Democratic congressional candidates that year. Of course, there were other issues than Webster that were moving votes, but there is no doubt that the court ruling played an important role that year.
Fast forward to 2014. If Webster improved Democratic chances in 1990, the court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby could prove a boon to Democrats. Abortion rights remain controversial but contraception is not, and the opposition to contraception raises hackles among most voters, but especially among women. If Democrats, who had seemed destined for defeat in November, can tie the ruling around the necks of their Republican opponents, they could do surprisingly well in November.
By: John B. Judis, The New Republic, July 2, 2014
“Outreach To ‘Lady People’ Campaign”: The GOP Wants The Ladies To Love Them, (Just Not Enough To Need Birth Control)
So, the announcement that Republicans had formed yet another political action committee targeting female voters – a lady-centric Super Pac named the Unlocking Potential Project – came just as America was digesting the supreme court’s decision to allow certain corporations to deny women birth control coverage based on religious objections. Did Republicans think this was genius counter-programming, or what?
Forget the obvious irony that limiting access to birth control is the definition of denying women their full potential: could launching a women’s outreach program the day we’re reminded of just where the GOP stands on women’s issues – on top of them, stomping down, mostly – ever be genius, or is it just run-of-the-mill tone-deafness?
It is nearly impossible to keep track of the number of times the GOP has rebooted this “outreach to lady people” campaign – there’s already an entirely separate Pac, called RightNOW, aimed at recruiting female candidates (launched this year), and a parallel effort by the National Republican Congressional Committee, Project GROW (from 2013). The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) launched yet another, similar recruitment project this summer – 14 in ’14 – primarily because the number of Republican women running for Congress actually shrank between 2012 and 2014. One presumes the party will keep holding recruitment drives until the number of female Republican candidates reaches zero.
(Republicans’ time and money is probably better spent on the other NRCC project relating to female candidates: workshops for male candidates on how to not to sound like dumbasses when running against them.)
GOP voters have stymied the NRCC’s efforts by rejecting women at the polls almost as fast as the party leadership can put them on stages and point to them as evidence that the party has no problem with women. In the 2012 primary season, female Democratic candidates won their races about 50% of the time, but female Republicans did just 31% of the time. This House primary season doesn’t look to be turning out much better: female Democratic candidates are winning their races about twice as often as Republicans, and some of those losses have been particularly nasty.
Former Miss America and Harvard Law School graduate Erika Harold, running as a Republican against incumbent Rodney Davis in Illinois, found herself the object of dirty tricks and vile slurs: “Rodney Davis will win,” wrote the chair of the county Republicans in an email to a GOP newsletter, “and the love child of the DNC will be back in Shitcago by May of 2014 working for some law firm that needs to meet their quota for minority hires.” Denied access to GOP voter data by the party – an invaluable source of information for both fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts – she lost, 55-41%. In other words, a female Republican candidate straight out of We Are the New GOP central casting got slimed by the kind of racist nonsense Republicans continually declare to be a vicious stereotype about Republicans.
But it’s not a stereotype if the examples just keep on coming.
The most charitable interpretation of Republican outreach efforts to women is “at least they know it’s a problem!”. But the truth is that they’ve known about the political gender gap since 1984, when it first emerged as a potential problem for the party. And, sadder still, they’ve been trying to address it explicitly for at least 20 years – a Quixotic crusade that’s given them the largest gender gap ever (20 points) in the 2012 election and, looking forward to this year’s elections, a double-digit deficit among women in generic congressional preference (50-38%).
The seeds of the party’s failure are clear in a dusty piece in The Atlantic from 1996, “In the Land of Conservative Women”: change a few names and dates and it could run in, say, Politico – tomorrow. The author, Elinor Burkett, spent half her time marvelling at the audaciousness of female Republican staffers wearing short skirts and enjoying rock-n-roll music (said one such rebel: “One girl told me I was the first girl she’d ever met who was pro-life and still cool”). The other half of the story was an earnest appraisal of kitchen-table-bound, pocket-book-cautious moms: “Overwhelmed by bills, worried about their kids, afraid of violence.” Surveying that vein of potential Republicans, she wondered, “If 1994 was the year of the angry white male, 1996 may turn out to be the year of the anxious white female.” (Nope! The Clinton-Dole gender gap was 14 points.)
What Republicans were really hoping to do in 1996, Burkett wrote, was “appeal to female voters by persuading them that a balanced budget, lower taxes, and school choice will do more to improve their lives than will affirmative action, abortion, and funding for rape-crisis centers.”
Well, that’s worked out great. (This strategy’s dismal chances can also be seen in the politician presented as female Republicans’ biggest ally: Newt Gingrich, described as “determined to help women come together”.)
Flash forward to more recent times and the right is still promoting fun-loving gals who like guns and God while writing positioning memos that urge candidates to address “the economic anxiety women feel” and making this familiar argument:
Women tell us their top issues are the economy, jobs, health care, spending. When we start buying into the Democrats’ definition that it’s all about reproductive issues, then we are not playing to our strengths.
That reproductive rights are an economic issue is a stubborn truth that will keep the GOP stumbling for as long as they choose to ignore it.
I’ll give you one hint about the problem with believing that your female compatriots are either lusty libertarian-leaning pixies or Xanax-seeking helpmeets: it starts with “virgin” ends with “complex” and has a “whore” in the middle.
Don Draper’s psyche is not anything upon which to base a political strategy – and if you require Pac upon strategic plan upon public statement to affirmatively appeal to women, you’re confirming the fact that your policies alone no longer do. Maybe work on that.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Guardian, July 1, 2014
“Republican’s Tricky Dancing Dilemma”: The GOP’s Religious Liberty Sham Is About To Blow Up Their Immigration Reform Excuse
The Supreme Court’s determination that Hobby Lobby and other closely held corporations can be treated as religious entities, and are thus exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, happened to fall on the same day that President Obama announced he’ll take executive action to reduce deportations from the U.S. interior now that John Boehner has confided to him that the House won’t vote on immigration reform this year.
I’m sure the timing was coincidental. But as the consequences of each development begin to play out, I think we’ll find that they’re much more revealing side by side than they would have been running sequentially.
The key is that Democrats are going to attempt, through legislation, to remedy the damage the Court did to the contraception mandate while simultaneously acknowledging that their attempts to legislate immigration reform have failed, and that they’ll have to content themselves with whatever steps the administration can take under current law.
But at the same time, Republicans are going to try to side-step the political dangers of the contraception decision and their leading role in killing immigration reform. That would be a tricky dance under any circumstances, but particularly difficult to do all at once.
Republican leaders are pretty surefooted talking about Hobby Lobby as a religious freedom fight (although it wasn’t one). But they are also rightly wary of its potential to draw the party’s latent Todd Akinism out of remission.
Here’s Rush Limbaugh, on Monday: “[S]omehow we’ve gotten to the point where women should not have to pay for their own birth control. Somebody else is gonna pay for it, no matter how much they want, no matter how often they want it, no matter for what reason, somebody else is going to pay for it. That’s the root of all this. The employer should pay it, the insurance company will pay it, but in no way in 2014 America are women going to being pay for it, even though you can go to Target or Walmart and get a month’s supply for nine bucks.”
The risk they face is that a legislative fight over contraception—over making sure female employees of Hobby Lobby and other companies aren’t burdened by the ruling—will draw the real, driving concern out from behind the religious liberty artifice. It’s on this ground that “striking a blow for religious liberty” becomes “we don’t want to pay for your immoral sex pills, either,” and that’s where Republicans lose.
The easy way out of this conundrum would be to get it off the agenda as quickly as possible—to say that Obama administration officials should issue a new regulation, placing the onus for financing the contraception on insurance companies, and move on. Obama already did this for religious nonprofits. He could do it for the religious owners of for-profit corporations, too. And in the opinion of the Court, Justice Samuel Alito all but suggested this remedy to the Department of Health and Human Services.
“HHS has already devised and implemented a system that seeks to respect the religious liberty of religious nonprofit corporations while ensuring that the employees of these entities have precisely the same access to all FDA-approved contraceptives as employees of companies whose owners have no religious objections to providing such coverage,” he wrote. “Although HHS has made this system available to religious nonprofits that have religious objections to the contraceptive mandate, HHS has provided no reason why the same system cannot be made available to the owners of for-profit corporations have similar religious objections.”
In a political vacuum, that’s what Republicans would say in response to Democratic contraception legislation. But in the real world, Republicans are claiming that they can’t pass immigration reform because Obama takes too many administrative liberties and can’t be trusted to implement the law as written. That’s always been a disingenuous excuse, but it loses all semblance of credibility when in the next breath they argue that members of Congress don’t have to stand and be counted in the case of contraception because Obama can just fix the problem on his own. Particularly given that the proposed remedy doesn’t actually satisfy religious conservatives.
Not that Republicans would have any qualms about talking out of both sides of their mouths. But if they try to sidestep a contraception conflagration in this way, they’ll undermine their own excuse for shelving immigration reform. And if they take the contraception fight head on, they’ll stumble into the conservative sexual morality play they’ve tried to avoid by claiming this is actually all about the religious freedom of certain employers.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, July 1, 2014
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