“A Year Of Living Negatively”: The Tea Party’s View Takes Precedence Over Majority Opinion Among Republicans.
Republicans feel good about this fall’s election even though their party is sharply divided and its brand is badly tainted.
The House GOP last week elected a balanced ticket of leaders in a relatively harmonious process. Nonetheless, the party’s right still complained that its voices were not heard.
And a party leadership that thought it had quelled the tea party rebellion faces a runoff in Mississippi on Tuesday that will end either in a victory for the insurgent challenger or in claims that the establishment candidate prevailed only because Democrats, particularly African Americans, crossed into the Republican primary to save him.
Is it any wonder that the GOP’s governing game plan for the rest of the year is to do as little as possible? Since the party can’t agree to anything that would pass muster with President Obama and the Democratic Senate, it will bet that Obama’s low poll ratings will be enough for Republicans to make gains in House races and, potentially, give them control of the Senate.
All of this is why 2014 will be the year of living negatively.
The prospect of months of attacks and more attacks reflects the depth of disillusionment with Washington. This is the best thing Republicans have going for them, but it might also provide Democrats with their clearest path to holding the Senate. Consider the findings of last week’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
The number that got the most attention was the president’s depressed 41 percent approval rating. But the survey also found that only 29 percent of those surveyed had a positive view of the Republican Party while 38 percent had a positive view of the Democrats. Democratic candidates have remained competitive in many key races because so many voters find the GOP alternative unpalatable.
The survey also showed that Republican divisions are not the invention of right-wing talk-show hosts or bloggers. Republicans who support the tea party are well to the right of others in their party. As NBC’s First Read reported, 68 percent of tea party Republicans said that immigration hurts the United States, compared with only 47 percent of non-tea party Republicans and 42 percent of all Americans. And a PRRI/Brookings survey (with which I was involved) found that while 41 percent of tea party members favored identifying and deporting illegal immigrants, only 26 percent of non-tea party Republicans preferred this option.
By a 74 percent to 23 percent margin in the NBC/Journal poll, tea party Republicans disapproved of requiring companies to reduce greenhouse gases, “even if it would mean higher utility bills for consumers.” By contrast, 57 percent of Americans and 50 percent of non-tea party Republicans backed the idea.
The Republican congressional leadership thus continues to be caught between an aspiration to appeal to middle-ground voters and a fear, reinforced by Eric Cantor’s recent loss, that efforts to do so will be punished by the party’s right, which plays an outsize role in low-turnout primaries. On policy — notably on immigration — this often means that the tea party’s view takes precedence over majority opinion among Republicans.
In electing Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) as majority leader over the more conservative Rep. Raúl Labrador (Idaho), House Republicans were actually trying to avoid ideology altogether. To replace Cantor (Va.), they picked a pragmatist focused on winning elections and an extrovert known for making friends across factional lines. Policy ambition is not McCarthy’s calling card.
The victory of Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana as whip pleased many conservatives and Southerners, but not all — and especially not the most ardently conservative bloggers and talk-show hosts who influence rank-and-file tea party opinion. Erick Erickson of the RedState blog, for example, accused Scalise of having worked “behind the scenes to marginalize conservatives.” Rep. Justin Amash, a young libertarian from Michigan, said the result of the leadership races showed that the House GOP “unfortunately hasn’t heard the message loud enough.”
There will be more loud commotion on Tuesday in Mississippi’s Republican runoff between the tea party’s Chris McDaniel and Sen. Thad Cochran, a six-term incumbent. McDaniel is seen as having the momentum, but his supporters are already attacking Cochran’s campaign for encouraging Democrats to participate in the Republican contest.
Cochran, a McDaniel e-mail insisted, “is so desperate to keep his seat that he’s going to use Democrats to steal the Republican primary.”
So the next stop in the battle for the Republican soul could see either a victory that emboldens the tea party — or a defeat that will be blamed on Democrats and infuriate the movement.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 22, 2014
“Interests, Ideology And Climate”: For Republicans, Overcoming Pride And Willful Ignorance Is Hard
There are three things we know about man-made global warming. First, the consequences will be terrible if we don’t take quick action to limit carbon emissions. Second, in pure economic terms the required action shouldn’t be hard to take: emission controls, done right, would probably slow economic growth, but not by much. Third, the politics of action are nonetheless very difficult.
But why is it so hard to act? Is it the power of vested interests?
I’ve been looking into that issue and have come to the somewhat surprising conclusion that it’s not mainly about the vested interests. They do, of course, exist and play an important role; funding from fossil-fuel interests has played a crucial role in sustaining the illusion that climate science is less settled than it is. But the monetary stakes aren’t nearly as big as you might think. What makes rational action on climate so hard is something else — a toxic mix of ideology and anti-intellectualism.
Before I get to that, however, an aside on the economics.
I’ve noted in earlier columns that every even halfway serious study of the economic impact of carbon reductions — including the recent study paid for by the anti-environmental U.S. Chamber of Commerce — finds at most modest costs. Practical experience points in the same direction. Back in the 1980s conservatives claimed that any attempt to limit acid rain would have devastating economic effects; in reality, the cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide was highly successful at minimal cost. The Northeastern states have had a cap-and-trade arrangement for carbon since 2009, and so far have seen emissions drop sharply while their economies grew faster than the rest of the country. Environmentalism is not the enemy of economic growth.
But wouldn’t protecting the environment nonetheless impose costs on some sectors and regions? Yes, it would — but not as much as you think.
Consider, in particular, the much-hyped “war on coal.” It’s true that getting serious about global warming means, above all, cutting back on (and eventually eliminating) coal-fired power, which would hurt regions of the country that depend on coal-mining jobs. What’s rarely pointed out is how few such jobs still exist.
Once upon a time King Coal was indeed a major employer: At the end of the 1970s there were more than 250,000 coal miners in America. Since then, however, coal employment has fallen by two-thirds, not because output is down — it’s up, substantially — but because most coal now comes from strip mines that require very few workers. At this point, coal mining accounts for only one-sixteenth of 1 percent of overall U.S. employment; shutting down the whole industry would eliminate fewer jobs than America lost in an average week during the Great Recession of 2007-9.
Or put it this way: The real war on coal, or at least on coal workers, took place a generation ago, waged not by liberal environmentalists but by the coal industry itself. And coal workers lost.
The owners of coal mines and coal-fired power plants do have a financial interest in blocking environmental policy, but even there the special interests don’t look all that big. So why is the opposition to climate policy so intense?
Well, think about global warming from the point of view of someone who grew up taking Ayn Rand seriously, believing that the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest is always good and that government is always the problem, never the solution. Along come some scientists declaring that unrestricted pursuit of self-interest will destroy the world, and that government intervention is the only answer. It doesn’t matter how market-friendly you make the proposed intervention; this is a direct challenge to the libertarian worldview.
And the natural reaction is denial — angry denial. Read or watch any extended debate over climate policy and you’ll be struck by the venom, the sheer rage, of the denialists.
The fact that climate concerns rest on scientific consensus makes things even worse, because it plays into the anti-intellectualism that has always been a powerful force in American life, mainly on the right. It’s not really surprising that so many right-wing politicians and pundits quickly turned to conspiracy theories, to accusations that thousands of researchers around the world were colluding in a gigantic hoax whose real purpose was to justify a big-government power grab. After all, right-wingers never liked or trusted scientists in the first place.
So the real obstacle, as we try to confront global warming, is economic ideology reinforced by hostility to science. In some ways this makes the task easier: we do not, in fact, have to force people to accept large monetary losses. But we do have to overcome pride and willful ignorance, which is hard indeed.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 8, 2014
“Gutlessness And Disingenuous”: While Our Planet Melts, GOP Pleads Ignorance”:
It is irreversible now.
And there’s a word that should get everybody’s attention. Last month, two groups of scientists, publishing separately in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters, issued reports that came to alarmingly similar conclusions: The melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet has reached a point of no return. If greenhouse gases stopped spewing forth tomorrow, we’d still face the grim prospect of steadily rising seas from this unstoppable melt.
So it would be a good idea to save what ice we still can. Or else condemn our grandchildren to vie for beachfront property in St. Louis on a planet of shrinking land, diminishing resources, and growing population.
This week, thankfully, the Obama administration — once noteworthy chiefly for its disinterested torpor where climate change is concerned — proposed politically risky new Environmental Protection Agency standards requiring deep cuts in carbon pollution levels at U.S. power plants by 2030. And the opposition party? Their attitude is summed up by the headline of a recent story on Politico: “Republicans on climate science: Don’t ask us.”
Writer Darren Goode reports that the GOP has adopted a new global warming “talking point.” Which is that they are not equipped to talk about it. As in Speaker John Boehner telling reporters, “Listen, I’m not qualified to debate the science over climate change.” And Florida governor Rick Scott demurring that, “I am not a scientist.” And a spokeswoman for the billionaire Koch brothers, the deep pockets of the right wing, saying, “We are not experts on climate change.”
The gutlessness, disingenuousness and sheer cynicism of this new tack are difficult to overstate.
For the record, most of us are not experts on climate science. But most of us have the good sense to listen to those who are.
The right, however, prefers to pretend there is some sort of “debate” in the scientific community over whether human activity is raising the temperature of our one and only planet. There isn’t. Indeed, that finding is accepted by 97 percent of climate scientists. This, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science that, with 121,000 members, is the world’s largest general science group.
So the GOP’s “debate” is three scientists out of a hundred. Heck, you could probably find three scientists out of a hundred who think smoking is good for you.
Our planet is at a point of crisis. The ice is melting, the sea levels are rising, the oceans are acidifying, drought patterns are changing, precipitation is increasing, extreme weather is growing ever more common. Yet for Boehner, the salient issue is that “every proposal that has come out of this administration to deal with climate change involves hurting our economy and killing American jobs.”
Not to be glib about unemployment and recession, but if asked to choose between dinging the U.S. economy and killing the planet on which that economy depends — assuming that were even a real choice — it’s hard to imagine most of us would prioritize the former. And if the Democrats’ ideas are so bad, fine. Where are the Republican proposals? As was the case with health care, why are they once again late in their discovery of a critical problem and bereft of serious solutions therefor?
Here is an idea. The two parties should work together as if they were composed of adults to find a way to save our planet. Instead, the GOP is buck passing with an eye on the midterms. Ninety-seven percent of experts say we don’t have time for these shenanigans, yet Boehner and company pretend there’s still some kind of “debate” going on. Ninety-seven percent.
Maybe the GOP isn’t good at science, but surely they understand basic math.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami, Herald; The National Memo, June 4, 2014
“Please Make Up Your Mind”: The Wall Street Journal Can’t Decide Why Obama Is Terrible
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal editorial board found an unusual way to criticize Barack Obama for his new limits on carbon emissions: the action, the paper declared, showed that he was too principled and insufficiently attuned to short-term political benefits.
One consequence of President Obama’s new anticarbon energy rule will be to create what economists call “stranded assets,” in this case still useful fossil-fuel plants that are suddenly made noneconomic. This is part of the plan. But if this grand design ultimately fails, it will be because Mr. Obama is also creating stranded Democrats from energy-producing states.
This will have far-reaching implications, especially for Democrats in energy-rich states and especially this year. Twenty years ago, Bill Clinton would never have dreamed of rolling out this EPA regulation five months before an election. Mr. Obama is willing to risk it now because his second term is winding down and he wants to put in place as a much of a legacy as he can…
As Jonathan Chait has noted, it’s rich indeed for the Journal, which savaged Bill Clinton to such an extent that it collected its editorials attacking him into a five-volume collector set, to now be praising him in hindsight for being more politically expedient and partisan-minded than his Democratic successor. But it gets better than that. Today—just one day later—the Journal completely flipped its critique of Obama. His problem, you see, is that he is too fixated on domestic politics, as his handling of Bowe Bergdahl’s release shows:
President Obama’s decision to swap five Taliban killers for the return of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has morphed from a debatable policy decision into the Administration’s latest political fiasco. There’s a lesson here about the risks of spin and narrow political calculation, especially in foreign policy when American lives are stake…
The larger problem is that Mr. Obama treats all of foreign policy as if it’s merely part of his domestic political calculus. It’s all too easy to imagine him figuring that if he announced the withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan by 2016 as he did last week, he could then more easily sell the prisoner swap, which would then help empty Guantanamo so he could fulfill that campaign promise too. Is it too much to ask that, in his final two and half years in office, the President act as if more is at stake in foreign policy than his domestic approval rating?
I read the Journal’s editorials every day, and have for years. I find them a handy way to track conservative opinion—hard-edged, no doubt, but generally also well-wrought (better-wrought, it must be admitted, than their counterparts at the New York Times.) But really, the Journal is not doing its regular readers a service here. We’re awfully confused: is Obama recklessly disregarding domestic politics to cement his legacy with grand edicts, or making hasty decisions purely for domestic political gain? Please make up your mind.
By: Alec MacGinnis, The New Republic, June 5, 2014
“The Overestimation Of The Power Of Coal”: The Politics Of Coal–And Other Mythic Government-Sensitive Industries
At TNR, Alec MacGillis has a useful analysis of the declining power of the coal industry in what we are used to calling Coal Country, in states ranging from Virginia to Illinois (and extending to very different coal-producing states out west), but centered in West Virginia and Kentucky, where we are led to believe the Obama administration’s new utility regulations are going to be political death for Democrats. The simple facts are that not that many people work in or are dependent on coal mines anymore:
Take Kentucky, the focus of much of the punditry, given the close race between Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes. Coal-mining employment in the Bluegrass State has plunged by more than half in the past three decades, from 38,000 in 1983 to under 17,000 in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. (Nationally, there are 78,000 people employed in coal mining—well less than half as many as are employed in oil and gas extraction, and not much more than the number of people employed in logging.) To put that in perspective: the auto manufacturing industry in Kentucky employs three times as many people as the coal industry does today. When is the last time you heard pundits making grand predictions about how new auto-industry regulations would affect Kentucky “Car Country”?
MacGillis points out that the overestimation of the Power of Coal was one of the strategic mistakes made by the 2012 Romney campaign, which thought hyperventilation over the “War on Coal” might tip Virginia and Ohio into its column (and to be fair, the Obama campaign spent a lot of time promoting the largely illusory future of “clean coal”).
But Alec also acknowledges that the mythic significance of coal outstrips its actual importance to the economies of Coal Country:
[T]here’s no question coal’s grip on politics in Kentucky extends beyond actual employment figures—it is part of the state’s cultural identity, part of the holy trinity that also includes horses and bourbon. That explains why, as the Times notes, a Republican congressional candidate recently savaged his opponent for being anti-coal in a Kentucky district that has not a single coal-mining job in it.
I would add that expectations of politicians to support policies friendly to mythic industries tend to be very strong, though not as much as when liberal environmentalism and conservative hostility to government subsidies began to cut into purely parochial attitudes. I recall that way back in 1972, a big issue in the race that eventually lifted Sam Nunn to the Senate from Georgia was incumbent David Gambrell’s failure to trade a vote for a Boeing SST project in exchange for Washington State support for Lockheed’s C-5 airlift project, which really only directly affected a relatively small portion of Georgia but was integral to its perceived future as a military-industrial superpower. More recently, one of America’s great political rituals has been the requirement that presidential candidates who want to compete in the Iowa Caucuses pledge to support the continuation of ethanol subsidies (in the 2000 cycle, this was George W. Bush’s first action after formally announcing his candidacy), and long-standing hostility to ethanol kept John McCain from seriously contesting Iowa in both 2000 and 2008).
With coal, of course, the normal ideological proclivities of Democrats and Republicans have made support for and opposition to carbon emissions regulations largely a no-brainer. And that might well be true if Coal Country really was a big economic bloc, or if hardly any coal was being mined or burned at all.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 3, 2014
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