“Divided And Undisciplined”: The GOP Circus Is In Town
Even Republicans have to be laughing at the circus sideshow the GOP presidential candidates are putting on. The Mitt-Rick-Herman act was so comical this week it looks concerted, almost like they collaborated with the Democratic National Committee. Team Obama is grinning so hard its ears are hurting, because 10 weeks out from the Iowa caucuses, the Republican Party is divided, the candidates are undisciplined and the voters don’t love any of them. Just in time for the real ugliness to begin a few weeks from now.
The marquee moment belongs to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, of course, indulging in birtherism on Monday night so that he could step on Tuesday’s rollout of his flat-tax plan. Sure, Perry tried to discount the birth-certificate controversy — sort of — while throwing some greasy scraps to the Trumpsters who still believe a U.S. president has actually released a fake certificate.
“I’m not really worried about the president’s birth certificate,” Perry said in an interview with CNBC. “It’s fun to poke at him a little bit and say, ‘Hey, how about, let’s see your grades and your birth certificate.’ ” Perry made sure to mention that Donald Trump recently said he didn’t think the birth certificate was real. And he said it’s “a good issue to keep alive.”
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney could have jumped all over that — if he hadn’t been busy shooting himself in the foot in the battleground state of Ohio. Yes, Romney decided a fresh flip-flop was in order, despite the fact that his critics are happy to savor his many others. While at a Republican call center in Ohio, he refused to comment on an Ohio law limiting collective bargaining that he had expressed support for months ago. After being pummeled by conservatives, Romney reiterated his, um, previous support.
Herman Cain, who tops the GOP field in a new CBS/New York Times poll, spent the last few days telling reporters who asked tough policy questions that he needed a little more time to think of an answer. He learned the hard way by saying on CNN that abortion is a family’s choice. Whoops — better to leave details out of this whole thing. Cain still can’t really be found on the campaign trail. No, the motivational speaker was in Texas selling books and giving a speech. And despite Perry’s attempt to beat Cain at his 9-9-9 game with a flat-tax plan, Cain-world still scored much buzz with a weirdo Web ad featuring his campaign manager Mark Block smoking into the camera. It already has more than 387,000 hits on YouTube.
With that kind of juice, who needs to endure the icy winds of the door-to-door campaigning Iowans demand of their caucus winners? If Cain continues to surge without leaving the book tour, then we will know that talking to voters in town-hall meetings and asking for their support is no longer necessary. In fact, perhaps televised debates aren’t, either. Perry told Bill O’Reilly in an interview on Fox News on Tuesday that while his debate performances have been disappointing, the debates themselves are a mistake. “If there was a mistake, it was probably ever doing one of the campaign [debates] when all they’re interested in is stirring up between the candidates instead of really talking about the issues that are important to the American people.” His campaign said Perry will attend one more in Michigan, but beyond that he might be a no-show.
That’s understandable. Questions at debates about serious policy matters — like what his response would be to the Taliban gaining control of Pakistani’s nuclear weapons — just aren’t Rick Perry’s idea of “fun.”
By: A. B. Stoddard, Associate Editor, The Hill, October 26, 2011
If Only GOP Lawmakers Were More Like GOP Voters
I imagine everyone has seen the bumper sticker that says, “Lord, protect us from your followers.” I have an idea for a related sticker that reads, “Republicans, protect us from your elected officials.”
In the existing political landscape, the real problem is not with GOP voters; it’s with GOP policymakers. This isn’t to let the party’s supporters off the hook entirely — they’re the ones who supported and elected the officeholders — but it’s hard to overstate how much more constructive the political process would be if Republican lawmakers in any way reflected the priorities of their own supporters.
Last week, a national poll found that Republican voters broadly support the Democratic jobs agenda — a payroll tax cut, jobs for teachers/first responders, infrastructure investments, and increased taxes on millionaires and billionaires — in some cases by wide margins. This week, Tim Noah noticed this observation can be applied even further.
I’m liking rank-and-file Republicans better and better. Earlier this month we learned that they favor Obama’s plan to tax the rich. Now we learn that a 55 percent majority of them think Wall Street bankers and brokers are “dishonest,” 69 percent think they’re “overpaid,” and 72 percent think they’re “greedy.” Fewer than half (47 percent) have an unfavorable view of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Thirty-three percent either favor them or have no opinion, and 20 percent haven’t heard of them. Also, a majority favor getting rid of the Electoral College and replacing it with a popular vote. After the 2000 election only 41 percent did. Now 53 percent do. How cool is that?
Every one of these positions puts the GOP rank-and-file at odds with their congressional leadership and field of presidential candidates.
I don’t want to exaggerate this too much. The fact remains that the Republican Party is dominated by conservative voters, especially those who participate in primaries and caucuses. I’m not suggesting for a moment that the party’s rank-and-file members are moving to the left.
But the recent poll results are also hard to miss — many if not most GOP voters are perfectly comfortable with plenty of progressive ideas, including tax increases on millionaires and billionaires. It’s starting to look like the party’s rank and file is made up of mainstream conservatives who want their party to help move the country forward.
And yet, when we look to Republican officials in Washington, how many GOP members of Congress are willing to endorse any of these popular measures? Zero. Literally, not even one Republican lawmaker has offered even tacit support for ideas that most GOP voters actually like. In the Senate, a united Republican caucus won’t even allow a vote — won’t even allow a debate — on popular job-creation ideas during a jobs crisis.
If the actions of GOP lawmakers in any way resembled the wishes of GOP voters, our political system wouldn’t be nearly as dysfunctional as it is now.
Congratulations, congressional Republicans. You’re far more extreme than your own supporters.
By: Steve Benen, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 25, 2011
Olympia “Snowe” Keeps Falling
Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) published a joint op-ed in the Wall Street Journal the other day, calling for new measures to make the legislative process more difficult. No, seriously, that’s what they said.
For two years in a row, the Democratic-led Senate has failed to adopt a budget as required by law. Meanwhile, our gross national debt has climbed to almost $15 trillion — as large as our entire economy. Our bill puts in place a 60-vote threshold before any appropriation bill can be moved through Congress — unless both houses have adopted a binding budget resolution.
We can certainly have a conversation about the breakdown in the budget-writing process, but let’s think about what Snowe and Sessions are proposing here: they want to make it harder for Congress to approve appropriations bills, regardless of the consequences.
Jamison Foser explained, “Republicans, including Sessions and Snowe, have filibustered even the most uncontroversial of measures — and that knee-jerk opposition to just about anything the Senate majority wants to do is a significant part of the reason why the Senate hasn’t adopted a budget. Now Sessions and Snowe cynically use that failure to justify structural changes that would make it harder for the Senate to pass any appropriations bills.”
Snowe and Sessions went on to call for additional “reforms” that would make it far more difficult for Congress to approve “emergency” spending without mandatory supermajorities, too, because they’re horrified by efforts to “spend money we don’t have,” which might “bankrupt the country.”
Of course, Snowe and Sessions see no need for mandatory supermajorities when it comes to tax cuts, alleged “bankruptcy” fears notwithstanding.
But in the larger picture, have you noticed just how far Olympia Snowe has fallen lately? Last week she demanded the administration act with “urgency” to address the jobs crisis, only to filibuster a popular jobs bill just one day later. A week earlier, Snowe prioritized tax cuts for millionaires over job creation. Just a couple of weeks earlier, Snowe tried to argue that government spending is “clearly … the problem” when it comes to the nation’s finances, which is a popular line among conservatives, despite being wrong.
It’s tempting to think the fear of a primary challenge is pushing Snowe to the far-right, but the truth is, the senator’s GOP opponents next year are barely even trying. She may fear a replay of the Castle-O’Donnell fight that played out in Delaware, but all indications are that Snowe really doesn’t have anything to worry about.
And yet, she’s become a shell of her former self, leading to this op-ed — written with a right-wing Alabama senator, no less — demanding that the dysfunctional Senate adopt new ideas that make it more difficult to pass necessary legislation.
There is some prime real estate in the political landscape for genuine GOP moderates who could have a significant impact. Instead, Congress has Olympia Snowe, who now bears no resemblance to the centrist she used to be.
If I had to guess, I’d say most mainstream voters in Maine have no idea of the extent to which Snowe has moved to the right, which is a shame. I wonder how those who supported her in the past would even recognize her anymore.
By: Steve Benen, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 25, 2011
Soaring Inequality: “It’s Time To Take The Crony Out Of Capitalism”
Whenever I write about Occupy Wall Street, some readers ask me if the protesters really are half-naked Communists aiming to bring down the American economic system when they’re not doing drugs or having sex in public.
The answer is no. That alarmist view of the movement is a credit to the (prurient) imagination of its critics, and voyeurs of Occupy Wall Street will be disappointed. More important, while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a “mob” trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.
To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists.
I’m as passionate a believer in capitalism as anyone. My Krzysztofowicz cousins (who didn’t shorten the family name) lived in Poland, and their experience with Communism taught me that the way to raise living standards is capitalism.
But, in recent years, some financiers have chosen to live in a government-backed featherbed. Their platform seems to be socialism for tycoons and capitalism for the rest of us. They’re not evil at all. But when the system allows you more than your fair share, it’s human to grab. That’s what explains featherbedding by both unions and tycoons, and both are impediments to a well-functioning market economy.
When I lived in Asia and covered the financial crisis there in the late 1990s, American government officials spoke scathingly about “crony capitalism” in the region. As Lawrence Summers, then a deputy Treasury secretary, put it in a speech in August 1998: “In Asia, the problems related to ‘crony capitalism’ are at the heart of this crisis, and that is why structural reforms must be a major part” of the International Monetary Fund’s solution.
The American critique of the Asian crisis was correct. The countries involved were nominally capitalist but needed major reforms to create accountability and competitive markets.
Something similar is true today of the United States.
So I’d like to invite the finance ministers of Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia — whom I and other Americans deemed emblems of crony capitalism in the 1990s — to stand up and denounce American crony capitalism today.
Capitalism is so successful an economic system partly because of an internal discipline that allows for loss and even bankruptcy. It’s the possibility of failure that creates the opportunity for triumph. Yet many of America’s major banks are too big to fail, so they can privatize profits while socializing risk.
The upshot is that financial institutions boost leverage in search of supersize profits and bonuses. Banks pretend that risk is eliminated because it’s securitized. Rating agencies accept money to issue an imprimatur that turns out to be meaningless. The system teeters, and then the taxpayer rushes in to bail bankers out. Where’s the accountability?
It’s not just rabble-rousers at Occupy Wall Street who are seeking to put America’s capitalists on a more capitalist footing. “Structural change is necessary,” Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said in an important speech last month that discussed many of these themes. He called for more curbs on big banks, possibly including trimming their size, and he warned that otherwise we’re on a path of “increasingly frequent, complex and dangerous financial breakdowns.”
Likewise, Mohamed El-Erian, another pillar of the financial world who is the chief executive of Pimco, one of the world’s largest money managers, is sympathetic to aspects of the Occupy movement. He told me that the economic system needs to move toward “inclusive capitalism” and embrace broad-based job creation while curbing excessive inequality.
“You cannot be a good house in a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood,” he told me. “The credibility and the fair functioning of the neighborhood matter a great deal. Without that, the integrity of the capitalist system will weaken further.”
Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, adds that some inequality is necessary to create incentives in a capitalist economy but that “too much inequality can harm the efficient operation of the economy.” In particular, he says, excessive inequality can have two perverse consequences: first, the very wealthy lobby for favors, contracts and bailouts that distort markets; and, second, growing inequality undermines the ability of the poorest to invest in their own education.
“These factors mean that high inequality can generate further high inequality and eventually poor economic growth,” Professor Katz said.
Does that ring a bell?
So, yes, we face a threat to our capitalist system. But it’s not coming from half-naked anarchists manning the barricades at Occupy Wall Street protests. Rather, it comes from pinstriped apologists for a financial system that glides along without enough of the discipline of failure and that produces soaring inequality, socialist bank bailouts and unaccountable executives.
It’s time to take the crony out of capitalism, right here at home.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 26, 2011
Campaign Financing: Small House In Tampa Ground Zero For Mega Millions In Campaign Donations
A little over a year ago, no-party gubernatorial candidate Bud Chiles stood outside an off-white single-story building with a carefully manicured lawn in suburban Tampa and said, “This building behind me is ground zero for what’s wrong with Florida politics.”
The building’s address: 610 South Blvd., a designation found on the financial disclosure forms of countless political committees in Florida and all over the country. The unassuming building nestled in an unassuming neighborhood is a veritable political action committee mill, churning out millions of dollars and influencing elections all over the country.
The kicker: What is happening at 610 South Blvd. is completely legal.
Chiles — who eventually dropped out of the race and endorsed Democratic candidate Alex Sink — was echoing the thoughts of millions of Americans who feel that too much money goes into our country’s political system, and we know way too little about where it comes from.
610 South Blvd. provides insight into a commonly overlooked aspect of campaign financing: Because so few people understand the nuances of campaign money, politicians and activists have a limited number of places to turn to when starting a committee. That leads to a high concentration of candidates and committees at a few select addresses, none more infamous in Florida political circles than 610 South Blvd.
Nancy and Robert Watkins together run Robert Watkins and Co., the accounting firm located at 610. Thirty-nine political committees are currently registered under the address with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The committees registered there have conservative leanings and ties exclusively to Republican politicians.
The organizations range from leadership PACs, 501(c)4s and 527s to campaign committee PACs and even a handful of Super PACs — a new and controversial type of PAC that allows groups to raise unlimited funds from corporations, individuals and unions. And these groups tend to bring in big money. In 2010, one of the Super PACs at 610 raised more than $4 million.
Watkins and Co. also has 19 state PAC clients filed with the Florida Division of Elections.
Nancy Watkins says her firm’s impressive number of clients exists because she has been in the business for more than 25 years. According to her, 610 South Blvd. is an “official address” for many groups “for a lot of reasons.” Mostly, she says, the firm provides a reliable and “durable mailing address” for all her clients.
Meredith McGehee — the policy director for The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works in the area of campaign finance and elections — tells The Florida Independent there are no rules against multiple PACs sharing an address.
McGehee calls the FEC’s rules for what passes as coordination among these groups “ridiculous,” and says that even if groups follow FEC rules, their activities would probably not “pass a smell test for regular people.”
According to McGehee, as long as the groups do not coordinate with each other in a way that violates FEC laws, they can communicate, work together and share an address. She calls the FEC’s rules for what passes as coordination among these groups “ridiculous,” and says that even if groups follow FEC rules, their activities would probably not “pass a smell test for regular people.”
“The rules are so loose,” she says. “So there is a lot they can do. They can coordinate in common sense terms — just not legal terms.”
McGehee says these groups, for example, can share an office and “talk about general strategy” and still not violate FEC coordination rules.
Watkins says the fact that all her clients share her address “does not create a relationship between them.” She says everything done at her business is ethical, and that she does not talk to one client about another.
Federal policy-makers from all over the country turn to Watkins and Co. for their services. Former Sen. Mel Martinez and Reps. Katherine Harris, Rick Renzi and Pat Roberts are among those with ties to 610 South Blvd. In 2008, Mike Huckabee registered his Florida presidential campaign committee with the firm.
Most have created their own leadership PACs with the company. Leadership PACs are political action committees that “can be established by current and former members of Congress as well as other prominent political figures,” according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The Center, a nonpartisan research group, explains that “leadership PACs are designed for two things: to make money and to make friends. In the rough and tumble political game, elected officials know that money and friends in high places are very important to winning elections and leadership positions.”
Watkins and Co., however, are not only providing leadership PAC services for folks in D.C. The firm also houses the paperwork for a number of state PACs, or committees of continuous existence, associated with GOP members of the Florida Legislature. Steve Precourt, Ellyn Bogdanoff, Jack Latvala, Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, Anitere Flores, Steve Crisafulli and Kevin Ambler, to name a few, all run campaign finance activity through 610 South Blvd.
Furthermore, these state PACs associated with Florida legislators have raked in a lot of money. In the year 2011 alone, these committees have brought in about $400,000. Latvala’s PAC has raised about $230,000 this year.
The office building also serves as the home for four Super PACs, controversial independent expenditure-only committees. Super PACs are a new kind of political action committee created in the wake of the federal court case SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, which loosened up previous campaign finance regulations.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Super PACs “may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates.” Thanks to new rules, Super PACs can receive unlimited amounts of money from a corporation’s treasuries (i.e. profits), something that was previously illegal.
Super PACs do have to report their donors to the FEC on a monthly or quarterly basis; unlike traditional PACs, they cannot contribute money directly to political candidates.
As of Oct. 18, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that 156 committees are registered as Super PACs and have already “reported total expenditures of $2,596,787 in the 2012 cycle.”
The Super PACs listed under 610 South Blvd. include a conservative committee called the Coalition to Protect American Values; the Ending Spending Fund, a group that ran attack ads in Nevada against Harry Reid; the We Love USA PAC, a Super PAC famous for saying Obama is a “socialist” who “detests America”; and Dick Morris’ Super PAC for America.
The Super PACs listed under 610 South Blvd. include a conservative committee called the Coalition to Protect American Values; the Ending Spending Fund, a group that ran attack ads in Nevada against Harry Reid; the We Love USA PAC, a Super PAC famous for saying Obama is a “socialist” who “detests America”; and Dick Morris’ Super PAC for America.
The firm is also contracted by more traditional PACs, such as the American Issues Project. The group is known for spending $3 million on ads during the 2008 election tying the former founder of the Weather Underground Bill Ayers to Barack Obama. Most recently, the group focused on attacking the president’s stimulus legislation in 2010.
Also at 610: Florida Working Families, a PAC funded primarily by Big Sugar, notorious for its significant political reach in Florida and all over the country. Working Families launched negative ads against Jim Davis, attacking him for missing a vote in support of Israel, and successfully attacked Mary Barley, an environmental activist who ran in the Democratic primary for agricultural commissioner in 2002.
Watkins and Co. also provides services to a PAC funded by developers, lobbyists, builder’s groups and the Florida Chamber of Commerce called Floridians for Smarter Growth. The group was among the political forces opposing last election’s Amendment 4, known as the “Hometown Democracy” amendment. According to Ballotpedia, the amendment “proposed requiring a taxpayer-funded referendum for all changes to local government comprehensive land-use plans.” Floridians for Smarter Growth launched a successful attack against the amendment and coined (.pdf) the phrase the “Vote on Everything Amendment.”
In total, about 50 different PACs get their financial assistance and guidance from Watkins and Co.
According to the IRS’ records of tax-exempt groups, there are also four 527s using the address. 527s are advocacy groups that electioneer, and spend millions on a variety of positions and issues. While they may not explicitly tell voters to cast their ballots for a specific candidate, they clearly affect the way voters see a candidate or issue.
Watkins and Co. also handles the finances for a handful of tax-exempt nonprofits, including 501(c)4 organization. New rules now allow these types of groups to spend the money they raise anonymously, because their “primary activity” is lobbying.
McGehee says these sorts of details “reveal how the system really works” in elections.
Most people, she says, have little to no participation in this part of the political process. “About .08 percent of the population will spend more that $200 in an election cycle,” McGehee says.
Echoing Watkins, McGehee says that only a select few have the campaign finance expertise that Nancy and Robert Watkins provide, which contributes to the high number of clients 610 South Blvd. works with.
According to McGehee, there is also “a desire among these groups to know what everyone else is doing.” She says that is why the firm works exclusively with conservative groups and GOP policy-makers. ”It is rare that someone is serving both sides,” McGehee says. “It’s not accidental.”
The high concentration of key players in campaign financing — whether it is contributors or accountants — has led to a situation in which the political process is dominated by very few people. McGehee says that people have noticed, even though new rules have done nothing to correct the situation.
“There has always been this populist strain, whether its the tea party or Occupy Wall Street,” McGehee says, “that knows — and is angry about — our political system being dominated by monied interests.”
By: Ashley Lopez, Florida Independent, Published in The Washington Independent, October 24, 2011
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