“The Media Just Hasn’t Reported On It”: Why Republicans Have Gotten Away With Craziness This Year
We don’t know if Joni Ernst is going to be the next Senator from Iowa, but one thing we can say is that Democrats failed to paint her as a radical Tea Partier with dangerous ideas. (Actually, there’s another thing we can say: her replacing liberal lion Tom Harkin would have to be the widest ideological swing in a Senate seat from one Congress to the next in a long time.) The question is, why? And more broadly, why have they failed to do that with any of the GOP Senate candidates running this year? It’s not like this is a bunch of moderates. One explanation is that the establishment triumphed by weeding out the nutcases:
National Republicans managed this year to snuff out every bomb-throwing insurgent who tried to wrest a Senate nod away from one of their favored candidates. They spent millions against baggage-laden activists such as Matt Bevin, the Louisville investor who mounted a ham-fisted challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel, the conservative upstart who imperiled a safe seat by nearly ousting longtime Sen. Thad Cochran.
The confrontational approach—by both party committees and outside super PACs—represented a sharp departure from the GOP’s cautious strategy in the 2010 and 2012 cycles, when cartoonishly inept nominees aligned with the tea party lost the party as many as five Senate seats.
All that’s true, but it’s not just that they kept crazy people from winning primaries, they also kept primary winners’ craziness from undoing their campaigns. Ernst has managed to skate away from accountability for her more disturbing ideas, like her embrace of the “Agenda 21” conspiracy theory or her statement that she might have to start shooting government officials if they trample her rights. That’s not to mention her beliefs that there should be no federal minimum wage and that weapons of mass destruction were actually found in Iraq.
And it isn’t like Democrats haven’t tried to convince voters that Ernst is a radical. So why hasn’t she, like Todd Akin and Sharron Angle before her, gotten all kinds of negative attention for her comments that ultimately drove her to defeat?
There are many factors, like the fact that the Republican party has stuck by her, that had an impact. But I think the biggest reason is that the media just haven’t reported on it very much. Ernst’s Agenda 21 conspiricizing may have gotten attention from liberal bloggers, but it didn’t get much notice in the Iowa media, or from national political reporters. In contrast, when Bruce Braley told attendees at a fundraiser that if Republicans took the Senate, the Judiciary Committee would be chaired by “a farmer from Iowa without a law degree,” meaning the state’s senior senator, Chuck Grassley, it was huge news. The Des Moines Register, the state’s largest paper (and one that Ernst complains is biased against her) did editorialize once against Ernst’s radical and constitutionally demented views on “nullification,” but that’s the only substantive article about the topic that comes up when you search the paper’s web site (though there are a few letters to the editor that mention it). On the other hand, when I searched for Braley’s statement about Grassley being a farmer in the DMR, I got 79 hits.
While I haven’t done a systematic analysis of the rest of Iowa or national media, that doesn’t seem unrepresentative—I’ve seen the Grassley farmer thing mentioned many, many times in mainstream sources, but not Ernst’s crazier beliefs. Perhaps it’s because reporters are just tired of writing the “Republican candidate says extreme things” story. But I think it’s also that the Braley “gaffes,” whether it’s implying that farmers are not necessarily the font of wisdom in all things, or being upset when his neighbor’s chickens crap on his lawn, are personal in a way Ernst’s statements aren’t. They supposedly imply that Braley might be a bit of a jerk, whereas you can be friendly and nice and also believe the UN is coming to kick you off your land.
The trouble is that when we’re talking about electing people to the nation’s legislature, this is completely backward. The personal stuff is of only the tiniest importance, if any at all, while beliefs about the world are very relevant. Joni Ernst’s ideas about the UN, about guns, and about the legal status of zygotes will actually make a difference in how she does her job, should she win. In contrast, unless Harry Reid has his chickens crap in Bruce Braley’s Capitol Hill office just before a critical budget vote, I don’t think that’s going to really be an issue. But that’s what the campaign coverage has focused on.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 3, 2014
“This Election’s Biggest Jokes”: ‘Republicans Are The Saviors Of Social Security And Medicare!’ And ‘Republicans Will End Gridlock’
The whole point of Republican rhetoric these days is to try to switch labels: that Democrats were responsible for the Great Depression, and that Republicans are responsible for all economic and social progress under the New Deal.
Now, imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but in this case it is most common or garden variety of fraud. You have all been to the circus, but even the best performing elephants could not do a handspring without falling flat on their backs.
[FDR- 1940 campaign]
If it were not so tragic, it would indeed be funny.
The greatest purveyor of gridlock, obstruction, hurting the American people so that they would feel bad enough to blame the president… i.e., Mitch McConnell (R-KY)… he says that he will end gridlock!
Republicans, and only Republicans, have tried to privatize Social Security. Republicans have been against Social Security from the day it was conceived.
Ronald Reagan, Republicans’ saint, made his political debut explaining how Medicare would destroy all freedom and liberty in the country.
Republicans in 2011 and 2013 voted to transform Medicare into a voucher program. No more guaranteed benefits. Good luck shopping around for insurance if you can find an insurer to take you on if you are elderly and have several chronic illnesses. Oh, and good luck to younger people whose premiums would skyrocket if the elderly were included in their insurance pools.
And, yet these same Republicans are attacking Democrats who fought for these popular programs, who sometimes lost their seats due to lies and innuendo about their votes for these programs, for the “sin” of (wrongly, in my opinion) signaling a willingness to compromise to reduce long-term outlays from the program as Republicans were polluting the media with cries of “Greece, Greece, Greece.”
They lie about the president “taking” $500B from Medicare, when all he did was reduce payments to providers. Not a single person, nor a single procedure or illness, has lost coverage. Indeed, President Obama extended Medicare’s solvency from 2016, when it was due to go bankrupt, to at least 2030.
That is, thanks to President Obama, there is no pending financial crisis in Medicare. Thanks to President Obama, no one has lost a drop of coverage. Thanks to President Obama the amount of money seniors have to shell out for their prescription drugs is falling, with full closure of the “doughnut hole” in Part D of Medicare occurring in the following years. Thanks to President Obama, preventative care is covered.
That is, thanks to President Obama, seniors are getting much better coverage for a lower cost. By contrast, Republicans continue to try to destroy the entire program that they always opposed.
And, yet, Republicans attack Democrats, pretending to be Medicare’s defenders.
It should be the campaign’s biggest joke. But, with millions of Koch-dollars behind the ads, lying about the programs, lying about their impact, it is no joke.
It is a tragedy.
As if Republicans are really interested in protecting these programs. They wish they never existed, and want to get rid of them. They have voted for measures to destroy Medicare, and sprung privatization on the American people in 2004 when they were elected without breathing a word of it during the campaign.
Because, if the Republicans do take power, they will destroy the programs they claim to champion.
And, no one will know what killed them.
By: Paul Abrams, The Huffington Post Blog, November 2, 2014
“No Wave, No Mandate”: Be Extremely Skeptical Of Republican Claims Of Any Mandate
With Republicans increasingly likely to take the Senate, we can be sure of one thing: Whether their victory is narrow or enormous, Republicans will claim a sweeping mandate to enact a radical shift in policy on pretty much any issue that they care about. The American people have spoken, they’ll say. This was a wave that swept us into power and washed away Barack Obama’s right to pursue his agenda.
We should be extremely skeptical of that claim, for a number of reasons.
The first is that it isn’t really looking like much of a wave. Every election analyst projects that Republicans will pick up a few seats in the House — maybe five, maybe ten — but nothing like the 63 seats they gained in 2010 or the 54 they netted in 1994. If they manage to take the Senate, it will be because most of the incredibly close races this year tipped their way in the end. Which would undoubtedly be a victory, but it would be hard to argue that the GOP squeaking out wins in deep-red states in the South and adding a couple in swing states like Iowa or Colorado represents some huge shift in public sentiment.
New polling data suggests that even if Republicans do take the Senate, we’re hardly looking at a “GOP wave.” The final pre-election poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal was released today, and it shows the two parties nearly deadlocked (46-45 in Republicans’ favor) in the generic ballot test among likely voters. Democratic voters’ interest in the campaign has risen to match Republicans’, and approval of the GOP as a party remains abysmal. There’s also evidence to suggest that turnout will be low.
Of course, that poll could be inaccurate on any given question. But a perfectly plausible outcome would be that Republicans end up with a Senate majority of 51, 52, or 53 seats, but the election as a whole looks not like a wave but like a mixed victory amid conditions that already favored them.
And yet, if Republicans are victorious, they’ll repeat over and over that quote from Barack Obama when he said his administration’s policies were on the ballot. They’ll say the country has repudiated his administration and its agenda, and therefore he should agree to the things they want to do instead. They’ll say they were given a mandate by the American people.
Which, when you think about it, is absurd. Given how many close elections there are this year, it would be odd to say that if Bruce Braley and Mark Udall had managed to get slightly more of their voters to the polls, then that would have meant America chose one course, while if those two candidates’ turnout operations couldn’t quite get them over the finish line, then America made a different choice.
The outcome in Congress is likely to reflect this. Republicans are now claiming they will “pass a lot of legislation” once they control both chambers, but in reality, we’re likely to see more gridlock, dysfunction, and stalemate. Congressional Republicans will find themselves stymied by other institutional procedures — the filibuster and the presidential veto. And they’ll probably complain that the voters’ will is being thwarted.
But they won’t have much of a case to make. Getting the ability to repeal the Affordable Care Act, slash environmental regulations, cut corporate taxes, and enact the rest of the GOP agenda is going to take more than prevailing in a close Congressional election. It will take winning the White House, something they seem to have all but forgotten how to do.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, November 3, 2014
“A Public Health Triumph”: Republicans Call Ebola A Federal Government Failure. It’s Exactly The Opposite
If you live in a state with a competitive Senate race, chances are you’ve seen an ad recently that told you to vote Republican because of Ebola. According to the media tracking firm CMAG (reported here by Bloomberg), there has been a significant increase in Ebola-themed ads in the race’s final days.
These ads are meant to stoke a general sense is that the world is spinning out of control, and only a Republican Senate can save us. As conservatives like Charles Krauthammer have argued: “Ebola has crystallized the collapse of trust in state authorities,” showing us that the Obama administration is too incompetent to handle the dangers confronting us.
But what if Ebola demonstrates exactly the opposite?
Imagine that a year ago, I told you that a few months hence, west Africa would see the largest Ebola outbreak in history. Then I explained that despite regular travel in and out of the affected countries by health professionals and ordinary people, there would be a grand total of two — not two hundred, or two thousand, but two — Americans who contracted the disease here, and both of them would be nurses who had treated a dying patient who had contracted the disease in Liberia. And I told you that both of them would be treated, and would survive and be healthy. If I had told you that a year ago, would you have said, “Wow, that sounds like a gigantic federal government failure”?
Of course not. You’d say that sounds like a public health triumph.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that there have been no mistakes. In the early days, the CDC didn’t offer clear enough guidance on prevention measures for health care professionals, which is what made it possible for those two nurses to become infected. But if you actually look at the facts, the disease has been completely prevented and contained here in the United States. It makes you wonder what the administration’s critics are talking about when they cry that the government has failed.
And right now, while the federal government is proceeding in a methodical, sober fashion to keep the disease contained, it’s state governments that are acting like fools. Governors Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie first announced that health care workers returning from the affected countries would be quarantined for 21 days, and Christie essentially imprisoned one nurse at Newark airport. Then, when they came under withering criticism from people who actually have some expertise in this subject, they changed the policy to request that those workers quarantine themselves in their homes.
The nurse held in New Jersey, Kaci Hickox — who has no Ebola symptoms, shows no sign of being infected, and poses no danger to anyone — returned to her home in Maine and is now fighting with Paul LePage, perhaps America’s most buffoonish governor, over whether she should be confined to her home against her will. You wouldn’t trust LePage to help your third-grader with his math homework, but he professes to know something about this disease that actual public health specialists don’t.
I have little doubt that the GOP fear-mongering on Ebola will be effective in these elections, at least to some degree. People are easily frightened, and it’s always easier to get them to vote on their fears than on the facts. But if you look objectively, it’s hard to reach any other conclusion but that the federal government has done quite a good job protecting the public from Ebola.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 31, 2014
“Imagine; The Democratic States Of America”: Is It Finally Time For Us Northeners To Encourage The South To Go Its Own Way?
I have a confession to make: I’m prejudiced against the South. You might even call me an anti-Southern bigot.
I’m not proud of it. It’s just a fact. I grew up a liberal, secular Jew in New York City and southern Connecticut — a Yankee through and through. The thought of “my” America being yoked together with a region that fought a bloody, traitorous war to defend the institution of slavery and a way of life based upon it — well, it just felt morally grotesque. That this same region persisted in de jure racism (backed up by brutal violence) right up through the decade prior to my birth in 1969 only made it more galling.
I became more conservative in my 20s. But it was the conservatism of the urbane, formerly left-liberal, mostly Jewish neocons, which is (or at least used to be) the furthest thing from the Southern, populist wing of the Republican Party that, in our time, sets the tone and agenda for the party as a whole. And as I’ve moved a few clicks back in the direction of my youthful liberalism over the past decade and become an unapologetic anti-Republican, my distaste for the South hasn’t diminished.
That’s why I get a little kick out of it any time I hear someone make an argument in favor of Southern secession — whether it’s a Southerner who wants to get the hell out of Obama’s godless Euro-socialist dystopia or a Northern liberal wishing the yokels would do exactly that.
Sure, Lincoln was willing to sacrifice vast quantities of blood and treasure to keep the South from bolting for the exits. But that was eons ago. And some days — like today, less than a week from the likely seizure of the Senate by the Southern-dominated GOP — I find myself wishing the South would make another go of it.
Today, the Democrats control the Senate by a margin of 53 to 45. Two senators, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, call themselves independents but caucus with the Democrats, bringing their effective total up to 55 seats. The House of Representatives, meanwhile, is held by the Republican Party by a margin of 233-199.
But without the 11 states of the Confederacy? Whoa boy. By my calculations, Democrats (with Sanders and King) would control the Senate by a wildly lopsided margin of 49 to 29 seats. And the House — entrenched power-base of the post-Gingrich GOP backed up by jimmy-rigged gerrymandering? Without the South, Democrats would hold the House easily, 160-135.
Then there’s the White House, where even with the South the Democrats hold an electoral edge rooted in ideology and demographics. If the 2012 election had been held in a post-secession America, Barack Obama’s 332-206 Electoral College romp would have become a monumental wipeout of 290-88. As for 2004, it would have gone from a relatively narrow win (286-251) for George W. Bush to a John Kerry landslide of 251-133.
Without the South, the country could very well be renamed the Democratic States of America.
Secession would have numerous policy implications. The deficit would likely shrink, since despite the South’s fondness for anti-government rhetoric and ideology, the region benefits substantially more from federal programs than it pays into the federal treasury. Serious gun control legislation might actually make it through Congress. ObamaCare would probably work better (the South has led the way in refusing to expand Medicaid), but it might also be possible to pass the kind of sweeping reform of the health-care system (single payer) that proved impossible for Obama.
In sum, the U.S. without the South would look an awful lot more like Canada and Europe than it currently does — while the newly independent Confederate States of America would likely look like, well, nowhere else in the civilized world. Rates of poverty, already among the highest in the nation, would probably leap higher still. Guns would be ubiquitous. Without a meddlesome Supreme Court to uphold reproductive rights, women in the New Confederacy might find it impossible to obtain abortions. Something similar would probably hold for gay rights (not just with regard to marriage, but even including sexual activity itself) and, of course, for African American voting rights. (Ten out of 11 states in the South have passed voting restrictions in the past four years. Imagine what would happen without what remains of the Voting Rights Act and the oversight of federal courts?)
So what do you say? Is it finally time for us Northeners to encourage the South to go its own way?
I’d be inclined to say yes, except for one thing. I have family members in the Midwest who hold views as conservative as those that prevail across wide swaths of the South. If it’s ideology and culture (rather than region) that divides us, then shouldn’t these Fox News aficionados join in the exodus? And come to think of it, my neighbor down the street in the Philadelphia suburbs has a Tea Party bumper sticker on his pickup truck. Maybe he’d be better off relocating somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, too.
You get the idea.
The dysfunction of our public institutions and the ideological polarization and self-segregation of our culture can easily convince us that we lack any common ground with those on opposite sides of the various conflicts that divide us. And yet here we are, sharing the same soil, the same history, the same democratic norms and ideals. If we don’t want to set a centrifugal precedent that states and even smaller groups of citizens are free to break off from the country and set out on their own at the first sign of tension — a precedent that if acted on with any regularity could easily lead to the dissolution of the nation itself — we need to accept that we’re stuck with each other and have no responsible choice but to learn, somehow, to get along.
Maybe that Lincoln fellow was onto something after all.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, October 29, 2014
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