“Remaining In Denial”: The GOP Must Come To Terms With George W. Bush’s Disastrous Presidency
It’s still freezing in much of country, but it’s springtime for Republican intellectuals.
With the Romney debacle behind them, a number of analysts have gone public with accounts of the party’s failures and ambitious proposals for its reform. Over the last few weeks, Ross Douthat, Michael Gerson and Pete Wehner, Yuval Levin, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jim Pethothoukis, David Frum, and Tod Lindberg have all weighed in on where the GOP should go.
The proposals include promising ideas, such as emphasizing tax and regulatory simplification over income tax cuts, or moving away from hard-line positions on abortion and gay marriage. Nevertheless, these plans are a misleading point of departure for GOP renewal. That’s because their authors remain in denial about the cause of Republicans’ unpopularity: the catastrophic failure of the Bush presidency.
Start with foreign policy. From the 1960s until the 21st century, Republicans reliably enjoyed the trust of the public to manage America’s foreign affairs and protect its national security. The attacks of September 11 gave George W. Bush the opportunity to build on that reputation. Instead, he squandered it by mismanaging the war in Afghanistan and plunging the nation into a disaster in Iraq.
Not every setback was Bush’s fault. Nevertheless, the president bears more personal responsibility for foreign policy than any other issue. In most Americans’ minds, then, Afghanistan and Iraq were Bush’s wars. By the conventional logic of politics, that means that they are Republican wars, too.
Yet Republican reformers are reluctant to admit the obstacle that Bush’s legacy poses to public confidence on foreign affairs. Although they acknowledge that the wars have been unpopular and expensive, they present these facts in the passive voice, as if the deaths of nearly 7,000 Americans were the result of weather or other uncontrollable forces. Here is how Gerson and Wehner describe the loss of the GOP’s foreign policy advantage: “Nor has the decidedly mixed legacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade worked to bolster the Republicans’ electoral advantage in the conduct of foreign policy; if anything, the opposite is the case.” Who do they think they’re fooling?
Then there’s the economy. The reformers write eloquently, and correctly, of the need for Republican responses to long-term problems of unemployment, wage stagnation, and rising health-care and education costs. As with foreign policy, however, they are reluctant to acknowledge that the Bush administration did little to reverse these trends, and in some ways exacerbated them. In an otherwise compelling critique of Republicans’ fixation on marginal income tax rates, Ponnuru manages not to mention that the Bush administration regarded tax cuts as a signature achievement. Ordinary citizens have longer memories.
I emphasize foreign policy and the economy because these are areas of Bush’s most dramatic failures. But Bush’s record as an administrative centralizer and critic of Social Security also overshadows Republican efforts in education and entitlement reform. It’s not good enough for Republicans to pledge that things will be different next time. To convince Americans that they’re serious, reformers need to name names about the cause of the public’s justifiable mistrust.
To be fair, the reformers are in a difficult position. They won’t attract converts within the party if they mount a frontal assault on its idols. And they know that Bush and his policies remain popular both with Republicans in office and with many base voters.
What’s more, several of the reformers have professional ties with the Bush administration. Frum, Gerson, and Wehner all worked as speechwriters in the White House. For them, rejection of the Bush legacy amounts to rejection of their own work. That’s not easy for even the most rigorous thinker.
But the reformers’ connections to the Bush administration reflect the GOP’s larger problem: an institutional and intellectual elite dominated by alumni or associates of the Bush administration. As Robert Draper reported in The New York Times Magazine, the RNC committee established late last year to investigate the party’s failings was staffed with the likes of Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary. Such a team is not very likely to ask tough questions — or to recognize unflattering answers. In addition to new policies, Republicans desperately need new personnel.
It takes a long time for political parties to recover from defeat. Since winning suggests that they’re doing something right, it takes even longer to recover from victory. Because it reassured Republicans that aggressive war, fiscal policies that favor the rich, and the ideologically-inspired transformation of beloved domestic programs were fundamentally popular, the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 was like a drug that relieves symptoms without treating the underlying disease. Conservative intellectuals must help the GOP break its dependence on these dangerous nostrums — and its continuing allegiance to the doctor who prescribed them.
By: Samuel Goldman, Blogger for The American Conservative; Published in The Week, March 5, 2013
“Paul The Younger”: Standing In The Quicksand Of Rand Paul’s Broader Ideology
You have to hand it to Rand Paul. With an investment of 13 hours of his time earlier this week, the junior Senator from Kentucky (a) became the national hero of the conservative movement; (b) helped detoxify his position on national security and civil liberties issues, his (and his father’s) weak point with more conventional Republicans; (c) intimidated most other GOPers, including the senior senator from Kentucky, the ostensible leader of all Senate Republicans, into following his lead; and (d) made a strong initial bid to emulate John McCain’s old ability to stimulate admiration from people on the other side of the partisan and ideological spectrum. That McCain was largely isolated, along with his amiguito Lindsey Graham, in criticizing Paul made the whole thing even sweeter for the guy who came to the Senate bearing the family reputation for incorrigible crankiness.
By the end of his filibuster, Paul had the RNC chairman and McConnell himself (see this interesting backstory on that phenomenon from National Journal‘s Shane Goldmacher and Beth Reindard) eating out of his hand. And lefty admiration of Paul became so robust that Adele Stan felt compelled to remind progressives of everything horrific about the man and his motives.
On top of everything else, as I fretted yesterday, Paul had rekindled the Romance of the Filibuster, precisely at the time we needed to get rid of it. Not a bad day’s work for a guy so fresh from the fever swamps that you could probably smell the sulphur on him right there on the Senate floor.
David Frum, for whom Paul’s sudden hyper-respectability is very bad news, summed up the Rand-o-Fest pretty well:
Paul’s filibuster ostensibly dealt only with a very remote hypothetical contingency: targeted killings on American soil of Americans who present no imminent threat to national security. Paul insisted that all the harder questions be taken off the table. He had (he said) no issue with a targeted killing on American soil of an American who did present an imminent threat. He avoided the issue of the targeted killings of Americans outside the United States – i.e., the actual real-world problem at hand.
Instead, Paul invoked a nightmare out of a dystopian future: an evil future president shooting a missile at an American having coffee in a neighborhood cafe, merely on suspicion, without any due process of law….
Paul emerges from a milieu in which far-fetched scenarios don’t seem far-fetched at all. Paul specifically mentioned the possibility of a democratically elected Adolph Hitler like figure coming to power in the United States. Looming federal tyranny – against which the only protection is an armed citizenry – is a staple item in the Rand Paul inventory of urgent concerns.
Most Republican senators don’t share this nightmarish vision of their country, thank goodness. But they do answer to an activist base that shares a nightmarish vision of President Obama. Rand Paul stipulated that he did not intend his remarks about a Hitler-like president to apply to the present president. But he must have a pretty fair idea of what his core constituency hears when he talks about looming tyranny – and so of course must the Republican senators who joined him at the rostrum.
They saw Rand Paul’s Twitter following jump. Perhaps they sensed a great fundraising bonanza at hand. Where Rand Paul led, other Republicans followed: some out of conviction, some out of opportunism, and some out of fear.
And thus conservatives followed Paul the Younger onto the quicksand of his broader ideology, which for the most part is in the mainstream of the John Birch Society. This is not what the GOP needs right now.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 8, 2013
“Obama’s Outreach Isn’t New”: When Dealing With Obstructionist’s, The Larger Dynamic Won’t Budge
After President Obama treated 12 Republican senators to dinner, and had a nice lunch with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the Beltway’s reaction can be summarized in one word: Finally.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who attended Wednesday’s dinner, said, “This is the first step that the president has made to really reach out and do like other presidents in the past — develop relationships and build trust.” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) added, “After being in office four years, he’s actually going to sit down and talk to members.”
And while plenty of pundits are echoing the sentiments, John Dickerson notes that those who insist this is a first for Obama are mistaken.
The aloof president is reaching out. That was the media’s first gloss on the president’s new robust effort at networking. He had finally embraced a Truth of Washington: You must engage your opponents and work with them. Finally he’s showing leadership. Hooray! […]
But this isn’t the first time the president has tried…. Early in his first term, during negotiations over the stimulus package, he reached out to Sens. Grassley, Snowe, Collins, and Specter…. Obama may not be very good at trying to work Congress; he may only have done it in fits and starts, but you can’t say he hasn’t tried.
On the Recovery Act, Obama reached out to Republican lawmakers. On health care, the president not only reached out, he spent about as much time talking to Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins as he did talking to his own staff. In May 2011, Obama invited a bipartisan group to the White House, not for a meeting or policy negotiations, but as part of “a get-to-know-you effort in the spirit of bipartisanship and collegiality.” In one of my very favorite moments of Obama’s presidency to date, he even attended a House Republican retreat, engaging in a spirited Q&A.
But, my DC pundit friends will tell me, these outreach efforts don’t count because they were in professional settings. What Obama needs to do is try personal outreach in informal ways and friendly settings. Except, the president has tried this, too, inviting members to the White House for Super Bowl and March Madness parties, and even golfing with Boehner.
Those who keep asking why Obama hasn’t reached out before this week don’t seem to be paying close enough attention.
So, why haven’t the efforts paid dividends? Dickerson has some worthwhile ideas on the subject, but for what it’s worth, I’ll add some speculation of my own.
For one thing, 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. Presidential face-time changes nothing.
For another, outreach may help set the stage for constructive negotiations, but compromise has been rendered all but impossible, not just because Republicans reflexively oppose everything Obama supports — including, at times, their own ideas — but also because the parties can’t horse-trade when one side doesn’t have much of a wish list.
Jonathan Bernstein had a very smart post on this yesterday.
In a world of divided government with two sensible parties, the logical compromise is that Republicans would trade the minimum wage hike — a popular policy Democrats care more about than Republicans anyway — for something which Republicans care about more than Democrats. That’s what happened last time, when Republicans were able to extract tax cuts for business in exchange for supporting the increase, with the whole thing going into a larger bill that had plenty of things for both parties.
And this gets at a larger problem that explains a lot about dysfunction in Washington right now: Republicans have largely given up on developing specific policy goals while becoming more and more dedicated to opposing compromise on everything as some sort of fundamental principle.
Think about it: what is the Republican agenda item the party could trade for a minimum wage increase? What’s the GOP policy request on health care, other than the dream of repealing the Affordable Care Act? What’s their policy request on climate? Energy? Education? I mostly have no idea.
And neither do I. Sure, it’s obvious Republicans have some vague policy preferences — energy = drilling; education = vouchers — and certainly stick to broad principles on tax cuts, but the traditional give-and-take process falls apart when transactional policymaking isn’t a possibility.
Obama could host luncheons and dinners every day, but this larger dynamic won’t budge.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 8, 2013
“A Class Act”: Let’s Hope Our Next First Lady Is As Exemplary As Michelle Obama
Something happened last week that was political, gratuitous and embarrassing for our country — and it actually can’t be blamed on the sequester.
Out of nowhere, the first lady of the United States appeared at the Academy Awards and announced the winner for Best Picture. Not landing by helicopter, not inside an egg like Lady Gaga, but via satellite from the White House, where she was hosting the nation’s governors for dinner, surrounded by smiling military personnel.
Immediately, the appearance — not her idea, but an invitation — became a national subject of scorn. Most of the first lady’s detractors were conservatives, like Michelle Malkin, who slammed “the White House-Hollywood industrial complex.” Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post blogged: “It is not enough that President Obama pops up at every sporting event in the nation. Now the first lady feels entitled, with military personnel as props, to intrude on other forms of entertaining (this time for the benefit of the Hollywood glitterati who so lavishly paid for her husband’s election) … it makes both the president and the first lady seem small and grasping.”
But other critics were liberals. Donny Deutsch of MSNBC, an “elite” of the first order, sniffed, “there was an elitist flavor to it.” The Post’s Courtland Milloy wrote he had “enough with the broccoli and Brussels sprouts” and all the attention paid to Obama’s toned arms and hair. “Where is that intellectually gifted Princeton graduate, the Harvard educated lawyer and mentor to the man who would become the first African-American president of the United States?” he asked.
These deeply disappointed Americans don’t exactly know what they want from the first lady — just that it isn’t what she is offering. And that’s why it’s so sad. No, Michelle Obama is not going to throw her Ivy League credentials around, or weigh in on war or peace. But she has led an awareness movement to tackle the epidemic of obesity and diseases associated with it, and she helped build a support net for military families and veterans returning from war, the likes of which they never had before.
Those who cannot understand the importance of Obama helping communities most affected by poor eating and poor health engage to improve their choices and habits must not appreciate not only the prevalence of obesity and diabetes, particularly among African-Americans, but the economic toll diabetes and other weight-related illnesses are taking on our healthcare system. Obama has not only worked on federal legislation requiring new standards for school lunches but is urging corporations to open new stores in the 6,000 “food deserts” the Department of Agriculture has identified across the country, areas where fresh food is not readily available.
Meanwhile, she has quietly invested thousands of hours — without any camera crews in tow — supporting military families along with Jill Biden, the wife of the vice president. Together they founded Joining Forces to encourage businesses to hire veterans returning from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Veterans groups have said Obama has hosted and participated in more events for veterans and military families than any other first lady.
Let’s hope our next first lady is an exemplary wife and mother, and a daughter who would move her mother in to the White House with her. Let’s hope she embraces strangers and hugs them tightly, just the first lady we have now.
We can all freak out if Obama appears on “Wife Swap.” But unless she does, please stand down.
Americans taking swipes at the first lady, asking why she is having a good time — when invited — with comedians and producers planning the Oscar ceremony, should instead think about saying “thank you.”
By: A. B. Stoddard, Associate Editor, The Hill, March 6, 2013
“No Naivete”: Negotiating With The GOP Is A Dead End
The framing of this question may well reveal more about the state of American politics and media commentary on dysfunctional government than the responses. The implicit assumption is that President Obama’s personal relationships with individual Republicans (or the presumed lack thereof) and his supposed reticence in tabling bold proposals for resolving the nation’s fiscal problems is a (if not the) major reason so little progress has been made in reaching a bipartisan consensus. I believe that assumption is greatly at odds with reality and distracts readers from the core governing problems confronting the country today.
Presidential leadership is contextual—shaped by our unique constitutional arrangements and the electoral, partisan, and institutional constraints that flow from them. Under present conditions of deep ideological polarization of the parties, rough parity between the parties that fuels a strategic hyperpartisanship, and divided party government, opportunities for cross-party coalitions on controversial policies are severely limited. Constraints on presidential leadership today are exacerbated by the relentlessly oppositional stand taken by the Republicans since Obama’s election, their continuing embrace of Grover Norquist’s “no new tax” pledge, and their willingness since gaining the House majority in 2011 to use a series of manufactured crises to impose their policy preferences on the Democrats with whom they share power.
Ironically, Obama tried harder and longer than the results merited to work cooperatively with Republicans in Congress. He has learned painfully that his public embrace of a policy virtually ensures Republican opposition and that intensive negotiations with Republican leaders are likely to lead to a dead end. No bourbon and branch-water laced meetings with Republicans in Congress or pre-emptive compromises with them will induce cooperative behavior.
Obama has now set out on the right course in his dealings with Republicans in Congress. No naiveté about the opposition he faces but a determination to make some cooperation in the electoral interests of enough Republicans to break the “taxes are off the table” logjam and move forward with an economic agenda that makes sense to most nonpartisan analysts and most Americans.
By: Thomas Mann, Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, U. S. News and World Report, March 6, 2013
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