GOP Has 2012 Trouble: Attacking Medicare And Social Security Could Be Death Of Republicans’ 2012 Hopes
Recent weeks have finally defined the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. The field has finally achieved a greater level of clarity as many candidates have opted out, running the absurd-to-formidable gamut from Donald Trump to Mitch Daniels. A smaller number have opted in, running the has-been to may-never-be gamut from Newt Gingrich to Tim Pawlenty, not to mention former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who officially entered the race yesterday.
A former Minnesota governor, Pawlenty officially joined the wannabe ranks last week with a speech aimed at defining himself as a fearless teller of hard truths (previously he had perhaps best been known for lacking any definition at all). This is smart on several levels. He quickly moved to fill the void left by Daniels, the governor of Indiana, whom many in the party had yearned for as a tough-minded fiscal hawk. And in part it is a strong bid for the mantel of not-Romney, the alternative to the former Massachusetts governor and current GOP front-runner. Romney is a laughably transparent flip-flopper, so Pawlenty’s new truth-teller frame could make him an ideal foil.
Politicians love to position themselves as tellers of hard truths, brave enough to boldly level with the voters. And the current tempestuous political climate, with its roiling discontent with politics as usual, especially lends itself to such a pose. Pawlenty is merely the latest candidate to seize this meme.
But his candidacy runs squarely afoul of Robert’s 13th rule of politics: People like the idea of hard truths and hard-truth tellers much more than they like the reality of them. You can ask straight shooters like Walter Mondale (“Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”), Paul “I’m not Santa Claus” Tsongas, and John “Straight Talk” McCain. Winning the presidency requires an aspirational element at odds with the doom-and-gloom that comes with those self-consciously trying to speak hard truths.
So kudos to Pawlenty for standing up to big ethanol in little Iowa. But while some may take off their hats to him for traveling to Florida in order to call for overhauls (read: cuts) of Social Security and Medicare, it might be merely to scratch one’s head. As Hot Air blogger Allahpundit quipped after Pawlenty’s Florida performance, “Alternate headline: ‘Pawlenty now unelectable in not one but two early primary states.’ ”
Maybe this is actually deep strategy. Many conservatives and Tea Partyers in particular seem intent these days on—as Ronald Reagan used to complain of some of his more gung-ho supporters—going “off the cliff with all flags flying.” Perhaps this is a clever way for Pawlenty to appeal to that “I’d rather lose being right” instinct.
An additional problem for would-be hard-truth tellers is that in the telling, these so-called truths often become vehicles for an even harder ideology. The attempt to conflate serious problems with ideologically inflexible and partisan solutions can create political tensions and open deadly political rifts. See the political abyss House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has marched his colleagues into over his plan to repeal and replace Medicare.
With the future insolubility of Medicare as a starting point, Ryan and the GOP have embarked on an emphatically ideological course. They hailed themselves as seriously facing a tough issue, and they spin the plan as an attempt to save the program, but all it would save would be the name “Medicare.” A guarantee of healthcare would be replaced with a voucher of diminishing value. If it fails to cover seniors’ costs . . . tough luck. The view was perhaps best summed up by Georgia GOP Rep. Rob Woodall, who chastised a constituent at a town hall meeting last month when she asked how, after Ryan’s reforms eliminated the guarantee of Medicare, she could expect to get medical coverage since she worked for a company that doesn’t offer it in their retirement package. “Hear yourself, ma’am,” he said. “You want the government to take care of you, because your employer decided not to take care of you. My question is, ‘When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?’ ”
Woodall, like many conservatives, fails to grasp why programs like Medicare were created. They were a response to a market failure—specifically an inability of senior citizens to get or pay for healthcare. But in Woodall’s world there are apparently no market failures; if seniors can’t get healthcare it’s because they simply won’t take responsibility for themselves. Of course in 1964, 44 percent of senior citizens had no health coverage, and the cost of medical bills had driven more than one third of them below the poverty line. If only they had had the moral fiber to take care of themselves!
Safe in a heavily conservative district, Woodall can spout such nonsense. But roughly 60 House Republicans represent districts Barack Obama won in 2008 and virtually all voted for the Ryancare overhaul. In this case, the gap between hard truths and hard ideology may be big enough to swallow a House majority.
Just ask the pollsters employed by the House GOP, who warned that the bill was a ticking time bomb, Politico reported last week. Or ask Jane Corwin, that bomb’s first casualty. She is the Republican who lost May’s special election in a GOP-leaning New York district in which the Ryan plan was the defining issue. Or ask Sens. Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Scott Brown, four of the five Senate Republicans who fled the plan last week (the fifth, Rand Paul, opposed it as not being conservative enough).
Or ask Gingrich, the former House speaker who drew party-wide opprobrium when he dismissed the Ryan plan as being so much “right-wing social engineering.” Pity poor Newt: He was just trying to tell a hard truth.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, June 3, 2011
Is The Tea Party Killing The Republican Party?
Conservatives are between a rock and a hard place. The Tea Party is in and the GOP is out. Tea Party is a brand that is popular with conservative voters but doesn’t have a national financial base. The Republican Party has a national finance infrastructure but it has been obliterated ideologically by the Tea Party. The emergence of the Tea Party keeps Karl Rove and other D.C. Republicans awake at night. But I’m not losing any sleep because of Karl Rove’s nightmares.
It wouldn’t be the first time in American history that an upstart has killed a party. In the 1840s and 1850s the Whigs gave way to the Republican Party. The old party wouldn’t or couldn’t take a strong antislavery position while Republicans did. The Republicans blossomed as the party of a strong national government while Democrats remained in the GOP’s dust as the party of rebellion and states’ rights. Timing is everything in politics and Democrats continued to fight for state power, right after a war that established the dominance of national power over states’ rights.
Or the opposite may happen. Populism gained favor in the 1890s because of its strong stance against corporate and government corruption but Democrats saved themselves and absorbed the populists by dropping its corporate coziness and becoming a peoples’ party.
And even though the great populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan lost the presidential elections in 1896, 1900 and 1908, the Great Commoner transformed a states’ rights party into a national force that produced the platform for presidential victories by Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and 1916 and by FDR in 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, and by Harry Truman in 1948.
In the 2010 primary elections, the Tea Party prevailed in just about every race against an establishment Republican congressional candidate. The GOP’s tendency to eat its own young prevented them from winning the Senate in 2010 and may stop win from winning the presidency and the U.S. Senate in 2012.
My guess is the Democratic leader of the Senate offers a daily prayer to the Tea Party. If the Republicans had not nominated Sharron Angle, a Tea Party favorite to oppose him, he would not be a U.S. senator. If the Tea Party hadn’t nominated extremists in Senate campaigns, he wouldn’t be the majority leader if he had been re-elected.
Last year, the GOP nominated Tea Party extremists and consequently lost Senate races in in three states where the party should have won. The candidates were Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Angle in Nevada and Ken Buck in Colorado. In this cycle, the Tea party is going after moderately conservative GOP senators, Dick Lugar of Indiana and Olympia Snowe in Maine. The Tea Party might very well win both primaries and hand over solid Republican seats to new Democratic senators and allow them to take the Senate back from Republicans.
But I’m not losing any sleep over that either.
By: Brad Brannon, U. S. News and World Report, June 2, 2011
Privatization: The Road To Hell
Billionaires are different from you and me, for obvious reasons, including the fact that they buy much pricier baubles than we do.
A sleek car costing $100,000? Why, for them, that’s just an easy impulse purchase. A few million bucks for a Matisse original? Go ahead — it’ll liven up the hallway. How about throwing a fat wad of cash at a university to get an academic chair named for you? Sure, it’s all part of the fun of living in BillionaireLand.
Then there is the top crust of the upper-crust — such megalomaniacal megabillionaires as the Koch brothers. Using money from their industrial conglomerate, their foundation and their personal fortunes, these two far-out, laissez-faire extremists are literally buying public policy. Their purchases of everything from politicians to the tea party help them push the privatization of all things public and the elimination of pesky regulations and taxes that crimp their style.
To advance their plutocratic privatization cause, brother Charles has even gone on a shopping spree for an invaluable bauble that most of us didn’t even know was for sale: academic freedom. And it’s surprisingly cheap!
For only $1.5 million, Koch bought a big chunk of the economics department of Florida State University a couple of years ago. His donation gives him control of a new “academic” program at this public institution to indoctrinate students in his self-serving political theories.
The billionaire gets to screen all applicants, veto any he deems insufficiently ideological, and sign off on all new hires. Also, the department head must submit yearly reports to Koch about the faculty’s speeches, publications and classes, and he evaluates the faculty based on “objectives” that he sets.
Charles has made similar purchases of academic freedom at two other state universities, Clemson and West Virginia. Also, in a May 20 piece at Alternet.org, investigative researcher Lee Fang reveals that Koch has paid $419,000 to buy into Brown University’s “political theory project,” $3.6 million to establish Troy University’s “center for political economy” and $700,000 for a piece of Utah State’s Huntsman School of Business, which now has the “Charles G.
Koch Professor of Political Economy.”
Imagine the screams of outrage we’d hear from the Kochs if a labor union were doing this.
A recent article in The Onion, the satirical newsweekly, printed a downsize-big-government spoof that Charles and David would love to turn into reality. The parody disclosed that President Obama had come up with a surefire plan to balance the federal budget: Rob Fort Knox! “I’ve got the blueprints,” Obama is quoted as saying, “and I think I found a way out through a drainage pipe.”
Unfortunately, with today’s political climate dominated by howling winds from the far-right fringe, there’s no longer any room in American culture for satire. Sure enough, some laissez-faire extremists at such Koch-funded corporate fronts as Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation are presently howling for the government to sell all of America’s gold stored in Fort Knox. Noting that we have billions worth of bullion in the vaults, a fellow from Heritage made this keen observation: “It’s just sort of sitting there.”
Uh, yeah, professor. Like Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, the Lincoln Memorial and other national assets — being there is the point.
Yet these ivory tower ideologues are using the current brouhaha over the budget deficit as an opening to push their loopiest fantasies of selling off all of America’s public properties, facilities, systems and treasures to create a no-government, plutocratic paradise. Just spread our public goods out on tables, like a flea market from hell, and invite the global rich to buy it all.
For example, a fellow from another Koch-funded front, the American Enterprise Institute, observes that the government could raise billions of dollars to retire that pesky deficit simply by selling our interstate highway system. Americans would then have to pay tolls forever to the corporate owners, but hey, he exclaims, remember that tolls “work for the River Styx, why not the Beltway?”
What a perfect metaphor for privatization! In ancient mythology, dead souls must pay a toll to be ferried across the River Styx and enter the depths of hell.
By: Jim Hightower, CommonDreams.org/Creators.com, May 25, 2011
The Continuing Fight Against Women: House Passes Amendment To Defund Medical Schools That Teach Abortion
Not content to defund health care for women, the Republicans in Congress, who just can’t stop obsessing about abortion, have now passed yet another bill, brought to us by the lovely Rep. Virginia Foxxxxxxxxx, to prohibit government funding of abortion. Only this one also bans medical programs that receive government dollars from even teaching students how to perform abortions. Because taxpayers shouldn’t have their hard-earned dollars spent on training doctors to provide health care to women.
And, in case we didn’t get the message the first gazillion times Republicans mentioned it, the amendment re-reiterates that taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund abortions. Which they aren’t.
But despite the endless parade of bills to make it really, really, really clear that taxpayers should not pay for abortions, Rep. Foxxxxxxxxxx still wanted to make it “crystal clear.” In case the bill they passed three weeks ago didn’t quite get the message across.
The measure is an amendment to H.R. 1216, the Republicans’ latest never-gonna-happen attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Because nothing creates jobs like passing ideologically-driven symbolic measures to appease teabaggers and woman-haters everywhere.
Next up: a bill to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to repair roads that lead to medical schools that teach doctors how to perform abortions, and to re-re-reiterate that taxpayer dollars should not be spent on abortions. And then I’m sure they’ll get around to that jobs, jobs, jobs thing.
By: Kaili Joy Gray, Daily Kos, May 25, 2011
How Partisanship, Ideology And Race Influence Attitudes Toward Obama
‘Birtherism’ is on the decline following the release of the President’s long form birth certificate. But it is nonetheless instructive to consider how the meme was accepted by so many conservatives. Alan I Abramowitz has what is likely be the definitive data-driven post on the subject up at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Abramowitz weighs the data regarding the influence of partisanship, ideology and race on formation of the birther meme:
Until now, debates about the influence of racial attitudes on opinions of Obama have been severely hampered by a lack of survey data including relevant questions. However, the availability of a new data set now makes it possible to directly examine the impact of racial attitudes on whites’ evaluations of President Obama.The data used in this article come from the October 2010 wave of the American National Election Study Evaluations of Government and Society Survey (EGSS). The October 2010 survey was the first of several cross-sectional studies being conducted by ANES in 2010, 2011 and 2012 to test new instrumentation and measure public opinion between the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. The surveys are being conducted entirely on the Internet using nationally representative probability samples. Respondents are members of the Knowledge Networks KnowledgePanel, an omnibus panel of respondents recruited using telephone and address-based sampling methods who are provided free Internet access and equipment when necessary.
Evaluations of President Obama were measured by two questions, a five-point scale measuring positive versus negative feelings about the president and a seven-point scale measuring how strongly respondents liked or disliked him. The correlation between these two questions was a very strong .85, so I combined them into a single Obama rating scale with a range from 0 (extremely negative) to 10 (extremely positive). The mean score on this scale was 5.1 with a standard deviation of 3.6. About a third (34%) of respondents gave Obama a rating of 8 through 10 while 31% gave him a rating of 0 through 2. Thus, opinions of Obama were closely divided and highly polarized.
Abramowitz also notes that “Obama’s approval rating averaged 38% for whites compared with 59% for nonwhites including 85% for African Americans.” Turning to the question of ‘birther’ attitudes, Abramowitz examines the data and adds,
…Racial resentment had a strong impact on beliefs about his place of birth. While recent polling indicates that doubts about whether President Obama was born in the United States have diminished since he released his “long form” Hawaiian birth certificate, the “birther” myth has proven stubbornly resistant to evidence. In fact, 58% of white respondents in the EGSS expressed some doubt about whether Barack Obama was born in the United States including 28% who thought that he definitely or probably was not born in the United States.
Abramowitz concludes that “partisanship and ideology were the strongest predictors of overall evaluations of President Obama and opinions about his place of birth among white Americans” and that “regardless of party or ideology, whites who scored high on racial resentment had more negative opinions of Obama and were more likely to harbor doubts about whether he was born in the United States than whites who scored low on racial resentment.”
Given the tenacity of racial bias among a substantial segment of the public, President Obama’s approval ratings are all the more impressive, as is his ability to calmly navigate around the treacherous shoals of race in America.
By: Staff, The Democratic Strategist, May 24, 2011
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