“Choose Your Grifter”: There Are Distinctions Between The Swindlers In The Republican Party
Steve LaTourette used to be a congressman from Ohio who was closely aligned with Speaker John Boehner. Now he runs a Super PAC called “Defending Main Street” that tries to serve the Chamber of Commerce’s interests against the nihilists in the Tea Party who don’t even want to maintain our roads and bridges. As part of that gig, he writes articles (see, e.g., Politico). Despite taking money from people to do something that he can’t actually do (beat back the nut-jobs) he has decided to divide the GOP into two factions, one of which he disapprovingly labels “the grifters.”
Historically, grifters have taken many shapes. They were the snake-oil salesmen who rolled into town promising a magical, cure-all elixir at a price. The grifter was long gone by the time people discovered the magical elixir was no more magical than water. They were the sideshow con men offering fantastic prizes in games that were rigged so that no one could actually win them. They were the Ponzi scheme operators who got rich promising fantastically high investment returns but returning nothing for those sorry investors at the bottom of the pyramid.
Over the last few years we have seen the rise of a new grifter—the political grifter. And the most important battle being waged today isn’t the one about which party controls the House or the Senate, it’s about who controls the Republican Party: the grifting wing or the governing wing.
Today’s political grifters are a lot like the grifters of old—lining their pockets with the hard-earned money of working men and women be promising things in return that they know they can’t deliver.
There are distinctions between the swindlers in the Republican Party, that is true. There’s a difference between the paranoid ramblings of Michele Bachmann, Steve King, and Louie Gohmert and the fundamentalist stylings of real thieves like K Street Project organizer Rick Santorum and U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce Freedom Support Award winner Sam Brownback. The first group acts crazy and gets a bunch of small donations. The latter group acts like pious little brats while they’re lining their pockets with massive corporate donations, if not outright bribes. But, it’s okay, because they’re more religious than you are.
They’re all grifters.
Government spending is where they seem to differ, with the first group looking to cash in by not spending federal cash and the latter group looking to direct that cash into private sector entities that reward them with big donations and lucrative second careers. But the record shows, both under Reagan and under the latter Bush, that the GOP deficit spends like mad when they have the power to control where that spending goes. Will the next time be any different?
Not if Steve LaTourette and his benefactors have anything to say about it.
And, yet, the traditional Republican type of grift, where you decry federal spending until the moment you actually control it, is vastly preferable to the new kind of grift which is based on paranoia and a more virulent kind of racism.
I’d tell you to pick your poison, but you don’t get to decide.
By: Martin Longman, Ten Miles Square, Washington Monthly, August 4, 2014
“How Did The GOP Turn Into Such A Bunch of Clowns?”: Lurching From One Strategic Screw Up To The Next
For a lot of reasons, the current era will probably be seen as unusually consequential in the history of the two parties, particularly the GOP. For Republicans, it has been a time of ideological hardening and bitter infighting. But one aspect of the Republican dilemma hasn’t gotten as much attention as those: This is a time of unusual, even stunning, Republican political incompetence.
Let me back up for a moment, to put what I’m saying in context. As the 2012 election approached, liberals began to understand just how deluded many conservatives were about empirical reality, and in ways that could do them serious political damage. It’s one thing to deny climate change (a denial that may benefit you and your allies), but if you convince yourself that you’re going to win when you’re actually going to lose, you’re hurting no one but yourself. When they began to rally around a guy claiming to “unskew” the 2012 presidential polls that showed Barack Obama heading for a victory, liberals had a great time ridiculing them. But then it turned out that even within the Romney campaign—including the candidate himself—people who were supposedly hard-nosed political professionals had convinced themselves that it was just impossible they could lose, whatever the polls said. As seen in an unforgettable bit of election-night television, Karl Rove, the party’s most celebrated strategist, refused to believe that Romney had lost even when Fox News called the race for Obama.
Once the race was over, there was some soul-searching within the GOP about their loss, but most of it concerned the party’s image as a bunch of unfeeling, out-of-touch white guys who couldn’t appeal to young voters and Hispanics. (Needless to say, this is a problem they’ve yet to solve,) There was some discussion about the conservative information bubble and the distorting effects it can have, but nothing changed—lots of conservatives still get their news from Fox and Rush Limbaugh, and assume that everything in the New York Times is a lie.
There seems to be little question that the alternative media universe they built, which was once a strength for the right, has become a liability. But their biggest problem now isn’t the things so many conservatives believe about the world that aren’t true, or what they think will happen that won’t. It’s about the strategic decisions they make, and where those decisions come from. Think about it this way: Has there been a single instance in the last few years when you said, “Wow, the Republicans really played that one brilliantly”?
In fact, before you’ll find evidence of the ruthless Republican skillfulness so many of us had come to accept as the norm in a previous era, you’ll need to go back an entire decade to the 2004 election. George W. Bush’s second term was a disaster, Republicans lost both houses of Congress in 2006, they lost the White House in 2008, they decided to oppose health-care reform with everything they had and lost, they lost the 2012 election—and around it all they worked as hard as they could to alienate the fastest growing minority group in the country and make themselves seem utterly unfit to govern.
In fact, in the last ten years they’ve only had one major victory, the 2010 midterm election. But that didn’t happen because of some brilliant GOP strategy, it was a confluence of circumstance; the natural tendency for the president’s party to lose significant numbers of seats two years after he’s elected, and the stagnant economy would have meant a big GOP victory no matter what they did.
Since then they’ve lurched from one strategic screw-up to the next, the root of which is almost always the same: It happens because they’re deluded into thinking that the country shares their particular collection of peeves and biases.
In fairness, this is a challenge for both parties and, indeed, for everyone involved in politics. When politics is your life, it’s hard, if not impossible, to think like an ordinary, inattentive voter thinks. When you’ve spent so much time convincing yourself that you’re right; the idea that anyone else who’s even remotely fair-minded wouldn’t agree can seem nothing short of absurd. It can be hard to persuade people when you can’t put yourself in their shoes.
But again and again, Republicans seem shocked to find out that Americans aren’t on the same page with them. They’re flummoxed when the public doesn’t rise up in outrage to demand more answers on Benghazi. They’re befuddled when shutting down the government turns into a political disaster. They’re gobsmacked when the electorate doesn’t reject Barack Obama for saying “you didn’t build that,” and even more amazed when he gets reelected. And in between, they can’t come up with any strategy to accomplish their goals, whether in policy or elections. Again and again, they think the American public is going to see things their way, and when the public doesn’t, they never seem to learn anything from it.
It isn’t always pure bumbling; there are times when the GOP follows an unwise strategic path not because of miscalculation, but because of unavoidable internal dynamics within the party. For instance, they’ve failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform not because party leaders don’t understand the political necessity of doing so, but because most members of the House come from conservative districts where comprehensive reform is unpopular, and therefore it makes sense for them to oppose it.
It would be too simple to put the GOP’s recent string of missteps and disasters down only to the struggle within the party, which yields a course ultimately determined by its radical wing. It is important that Tea Partiers, while being very good at figuring out how to make life miserable for the rest of their party, are abysmal when it comes to devising strategies for appealing to the country as a whole. But it’s equally relevant that the supposedly more pragmatic and experienced conservatives haven’t found a way to handle the snarling beast on their right flank and turn the whole ghastly mess into something that can fight Democrats with any modicum of success.
This shows no sign of changing. They’re going to win seats this November, but once again it won’t be because they came up with some brilliant strategy. If they win the Senate it will be because Democrats are defending more seats this year, many of which are in conservative states. (Two years from now when that situation is reversed, Democrats will almost certainly take back the Senate if they lose it this year.) Republicans will probably gain a few seats in the House, but don’t forget that in 2012, they retained their sizeable majority despite getting fewer votes nationwide than Democrats: Their advantage there is baked into the distribution of congressional districts.
And look at the people lining up to run for the White House in 2016. Does any one of them seem like the kind of brilliant politician who can navigate the deadly obstacle course of a two-year long presidential campaign and win over a majority of American voters, including millions who aren’t already on board with his party’s agenda? Who might that be? Ted Cruz? Rand Paul? Bobby Jindal? Rick Perry? Facing that collection of political samurai, Hillary Clinton must be positively terrified.
There are still plenty of smart Republicans out there. But the days when Republicans would run circles around Democrats, outdoing them in fundraising, messaging, organizing, and every other aspect of campaigning and politics, are a fading memory. The 2010 election may have blinded us to how long it’s really been since they set out to achieve a political goal and made it happen through their acumen and judgment. I’m sure that one day the GOP will get its strategic mojo back. But it could be a while.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 24, 2014
“Creating Two Different Nations”: The Deepening Divide Between Red And Blue America
Halbig v. Burwell, the case in which opponents of the Affordable Care Act won a dramatic if temporary victory yesterday, has profound implications for millions of Americans’ health care. But it’s also a demonstration of a trend that is determining more and more of what our politics and our country are going to look like in future years.
We talk a lot about America being divided ideologically, with liberals and conservatives increasingly distrustful and dismissive of each other. But we’re also in the process of creating two different nations, where stepping across a state border means entering a society with profoundly different laws and policy goals. And Republicans may have just stumbled on a way to use the federal government to increase that division.
Both parties are driving this broad movement. In many Republican-controlled states, it’s now all but impossible for a woman to get an abortion; people are encouraged by the state government to bring their guns to church and into bars; and taxes are whittled away while social services are slashed. Democrats too have gotten more aggressive in places they control, on issues like raising the minimum wage, same-sex marriage, and legalizing marijuana.
But the challenges to the ACA have shown the Republicans a new path, a kind of federalized federalism, where they can not only make Red America a more conservative place through state laws, but exempt Red America from federal laws they don’t like.
This wasn’t part of a carefully laid-out plan. Initially Republicans were just using any and every means they could find to undermine the ACA, with the goal of destroying it completely. Though they failed to do that, they won their first significant (if partial) victory when the Supreme Court ruled that states could opt out of the law’s expansion of Medicaid, which meant that we have two different countries when it comes to health coverage for poor people. If you’re poor and you live in a blue state or one of the few red states that has accepted the expansion, you can get free health insurance. If not, you’re out of luck. See, for instance, this vivid New York Times article about the city of Texarkana, which lies half in Texas and half in Arkansas; whether you get health insurance is determined by which side of town you live in.
In the Halbig case, conservatives located a drafting error and pursued it for no reason other than that it looked like a promising vehicle for Republican-appointed judges to strike a blow at the law. Creating two different countries when it comes to the ACA wasn’t really the goal, but it could be the outcome.
Let’s imagine the Supreme Court upheld the D.C. Circuit panel’s decision. In the states that have already established state exchanges, nothing would change. With a few exceptions (like Kentucky and Idaho) these are blue states. Everywhere else, people would immediately lose the tax credits they received to buy insurance, reverting to the pre-ACA status quo. That means more people without insurance, and a system that is generally more cruel and unforgiving. The states that are Democratic-controlled or divided but haven’t yet set up an exchange, like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maine, would probably move to do so in order to restore those subsidies to their citizens. Once it all shook out, you’d have a situation in which, for all intents and purposes, the most consequential social legislation passed through Congress in nearly half a century was operative in only half the country.
If that were to happen (and maybe even if it doesn’t), Republicans are likely to see a new means to accomplish their policy goals on any number of issues. If you can’t repeal a federal law you don’t like, maybe you can have it apply only to Blue America. Get a few creative lawyers together, and you can come up with a rationale for a lawsuit to allow states to opt out of almost any law; few can deny now that no matter how thin the legal reed you hang such a suit on, there will always be conservative judges who will embrace your logic. We could see a proliferation of opt-out amendments in Congress, as each significant piece of legislation is accompanied by an effort to give Republican states the ability to exempt themselves.
And don’t be surprised if perpetually vulnerable red state Democrats end up supporting those amendments from time to time, so they can give their party the votes it needs to pass bills, but also tell the folks back home that they stood up for states’ rights.
In 1932, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in a dissenting opinion:
It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
But the assumption has always been that when states act as laboratories of democracy, they’re exploring different ways to arrive at common goals. Increasingly, liberals and conservatives can agree only on the most abstract goals, like prosperity and freedom, but on almost none of the specifics. With the ACA as an example, Washington could become the new laboratory of division, where federal legislation and federal lawsuits become the means to drive Red America and Blue America further apart.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; Published in The Plum Line, The Washington Post, July 23, 2014
“A Stroll Down Memory Lane”: Sometimes, ‘What Would Reagan Do?’ Is The Wrong Question
After the public learned last week that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 had been shot down, killing all 298 people on board, it wasn’t long before an obvious comparison came to mind: in September 1983, a Russian fighter jet shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007. The attack left 269 passengers and crew dead, 62 of whom were American, including a member of Congress.
Olivia Kittel noted that for many Republicans, President Obama should not only follow Ronald Reagan’s example from 31 years ago, but also that Obama is already falling short of the Reagan example.
In the wake of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner crash, Fox News has rushed to conveniently rewrite history to disparage President Obama by drawing false comparisons to former President Ronald Reagan’s response to a 1983 attack on a Korean airliner.
After Fox News said Obama wasn’t Reagan-esque enough, plenty of other conservatives soon followed.
Let’s take a brief stroll down memory lane in case some have forgotten what actually happened in 1983.
After the Soviet pilot killed 269 people on a civilian airliner, Reagan’s aides didn’t bother to wake him up to tell him what happened. When the president was eventually briefed on developments, Reagan, who was on vacation in California at the time, announced he did not intend to cut his trip short. (Reagan’s aides later convinced him to return to the White House.)
Last week, Obama delivered a public address on the Malaysia Airlines plane about 24 hours after it was shot down, calling the incident an “outrage of unspeakable proportions.” Reagan also delivered stern words, but in contrast, he waited four days to deliver public remarks.
So what is Fox talking about?
More from Kittel’s report:
On the July 17 edition of Fox News’ The Kelly File, host Megyn Kelly connected the July 17 tragedy to the 1983 Korean airliner crash, highlighting Reagan’s speech in response and noting in comparison that Obama has “been accused of ‘leading from behind.’ ” Fox contributor Chris Stirewalt compared Reagan’s response to Obama’s, saying Reagan’s response made Americans feel “reassured and resolute,” and Kelly echoed that Obama’s response “makes him look unconnected and makes a lot of Americans feel unrepresented.” […]
Such comparisons applauding Reagan’s 1983 response to attack Obama have reverberated throughout Fox News. Andrew Napolitano invoked Reagan’s response to insist Obama should “get on national television and call Vladimir Putin a killer.” Fox correspondent Peter Johnson Jr. said of Obama, “I think the president needs to take a page out of Ronald Reagan,” while Fox strategic analyst Ralph Peters suggested Obama’s strategy should reflect “clear speech, a la Ronald Reagan, backed up by firm action and with follow-through.”
This over-the-top Reagan worship isn’t just wrong; it’s ironic. In 1983, some of the prominent conservative media voices of the day actually complained bitterly that Reagan’s response was wholly inadequate.
George Will – yes, that George Will – called the Reagan White House’s arguments “pathetic” at the time, insisting, “It’s time for [Reagan] to act.”
The president responded publicly with rhetoric that made the president sound rather helpless. “Short of going to war, what would they have us do?” Reagan said. “I know that some of our critics have sounded off that somehow we haven’t exacted enough vengeance. Well, vengeance isn’t the name of the game in this.”
One wonders what the reaction would have been from the right and the Beltway media if Obama responded with similar rhetoric to a comparable situation.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 21, 2014
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