“When The Red Meat Gets Really Bloody”: A Reflection Of Actual Republican Priorities And Governing Philosophy
When I wrote about Rick Perry’s very well-received speech at CPAC representing the underlying radicalism that has become commonplace at conservative gatherings, I did so in part because we’ve all gotten too accustomed to the duplicitous game played by Republican pols who talk out of both sides of their mouths about very popular federal domestic programs like Medicare and federally guaranteed student loans. If they aren’t hinting they’d like to repeal them altogether, they’re often promising to defend them to the last ditch, like Paul Ryan so conspicuously did with respect to Medicare in 2012.
But to my surprise, at least one major Republican writer was disturbed by Perry’s rhetoric at CPAC: Commentary‘s Peter Wehner:
It is one thing – and I think very much the right thing – to argue for a more limited role for the federal government and conservative reforms of everything from entitlement programs to education, from our tax code to our immigration system to much else. It’s quite another when we have the kind of loose talk from the governor of the second most populous state in America.
I realize that some people will argue that what Perry is offering up is simply “red meat” for a conservative audience. It’s a (lazy) default language those on the right sometimes resort to in order to express their unhappiness with the size of the federal government. But words matter, Governor Perry is actually putting forth (albeit in a simplified version) a governing philosophy, and most Americans who hear it will be alarmed by it.
As a political matter, running under the banner of “Get out of the health care business! Get out of the education business!” hardly strikes me as the best way to rally people who are not now voting for the GOP in presidential elections. I’m reminded of the words of the distinguished political scientist James Q. Wilson: “Telling people who want clean air, a safe environment, fewer drug dealers, a decent retirement, and protection against catastrophic medical bills that the government ought not to do these things is wishful or suicidal politics.”
Wehner, of course, is not your typical conservative writer. In February of last year, he and WaPo columnist Michael Gerson penned one of the more serious post-2012 articles on the need for some serious rethinking of the GOP message and policy agenda, earning them a spot in Ryan Cooper’s list of “Reformish Conservatives” in the May/June 2013 issue of the Washington Monthly.
But still, with Republicans getting themselves all revved up for a big 2014 victory so long as they keep their message simple and stupid, it’s refreshing to hear at least one voice suggest there is long-term danger–or really short-term danger, since 2016 isn’t that far away–in Perry’s kind of rap. At some point, Democrats are going to figure out how to effectively make the case that the “red meat” speeches reflect actual Republican priorities far more than the “incremental reform” or even defense-of-the-status quo rhetoric GOPers aim at swing voters.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 13, 2014
“Batter Up”: GOP’s Whack A Mole Addiction
While the Republican presidential contenders were kumbaya-ing at CPAC, evidence continued to mount over which of them gets to suffer the embarrassment of winning 180 electoral votes. A USA Today poll found that 59 percent of respondents said they will or might vote for Clinton. It showed enormous improvements in personal qualities (Is she likeable? Is she honest?, etc.) since the first time she ran for president. Respondents even thought that she was six years younger than she actually is!
What the CPAC goings on tell us, combined with a burst of polls showing Clinton wiping out Chris Christie and just mopping the floor with Jeb Bush, is that as they face 2016, the Republicans are in a situation that has almost no precedent in the party’s modern history. In practically every nomination battle going back to Tom Dewey—I’m not even going to tell you the year, but trust me, that’s going back!—the Republicans have had a chalk candidate. The establishment guy, the early front-runner.
Dewey, Dewey, Eisenhower, Eisenhower, Nixon, Rockefeller, Nixon, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Sr., Dole, Bush Jr., Bush Jr., McCain, Romney. These were the establishment nominees. You could make a case for William Scranton instead of Rocky in ’64, and you might argue, I guess, that at the start of the 1968 cycle, it wasn’t Nixon but George Romney, although he imploded in the pretty early innings. And anyway, I’m not sure Romney ever led Nixon in the polls. So these were the GOP establishment choices. You’ll have noted that only one of the whole bunch of them, Nelson Rockefeller, failed to capture the nomination.
Today? No chalk horse. Wide open. Christie was, but clearly isn’t anymore (by the way, Clinton leads him by 10 points—in New Jersey). Those who think Jeb Bush can step in and play this role are going on name and history, but they obviously aren’t looking at the numbers—Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee do just about as well against Clinton as Bush does. Establishment money might chase Bush if he got in, but there’s no evidence that votes would.
So this time it really could be almost anyone. The CPAC straw poll results suggest as much. It doesn’t mean much that Rand Paul won going away with 31 percent. He’s engineered to win CPAC straw polls. They’ll always overstate his support, although he is certainly among the front rank of aspirants right now. But look at the other numbers: Cruz, 11; Christie, 8; Rick Santorum, 7; Scott Walker, 7; Marco Rubio, 6. It’s a good bet that the nominee is going to be one of these people (counting Paul), and they’re packed in there pretty tight. That’s not a bad number for Rubio, whom the chattering classes have spent the last few weeks writing off (except Ross Douthat, who just yesterday suggested that a Rubio nomination was a distinct possibility.) I remember telling people in 2006 that I thought there was no way the GOP would nominate McCain in 2008, although I also said the opposite the following week.
It’s fascinating that this is happening at the precise time that the GOP establishment looks to be asserting control over the party at the congressional level. After two congressional election cycles during which the insurgent radicals started to take over, the establishment conservatives have said enough and started their own organizations to beat back Tea Party challenges to incumbents (the Times ran a good summary on this Sunday). The early sense is that for the most part, the establishment will succeed at this task. No more Christine O’Donnells on ballots. Most of the GOP incumbent senators being challenged from the right are probably going to end up winning their primaries. All those senators needed to see was what happened in Indiana in 2012, when the Tea Party wingnut beat the establishment Republican and then lost in the general, giving the state a Democratic senator even as Mitt Romney was beating Barack Obama there by 10 points, to conclude finally that they’d better clamp down on can’t-win-in-November extremism.
But it turns out they can’t contain it completely. It’s whack-a-mole, GOP style: They move to solve the problem at the congressional level, but lo and behold the mole pops up out of the presidential hole. If Christie is cleared, maybe matters will revert to normal. But even if he is cleared, he can’t turn back time; his image just isn’t what it was and never will be. He is already not quite Dole/McCain/Romney, the troika calumniated as sellouts by Cruz at his CPAC speech last week.
And thus the odds are strong that the GOP, for only the second time since 1944, is going to nominate an anti-establishment insurgent. Because, you know, they only lost in 2008 and 2012 because they failed to offer voters “a real choice.” Or so some of them say. So let them offer voters that choice. As they did in 1964, the voters will know what choice to make, and she’ll be a fine president.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 10, 2014
“Surprise, Surprise”: The Real Numbers On ‘The Obamacare Effect’ Are In, Now Let The Crow Eating Begin
After years of negative speculation on the part of the opponents of Obamacare, hard data is finally coming in with respect to the anticipated negative side-effects of the law.
The results are guaranteed to both surprise and depress those who have built their narrative around the effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act.
Let’s begin with the meme threatening that healthcare reform will lead to a serious decline in full-time employment as employers reduce workforce hours to below 30 per week in the effort to avoid their responsibility to provide health benefits to their employees.
It turns out that there has, in fact, been no such rush to reduce work hours. Indeed, numbers released last week reveal that precisely the opposite is taking place.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the number of part-time workers in the United States has fallen by 300,000 since March of 2010 when the Affordable Care Act was passed into law. What’s more, in the past year alone—the time period in which the nation was approaching the start date for Obamacare—full-time employment grew by over 2 million while part-time employment declined by 230,000.
And it gets even more interesting.
Despite the cries of anguish over the coming destruction of private sector work opportunities at the hands of Obamacare, it turns out that the only significant ‘cutter’ of work hours turns out to be in the public sector where cops, teachers, prison guards and the like are experiencing cuts in work time as cities, states and universities seek to avoid the obligations of the health reform law.
Correct me if I am wrong, but is it not the very same folks who strenuously oppose Obamacare who are constantly screaming for smaller government? Are these not the same people who have, for as many years as I can recall, been carping about swollen government payrolls?
But the false narrative that has been peddled to make us believe that the private sector can’t wait to lower our hours of employment turns out not to be the only false note being played by anti-Obamacare forces.
For months now, we have been pounded with the story of the millions of Americans who have lost their non-group, individual health insurance policy due to cancellations forced by Obamacare.
Yet, a new study just out by Lisa Clemons-Cope and Nathaniel Anderson of the Urban Institute tells a very different story.
How many times have readers, along with television and radio audiences, read or heard me point out that few ever expected to hang onto their individual insurance policy for longer than a year or two following date of purchase? Long before there was Obamacare, it was always clear that when someone purchased an individual health instance policy, it was pretty much a given that they would either be moving on to an employer provided group plan when they get a job or that their policy would respond to the ordinary, pre-Obamacare changes that occurred from year to year and result in the consumer having to purchasing a new plan after a short period of time.
Indeed, it was this very reality that made it clear to those who follow the health insurance industry that Obama’s “If you like your policy you can keep your policy” proclamation was a near impossibility for those participating in the individual marketplace. This simply wasn’t the way the individual market worked.
The Urban Institute study bears this out, noting that “the non-group market has historically been highly volatile, with just 17 percent retaining coverage for more than two years.”
While Obamacare foes have been quick to jump on this statistic when it comes to condemning the President for uttering his promise that you could keep your insurance if you are happy with your policy, the same people have somehow managed to miss the reality that a huge percentage of those who received cancellation notices last year were going to get that notice even if the Affordable Care Act had never existed.
But that is not all that critics have been missing as they’ve sought to exploit the supposed high number of cancellations they claim are due to Obamacare.
To find out just how many people have really been put into an insurance fix, the Urban Institute’s Health Reform Monitoring Survey, in December of 2013, asked people between the ages of 18 and 64 the following question:
“Did you receive a notice in the past few months from a health insurance company saying that your policy is cancelled or will no longer be offered at the end of 2013?”
The following bar published in Health Affairs provides the results—
Note that the number of people who saw their policy cancelled because it did not meet the Obamacare minimum requirements was 18.6 percent—dangerously close to the 17 percent of individual policyholders who were losing their individual market policies pre-Obamacare.
Also note that the 18.6 percent equates to roughly 2.6 million people whose plans were cancelled as a result of Obamacare—a number well below the estimates of 5 million or considerably more being tossed about by Obamacare opposition.
So, what happens to these folks who saw their health insurance policy cancelled?
According to the Urban Institute researchers :
“While our sample size of those with non-group health insurance who report that their plan was cancelled due to ACA compliance is small (N=123), we estimate that over half of this population is likely to be eligible for coverage assistance, mostly through Marketplace subsidies. Consistent with these findings, other work by Urban Institute researchers estimated that slightly more than half of adults with pre-reform, nongroup coverage would be eligible for Marketplace subsidies or Medicaid.”
So what does this data tell us?
As a result of at least half of those cancelled being able to either enroll in a Medicaid program or receive subsidies on the healthcare exchanges, many—if not most—will now find health care coverage at a price lower than previously paid while greatly improving the quality of coverage.
Still, roughly one million people will have to replace their cancelled policy with something that may cost them more. This is not a good thing but it is far, far less dramatic than what we’ve been hearing. It is also a part of the expected upheaval that has always—and will always—result from the passage of reforms designed to benefit the greatest number of people. Traditionally, those who are disadvantaged in this way find that things are sorted out in amendments to the initial legislation, amendments that can only result when Republicans in Congress stop playing politics and begin the serious work of making the law better for Americans.
There is another problem noted in the study—
Because of the amount of focus placed on scaring the you-know-what out of people when it comes to the alleged dire effects of Obamacare rather than educating them, people remain in the dark as to what is available on the exchanges or via the state Medicaid programs.
Per the Urban Institute study—
“Yet making the best enrollment choice may be difficult for consumers. HRMS findings show that many people are not aware of the new state Marketplaces, few know whether their state is expanding Medicaid, and many lack the confidence to enroll, make choices, and pay their premiums.”
Once again, politics trumps policy and the critical needs of those our elected officials are sworn to serve.
I highly encourage everyone—whether friend or foe of healthcare reform—to take a look at the study cited above and the BLS statistics. While most all would agree that there are some repairs that need to be made to the Affordable Care Act, workable fixes designed to benefit the public and improve American healthcare cannot happen so long as politicians, pundits and special interests are devoted to lying about what Obamacare means and what it does not mean to the American public.
Facts matter—even when they screw up an effective disinformation campaign.
UPDATE: Monday, 12:15pm EST:
The news just keeps on coming.
The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index is out this morning and reveals that 15.9 percent of American adults are now uninsured, down from 17.1 percent for the last three months of 2013 and has shown improvements in every major demographic group with the exception of Hispanics who did not advance.
That translates roughly to 3 million to 4 million people getting coverage who did not have it before.
According to Gallup, the number of Americans who still do not have health insurance coverage is on track to reach the lowest quarterly number since 2008.
This is one statistic that is going to be tough for Obamacare critics to overcome.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, March 10, 2014
“A Target-Rich Environment”: Meet The Right-Wing Doctor Who Could Cost Republicans A Senate Seat
The upcoming U.S. Senate election in North Carolina just got a bit more interesting — and a lot more perilous for Republicans.
On Thursday, Republican candidate Greg Brannon received an effusive endorsement from Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), one of the leaders of the Tea Party’s delegation on Capitol Hill.
“Greg Brannon is dedicated to enacting a conservative reform agenda in Congress. He is willing to challenge the status quo and entrenched special interests. And he has pledged to work alongside myself, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and others in the Senate to change the way Washington works,” Senator Lee said. “Greg Brannon will be a strong voice for the people in the Senate and I am proud to endorse him.”
Lee is just one of many prominent right-wingers to support Brannon’s campaign. Among others, the obstetrician from Cary, North Carolina is backed by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), media personality Glenn Beck, and several Tea Party groups (including the influential, big-spending FreedomWorks).
It’s not hard to understand why the right is coalescing around Brannon, who has spent much of his campaign working to establish himself as the most conservative candidate in the race. But it could create a problem for Republicans who are counting on unseating Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC) on the way to a majority in the U.S. Senate.
Senator Hagan is widely regarded as one of the most vulnerable incumbents in the nation, and she trails each of her Republican rivals in early polling of the general election. But if Brannon captures the Republican nomination, it could give Democrats an unexpected gift. Brannon’s march to the right throughout the campaign has created a target-rich environment for Senator Hagan to attack. Among other incidents, Brannon has:
- Been caught plagiarizing from Senator Paul’s campaign site (he later apologized and added proper attribution)
- Called for abolishing SNAP, arguing that food aid “enslaves people“
- Warned that interstate toll roads are close to “fascism“
- Falsely claimed that abortion is linked to breast cancer
- Been ordered by a jury to pay $250,000 in restitution after misleading investors in a tech startup
- Addressed a rally co-sponsored by the League of the South, a well-known secessionist group
- Served as president of an organization called “Founder’s Truth,” which routinely posted blog posts featuring conspiracy theories claiming that the Aurora massacre was a false flag operation, the TSA will soon force Americans to wear shock bracelets, and Intel hopes to implant microchips into your brain, among many others
It’s still far too early to declare that Brannon is the next Todd Akin, but it does seem likely that a matchup with Brannon would give Hagan the best chance to keep her seat.
Brannon would have to win the nomination first, however. North Carolina state House Speaker Thom Tillis currently leads the Republican field, boasting a 5 percent lead over Brannon in the Huffington Post’s polling average of the race. Tillis is also leading the money battle, with over $1 million in cash on hand, according to the most recent data. Brannon reported just $142,329, putting him at a big disadvantage. Still, given the typically conservative character of midterm Republican primaries, endorsements like Lee’s could give Brannon the boost he needs to claim victory in the May 6 election.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, March 7, 2014
“A Confederacy Of Dunces”: President Obama Is Truly Blessed In The Idiocy Of His Enemies
You probably saw a news item about a hearing yesterday of the House Government Oversight Committee. The reason you saw it is that it ended with some shouting, which is a relatively rare occurrence on Capitol Hill, and therefore that became an irresistible piece of news. But what really mattered about that hearing wasn’t Darrell Issa cutting off Elijah Cummings’ mike, causing Cummings to get extremely angry. It was that the hearing was happening at all. I’m not sure if there’s ever been an opposition party more thoroughly convinced of a president’s corruption yet so utterly incapable of doing anything about what they see as his crimes. You might think that’s because Barack Obama is not particularly corrupt, and that’s part of the story. But the Republicans’ buffoonery—and Issa’s in particular—when it comes to making Obama pay for his alleged misdeeds seems to know no bounds.
If I were a Republican, I’d really be wondering right now whether Issa can tie his own shoes, much less whether he’ll be able to take down the President of the United States. Just look at how this thing developed. On Sunday, Issa went on television and said that Lois Lerner, the former IRS official whom Republicans believe holds the key to showing how a lengthy application process for Tea Party groups seeking 501(c)(4) status was the linchpin of a White House conspiracy to destroy its enemies, would finally be testifying in front of his committee, answering all the biting and incisive questions Republicans have. Later that day, Lerner’s attorney told reporters that he had no idea what Issa was talking about. Lerner had invoked her Fifth Amendment rights, and she was going to continue to do so; there would be no testimony. Yet Issa still maintained she would be answering questions, and when she was brought before the committee on Wednesday, he was apparently surprised that she invoked those rights and would not answer their questions.
There are a few explanations for how this happened. One is that Lerner’s lawyer simply lied to Issa and his staff, telling them that she was ready to answer questions when he had no intention of letting her do so. This seems rather unlikely, particularly since he said publicly that she wouldn’t testify. The second possibility is that there was some kind of misunderstanding somewhere along the way, leading Issa and his people to believe she would answer questions when she actually wouldn’t. Again, this would seem to be contradicted by the fact that the lawyer said publicly she wouldn’t testify. The third is that Issa sensed some weakness in her position and thought that if he got her under the hot lights, he might force a few answers out of her.
Not knowing anything about the internal deliberations, I can’t say which of those three most resembles what happened, but given that from the outset this investigation has been an endless string of embarrassing pratfalls on Issa’s part, I suspect it’s the third. But what I wonder is, do they actually believe that they’re just one hearing away from busting this whole thing wide open? Just how deluded are they?
Meanwhile, you have Republicans like Lindsey Graham telling anyone who’ll listen that the reason for the crisis in Ukraine is…Benghazi! Yes, that must be it. If we can’t actually use it to impeach Obama, at least we can blame it for everything that happens anywhere in the world that we don’t like. Why is China still communist? Benghazi. Why did Oscar Pistorius shoot his girlfriend? Duh, Benghazi. Why did the women’s hockey team lose the gold medal game to Canada? Obviously, the Canadians were emboldened by Benghazi.
And I think they genuinely believe that Benghazi is going to keep Hillary Clinton from the White House. Sure, their potential 2016 candidates may look like a collection of amateurs and extremists. But just you wait—once Americans hear the truth about Benghazi, she doesn’t stand a chance!
Barack Obama has ridden a lot of ups and downs in his presidency, some of his own making and some that he could not have controlled. But he has been truly blessed in his enemies. They’re such a bunch of incompetent clowns, he could strangle the Dalai Lama on the White House lawn in full view of the cameras and they wouldn’t be able to pin it on him.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March , 2014
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