“Something Liberals Should Remember”: Obama Is Right: Elizabeth Warren Is “A Politician Like Everybody Else”
On Friday, President Barack Obama sat down with Yahoo’s Matt Bai to promote the Trans Pacific Partnership and delivered his sharpest rebuke yet to Senator Elizabeth Warren and other liberals who oppose the trade deal.
“The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else,” he said in the interview, which was published Saturday. “And you know, she’s got a voice that she wants to get out there. And I understand that. And on most issues, she and I deeply agree. On this one, though, her arguments don’t stand the test of fact and scrutiny.”
Bai correctly interpreted these comments as some of the harshest words the president has used against his liberal allies. But, at the same time, they are rather innocuous: Warren is a politician and is susceptible to outside pressure like anyone else. Liberals should remember that.
When Warren speaks about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she often references a battle over a financial regulatory bill in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A law professor at the time, Warren strongly opposed the bill. But the economic team in President Bill Clinton’s White House was divided on it. Warren met with Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, and convinced her to oppose the bill as well. Hillary then convinced her husband not to sign the legislation at the end of his presidency.
Yet just a few months later, Clinton, as a senator from New York, the financial capital of the world, reversed her position. The bill passed and President George W. Bush signed it. “There were a lot of people who voted for that bill who thought that there was going to be no political price to pay,” Warren told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza recently. Warren wants to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
The fact that Hillary, the first lady, and Hillary, the New York senator, had opposite opinions of the bill shouldn’t have surprised Warren that much. As first lady, Hillary had no constituents to worry about. But as a senator, Hillary suddenly had millions of constituents with jobs either directly or indirectly connected to the financial industry. It would be great if she—and all politicians for that matter—always voted on principle and were immune from lobbying pressure. But that isn’t the case.
That’s true for Warren as well. The medical device industry is one of the most important industries in Massachusetts, and Warren has gone to bat for the industry multiple times. For instance, she is one of the few Democrats that supports the repeal of the medical device tax, which is part of Obamacare. In February, she introduced a bill to require pharmaceutical companies that pay a penalty and break the law to reinvest a percentage of that penalty into the National Institute of Health. But it has a loophole: Medical device manufacturers are exempt from the requirement unless they make drugs as well.
If liberals want to see a politician who always votes with his conscience, they need to look no further than Hillary’s one current challenger, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. When Sanders announced his presidential run, Matt Taibbi, writing at Rolling Stone, explained:
Sanders genuinely, sincerely, does not care about optics. He is the rarest of Washington animals, a completely honest person. If he’s motivated by anything other than a desire to use his influence to protect people who can’t protect themselves, I’ve never seen it. Bernie Sanders is the kind of person who goes to bed at night thinking about how to increase the heating-oil aid program for the poor.
When Sanders sat down with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, the host noted that he “can hear the Republican attack ad right now: He wants America to look more like Scandinavia.” To which Sanders responded, “That’s right. That’s right. What’s wrong with that?” That is a politician who doesn’t care about his image.
It’s just about impossible to imagine Warren answering a question that way. She and her staff closely guard her image. For instance, she is notorious for not speaking to reporters in the U.S. Capitol, unlike most of her colleagues. It’s very rare that she strays off message.
That doesn’t mean that her votes and policy positions aren’t principled most of the time. I have no reason to believe that she is opposing the trade deal for political reasons. I think she and the president simply disagree on the issue. But as liberals criticize the TPP as a sop to big business and the U.S. Trade Representative for its corporate ties—both of which may be true—it’s worth remembering that Warren herself is not immune to pressure.
By: Danny Vinik, Staff Writer, The New Republic, May 11, 2015
“Vote Republican Or Else”: GOP Campaign Slogan; Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid
Republican presidential candidates want to win your votes by scaring you.
Thanks to the national security lapses of the Obama administration, “we will pay a terrible price one day,” says Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
“The next 20 months will be a dangerous time,” warns Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, but he offers this hint of hope: “January 2017 is coming.”
And so on. Republicans think fears of terrorist attacks are a major issue, and a major political motivator.
“Republicans are looking for some issue where they have a clear advantage,” said Ann Selzer, a Des Moines-based pollster who conducts Iowa and national surveys.
Selzer’s April 6-8 national poll found the percentage of people who name terrorism or the Islamic State as the 2016 campaign’s most important issue had nearly doubled since December.
Among Republicans, one-fourth said terrorism was their top concern. Democrats still listed unemployment as their first worry, with climate change next. Terrorism tied for fourth among Democrats.
Republicans see another big reason to keep pounding away on terrorism. If Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton wins her party’s nomination, they can conveniently brand her as a key architect of President Barack Obama’s national security policy. Clinton was secretary of state in Obama’s first term.
Republicans can also keep talking about the 2012 terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya. The House of Representatives has a special committee investigating the incident, and Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said he’ll call Clinton to testify. He also wants her to testify separately on conducting government business using email from a private computer server.
This campaign is all part of a narrative that’s become highly popular among the Republican candidates in stump speeches and media appearances.
They tend to start with zingers aimed what they label the Obama administration’s ineptness. “Barack Obama has never run a lemonade stand,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush maintains that Obama is the first post-World War II president who “does not believe that America’s presence in the world as a leader and America’s power in the world is a force for good.”
That’s why, says Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, “We need a commander in chief in this country who, once and for all, will identify that radical Islamic terrorism is a threat to us all.”
Their narrative usually continues with dire warnings.
“There are thousands of people around the world who are plotting to kill Americans here and abroad,” Rubio said recently in New Hampshire. “This risk is real. This is not hyperbole. It needs to be confronted.”
He didn’t mention how the White House has tried to do just that. In February, the president hosted a summit on violent extremism, and cited U.S. involvement in a 60-nation fight against terrorism.
Republicans won’t relent.
Sometimes, tough guy talk backfires, as when Walker said in February that he was equipped to fight terrorists because he fought labor union protesters in his state.
Finally, in the Republican pitch comes the message of hope. “There is a pessimism in the world, but it does not have to be that way,” says former Texas Gov. Rick Perry
.
Sometimes Republicans are at war with one another. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., labeled U.S. involvement in Libya a mistake and criticized U.S. policy toward Syria and the rebels. He called Graham and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., “lapdogs for President Obama.”
McCain fired back, saying, “The record is very clear that he simply does not have an understanding about the needs and the threats of United States national security.”
Democrats’ response is that of course they want to combat terrorism. If Republicans are so intent on doing so, they ask, why did they stall Loretta Lynch’s nomination as attorney general for months?
“With all that this country is facing from terrorism,” asked Sen. Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent, “How at this vital time can anyone elected to the Senate play partisan politics with something as sensitive as the head of the Justice Department?” On Thursday, Sanders announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Whether the Republican assault on national security policy becomes a winning strategy depends largely on events. President George W. Bush was able to use the war in Iraq — and the votes of dozens of congressional Democrats for the war — to help himself win re-election in 2004, but war weariness hurt Republicans in 2008 and 2012.
This time, Republicans see the public as weary of Democratic policies, and that’s a big potential plus. “Republicans have always been trusted more on national security,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, “and Obama has been a weaker leader than people expected.”
By: David Lightman, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS); The National Memo, May 2, 2015
“Keystone, Patriotism, And The White Working Class”: That Moment In Which Good Policy And Good Rhetoric Meet
Some time in the next two weeks, President Barack Obama is expected to veto a bill authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The U.S. House passed a measure last week. A similar bill passed the U.S. Senate the week before. Republicans, and even some Democrats, are calling it the “Keystone jobs bill.”
Activists hope Obama will veto the bill out of concern for an already overheated planet — the refining and consumption of Canadian tar-sands oil results in double the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere. But that rationale is unlikely. The president is probably going to argue that Congress exceeded its constitutional authority. In crossing an international boundary, the pipeline is executive-branch turf.
But I wonder if this might be an opportunity, at least a rhetorical opportunity best understood in a somewhat different context. That context is the Democratic Party’s dismal performance among white working-class voters, who generally believe the Republican Party represents their interests even though it doesn’t.
Before I continue, please allow me to disclaim that when it comes to the white working class, I have some authority. My dad long-hauled steel. My mom raised four children in a comfortable trailer home while Dad was on the road. They certainly don’t approve of everything the government does — their anti-military views are exceptional — but right or wrong, America is theirs. And thanks to their rearing, America is mine, too.
To say my parents were conflicted over the role of the federal government in their lives is an understatement, but to say they wanted it out of their lives, as Republicans repeatedly claim on their behalf, is a gross overstatement. There’s nothing wrong with government as long as it serves the people whose biggest asset is their labor, which in their world means everyone not born into so much wealth that they don’t need to work.
Why does the white working class even matter to Democrats? Doesn’t the demographic tide favor them? Yes, but as Andrew Levison has argued, the Democrats still need white working-class voters. Without them, the party will scarcely attain the majoritarian momentum it needs to advance a truly progressive agenda. To be blunt, without them, demographics for the Democratic Party isn’t destiny. It’s doom.
The question is how to reach them. Democratic strategists cyclically scratch their heads in disbelief at white working-class voters acting in contrast to their interests. But such behavior shouldn’t be all that surprising. After all, voting is the result of emotion at least as much as it is the result of tactical decision making. And this is where I think the president’s expected veto of the Keystone bill is connected to the white working class. If there’s one thing white working-class voters respond to, it is emotional appeals to their deep and abiding sense of patriotism (the Republicans long ago mastered the art of such appeals). But Obama has an opportunity to shift the rhetorical landscape in favor of the Democrats by vetoing the Keystone bill in the name of country.
I’m not just favoring good rhetoric over good policy: This is a moment in which good policy and good rhetoric meet.
First, the pipeline isn’t going to help many Americans. Indeed, the Republicans never let a moment go by without reminding us that Obama’s own Department of State estimates that thousands of jobs will emerge from the $8 billion construction of the pipeline. But a majority of those jobs are seasonal. Once the project is completed, about 35 jobs will endure, according to the very same government estimate.
Second, the pipeline is going to help many Canadians. The Keystone is one of five proposed pipelines needed to profit from billions being invested in the extraction of tar-sands crude. This handful of pipelines tops the list of Canada’s national priorities. According to Mark Dowie, in The Washington Spectator, if even one of the pipelines is stymied, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s dream of creating a petro-state will die. So pressure is mounting. Harper, Canada’s oil companies, and their very wealthy investors around the world want to see the Keystone built. In the United States, it will create a flurry of temporary activity, but the long-term rewards will be entirely enjoyed by Canadians.
That matters to white working-class voters. That’s something that can’t be squared with Republican claims that Keystone is simply a jobs bill.
All right. Let’s accept the premise — Keystone is a jobs bill. If so, it’s bad one. As I said, lots of temporary jobs, a few permanent jobs and nothing left for the greater good. All future dividends from billions presently invested will flow north of the border. Indeed, it’s Americans who will suffer detriment in the event of a leak. (Leaks are rare, but when they happen, they are catastrophic to communities, property and natural resources.) A better jobs plan can be found in the president’s fiscal year budget. It calls for federal expenditures on the construction and upkeep of the country’s (literally) crumbling infrastructure. How does Obama hope to pay for all these roads, bridges, tunnels and waterways? By levying a tax on the offshore accounts of the very wealthy.
The president wants to tax the money of a very small minority of Americans who don’t want to pay U.S. taxes. He wants to raise revenues to fund the construction, and reconstruction, of the country’s infrastructure. If expenditures reach as high as $1 trillion, as Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has proposed, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of seasonal and permanent jobs, with something to show for all the effort—a lasting investment. (Sanders’ proposal would also probably include a hike in the federal gas tax, which hasn’t gone up since the mid-1990s.) Conversely, the Republicans blindly oppose all tax increases, even on those without enough sense of patriotism to want to pay their due in taxes while everyone else does.
If that appears to be the making of a wedge issue, that’s because it is, and the Democrats need to exploit it. The Keystone reveals a rift between rich Americans who don’t pay taxes and working-class Americans who do; between rich Americans who don’t want to rebuild America, for Americans, and working-class Americans who do.
The bottom line: Courting white working-class voters will take more than appealing to their economic interests. It isn’t enough to do the right thing, and this is where I part ways with others on this subject. I tend to believe the Democrats don’t do enough to drive a wedge between white working-class voters and the Republican Party elites who claim to represent them. The GOP’s hold on the working-class imagination is strong, thanks to years and years of race baiting and fearmongering. So when the rare opportunity arises in which Democrats can illuminate the clear contrasts between the interests of the very, very rich and everyone else, it shouldn’t be wasted.
By: John Stoehr, Managing Editor of The Washington Spectator; The National Memo, February 17, 2015
“Clinton Must Address Income Inequality In 2016”: Hillary Needs A Set Of Policies That Go Beyond Raising The Minimum Wage
Poor Hillary Clinton. She’s rich. And that’s a problem for her presidential campaign.
Even as the economy finally mounts an apparently sustained recovery, income inequality remains a primary worry for American voters. According to a poll by the Pew Research Center last November, 78 percent saw the gap between the haves and the have-nots as a big problem.
Since the 1970s, wages have been stagnating for average workers, who have been buffeted by the crosswinds of globalization and the technological revolution. Factories have fled to cheaper lands. Jobs that were once commonplace — such as those of bank tellers and grocery store clerks — have been lost to technological innovations: ATMs and digital scanners. Meanwhile, the economic gains have accumulated in the bank accounts of a wealthy few.
Clinton — who shares with her husband, former president Bill Clinton, an estimated net worth of more than $20 million — is definitely among those haves. That means the optics of her lifestyle are considerably different from those of Barack and Michelle Obama when he sought the White House: They had barely paid off their student debt.
But appearances aren’t the biggest problem for the former secretary of state. Plenty of rich folk have won the White House in the past; wealth is clearly no barrier.
The far bigger problem for her is that she is not easily associated with the battle to lift up the 99 percent, unlike, say, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). If Warren runs for the presidency, as many observers assume she will, Clinton needs to quickly come up with a viable plan to restore America’s dwindling middle class. That ought to be the centerpiece of her campaign.
For that matter, her rivals, especially among the Republicans, need viable proposals to restore the middle class, too. (Warren has said she will not run, but Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist, is considering a run for the Democratic nomination. He is a longtime advocate for average workers.)
Mitt Romney’s greatest weakness during his 2012 presidential campaign wasn’t his wealth, which, at an estimated $250 million, dwarfs that of the Clintons. His Achilles’ heel was his clear disdain for those who struggle to make ends meet, evidenced in his infamous remarks about the “47 percent.”
He was also weakened by his association with Bain Capital, a private equity firm that, among other things, bought up companies and sometimes streamlined their workforces. In an age of widespread economic anxiety, Obama was able to paint Romney as a callous — and clueless — plutocrat.
Clinton can’t be so easily characterized as an out-of-touch member of the 1 percent; her political positions fit comfortably within the moderate-to-liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Still, she is associated with the centrist economic policies of her husband, who worked hard during his presidency to cozy up to Wall Street and change the image of the Democratic Party, which was believed to be hostile to the business elite. Indeed, President Clinton helped to loosen some of the regulations that had held Wall Street in check.
The results of that loosening are still wreaking havoc on households across the country. The big banks, reckless and greedy, used their new freedom to crash the economy. And, unfortunately, many of the moguls responsible for the mess were unscathed by the wreckage.
As if that were not galling enough, the taxpayers bailed out Wall Street, even as millions of average folks lost their homes to foreclosure. The bailout may have been necessary, but it’s still infuriating. Clinton needs to demonstrate that she understands the anger still loose in the land — among liberal and conservative voters alike.
She needs to be able to answer questions about the high-dollar fees that she has collected from exclusive audiences and about the campaign contributions she has accepted from corporate interests, especially Wall Street types. But more than that, she needs a set of policies that go beyond raising the minimum wage.
She may have to risk alienating some of her big-money donors if she is to assist the shrinking middle class. If she has the courage to do that, Clinton will be hard to beat.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, February 14, 2015
“Social Security Faces Threat From ‘Ideological War'”: Republicans Manufacturing A Crisis’ To Hide Their Real Intent
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a message to supporters yesterday, warning of a real threat to Social Security. By any fair measure, she’s right.
“We’ve known for years that Social Security Disability Insurance is set to run low in 2016, and most people assumed that another bipartisan reallocation was coming,” the senator wrote. “But now, thanks to the Republican ideological war on our most important national safety net, disabled Americans could suddenly face a 20% cut in their Social Security checks next year.”
Let’s recap for those just joining us. The Social Security system provides disability payments to Americans who want to work but can’t for health reasons. For generations, when the disability-insurance program runs short on funds, Congress transfers money from elsewhere in the Social Security system to prevent benefit cuts. The solution, sometimes called “reallocation,” has never been especially controversial – in fact, it’s been done 11 times over the last seven decades.
But last month, congressional Republicans adopted a rule change that makes it almost impossible to approve the usual, straightforward fix. GOP lawmakers seem to want to create the conditions for a crisis.
All of which led to an important Senate hearing yesterday.
Carolyn Colvin, acting commissioner for the Social Security Administration, urged senators to act first to avert the crisis at hand and then begin serious negotiations on finding a longer-term solution. She said the threatened cut in disability payments – about 19 percent – would be a “death sentence” for many of the poorest recipients, but time and again, she refused to opine on more concrete options going forward.
When Colvin read aloud the president’s six principles for future reforms, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was scornful. “That’s a set of principles that makes sure we do absolutely nothing meaningful,” Graham said. “If that’s the president’s plan, we’ll never get there.”
And by “meaningful,” it appears Graham and other Senate Republicans are waiting for the White House to propose cuts to Social Security. (Ironically, President Obama was open to modest Social Security cuts as part of a grand bargain with GOP lawmakers, but Republicans have refused to consider any possible concessions and effectively ruled out the possibility of a compromise.)
The Politico report added that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the Senate Budget Committee’s ranking member, “angrily accused the GOP of ‘manufacturing a crisis’ to hide its intent to resurrect past proposals to cut Social Security benefits and privatize the system.”
This has the benefit of being true. Addressing the upcoming shortfall in the disability-insurance program should be easy. Republicans are ensuring that it’s not, hoping to exploit a manufactured crisis to force Social Security cuts they wouldn’t otherwise be able to get.
Indeed, the literal name for yesterday’s hearing for the GOP-led committee was, “The coming crisis: Social Security Disability Trust Fund Insolvency.” There would be no crisis, and no threat of insolvency, if Republicans hadn’t already ruled out the straightforward solution lawmakers have relied on for decades.
Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) said yesterday, “I’m hoping the president will take an active role in this.” Expect more of this kind of rhetoric: Republicans will feign outrage over Obama refusing to offer far-right solutions the GOP-led Congress considers acceptable.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, February 12, 2015
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