“RNC Unveils Its ‘14 In ‘14’ Plan”: A Stroke of Genius, Include More Women In Campaign Ads
When Democratic policymakers started a fight over the Paycheck Fairness Act, Republicans responded by dismissing it as a hollow, election-year stunt. Sure, it was a substantive policy response to a legitimate issue, but GOP officials said the debate itself was little more than a cheap political exercise – which women voters would see through immediately.
And speaking of cheap political exercises that women voters will see through immediately…
The Republican National Committee plans a new initiative, “14 in ‘14,” to recruit and train women under age 40 to help spread the party’s message in the final 14 weeks of the campaign. […]
They are encouraging candidates to include their wives and daughters in campaign ads, have women at their events and build a Facebook-like internal database of women willing to campaign on their behalf.
I see. If Democrats push the Paycheck Fairness Act, they’re cynically trying to give the appearance of helping women in the workplace. But if Republicans include more women in campaign ads, that’s just quality messaging.
The “14 in ‘14” initiative, it’s worth noting, is actually a fallback plan of sorts. The original strategy was to push “Project GROW,” in which Republicans would recruit more women candidates to run for Congress in 2014. That project failed – there are actually going to be fewer Republican women running for Congress in this cycle than in 2012.
Presumably, “encouraging candidates to include their wives and daughters in campaign ads” is intended to compensate for the misstep, while hoping voters overlook the GOP’s opposition to pay-equity legislation and its preoccupation with issues such as restricting women’s reproductive rights and access to contraception?
Greg Sargent also had a good piece questioning the utility of the “14 in ‘14” plan.
Democrats are actively building their women’s economic agenda around the broader idea that women face unique economic challenges. A recent CNN poll found that 55 percent of Americans, and 59 percent of women, don’t believe the GOP understands the problems women face today. A Republican National Committee spokeswoman recently admitted that Republicans need to do a better job appearing in touch with women.
Republicans oppose a minimum wage hike; oppose Dem proposals to address pay inequity (while admitting it is a legitimate problem); and are telling women that their economic prospects can be improved by repealing Obamacare (and its protections for women). Indeed, they are even telling them that the push for pay equity is nothing but a distraction from the health law. Yes, Republicans could win big this fall with such an agenda. But this could also prove another area where structural factors ensure that Republicans win in 2014 in spite of the failure to address the need — which they themselves have acknowledged — to broaden their appeal to women with an eye towards future national elections.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 14, 2014
“The Missing Generation Of Obama-Inspired Politicians”: Congress Is The Last Place From Which Important Change Is Going To Come
The 2008 Obama presidential campaign, you’ll no doubt remember, was a marvel of social engagement, particularly among young people. They got involved in politics, they saw the potential for change, they sent emails and posted to Facebook and knocked on doors. But as Jason Horowitz reports in The New York Times, not too many of them decided to run for office. I’ll solve that mystery in a moment, but here’s an excerpt:
But if Mr. Lesser, who is on leave from Harvard Law School to run for office, is the face of the promised Obama political generation, he is also one of its few participants. For all the talk about the movement that elected Mr. Obama, the more notable movement of Obama supporters has been away from politics. It appears that few of the young people who voted for him, and even fewer Obama campaign and administration operatives, have decided to run for office. Far more have joined the high-paid consultant ranks.
Unlike John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, who inspired virtual legislatures of politicians and became generational touchstones, Mr. Obama has so far had little such influence. That is all the more remarkable considering he came to office tapping into spirit of volunteerism and community service that pollsters say is widespread and intense among young people. Mr. Obama has come to represent that spirit, but he has failed, pollsters say, to transform it into meaningful engagement in the political process.
There are a bunch of empirical claims here that may be questionable. Are there actually fewer young people running for office six years after Barack Obama got elected than there were in 1966 or 1986? Perhaps, but I don’t know that anyone has determined that for sure. And as for more of Obama staffers going into consulting than running for office, that always happens. You could without question say the same thing about every president since political consulting became an industry. Running for office is something very few people ever do, and for people who are working in politics and want to keep working in politics, the move from staffer to consultant is a natural career progression without huge risks.
More importantly, running for office is just one tiny part of “meaningful engagement in the political process.” What other things have all those former Obama volunteers been doing? The answer may be that they’ve actually been doing quite a bit.
But if mounting a congressional campaign is the one thing they haven’t been doing, it would be hard to blame them (and they may be running for other offices, but national reporters haven’t noticed). The last five years haven’t exactly made being a member of Congress look like the kind of fulfilling endeavor for which you’d make extraordinary life sacrifices. In fact, these days Congress looks like the last place from which important change is going to come. So if you’re an idealistic young person and the prospect of spending the next few years voting against the 50th and 60th and 70th Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act doesn’t stir you to the depths of your soul, it’s hard to say that’s Barack Obama’s failure.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 14, 2014
“A Program Conservatives Should Love”: One That Even Paul Ryan Should Be Able To Embrace
We are at a point at which we will soon have vicious ideological debates over motherhood and apple pie.
Don’t laugh. If we can agree on anything across our philosophical divides, surely we can support efforts to promote voluntary service by our fellow citizens and to strengthen our nation’s extraordinary network of civic and religious charities.
This shared set of commitments led to one of the few bipartisan initiatives of President Obama’s time in office. On April 21, it will be five years since the president signed the Serve America Act, the final product of one of Congress’s most creative odd couples. Again and again, Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts found ways to legislate together. The law aimed at authorizing 250,000 service slots by 2017 was the unlikely duo’s capstone project before Kennedy’s death.
At a very modest cost to government — those who serve essentially get living expenses and some scholarship assistance later — AmeriCorps gives mostly young Americans a chance to spend a year helping communities and those in need while nurturing thousands of organizations across the country. Senior Corps provides Americans 55 or older a chance to serve, too.
AmeriCorps sent out its first volunteers 20 years ago this fall. Since then, more than 800,000 Americans have participated in the program. By giving life to this great venture in generosity, our government did something that taxpayers, regardless of party, can be proud of.
One politician who speaks often about the importance of civil society groups is Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Ryan rightly talks about the “vast middle ground between government and the individual,” and of empowering “community organizations to improve people’s lives.”
Yet Ryan’s new budget comes out against apple pie. It zeroes out AmeriCorps. Poof. Gone.
Rather than denouncing Ryan for this, I urge him instead to take a second look on the basis of his own principles and realize the opportunity he has. The best move for someone who loves the activities of the nonprofits as much as Ryan says he does is to try to trump the president.
Obama’s budget proposes $1.05 billion, a slight increase that would allow AmeriCorps, including Senior Corps, to expand to more than 100,000 positions . It’s good that Obama and Senate Democrats have worked to keep the program funded in the face of House Republican resistance. But even the number Obama proposes amounts to slightly more than half of the 200,000 spots for 2014 that Hatch and Kennedy envisioned in their original bill.
It’s not as if young people don’t want to serve. AmeriCorps had 580,000 applications for 80,000 openings; Teach for America had 55,000 applications for 6,000 slots . Alan Khazei, co-chair of the Franklin Project at the Aspen Institute, which promotes national service, points to the 16 percent unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds. Service, he argues, is a gateway. It can lead to “employment opportunities and help young Americans develop important job skills for their future careers.”
If Ryan isn’t convinced yet, he should talk to Wendy Spencer, the chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service. He’d have a lot in common politically with Spencer, a Republican. She worked in the private sector, for a local Chamber of Commerce and a United Way, and held positions in former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s administration in Florida. She headed the state’s Commission on Volunteerism for the last three Republican governors.
Spencer has been inventive at a time of tough budgets. At the end of March, she announced a partnership with Citi Foundation and the Points of Light Institute involving $10 million in private financing to engage 25,000 low-income young Americans to lead volunteer service projects even as they get mentoring and training from Citi employees.
Encouraged by Obama, federal agencies are using AmeriCorps volunteers in new ways. The Federal Emergency Management Agency Corps, for example, can deploy 1,600 volunteers in disaster relief emergencies while the School Turnaround corps has used hundreds of volunteers in repairing troubled schools.
Spencer views the federal service programs as a “trifecta.” The organizations receiving AmeriCorps and Senior Corps members see their capacity enhanced as full-time volunteers leverage the work of thousands more. And, of course, the participants themselves benefit, as do the people they serve.
If you wish, Mr. Ryan, you can let the president get all the credit for saving this worthy endeavor and for fostering innovation. Or you can go him one better by expanding it. You could use AmeriCorps as a model for a practical, locally oriented, conservative approach to government. Because that’s exactly what it is.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 13, 2014
“She Surely Paid Her Dues”: Will Kathleen Sebelius Win In The End? Legacy Tied To Obamacare’s Outcome
Yes, there was utter failure, but there was also one hell of a recovery. As time goes on, she’ll get less blame for the former and more credit for the latter.
It was always going to be a tough job, Health and Human Services secretary under this president. Even so, I’d bet Kathleen Sebelius was plenty shocked at the whole business.
True, she was only a second-string nominee, after Tom Daschle had to bow out because of those tax problems. But Sebelius still should have had little to fear. After all, she’d been the Democratic governor of a ruby-red state, Kansas. In a state where Republicans outnumbered Democrats roughly two-to-one, she won reelection in 2006 with 57 percent of the vote. She got one of the state’s prominent Republicans to switch parties and run with her for lieutenant governor.
So yes, it must have shocked when only eight Republicans voted to confirm her, while 31 voted against. Four-to-one against?! What had she done that was so bad? The answer was: nothing. Oh, Republicans invoked her “ties” to a Wichita doctor who performed abortions. But really, it was what she was going to do. She was going to be a point person on health-care reform, and they needed to ding her.
Today, and in the near future, she will have to endure being associated with the massive fiasco that was the launch of healthcare.gov. And that’s deserved. It’s hard to imagine what she was doing last summer instead of spending every waking minute ensuring that the initiative for which this administration will be remembered, the one thing that will color and even determine its historical legacy, was going to launch well. But it happened.
I don’t know how many times she got dragged up to the Hill and asked the same questions by all those Republican solons, striving to win the “let’s use this guy!” competition for the cable nets and NPR and the nightly newscasts, but it seemed like she was up there almost every day for a spell. On the surface, it all looked disastrous.
But I will say this. Behind the scenes, they did get to work. I could tell just from the way people talked, the things they said were happening there, that it really was getting better. They were (and I guess still are) sitting on this battery of IT stats about response times and how long a person had to wait to be logged in and so on and so forth, and those were being cut quickly. So Sebelius and the rescue team really did do their jobs once they were up against the wall.
Think of it this way. Did you think, last fall, that they’d actually hit the 7 million? Did you think they’d even come close? In a year-end column I wrote with my 2014 predictions, I said they’d make 5.8 million. And I thought that would be respectable. The latest report is that they’re approaching 7.5 million. So yes, there was utter failure. But there was one hell of a nice recovery. As time goes on, I think Sebelius will start getting less blame for the former, and more credit for the latter.
But her fate will be forever tied to Obamacare. If it succeeds, she’ll share the credit as the secretary who helped bring it to life. If it fails, she’ll share the blame. It’s about that simple. And I think it’ll probably succeed.
Meanwhile, there’s the question of getting a new HHS secretary installed. Obama’s nominee is Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who heads the Office of Management and Budget. Chief of staff Denis McDonough told The New York Times that “the president wants to make sure we have a proven manager and relentless implementer in the job over there,” which is both praise of Burwell and a little slap at Sebelius.
But will the Republicans let her through? Actually, forget the Republicans: Six Democratic senators are seeking reelection in red states. Are they going to vote for a new Obamacare point person during an election season? It never ends. Except it is now for Sebelius, who’s surely paid her dues.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 10, 2014
“It’s Time To Get Creative”: Want To Cut The Rich’s Influence? Take Away Their Money!
Chief Justice John Roberts this week continued his gradual judicial elimination of America’s campaign finance laws, with a decision in McCutcheon v. FEC that eliminates “aggregate” contribution limits from individuals to political parties, PACs and candidates. The decision may not have a catastrophic effect, in a world where individuals were already permitted to donate unlimited sums to independent political organizations, but it is just another move toward the end of regulation of political spending altogether. If Americans want to limit the influence of money on politics, they will have to start getting more creative.
Roberts’ specialty is “faux judicial restraint,” in which he achieves his radical desired goals over the course of many incremental decisions instead of one sweeping one. In this case, as many observers have noted, Roberts pointed to our current easily circumvented caps on political spending as justification for lifting yet another cap, without noting that the Roberts court helped create the current system to begin with. Our campaign finance laws have not quite yet been “eviscerated,” but the trend is clear. Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas, who penned a partial dissent calling for all regulation of political spending to be eliminated, have something close to the same end goal, but Roberts is willing to be patient in getting there.
As long as Roberts and his fellow conservatives dominate the Supreme Court — and it seems likely that they will continue to dominate it for years to come — campaign finance reformers are going to find themselves sabotaged at every turn. As Rick Hasen says: “It is hard to see what will be left of campaign finance law beyond disclosure in a few years.”
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 3, 2014
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