“Doing Real Vetting Should Be Part Of The Job”: Why Conservative Media Should Be Tough On Republican Candidates
When the RNC announced a few weeks ago that conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt was going to moderate a primary debate, many liberals ridiculed it as evidence that they wanted to shield their candidates from anything but softball questions. I argued that it was a good thing, first because the journalists (mostly from TV) who have moderated primary debates in the past have done such a terrible job, and second because primaries should be about what people within the party think. Someone with an interest in picking the best nominee might actually be tougher on the candidates, and would certainly have a better sense of what will matter to primary voters.
I don’t listen to Hugh Hewitt, so I can’t make any detailed assessment of his oeuvre, but though he’s certainly a partisan Republican he has a reputation as one of the better interviewers on the right. Yesterday, he interviewed Ben Carson and seemed to expose some gaps in Carson’s knowledge. This is being touted in some quarters as Carson showing his ignorance, but I actually think it’s an example of what partisan media ought to do during a primary.
I don’t know if Hewitt thinks of his mission this way, but if I were a conservative media figure like him, the last thing I’d want is a repeat of the nincompoop parade that was the 2012 GOP primaries. So doing some real vetting should be part of the job: asking difficult questions, exposing the areas of weakness that will eventually come up anyway, not to mention illuminating the real areas of distinctions that separate the candidates.
So did Hewitt ambush Carson? Maybe a bit, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with what he asked. In this case, it was about what might draw us into a war with Russia. Yes, Carson displayed some momentary confusion about NATO and the Baltic states, but candidates have done far worse (see here, for instance). And running for president ought to be hard. The job is hard. If we’re going to give someone that kind of power, there’s almost no question too tricky or detailed for them to be asked.
Now I’m no fan of Ben Carson, not by a long shot. But Hewitt asks him exactly the right question about being an amateur in politics, and Carson’s answer isn’t so terrible. Here’s the exchange:
HH: And so what I worry about as a Republican, as a conservative, is that because you’ve been being a great neurosurgeon all these years, you haven’t been deep into geopolitics, and that the same kind of questions that tripped up Sarah Palin early in her campaign are going to trip you up when, for example, the gotcha question, does she believe in the Bush doctrine when it depends on how you define the Bush doctrine. And so how are you going to navigate that, because I mean, you’ve only, have you been doing geopolitics? Do you read this stuff? Do you immerse yourself in it?
BC: I ‘ve read a lot in the last six months, no question about that. There’s a lot of material to learn. There’s no question about that. But again, I have to go back to something that I feel is a fundamental problem, and that is we spend too much time trying to get into these little details that are easily within the purview of the experts that you have available to you. And I think where we get lost is not being able to define what our real mission is, and not being able to strategize in terms of how do we defeat our enemies, how do we support our allies? I could spend, you know, the next six years learning all the details of all the SALT treaties and every other treaty that’s ever been done and completely miss the boat.
HH: Well, that’s possible, and I want to be respectful in posing this. But I mean, you wouldn’t expect me to become a neurosurgeon in a couple of years. And I wouldn’t expect you to be able to access and understand and collate the information necessary to be a global strategist in a couple of years. Is it fair for people to worry that you just haven’t been in the world strategy long enough to be competent to imagine you in the Oval Office deciding these things? I mean, we’ve tried an amateur for the last six years and look what it got us.
BC: Well, if you go to, let’s say, a very well-run hospital, you’re going to have a president of the hospital or chief administrator. He probably doesn’t know a whole lot about cardiac surgery, probably doesn’t know a whole lot about neurosurgery or pediatric infectious disease. But he knows how to put together a structure where the strength of all those departments work effectively. And as far as having an amateur in the Oval Office in the last six years, I would take issue with that. I would say that this man has been able to accomplish a great deal. It’s maybe not the things that you and I want accomplished, but in terms of fundamentally changing this nation and putting it on a different footing? I think he’s done quite a masterful job.
Ben Carson obviously isn’t going to be the GOP nominee; his run for the White House is part of a media strategy whose end point is a Fox gig or a talk radio show, supplemented by revenue from books revealing the shocking story of how liberals are destroying America. But you have to give him credit for pushing back on the idea so common in conservative circles that Barack Obama is some kind of incompetent dolt (he can’t give a speech without a teleprompter, ha ha!).
In any case, this is how interviews from conservative talk show hosts ought to go. Carson can go on Sean Hannity’s show and get a bunch of softball questions, and the answers will make the viewers nod their heads in agreement. But that doesn’t do them any good. They’ll be much better served if all their candidates get the toughest interviews possible now, and conservatives are the ones to do it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 19, 2015
“Jeb Bush’s Minimum Wage Radicalism”: The Abolition Of A Federal Minimum Wage Of Any Sort Is Now A Mainstream Republican Position
Every so often I feel the need to write the column that says: The one thing our political system needs more than any other single feature is a strengthened moderate wing of the Republican Party. I say this of course as a liberal, whose party registration is Democratic, which means you might think I’d say we need more liberals; and while I think that, I believe without question that having a strong moderate faction within the GOP would do far more to change our politics for the better than—yes—even having more Americans who think exactly as I do!
Having more liberals would if anything merely deepen the intensity of our civil war and produce more stalemate. The presence of a more muscular moderate Republican wing, however, would change everything. Then, there would be pressure on Republicans to adopt some sensible moderate positions, instead of what we have today, which is unceasing pressure to play this game of one-upmanship to see who can take the most reactionary, ignorant, and borderline racist position imaginable. Then, you’d have some Republicans from blue districts and states who would find it to be in their electoral self-interest to compromise with Democrats and vote for a Democratic president’s bill once in a while. Then, our political culture really would change.
And, then, people like Jeb Bush, the alleged moderate in the GOP presidential field, wouldn’t say jaw-dropping things like this, about the minimum wage, which he said Tuesday in (where else, somehow) South Carolina:
“We need to leave it to the private sector. I think state minimum wages are fine. The federal government shouldn’t be doing this. This is one of those poll-driven deals. It polls well, I’m sure—I haven’t looked at the polling, but I’m sure on the surface without any conversation, without any digging into it, people say, ‘Yeah, everybody’s wages should be up.’ And in the case of Wal-Mart, they have raised wages because of supply and demand and that’s good.
“But the federal government doing this will make it harder and harder for the first rung of the ladder to be reached, particularly for young people, particularly for people that have less education.”
Now it’s great that Wal-Mart and McDonald’s and Target and the others are voluntarily raising their minimum wages. One might argue that we’ve come to a particularly sad pass when the Walton family is doing more for its beleaguered workers than Congress can rouse itself to, but however you want to spin it, good for Wal-Mart.
But to take this little boomlet from what is still a small number of employers (although of course they do employ millions of people) and say that’s it, we should now have no federal minimum wage, is logical sleight of hand, and it’s a very radical position. A little background.
We first got a minimum wage in 1935. Then the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional (which could happen again, with this lot). Then it was passed again in 1938. We’ve had it ever since, although, as you probably know, it hasn’t gone up since 2009. That rise was the third and final phase of a 2007 law that raised the wage in increments. We haven’t had a new law to that effect in those eight years since.
It is true that in the 1980s, economists debated whether a federal minimum wage was desirable. Even The New York Times once editorialized against it, in 1987. At the time, economists thought it had deleterious effects on low-wage employment. Then, in the mid-1990s, the economists David Card and Alan Krueger studied this question in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (the former had increase its minimum wage, while the latter had not), and they found no employment impact.
That changed the academic consensus. An increase was passed in 1996. Some conservative economists continued to spoon out the “job-killer” Kool-Aid, as indeed they still do, but evidence continues to support the idea that there is no serious job-killing effect.
The parties disagreed strongly about how much the wage should be increased, but at least they agreed on increasing it—the 2007 increase, for example, passed the Senate 94-3, and the House by 233-82. John McCain, the GOP’s 2008 standard bearer, voted for the 2007 increase. And Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee, ran on supporting a modest increase and even indexing the minimum wage to inflation, which Barack Obama also supported and which would prevent Congress from having to pass legislation on the question ever again—a pretty progressive position, really.
So the last two mainstream, establishment GOP candidates—the last three, counting George W. Bush—supported an increase. But now, the mainstream, establishment candidate is against it. And if the mainstream, establishment candidate is against it, where are the others going to line up?
And so, one more hard-right pirouette by a party that keeps finding new ways to radicalize itself. But this one is particularly shocking coming from Bush, because it means that the abolition of a federal minimum wage of any sort is now a mainstream Republican position. And remember: The minimum wage, if it had kept pace with inflation, would be around $13 today, so it’s already insanely low at $7.25.
Which brings me back to how I opened this column. If there were a moderate wing of the GOP, this is most certainly an issue on which we’d have bipartisan agreement. The position Bush has just embraced would be seen across party lines for exactly the radical pandering that it is. Indeed he would not have taken it. That would be a nice world, but the world we have is the one we have. And if Bush can take this position, completely out of step with his party’s conservative mainstream in recent history, then what else will he prove himself capable of?
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 20, 2015
“Netanyahu, The Linchpin Of GOP Foreign Policy”: Hooray! Boehner Wins The Israeli Elections! Time For A Victory Tour!
It’s pretty ironic: just as Bibi Netanyahu seems ready to get over the recent unpleasantness with the Obama administration and get back to the status quo ante of unfriendly cooperation, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives is packing for a trip to Israel that is inevitably being called a “victory tour.” According to Josh Marshall, the trip is expected to last ten days. I’m not 100% sure John Boehner has spent ten straight days in Ohio in recent memory.
But since Boehner accommodated Bibi’s wish for a pre-election campaign rally on the floor of the House, the Israeli leader is hardly in a position to say no, though he may feel like a husband who’s tried to make his wife jealous by consorting with her deadliest enemy, only to discover the intended catspaw on his doorstep with a suitcase.
In any event, Boehner’s trip is a vivid reminder of something I’ve been saying off and on since 2012: the current Israeli government has become the linchpin of Republican foreign policy, as central to the GOP’s calculations on how it views the world as the USSR was (in a negative rather than positive sense, of course) before Gorbachev. So of course Bibi’s victory is Boehner’s victory, and he’d want to share in the celebration. He may claim he’s just another Catholic tourist going to the Holy Land for Holy Week. But I suspect it’s Netanyahu’s resurrection rather than Jesus Christ’s we’ll eventually hear him talking about.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, March 20, 2015
“He’s Really Running For Vice-President”: Why Haven’t Republicans Caught On To Marco Rubio?
When you try to assess candidates from the other party, even the most unsentimental among us can have a hard time separating our emotional reactions from our level-headed assessment of who’s a strong contender and who isn’t. For instance, to me, Scott Walker radiates a kind of unpleasant meanness that I suspect wouldn’t wear very well among the general electorate. But that’s hard to quantify, and I can’t be sure that I don’t feel that way only because I disagree with his policy positions and with what he has done in Wisconsin.
As a liberal, Walker scares me, because among the serious Republican presidential candidates, I suspect he’s the one who would govern with the most intense combination of recklessness and malice. But he doesn’t strike me as the most formidable general-election candidate. That would probably be Marco Rubio. Although that judgment is subject to change (we’ll have to see how they all perform in the rigors of the primary campaign), Rubio’s appeal is undeniable. He’s extremely conservative, but wears his ideology lightly—unlike someone like Ted Cruz, he doesn’t seem eager to smack voters in the face with how much of a right-winger he is. He’s obviously smart, and of course the fact that he’s Latino means he could cut in to the Democrats’ advantage among that increasingly important group (though by how much, we really have no idea). If I were a Republican, I’d be amazed that more of my compatriots weren’t flocking to him.
Amy Walter points out that according to some recent poll results, Walker and Rubio are the only candidates whom every sector of the Republican electorate finds appealing. Yet at the moment, he seems to be barely anyone’s first choice, and she doesn’t have much of an explanation as to why:
Yet, if Rubio’s got such obvious advantages, why is he stuck in the low single digits while Walker has become a “co-frontrunner” with Bush? First, don’t underestimate the power of Walker’s profile as a conservative governor of a blue state. Furthermore, for a party that’s ambivalent at best about the idea of the idea of a “legacy” candidate like Bush, Walker’s understated Midwestern-ism is appealing.
Rubio backers, however, aren’t worried about his low standing in the polls. If anything, they like where he sits today. Rubio gets to go about his work without the same level of scrutiny that Walker and Bush get. They also see Rubio as a candidate who can endure for the long-haul thanks to his natural political talent. Where Bush struggles on the stump, Rubio shines. Where Walker fails to engage, Rubio connects emotionally.
So, when can we expect to see Rubio’s poll numbers catch up with his potential? A high-profile stumble by Bush or Walker could give the Florida senator an opening. The debates could be another place for Rubio to break out. His allies, meanwhile, aren’t convinced they need those things to happen for him to succeed. Instead, they say, he just needs to keep doing what he’s doing and the voters will catch on to his appeal.
That could be true. It’s still very early, and now that we’ve gone through the “Hey, check out this Scott Walker guy” stage of the campaign, there could be a Rubio boomlet on its way. If there’s anything that will hold Rubio back, it may be his youth. Not only is he young, he seems young. In November 2016, he will only be two years younger than Barack Obama was in November 2008 (45 versus 47), but Obama looked like a grown-up while Rubio has a baby face that makes it hard to imagine him at the top of the ticket. That’s why I still think he’s really running for vice-president, which would set up a second try for the presidency in 2020 or 2024. It isn’t such a bad idea.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 20, 2015
“The Base Is Skeptical Of Both Men”: Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, And The Art Of Disagreeing With The Base
The race for the Republican nomination is full of potential candidates who could plausibly claim the mantle of the conservative movement’s electoral champion. Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz — they all want to speak for the right wing of the Republican Party.
Jeb Bush and Rand Paul, on the other hand, despite having plenty to offer base Republican voters, simply cannot check all the boxes of a median conservative-movement voter. Bush is a lead promoter of Common Core education standards. He supports a “path-to-citizenship” for illegal immigrants (known to Republicans as “amnesty”). Rand Paul, meanwhile, is significantly more dovish than the average Republican office-holder, and has tried to leverage his libertarian convictions to reach groups that don’t typically favor Republicans, namely young voters and African-Americans.
The base is skeptical of both men, and it’s not hard to see why. And so far, these two likely candidates have utilized extremely different strategies for selling themselves to suspicious conservative voters. Bush opts for open confrontation. Paul tries for appeasement.
Paul, a first-term senator from Kentucky, sometimes gives the impression that he can’t prevent himself from presenting the least-popular, most-controversy-generating libertarian convictions that lie in his heart. Where he succeeds in selling his rather unconventional non-interventionist and libertarian views to conservative audiences is when he can contrast them to either President Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. The most obvious example would be his opposition to intervention in Libya. Paul could argue to skeptical conservatives that in fact, his dovish position was the one consistently opposing the Obama-Clinton foreign policy agenda.
But in a scrum with Republicans, Paul has a harder time. He starts to fudge the differences between his position and that at the core of his party. For instance, his most devoted fans were completely flummoxed when Paul signed Sen. Tom Cotton’s blistering open letter to Iran about the negotiations. Justin Raimondo, the libertarian behind antiwar.com, called Paul “the Neville Chamberlain of the Liberty Movement.”
When first elected by a Tea Party swell, Paul proposed an idealistic libertarian-ish federal budget that cut off all foreign aid, including aid to Israel. But now, instead of arguing that cutting foreign aid makes good fiscal and foreign policy sense, Paul has repositioned himself in a way that gets part of the way to his goal, while ceding much rhetorically to the base. He has introduced legislation that would halt aid to the Palestinian Authority, calling it the “Stand with Israel Act.” This didn’t prevent critics from laughing at his unenthusiastic clapping for Benjamin Netanyahu.
While Paul tries to have it both ways, Bush’s approach has been to confront his critics head on. In an interview with Sean Hannity at CPAC, Bush adverted his views on immigration: “There is no plan to deport 11 million people.” (He did throw a bone in the direction of the movement right, saying, “A great country needs to enforce the borders.”)
When Bush is asked about Common Core, he doesn’t let himself get pulled into the weeds about individual curriculum choices that schools have been developing and making in response to the standards. Instead, he reframes Common Core as a common-sense effort at accountability in public education: “Raising expectations and having accurate assessments of where kids are is essential for success, and I’m not going to back down on that,” the former Florida governor said.
Some conservative commentators have interpreted Bush’s strategies as a a replay of Jon Huntsman’s base-baiting 2012 campaign. But Huntsman seemed to be uninterested in conservative support entirely. Bush’s rhetorical game might actually win their respect.
Bush doesn’t come to conservatives as Mitt Romney did, with a basket full of new convictions. Bush’s efforts to sell his positions to conservative voters is an implicit message that he wants conservatives to support him. It also helps that he keeps hiring political and activist figures who have a devoted following among the most conservative parts of the right.
Even if conservatives can’t get everything they want, they seem to appreciate knowing where the GOP candidate stands, and what they can expect from him. In a way, Bush is giving the movement a compliment by disagreeing forthrightly, and selling his position to them anyway. Paul, on the other hand, is doing his own convictions and his party a disservice by pretending their differences don’t really exist.
By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, March 17, 2015
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