“The GOP’s Poverty Problem”: Views Of Republicans Toward Poor People Run From Active Hostility At Worst, To Indifference At Best
Poverty is all the rage among conservatives this week, and will be for, oh, another few days at least. My guess is that this is happening largely because Democrats have made clear that income inequality is the issue they’ll be pressing from now until the November midterm elections, and Republicans are concerned that it might work. So they’re going to head it off by showing voters that they care about people who are struggling, too. The question is, how do you do that when you’re fighting against extending unemployment benefits, trying to cut food stamps, preventing poor people from getting health insurance through Medicaid, and arguing against increasing the minimum wage?
The answer, it seems, is to make public statements in which the word “poverty” appears. Marco Rubio and Eric Cantor gave speeches on it, Paul Ryan will be doing interviews on it, and you’ll probably be hearing more from Republicans on the topic. Mixed in will be some advocacy for policies they’ve pushed for a long time like school vouchers, and the occasional grand if counterproductive idea, like turning over all federal antipoverty programs to the states.
In seeing this, I couldn’t help but think about one of my favorite tidbits from the 2004 presidential campaign, the Bush website’s “Compassion Photo Album,” which consisted entirely of photos of George and/or Laura Bush hanging out with black and Hispanic people. Put aside how condescending it was to present the very fact of talking to a black person as an exercise in “compassion,” as though they were so pathetic that it took a mighty act of generosity for Bush to deign to place himself amongst them. The point is that things like that, and “compassionate conservatism” in general, were never about winning the votes of minorities. It was about showing moderate white voters that Bush was, in the phrase that was so often applied to him by the press when he first ran in 2000, “a different kind of Republican.” When he weighed in on a 1999 Republican budget proposal by saying, “I don’t think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor,” he wasn’t speaking to poor people, he was showing middle class people that he had a heart.
Republicans are doing the same thing now. The fact is that views in the GOP toward poor people run from active hostility at worst to indifference at best. I’m not saying your average Republican wouldn’t be pleased if cutting the capital gains tax did trickle down to the little guy, but even if it doesn’t, they’re still eager to do it because their hearts are with the wealthy. Conservatives see wealth as an expression of virtue; if you have it, it’s because you work hard and deserve it, and if you don’t, that reflects a defect in your character. That’s why so many of their proposals to address poverty are either of the “tough love” variety—have the government stop helping you as a means of encouraging you to get a firm grip on those bootstraps—or things like “enterprise zones” that involve giving tax breaks and exemptions from environmental regulations to wealthy investors and corporations, in the belief that the largesse will trickle down.
The political problem Republicans are trying to address is that, deny it though they might and protest it with cries of “Class warfare!”, economic populism has always been effective for Democrats. That’s partly because it speaks to people’s genuine sentiments about their own struggles and how society should work, and partly because Republicans are the party of the rich. They’d prefer not to be seen that way, of course. But they just are. So when Democrats say “They’re the party of the rich!”, they don’t have to do a lot of persuading, since it’s what voters already believe. A few speeches about poverty aren’t going to change that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 9, 2014
“Meet The Poverty Liars”: GOP Peddles More Garbage In War On The Poor
As we observe the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson declaring the “War on Poverty” this week, it’s worth remembering the way Ronald Reagan wrote its history, and its epitaph, with a soothing nine-word bromide: “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.”
It’s worth remembering, because as Republicans scramble to appear as though they care about the poor, circulating memos teaching how to seem “compassionate” and digging “anti-poverty plans” out of dusty file folders from the 1980s, all they’re doing is updating Reagan for the 21st century. And Reagan was dead wrong the first time around.
It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the effect of Reagan’s War on Poverty lies, especially as they’re warmed over by Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan as they dream about 2016. Even though Reagan began his Republican political career as a race-baiter and anti-welfare demagogue, by the 1980 campaign and his presidency, he’d softened some. He didn’t rail as much against “welfare queens” and “young bucks” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. Now he projected concern for the poor: He wanted to help them, and poverty programs hurt them.
Of course, we can’t forget the racial component of Reagan’s anti-welfare animus. Racial division is what doomed Johnson’s War on Poverty, almost as soon as it began. I was riveted by Slate’s feature on the actual woman behind Reagan’s race-baiting “welfare queen” stereotype. Reagan didn’t invent her, as many people thought over the years; his anecdote was based on Linda Taylor, a Chicago woman who did in fact use multiple identities to commit welfare fraud.
But my takeaway from Josh Levin’s mind-blowing piece had nothing to do with government poverty programs: Linda Taylor was a scary sociopath, a serial identity-switcher credibly accused of multiple cases of kidnapping and murder. Yet politicians and the media focused on the welfare fraud charges. It was the Chicago Tribune, not Reagan, that dubbed her the “welfare queen.” The Chicago police officer responsible for investigating her actual crimes was aghast at the focus on her welfare-grifting rather than her more far serious crimes. She went down in history as a symbol of a “welfare cheat,” not the kind of shrewd but deadly con artist and criminal that comes in every color and gender. And she got away with everything except the welfare fraud.
There weren’t neighborhoods full of Linda Taylors; there was one. But she’s the person Reagan chose to represent the millions of mothers – the vast majority of them white, by the way — struggling to feed their children on welfare aid that in many states might not bring them over the poverty line. And too many Americans chose to believe him.
Later, they believed his lyrical lie about welfare. Reagan revolutionized the poverty game for Republicans: You didn’t have to be angry and Nixonian, or an Archie Bunker type, to be against welfare anymore; instead you could project compassion. White middle-class folks didn’t have to worry that they were indulging resentment, or God forbid racism, by opposing poverty programs. Those programs hurt the poor; Reagan said so.
And here we are again. On the one hand, it’s a slight relief to see some in the GOP abandoning their ugly narrative about “makers” and “takers,” their demonization of the “47 percent” who “just won’t take care and responsibility for their lives,” in Mitt Romney’s campaign-killing words. House Republican leaders are now coaching members to show “compassion” for the unemployed, making sure they reflect that it’s a “personal crisis” and that they will give “proper consideration” to an extension of benefits — as long as Democrats cut other programs, of course — instead of rejecting it out of hand as they did last month.
Meanwhile Sen. Marco Rubio made a whole video to channel Reagan’s ideas about poverty programs. (Is it just me, or is anyone else waiting for him to lurch for a nearby bottle of water and take a slug?) Sleepy-eyed and absolutely unconvincing, Rubio asks: “After 50 years, isn’t it time to declare big government’s war on poverty a failure?” Not surprisingly, his cheesy video offers absolutely no policy agenda to fight poverty.
Rubio’s efforts are being met by well-deserved cynicism in the media and among Republicans. Not so for Paul Ryan’s claims that he’ll develop a bold new anti-poverty agenda. Yet so far, the notions Ryan has floated sound like warmed over Enterprise Zones, the failed 1980s GOP prescription for urban neighborhoods that cut taxes and created other incentives for employers to hire poor residents. Not to be outdone, Sen. Rand Paul is advocating “enterprise zones on steroids,” what he calls “economic freedom zones” in places like Detroit with high unemployment.
Of course, every reputable study of enterprise zones has found their impact on urban poverty “negligible” to nonexistent. “Enterprise zones are not especially effective at increasing overall economic activity or raising incomes for the poor,” Len Burman of the Urban/Brookings Tax Policy Center told Politico recently. “They just seem to move the locus of activity across the zone’s boundary — reducing activity outside the zone and increasing it inside.”
Criticizing GOP flim-flam on poverty shouldn’t obscure the fact that the War on Poverty didn’t do all that its sponsors hoped. That’s not because we did too much, but because we did too little. It’s true that in the immediate wake of the war’s launch, poverty fell from roughly 22 percent to 12 percent, before it began to climb again in the mid-1970s. Not surprisingly, given that establishing Medicare and expanding Social Security were its core components, Johnson’s anti-poverty push made the biggest strides in reducing poverty among the elderly.
For the rest of the poor, the program was never as ambitious – or successful. Johnson famously rejected a big public works jobs program as too expensive, especially as the Vietnam War escalated. He agreed to make “community action” a centerpiece of his anti-poverty work, but he had very different ideas about what that meant than some of the people who implemented the program. To kick it off, Johnson called Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and told him, “Get your planning and development people busy right now to see what you do for the crummiest place in town, the lowest, the bottom thing, and see what we can do about it. We’ll get our dough, and then you can have your plan ready, and we’ll move.”
But on the ground, community action organizers saw their role as organizing the poor to challenge mayors like Daley, which widened existing fissures around race and power in the Democratic Party. Federally funded anti-poverty warriors often took the side of urban insurgents – which was surely the correct side, in moral terms, but with hindsight, not the most effective way to mount a controversial and weakly bipartisan anti-poverty effort.
Finally, Democrats ran away from the War on Poverty, joining Reagan in declaring that government was too often a problem rather than a solution. Bill Clinton’s anti-poverty agenda was a stealthy one. With one hand, he ended welfare as we knew it with the 1996 reform act; with the other hand, he funneled billions to poor people by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit – a Republican idea – as well as eligibility for food stamps and Medicaid. That lifted millions of Americans above the poverty line — but most Americans didn’t know he did it. Democrats from Jimmy Carter to Clinton to Barack Obama – at least until recently — have contributed to the belief that “we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,” by refusing to either take credit for existing programs that fight poverty or advance a bold new agenda to update them.
That’s changing some. Obama is said to be readying a big income inequality push for his State of the Union, and he seems to have realized it must include taking aim at persistent poverty. With even Republicans conceding they can no longer demonize the poor, maybe Democrats can do something to actually help them.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 8, 2014
“Feeling A Little Left Out”: The Religious Right Won’t Tolerate Being Ignored
The defining debate within the Republican Party over the last several months has pitted Tea Partiers against the GOP’s Corporate wing. The two contingents have already begun gearing up for some notable primary fights in advance of this year’s midterm elections.
But there’s another wing of the party that’s apparently feeling a little left out.
On a recent snowy day in the Washington suburb of Tyson’s Corner, Va., some of the religious right’s wealthiest backers and top operatives gathered at the Ritz-Carlton to plot their entry into the conservative civil war.
Their plan: take a page out of the playbooks of Karl Rove and the Koch brothers by raising millions of dollars, coordinating their political spending and assiduously courting megadonors…. It’s all geared toward elevating the place of social issues like abortion and gay marriage in conservative politics.
To be sure, all of this makes sense. The religious right, as a political movement, wants to remain relevant with its allies, so it stands to reason that leading social conservatives would begin plotting to defend and expand its influence. It may make intra-party tensions a little more complicated in the coming months, but the religious right probably doesn’t much care.
The trouble, though, is in the assumption that social conservatives have been irrelevant of late.
Indeed, the Politico article stated as fact that social issues have “been largely relegated to the sidelines” in Republican politics, and the GOP’s competing wings have both “steered away from social issues they deem too divisive.”
I can appreciate why this might seem true – after all, it’s not as if John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Eric Cantor run around prioritizing the culture war above other GOP goals. But the closer one looks, the more these assumptions start to crumble.
For example ,the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit reproductive health research organization, found that “abortion was at the forefront of the state legislative debate during the past three years – so much so that states added more restrictions to the books from 2011-2013 than during the entire preceding decade.”
This isn’t the result of a party steering away from divisive social issues; this is the opposite.
What’s more, as we discussed a few months ago, let’s not forget that Republican leaders lined up to kiss the religious right movement’s ring at the 2013 Values Voter Summit, and GOP officials incorporated their opposition to contraception into the government-shutdown strategy. While Republican governors spent much of the year trying to limit women’s reproductive choices, it’s not limited to state government – just about the only bills House GOP lawmakers find it easy to pass deal with abortion.
The Republican Party’s commitment to the culture war remains alive and well. The religious right is worried about lost relevance, but the movement already has considerable influence over the GOP’s direction.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 3, 2014
“The Three Stages Of Obamacare Acceptance”: It’s Increasingly Difficult To See How Repeal Would Work, Even With Full GOP Control
Now that Obamacare is clearly moving forward, Republicans are adjusting to a new reality: it may no longer be a realistic option to simply wait until the law collapses under its own weight and vanishes entirely. GOP lawmakers are increasingly discussing a range of responses, from proposing profound changes to finally embracing a comprehensive alternative.
Which raises a question: Is it possible to envision a future in which Republicans and Democrats do enter into real negotiations over the future of the law and the health system, in which each side gets some changes it wants, in exchange for accepting some of the other’s proposed changes?
Yes, it is. But to get there, Republicans will first have to pass through what might be called the Three Stages of Obamacare Acceptance.
Right now, Republicans entertaining changes or alternatives are still proceeding from the premise that no outcome is acceptable unless it fatally cripples the law or eliminates it entirely. Republicans don’t believe the law can be fixed, since they think that even if it does work according to its own lights, it will still amount to a colossal policy failure. If Republicans want to hold that position indefinitely, there’s not much Dems can do about it.
But if Republicans do get to a point where crippling or eliminating the law is not the only acceptable outcome, there are scenarios under which they might negotiate for certain types of changes to the law, in exchange for changes Dems or liberals want.
Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation laid out the types of incremental changes Republicans might pursue. He suggested Republicans might propose various ways of relaxing Obamacare’s regulations, in keeping with conservative policy ideas, that wouldn’t destroy the law. For instance, they could propose allowing insurance sales across state lines so competition drives down prices, something liberals might be willing to accept under certain circumstances if the law’s uniform federal minimum coverage standards are kept (which could theoretically prevent the “race to the bottom” liberals fear).
Or Republicans could propose to make tax deductions available to those over 400 percent of the poverty line who do not qualify for Obamacare subsidies, helping those who see premiums go up (which Republicans have turned into a major issue) and mitigating Obamacare’s redistributive elements a bit. Or Republicans could propose relaxing the limitations on age ratings, allowing insurance companies to charge more than the current three-to-one ratio the law mandates between older and younger people.
In exchange, liberals might ask for subsidies to be expanded to those who fall into the Medicaid gap — making too little to qualify for subsidies but too much to qualify for Medicaid in states that haven’t opted in to the expansion. Or they might ask for more in subsidies for those who currently qualify.
The point is, there are scenarios under which real negotiations over the future of the law could take place. But Republicans would have to be willing to accept something less than its complete destruction. (As Jonathan Bernstein has detailed, a general unwillingness by Republicans to try to get some of what they want on multiple issues has made the GOP into a kind of dysfunctional “post policy” opposition.)
Let’s be clear: It is certainly still possible that over the long term, Obamacare could fail, if, say, the demographic mix is bad, insurers pull out, and the exchanges collapse. If so, Republicans would theoretically be able to simply wait for the law to fall apart in a few years. But some experts are cautiously optimistic that the latest enrollment numbers suggest the law could be on track to work.
And that’s where the Three Stages of Obamacare Acceptance come in — presuming, again, that the law works at least moderately well over the long term:
* Stage One: A dim awareness that there might be some good elements in the law, and that the public might not support returning to the old system. GOP Rep. Jack Kingston, for instance, recently suggested that it might not be “responsible” to simply let the law fall apart, and that lawmakers should be open to anything in it that would help people get coverage. Kingston was immediately slapped down by his primary opponent and quickly reiterated his zeal to get rid of it entirely. Something similar happened to a GOP Senate candidate in Michigan.
* Stage Two: A genuine recognition that large numbers of people are already benefitting from the law, and that this reality needs to be reckoned with — such as by proposing alternatives or changes that purport to accomplish similar goals, even as the elimination or crippling of it remains a paramount aim. GOP Rep. Tom Price has proposed an alternative designed, in part, to cover people with preexisting conditions, but it would probably cover far fewer people, and Price continues to insist on Obamacare’s repeal, maintaining its demise is a certainty.
Meanwhile, Senator Ron Johnson has admitted that “we have to deal with the people who are currently covered under Obamacare,” and to do this, he has proposed keeping the exchanges while getting rid of the individual mandate. The latter, experts say, would fatally undermine the law, and as such this isn’t a serious proposal.
* Stage Three: Republicans accept Obamacare is likely here to stay, abandon the premise that the only acceptable outcome is crippling or eliminating the law, and negotiate to achieve incremental changes they want. This is the scenario outlined by Levitt above. It’s hard to know when this might happen in earnest – certainly not in 2014, and GOP presidential primary politics could also make this difficult next year. But you’re already seeing this a bit with GOP governors who are negotiating with the feds to create their own versions of the Medicaid expansion.
It’s always possible Republicans could win the presidency and both houses of Congress in 2016 and pass legislation repealing the law. And again, if the law fails over time, the above stages could be moot. But it’s increasingly difficult to see how repeal would work in practical terms, even with full GOP control. What’s more, as Jonathan Cohn has detailed, experts think early returns suggest the law is likely to work out. Which means you can begin to imagine Stage Three kicking in. At some point.
“If Republicans were to accept that the law is in place for the foreseeable future, then one could envision tweaks that could move it in a more conservative direction without undermining its goals, while also providing improvements to the law that liberals are looking for,” Levitt says.
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 2, 2014
“Crises Beyond Duck Dynasty”: If GOP Devoted It’s Intensity Towards The Jobless And Uninsured, They Might Actually Do Some Good
I’m just back from a week out of the country, and it appears I missed some major happenings.
Political news sites report a significant development in the Pajama Boy controversy (involving a promotion for Obamacare) and the “Duck Dynasty” flap. There’s apparently a new scandal, as well, over the Obama family’s failure to attend church on Christmas. Then there’s the brouhaha about a church in California putting a likeness of Trayvon Martin in its Christmas manger.
From the Drudge Report, meanwhile, I learned the naked truth about two other incidents: a Louisville man who ran through a bingo hall with his pants down yelling “Bingo!” and police in Portland, Ore., who used a sandwich to convince an unclothed man not to jump off of a building.
According to ABC News, the man reportedly requested a cheeseburger but eventually settled for turkey and bacon.
That the headlines are about pajamas and bingo is both good and bad. Good, because it means we have no crisis during this holiday season; Congress is in recess, the president is on the beach, and there is no imminent standoff in Washington. Bad, because we’re letting ourselves be distracted again.
In the weeks before the 9/11 attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush was on his ranch in Texas, the big news was about shark attacks, and nobody connected the terrorists’ dots. This time, there’s more than just the theoretical possibility of a crisis to worry about.
On Saturday, 1.3 million unemployed Americans were kicked off unemployment benefits. And if our vacationing lawmakers don’t do something about it when they return, millions more will follow. The matter is getting less attention than Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty,” but it’s a real crisis for those affected and a disgrace for the rest of us.
As The Post’s Brad Plumer expertly outlined on Friday, there are 4 million people who have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, translating to the highest long-term unemployment rate since World War II. These people — young, old and from all kinds of demographics — have a 12 percent chance of finding a job in any given month, and, contrary to the theories of Rand Paul Republicans, there’s little evidence that they’re more likely to find work after losing benefits. Cutting off their benefits only causes more suffering for them and more damage to the economy.
Also last weekend, the Obama administration reported that 1.1 million people had signed up online for coverage under the new health-care law. That’s a dramatic acceleration in enrollment, but it also leaves uninsured millions of people who are eligible for coverage. Some of them are working poor in states where Republican governors have refused to implement the law’s Medicaid expansion, and many more are being discouraged from enrolling by Republicans’ incessant opposition. This month’s CBS News-New York Times poll found that a majority of uninsured Americans disapprove of the new law, even though nearly six in 10 of the uninsured think insurance would improve their health.
These real outrages make the Christmas-week controversies seem like tinsel.
“Can you guess what key thing Obama did not do on Christmas Day?” asked Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, full of outrage that the president didn’t go to a public worship service. Breitbart.com found it “ironic” that Obama had “recently asked all Christians to remember the religious aspects of Christmas.”
What did they expect from a Muslim born in Kenya?
While that was going on, David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times was deflating an earlier scandal hawked by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of a House committee that had been examining the killing of Americans in Benghazi last year. Issa had charged that the attackers were affiliated with al-Qaeda, and he disparaged the administration’s claim that the attack had been stirred up by an anti-Islam video; Kirkpatrick, after an extensive investigation in Benghazi, found no international terrorist involvement but did find that the video played a role.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Issa offered the more qualified claim that while there was no al-Qaeda “central command and control,” some of the attackers were “self-effacing or self-claimed as al-Qaeda-linked.”
Those self-effacing terrorists are so beguiling.
No doubt Issa will continue to pursue the Benghazi “scandal.” Others will look deeper into Pajama Boy, or Obama’s religion. If they’d devote a similar intensity toward the jobless and the uninsured, they might actually do some good.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 30, 2013
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