“Making A Commitment To A Lie”: Republicans Are Invested In Undermining Innovation
Remember in “Seinfeld” when George Costanza got a new job and his employer thought he had a physical disability? He loved the benefits and attention, so he fully committed himself to the lie — and intended to keep it up indefinitely.
The episode reminds me a bit of how Republicans treat their 2012 welfare reform lie.
As you’ll recall, a bipartisan group of governors asked the Obama administration for some flexibility on the existing welfare law, transitioning beneficiaries from welfare to work. The White House agreed to give the states some leeway, so long as the work requirement wasn’t weakened. It inspired Mitt Romney and GOP leaders to make up a shameless lie, accusing President Obama of weakening welfare work requirements.
The blatant falsehood didn’t make much of a difference, and I assumed the issue would disappear once the election ended. But like George Costanza, Republicans have become so invested in the lie, they’re afraid to let it go.
Prominent House Republicans are relaunching efforts to stop the Obama administration from giving states waivers under welfare reform.
GOP leaders of several committees reintroduced a bill Thursday that would block the policy, which Republicans say “guts” welfare’s work requirement.
“This legislation makes it clear — the Obama administration cannot undermine the work requirement that has resulted in higher earnings and employment for low-income individuals,” said Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) in a statement.
That the Obama administration never undermined the work requirement — and has no intention of doing so in the future — apparently doesn’t matter. What’s necessary, apparently, is to keep the lie alive, even after it’s been exposed as untrue.
Yesterday, the White House criticized the House GOP bill, which has 23 cosponsors, as standing in the way of “innovative” state-based programs that could help more welfare recipients into new jobs. The administration called the bill “unnecessary.”
Which it is, though that doesn’t seem to matter.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 13, 2013
“Reaching Out, Finding Nothing”: Remind Me Again Of How All The President Has To Do Is “Lead” & Offer Good-Faith Compromises
It’s hard to blame President Obama for at least making an effort. For four years, he took a variety of steps — some social, some formal, some professional — to establish relationships with congressional Republicans. The outreach didn’t amount to much.
But it appears the president, either out of necessity or stubbornness, will continue his newly revamped charm offensive, including a trip to Capitol Hill for another round of budget talks. It’s clearly intended as a major gesture on Obama’s part — presidents usually summon lawmakers to the White House, not head to Capitol Hill for meetings on lawmakers’ turf.
Time will tell, obviously, whether the efforts pay dividends, but the New York Times has an interesting report today on the ineffectiveness of recent outreach, including a great anecdote I hadn’t heard before.
For all the attention to President Obama’s new campaign of outreach to Republicans, it was four months ago — on the eve of bipartisan budget talks — that he secretly invited five of them to the White House for a movie screening with the stars of “Lincoln,” the film about that president’s courtship of Congress to pass a significant measure.
None accepted.
For all the pundits who complain bitterly that Obama hasn’t done enough to schmooze with lawmakers, doesn’t an anecdote like this suggest the problem is not entirely the president’s fault? Are we to believe that all five — invited in secret so they wouldn’t have to take heat from Fox or the GOP base — were all washing their hair that night?
On a more substantive note, the piece also included this key piece of information:
What spurred Mr. Obama to reach out to rank-and-file Republicans with a flurry of phone calls, meals and now Capitol visits were the recent announcements by their leaders — Speaker John A. Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — that they will no longer negotiate with Mr. Obama on budget policy as long as he keeps demanding more tax revenues as the condition for Democrats’ support of reduced spending on Medicare and other entitlement programs.
This is important. Congressional Republican leaders are now saying they won’t even talk to the president unless Obama agrees — before any meetings even take place — to give them what they want. In other words, when the White House announces that all efforts at deficit reduction in the coming years will include literally nothing but 100% spending cuts, then GOP leaders will be prepared to negotiate with the president.
Please, Beltway pundits, remind me again how all the president has to do to resolve political paralysis is “lead” and offer good-faith compromises.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 12, 2013
“Why Mess With Success?”: The Smart Strategy Behind Paul Ryan’s Stupid Budget
Unlike most unsuccessful VP candidates, Ryan’s path to continued influence meant going right back to what he was doing before.
For an ambitious politician, a spot on your party’s presidential ticket is fraught with danger. On one hand, you immediately become a national figure, and if you win, you’re vice president and you’ve got a good chance to become president. On the other hand, if you lose, you may wind up the target of contempt from forces within your own party and quickly fade away. Look at the list of recent VP losers: Sarah Palin, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Jack Kemp. None of them had any political future after their loss.
And then there’s Paul Ryan. You have to give him credit for one thing. Unlike, say, Palin, he didn’t let his time on the national stage give him delusions of grandeur. Instead of proclaiming himself the leader of a movement, he went right back to what he was doing before: using the budgeting process to push an extraordinarily radical agenda, all couched in enough numbers and figures to convince naive reporters that he’s a Very Serious Fellow, despite the fact that his numbers and figures are about as serious as an episode of The Benny Hill Show. But this act is what got him where he is, and he seems to have concluded, probably wisely, that his best move is to get back on that same track, which might eventually lead him to the White House.
During an appearance on Fox News Sunday last weekend, Chris Wallace asked Ryan whether he’d like to be speaker of the House one day, and Ryan responded, “If I wanted to be in elected leadership like speaker, I would have run for these jobs years ago. I’ve always believed the better place for me is in policy leadership, like being a chairman.” And he’s absolutely right. These days, being a Republican Speaker is nothing but a hassle. For Ryan, the budget is both the vehicle of his (continued, he hopes) political rise and the means of radical ideological transformation. As Ezra Klein explains well, Ryan’s budget, the latest iteration of which comes out today, is a blueprint for that ideological transformation, presented as nothing but a sober-minded effort to make “tough choices” and solve practical problems. It turns Medicare into a voucher plan, slashes spending on Medicaid and food stamps, repeals Obamacare, and cuts taxes for the wealthy. But it balances the budget! How? Well, partly by accepting the tax increases in the fiscal cliff deal (which Ryan opposed), and repealing only the benefits of Obamacare, like providing coverage to people, but keeping Obamacare’s tax increases and Medicare savings (which, you’ll remember, Ryan attacked relentlessly during last year’s campaign as an unconscionable assault on our seniors). It brings to mind the old joke about an economist stuck in a pit who says he can get out of it easily. How? “Assume a ladder.” Ryan’s budget assumes that Republicans won the White House and both houses of Congress in 2012.
And why, you might ask, is this treated with any more seriousness than a press release put out by some numbskull backbench congressman? Because Paul Ryan is a wonk, making tough choices! If Ryan weren’t so skilled at charming Washington reporters, and so shameless about the hypocrisy embedded in his plans, this kind of thing would be regarded not as some possibly questionable budget math, but as outright buffoonery, just a step or two above the Republicans who rush to the cameras whenever it snows to make lame jokes about how Al Gore is a stupid-head. But it isn’t treated that way. It’s treated the same way it was before Ryan became Mitt Romney’s running mate, as more evidence of what an intellectual leader of the GOP Ryan is. Why mess with success?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 12, 2013
“The Dubya Albatross”: Why Republicans Can Never Distance Themselves From George W. Bush
When he was performing his Full Jeb of Sunday show interviews over the weekend, Jeb Bush got asked everywhere whether he’s running for president, and each time he gave the same practiced answer (not thinking about it yet). He also got asked whether his brother’s disastrous presidency, and the fact that Dubya left office with abysmal approval ratings (Gallup had him in the 20s for much of 2008) would be a drag on him. Jeb gave the answer you’d expect: history will be kind to my brother, I’m very proud of him, and so on. Of course it’s true that Jeb, what with his last name and all, would have to “grapple” with his brother’s legacy more than other candidates. But when we think about it in those terms, I think we overlook something important about how the Bush legacy will continue to operate on Republicans, not just Jeb but all of them.
I thought of this when reading Peter Beinart’s take on Jeb, wherein he says something I think misses the mark:
That’s why Jeb Bush will never seriously challenge for the presidency—because to seriously challenge for the presidency, a Republican will have to pointedly distance himself from Jeb’s older brother. No Republican will enjoy credibility as a deficit hawk unless he or she acknowledges that George W. Bush squandered the budget surplus he inherited. No Republican will be able to promise foreign-policy competence unless he or she acknowledges the Bush administration’s disastrous mismanagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. It won’t be enough for a candidate merely to keep his or her distance from W. John McCain and Mitt Romney tried that, and they failed because the Obama campaign hung Bush around their neck every chance it got. To seriously compete, the next Republican candidate for president will have to preempt that Democratic line of attack by repudiating key aspects of Bush’s legacy. Jeb Bush would find that excruciatingly hard even if he wanted to. And as his interviews Sunday make clear, he doesn’t even want to try.
The focus on ideas like credibility and pre-empting attacks makes it seem as though this is really an issue of rhetoric and positioning, but it’s more than that. Let’s go through point by point. Does a Republican need to establish credibility as a deficit hawk? No, because the definition of deficit hawkery is endlessly malleable; Republicans who want to give huge tax cuts to the rich and increase military spending pretend to be deficit hawks just by saying “We need to rein in entitlements,” and people in the press believe them. Nobody voted for Barack Obama because they didn’t think Mitt Romney was enough of a legitimate deficit hawk. Does the next Republican candidate need to promise foreign-policy competence? Ask Michael Dukakis how important establishing your competence is to winning the White House. And did McCain and Romney lose because they didn’t create enough distance between themselves and Bush by not repudiating parts of his legacy?
Ah, here’s where it gets tricky. What, exactly, should they have repudiated, or should future Republican presidential contenders repudiate? Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy that helped explode the deficit? His military adventurism? Appointing right-wing judges? Undermining environmental and workplace protections? The trouble is that those things are central to conservative ideology as it exists today. During much of the Bush years, Republicans controlled all three branches of government, and got pretty much everything they had ever wanted. You can tweak Bush’s legacy around the edges, but if you don’t believe in nearly everything he did, you aren’t really a Republican.
This reminds me of a terrific piece this magazine ran about the Iraq War in the fall of 2005 by Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias called “The Competence Dodge.” Their argument was that while the Bush administration was most certainly screwing up the war, even if they had been more competent, it would only have made a small difference. The problem wasn’t the details of the execution; the problem was that invading Iraq was a terrible idea. The same is true of the Bush administration more broadly. Yes, they screwed some things up. But on the whole, the problems sprang from their goals. The people who run for the Republican nomination in 2016 are going to share those goals, and the Democrats will once again say “You just want to take us back to the Bush years.” That will be true whether any of them are named Bush or not.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 12, 2013
“A Lobbyist By Any Other Name”: Scott Brown Makes It Official With Wall Street
Former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown announced today that he’s joining the government affairs department of a giant multinational law firm with major Wall Street clients.
“Brown will focus his practice on business and governmental affairs as they relate to the financial services industry as well as on commercial real estate matters,” the firm, Nixon Peabody LLC, said in a press release. Brown will not be a lobbyist, the firm said, but whether he meets the specific legal requirements to be a registered lobbyist or not, it’s clear that he will draw on his contacts and status to help advance clients’ agenda in government. “He can offer many types of legal services to his broad network of contacts,” the firm said.
The head of the Nixon Peabody’s Government Relations practice is ex-New York congressman Tom Reynolds, who now lobbies for Goldman Sachs on “[f]inancial services regulatory and tax issues.” According to the firm, Brown will also work with fellow Massachusettsian Jim Vallee, who abruptly left his job as majority leader of the state House of Representatives last year after getting hired by the firm.
Nixon Peabody contributed $2,500 to a PAC associated with Brown’s reelection campaign last year, the most it gave to any candidate in the country (tied only with a Democratic House member).
Brown was a reliable ally of the financial services industry in the Senate, where he helped water down the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law and influence other bills of interest to banks. It was no surprise, considering how much money they threw at his campaigns. The Securities and Investment sector was the top industry donor to Brown’s 2012 campaign, giving him $3.2 million, on top of the millions he received from the insurance, real estate and finance industries, according to Open Secrets.
The move, however, is a blow to Massachusetts Republicans, who see Brown as their best — and possibly only — hope of retaking a Senate seat or winning the governor’s mansion. Perhaps Brown didn’t think he could win or perhaps he was more interested in cashing in.
It’s notable that Massachusetts voters have replaced Brown, who is now almost literally a Wall Street lobbyist, with Elizabeth Warren, one of the most outspoken critics of the finance industry in the country.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, March 11, 2013
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