“Solely An Oppositional Movement”: Why Winning Elections Is The Last Thing The Tea Party Wants
Keith Humphreys asks a provocative question: Does the Tea Party even want to win elections? This comes up in response to a long article in the National Review by Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry telling the Tea Party to get its head out of the clouds and start doing things that will help Republicans win. While it’s tricky to ascribe specific desires and intentions to a large, complicated collection of people like the Tea Party, to the extent we can, I think the answer to whether they want to win is pretty clearly no. And there’s a certain logic to it.
The reason is that the Tea Party is an oppositional movement, and oppositional movements only thrive when they’re in the opposition. They can talk all they like about both Republicans and Democrats being part of the problem, and being opposed just to “Washington,” but we all know that at its heart it’s about Barack Obama and everything he represents. If Hillary Clinton or another Democrat becomes president in 2016, most of the anger and resentment that gives the movement life will get transferred to that person, and it will continue. But as I’ve held for a few years now, as a movement the Tea Party has a firm expiration date, which is the inauguration of the next Republican president.
The movement also holds a contempt for compromise of any sort as one of its fundamental pillars, which is fairly easy to stick with when your side is out of power. It’s not like you’re going to be getting much of what you want anyway, so you can scoff at the half-loaves your more reasonable colleagues are offering up. But when there’s a Republican administration the gifts to conservatism will be showering down from every cloud, and they’ll be much tougher to say no to. How about we give you an appointment at the EPA, where you can destroy the agency from the inside instead of railing at it from the street? What say we do the same to the Labor Department? Now that our bills won’t get vetoed, let’s start slashing away at food stamps and CHIP and all those other programs the “takers” suckle on. It’s time to party! In that atmosphere, there’s so much to say yes to that saying no to everything isn’t so attractive anymore.
And when it can’t shout “No!”, the Tea Party will have no more reason for being. Obviously, even if it’s dead as a movement, many of the people who championed it will still be in Congress. But saying no won’t be as attractive for them either. It’s one thing to imagine yourself a brave warrior standing up against Barack Obama and his plan to turn America into a nightmare of socialist misery. It’s another to, say, fight against cuts to Medicaid because you want even bigger cuts to Medicaid. That’s far less romantic.
So no, as a whole the Tea Party doesn’t have much of an interest in winning elections, because if it helped Republicans have a resounding win, it would literally be the last thing the movement ever did.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 31, 2013
“A New Group Whipping Up Right-Wing Fear”: Predatory Lenders Fight Regulators With Offer Of $500 Visa Gift Cards
Visitors this weekend to Townhall.com were welcomed with a pop-up advertisement soliciting a petition against the Obama administration. “Help us send 1 million letters to stop reckless regulators,” the ad beckons, atop images of President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.
The advertisement is sponsored by Consumers for Choices, a new group whipping up right-wing anger at the Obama administration for supposedly using his “Reckless, Elitist, Overzealous Regulators” to destroy “small-dollar” and tribal lenders. Visitors to the Consumers for Choices website, which is being advertised on conservative news portals like Townhall, are encouraged to contact their local representatives to send an angry pre-written letter. Consumers for Choices says their supporters will be automatically entered into a weekly raffle, with a grand prize $500 Visa gift card.
The advocacy website repeatedly references Western Sky Financial, an online installment loan company that recently suspended lending after being sent cease-and-desist letters from government agencies. Left unsaid on the Consumers for Choices site are the types of loans offered by the company, which feature interest rates of 355 percent.
A single $5,075 loan from Western Sky cost $40,872.72 to pay back—more than eight times the original amount.
A commercial from the company featured a Native American woman exclaiming, “Making the six monthly payments is good for your credit profile!”
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently sued Western Sky Financial, CashCall Inc. and other online lenders for violating New York state usury laws, which cap interest at 16 percent for such loans. In August, the Department of Justice began investigating a broad range of banks that handle payments for payday and installment lending companies accused of deceiving customers and charging predatory interest rates.
Regulators say predatory lenders are pairing to Native American groups to exploit tribal sovereignty.
Western Sky, which operates on a reservation in South Dakota but markets its loans through national television and Internet advertising, says its location on tribal land prevents authorities from using state law to regulate its business. The Consumers for Choice site takes that argument a step further, declaring, “With your help, we can tell our elected leaders to put a stop to baseless attacks on tribal business and eliminate government fraud!”
Though the website contains no information about the type of loans in jeopardy of being eliminated, there is plenty of incendiary language designed to incite readers into action. Consumers for Choice warns of “elitist Federal regulators” seeking to deny “access to much-needed credit and funding for the average American family.”
The Consumers for Choice site, registered in August shortly after the New York State and Department of Justice probe began, also does not disclose any information about who is behind the effort. The Contact Us page lists an address for Aristotle, a political website company.
The only names listed on the site are Republican members of Congress who have issued supportive blurbs.
“I applaud the efforts of Consumers for Choice to promote free market principals and help make the general public aware of how federal and state regulators are now working to limit consumers and small businesses ability to access consumer credit,” reads one message from Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS). Similar quotes are provided from Representatives Dennis Ross (R-FL), Dave Schweikert (R-AZ) and Tom Graves (R-GA). In August, thirty-one House Republicans signed a letter to the government, accusing the Department of Justice of “intimidating” banks for working with online lenders.
A look into Florida state business records, where Consumers for Choices Inc. is registered, provides more clues.
On August 30, 2013, an attorney named Andrew L. Asher filed documents to change the name of “Floridians for Good Government, Inc.” to “Consumers for Choices, Inc.”
Asher is attorney with Jenkins Hill Consulting, a lobbying firm that represents a trade association for installment lenders called the American Financial Services Association.
The group spends about $6 million a year, with a large portion of its budget devoted to advocacy and government relations. Last week, AFSA held its annual meeting at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, DC, where member companies, along with their lobbyists, met with lawmakers and were treated to a private talk on “inside politics” by Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, October 28, 2013
“Confronting The Pathologies Of Poverty:” Do We Invest In Preschools Or Prisons?
Congress is often compared to pre-K, which seems defamatory of small children. But the similarities also offer hope, because an initiative that should be on the top of the national agenda has less to do with the sequester than with the A.B.C.’s and Big Bird.
Growing mountains of research suggest that the best way to address American economic inequality, poverty and crime is — you guessed it! — early education programs, including coaching of parents who want help. It’s not a magic wand, but it’s the best tool we have to break cycles of poverty.
President Obama called in his State of the Union address for such a national initiative, but it hasn’t gained traction. Obama himself hasn’t campaigned enough for it, yet there’s still a reed of hope.
One reason is that this is one of those rare initiatives that polls well across the spectrum, with support from 84 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans in a recent national survey. And even if the program stalls in Washington, states and localities are moving ahead — from San Antonio to Michigan. Colorado voters will decide next month on a much-watched ballot measure to bolster education spending, including in preschool, and a ballot measure in Memphis would expand preschool as well.
“There’s this magical opportunity” now to get a national early education program in America, Education Secretary Arne Duncan told me. He says he’s optimistic that members of Congress will introduce a bipartisan bill for such a plan this year.
“When you think how you make change for the next 30 years, this is arguably at the top of my list,” Duncan said. “It can literally transform the life chances of children, and strengthen families in important ways.”
Whether it happens through Congressional action or is locally led, this may be the best chance America has had to broaden early programs since 1971, when Congress approved such a program but President Nixon vetoed it.
The massive evidence base for early education grew a bit more with a major new study from Stanford University noting that achievement gaps begin as early as 18 months. Then at 2 years old, there’s a six-month achievement gap. By age 5, it can be a two-year gap. Poor kids start so far behind when school begins that they never catch up — especially because they regress each summer.
One problem is straightforward. Poorer kids are more likely to have a single teenage mom who is stressed out, who was herself raised in an authoritarian style that she mimics, and who, as a result, doesn’t chatter much with the child.
Yet help these parents, and they do much better. Some of the most astonishing research in poverty-fighting methods comes from the success of programs to coach at-risk parents — and these, too, are part of Obama’s early education program. “Early education” doesn’t just mean prekindergarten for 4-year-olds, but embraces a plan covering ages 0 to 5.
The earliest interventions, and maybe the most important, are home visitation programs like Nurse-Family Partnership. It begins working with at-risk moms during pregnancy, with a nurse making regular visits to offer basic support and guidance: don’t drink or smoke while pregnant; don’t take heroin or cocaine. After birth, the coach offers help with managing stress, breast-feeding and diapers, while encouraging chatting to the child and reading aloud.
These interventions are cheap and end at age 2. Yet, in randomized controlled trials, the gold standard of evaluation, there was a 59 percent reduction in child arrests at age 15 among those who had gone through the program.
Something similar happens with good pre-K programs. Critics have noted that with programs like Head Start, there are early educational gains that then fade by second or third grade. That’s true, and that’s disappointing.
Yet, in recent years, long-term follow-ups have shown that while the educational advantages of Head Start might fade, there are “life skill” gains that don’t. A rigorous study by David Deming of Harvard, for example, found that Head Start graduates were less likely to repeat grades or be diagnosed with a learning disability, and more likely to graduate from high school and attend college.
Look, we’ll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.
We just might have a rare chance in the next couple of months to take steps toward such a landmark early education program in America. But children can’t vote, and they have no highly paid lobbyists — so it’ll happen only if we the public speak up.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, October 26, 2013
“The Cry Of The True Republican”: As Seen By A “Genetic Republican”, Today’s GOP Is A Virulent Strain Of Empty Nihilism
I am a genetic Republican.
Five generations of Tafts have served our nation as unwaveringly stalwart Republicans, from Alphonso Taft, who served as attorney general in the late 19th century, through William Howard Taft, who not only was the only person to be both president of the United States and chief justice of the United States but also served as the chief civil administrator of the Philippines and secretary of war, to my cousin, Robert Taft, a two-term governor of Ohio.
As I write, a photograph of my grandfather, Senator Robert Alphonso Taft, looks across at me from the wall of my office. He led the Republican Party in the United States Senate in the 1940s and early 1950s, ran for the Republican nomination for president three times and was known as “Mr. Republican.” If he were alive today, I can assure you he wouldn’t even recognize the modern Republican Party, which has repeatedly brought the United States of America to the edge of a fiscal cliff — seemingly with every intention of pushing us off the edge.
Throughout my family’s more than 170-year legacy of public service, Republicans have represented the voice of fiscal conservatism. Republicans have been the adults in the room. Yet somehow the current generation of party activists has managed to do what no previous Republicans have been able to do — position the Democratic Party as the agents of fiscal responsibility.
Speaking through the night, Senator Ted Cruz, with heavy-lidded, sleep-deprived eyes, conveyed not the libertarian element in Republican philosophy that advocates for smaller government and less intrusion into the personal lives of citizens, but a new, virulent strain of empty nihilism: “blow it up if we can’t get what we want.”
This recent display of bomb-throwing obstructionism by Republicans in Congress evokes another painful, historically embarrassing chapter in the Republican Party — that of Senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose anti-Communist crusade was allowed by Republican elders to expand unchecked, unnecessarily and unfairly tarnishing the reputations of thousands of people with “Red Scare” accusations of Communist affiliation. Finally Senator McCarthy was brought up short during the questioning of the United States Army’s chief counsel, Joseph N. Welch, who at one point demanded the senator’s attention, then said: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” He later added: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Watching the Republican Party use the full faith and credit of the United States to try to roll back Obamacare, watching its members threaten not to raise the debt limit — which Warren Buffett rightly called a “political weapon of mass destruction” — to repeal a tax on medical devices, I so wanted to ask a similar question: “Have you no sense of responsibility? At long last, have you left no sense of responsibility?”
There is more than a passing similarity between Joseph McCarthy and Ted Cruz, between McCarthyism and the Tea Party movement. The Republican Party survived McCarthyism because, ultimately, its excesses caused it to burn out. And eventually party elders in the mold of my grandfather were able to realign the party with its brand promise: The Republican Party is (or should be) the Stewardship Party. The Republican brand is (or should be) about responsible behavior. The Republican party is (or should be) at long last, about decency.
What a long way we have yet to go.
By: John G. Taft, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, October 22, 2013
“Reality Is Not, And Never Was The Point”: The Tea Party’s True Believers Thrive On Rejection
Yay.
Yippee.
Woo hoo, even.
It was a nick-of-time rescue, like when Polly Pureheart is whisked off the railroad tracks right before the train comes barreling through, or the correct wire is snipped and the bomb timer stops counting down with just seconds left.
Last week, hours before a historic default, Congress finally stopped playing chicken with the world’s largest economy and ended the government shutdown.
So . . . hurray, right?
Huzzah, right?
Crisis averted, lessons learned, common sense restored. Everything’s good, is it not?
Well, no. Not even close.
Pardon the pooping of the party, but it’s hard to cheer the aversion of a crisis that:
A) Was entirely manufactured.
B) Will in all likelihood recur very soon.
This is what it has come to in Tea Party America: government of the crisis, by the crisis, for the crisis, government that lurches from emergency to emergency, accomplishing little, resolving less and generally behaving with all the thoughtful reflection of a toddler holding her breath until she gets her way.
Let no one claim this is no big deal because we’ve had shutdowns before. Let no one chirp that this is how things are supposed to work — checks and balances and all. Let none of us act as if it’s anything but bizarre to see a militant faction in one chamber of the legislature bring government to a halt because it doesn’t like a law.
Most of all, let us finally stop pretending this is only about that law, the Affordable Care Act, and the delusional claim that it will usher in socialism, communism and slavery, resurrect Vladimir Lenin and send Nazis marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Obamacare?
No, this is about Obamascare, the terror of what some still regard as alien and their consequent refusal, even five years in, to accept the legitimacy of a president twice elected with nary a hanging chad in sight.
The only good news out of this 16-day debacle is that his refusal to kowtow to these bullyboy tactics suggests that the president does, indeed, have a spine, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding.
Repeat: That’s the only good news. Anyone expecting the even-better news that this closes the book on the Tea Party, given its abject failure to achieve its stated goal of defunding the Affordable Care Act, will be bitterly disappointed. These are true believers. True believers thrive on rejection.
Note that, even as other Republicans were sounding appropriately chastened, Tea Party activists were assailing the party for “surrender” and were disavowing regret. As the shutdown was going down in flames, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a Tea Party stalwart, told CNN, “Unfortunately, once again, it appears the Washington establishment is refusing to listen to the American people.”
This, as polls show the American people’s esteem for the GOP and the Tea Party at record lows and 62 percent of respondents were telling Gallup they wanted their representatives to compromise so the government could reopen. Gallup also tells us Americans now identify government dysfunction as this country’s biggest problem.
The disconnect between what Cruz says the people are saying and what they are actually saying should surprise no one. The defining characteristic of the Tea People has always been their ability to convince themselves reality is whatever they need it to be.
Reality, after all, is not the point. Ideological purity is.
So we will likely return to this crossroads, or one very much like it. Any hope of avoiding that rests with the dwindling population of adults in the GOP and their ability to make their party realize what should have long ago been obvious.
They can have purity or they can have power. They cannot have both.
By: Leonard Pitts, J., Featured Post, The National Memo, October 21, 2013
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