“Leaving Republicans Even Deeper In The Trap”: Obama Didn’t Give Republicans The Speech They Wanted
My initial impressions of the State of the Union Address and Joni Ernst’s official GOP Response were posted last night beginning a bit before the 9:00 EST start time, if you’re interested. The next day I continue to be impressed with Obama’s success in wrong-footing Republicans with this speech, changing what could have been a nasty scene of GOP triumphalism over a president begging for “relevance” into an occasion when they looked to be bystanders.
That’s the topic of my TPMCafe column on the speech, which was written late in the night. But I’d say my impressions were best confirmed by the day-after reactions of the conservative commentariat, which in a word are petulant. A case in point is from Byron York, who generally tries to act like a reporter, not a pure partisan pundit. But his Washington Examiner column today is a long whine:
Perhaps the most striking thing about the 2015 State of the Union address was not the president at the podium but the audience in the seats. The joint session of Congress listening to President Obama Tuesday night included 83 fewer Democrats than the group that heard Obama’s first address in 2009 — 69 fewer Democrats in the House and 14 fewer in the Senate. The scene in the House Chamber was a graphic reminder of the terrible toll the Obama years have taken on Capitol Hill Democrats.
Not that the president would ever acknowledge that. Indeed, in more than an hour of speaking, Obama never once acknowledged that there was a big election in November and that the leadership of the Senate has changed. Obama’s silence on that political reality stood in stark contrast to George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address, in which he graciously and at some length acknowledged the Democrats’ victory in the 2006 midterms. Bush said it was an honor to address Nancy Pelosi as “Madam Speaker.” He spoke of the pride Pelosi’s late father would have felt to see his daughter lead the House. “I congratulate the new Democrat majority,” Bush said. “Congress has changed, but not our responsibilities.”
If one cannot imagine Obama saying such a thing — well, he didn’t.
Aside from the hilarious implied suggestion here that Obama should have done some sort of “gracious” shout-out to Mitch McConnell, the man more responsible than any other for the obstructionist tactics of the GOP from the day Obama would first elected, York is reflecting the apparent anticipation of conservatives that Obama would crawl to the podium for this speech and spend an hour or so of national television time identifying issues on which the two parties could achieve “common ground,” which GOPers could then deride as too little and too late. And that’s why they are particularly infuriated by his apparent ad lib (though I thought it looked more like a planned trap given the predictable Republican applause at his remarks that his own elections were in the rear-view mirror) reminder that he’s been elected twice.
In conservative-land, you see, Obama’s first election was a fluke and his second a calamitous accident, both canceled by the ensuring midterms and both destined to be remembered as incidental interruptions of the Long March of Movement Conservatism towards total power. The idea that 2008 and 2012 are just as significant as 2010 and 2014 (maybe a bit more significant insofar as far more Americans participated) is outrageous to the Right, and so Obama mentioning them was the defiant act of a political nonentity.
Beyond that, the basic framing of Obama’s remarks on the economy left Republicans even deeper in the trap they’ve been in ever since conditions began improving. The main criticism available to them for the performance of the economy is the one Democrats (and Obama himself) have been articulated: sluggish wage growth and growing inequality. But Republicans have little or no agenda to deal with that beyond the usual engorge-the-job-creators stuff dressed up with attacks on the few corporate welfare accounts they’ve agreed to oppose, and then the Keystone XL Pipeline. On this last point, Obama was very clever in dismissing Keystone as one controversial infrastructure project we’re spending too much time fighting over as hundreds of others languish. It made Joni Ernst’s plodding Official Response sound all the more foolish for spending so much time on that one project.
The underlying reality was nicely captured by TNR”s Brian Beutler:
If Mitt Romney had won the presidency in 2012 and caught the wave of economic growth we’re now experiencing—after cutting both income taxes and domestic spending, and eliminating the Affordable Care Act—conservatives would have draped him in Reagan’s cloak, and the public would have warmed once again to the kinds of policies that George W. Bush’s presidency briefly discredited.
Or as Ezra Klein put it:
Imagine if Mitt Romney was giving the State of the Union address amidst these economic numbers. The cheering wouldn’t stop long enough to let him speak.
No wonder Republicans are still sore about 2012, and can’t decide whether to regard Mitt as the Great President Who Should Have Been or the bozo who couldn’t seal the deal.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 23, 2015
“More Rancid Red Meat”: For Republicans, Muslims Will Be The Gays of 2016
Now that Republicans realize that the fight over gay marriage is over, they’re pivoting back to the old reliable: Muslims. It’s true that Muslim-bashing among Republicans is hardly new, but I think that as 2016 approaches we’re going to see even more of it as candidates try to outflank one another.
The latest example was LouisianaGovernor’s Bobby Jindal’s speech on Monday in London. Jindal told the audience that there are “no-go zones” in Europe where Muslims have in essence carved out Islamic “autonomous” zones that are ruled by Koranic law and where non-Muslims fear to tread. His point, of course, was to warn Americans that Muslims could try the same thing in the United States.
Now if that concept sounds familiar it’s because last week Fox News served up this same rancid red meat to its viewers. Some Fox News anchors claimed these so-called “no-go zones” existed in parts of France. And Fox News’ terrorism “expert” Steve Emerson even went as far as to say that Birmingham, England, the nation’s second biggest city with more than one million people, was a “totally Muslim city where non-Muslims don’t go in.”
The backlash to these comments was swift. Even British Prime Minster David Cameron responded, “When I heard this, frankly, I choked on my porridge and I thought it must be April Fools Day. This guy is clearly a complete idiot.”
Fox News stirring up fear of Muslims is nothing new. In fact, in my view it’s part of Fox’s business model since its viewers hold the most negative views of Muslims of any cable news audience. Fox is simply giving their viewers what they want to see.
But a few days ago, Fox did something truly shocking. They apologized for making the claims about Muslim-controlled “no-go zones” in Europe. In fact, they apologized not once, but four times, and admitted unequivocally that these “no-go zones” don’t even exist.
Yet even though the Fox retractions occurred days before Jindal delivered his speech, that didn’t stop him from asserting the same baseless claims. After his speech, Jindal was asked by a CNN reporter for specifics on where exactly these “no-go zones “are located. Jindal, in what looked almost like a sketch from Saturday Night Live, hemmed and hawed, finally responding: “I think your viewers know.”
For those unfamiliar with Jindal, he’s no Louie Gohmert. He’s an Ivy League graduate and a Rhodes scholar. Jindal’s remarks were not a mistake, but rather part of a calculated strategy to garner support from more conservative Republicans for an expected2016 presidential run.
Now, in the past, candidates trying to garner support from these right wing voters could use opposition to gay marriage to curry favor. As conservative James Kirchick noted in an article he penned for The Wall Street Journal in 2008, the Republican Party has a long history of its candidates using not just opposition to gay marriage, but also anti-gay rhetoric to attract support from the GOP Base. Kirchick went on to urge Republicans to “kiss gay-bashing goodbye.”
But we still saw this bigotry in the 2012 race. For example, Rick Perry ran a campaign commercial that said you know “there’s something wrong with this country when gays can openly serve in the military.”
Polls, however, now show a majority of Americans support gay marriage. And even the Mike Huckabees of the GOP would have to admit that after the Supreme Court announced Friday that it is considering the constitutionality of same-sex marriage this term, gay marriage will likely soon be the law of the land. Bottom line: gay marriage will probably be dead as an issue capable of rallying conservative voters.
So what do you do if you are a Republican candidate seeking conservative votes? Simple. Bash Muslims. We are truly an easy target. First, Muslims are a small percentage of our nation’s population at approximately 1 to 2 percent. Second, there are horrible Muslims who do commit terror in the name of our faith, which does offer cover for anti-Muslim bigotry. Third, we still don’t have many allies outside of our community that stand with us.
Sure, we have some interfaith supporters. But when ant-gay comments are made, like in the case of “Duck Dynasty’s” Phil Roberson in 2013, the response by the left was swift and united. But with anti-Muslim bigotry, we don’t see that. We see silence from many on the left, including from most Democratic elected officials. And worse, we see some outright anti-Muslim fear mongering by so-called liberals like Bill Maher.
If I’m right, what can we expect to see as the 2016 presidential race heats up? More speeches like Jindal’s designed to stir up fear with no factual support. His remarks were applauded by conservative Larry Kudlow in The National Review.
Even more comments like the ones recently made by Oklahoma State Representative John Bennett that Muslims are a “cancer” that must be cut of our country and that Muslim-Americans are not loyal to the United States but to the “constitution of Islam.” Bennett received a standing ovation from the conservative audience that heard these remarks, and the Oklahoma GOP Chair even backed him up.
And possibly even more comments like the one made by newly sworn in member of Congress Jody Hice who stated that Islam is not a religion and doesn’t deserve First Amendment protection. Was there any backlash from GOP leaders to this remarks? Nope, in fact people like Red States’ Erick Erickson even spoke at one of his fundraisers and wrote he was “proud to support” Hice.
This is a far cry from the 2008 presidential race when John McCain countered anti-Muslim remarks made by a supporter at one of his campaign rallies.
My hope is that I’m wrong. But after seeing close to a thousand people over the weekend protesting a Muslim-American event in Texas that was ironically organized to counter extremism, I’m not so optimistic.
The more conservative parts of the GOP base tend to vote in higher numbers in the primaries. So don’t’ be surprised when you see Republican candidates trying to get their attention with this cut of red meat.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, January 21, 2015
“Everybody Over 40 Has A Little Back Pain”: Watch Out, Grandpa! Republicans Are Coming For Your Social Security
Hey, Rand Paul, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?
Last week, the junior senator from Kentucky mocked people on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSD), suggesting their ailments are not worthy:
What I tell people is, if you look like me and you hop out of your truck, you shouldn’t be getting your disability check. Over half of the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts. Join the club… Who doesn’t get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts. Everybody over 40 has a little back pain. [Huffington Post]
This is just the prelude to the GOP’s plan to roll back the whole of Social Security. Paul’s remarks are part of a PR campaign to portray the program as riddled with lazy deadbeats and cheats.
Don’t believe me? Earlier this month, the Republican Congress adopted a rule change regarding the disability portion of Social Security. It has occasionally run short of money, which last happened in 1994 and will happen again in late 2016. Typically, the disability side is topped up with money from the (much larger) general Social Security funds. But Republicans have changed the rules to prevent this, which means disability payments will be cut by a fifth when the money runs out.
Now, they’re beginning to argue this is a great time to “reform” the system as a whole:
One of the co-sponsors of the rule change, Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY), said that his intention was to “force us to look for a long-term solution” to the disability program. But the rule itself says it will allow a revenue transfer if the “overall health” of Social Security, encompassing both the retirement and disability programs, is improved. That’s what Democrats are warning about, but some conservative analysts who have consulted with House staffers are also hoping that the GOP uses the threat of benefits cuts to go big. [Talking Points Memo]
If you examine the history of conservative animosity towards Social Security, as Dylan Scott does in a great piece, the long game here is obvious. Conservatives hated the program when it started, tried to abolish it for a generation, rolled it back slightly when it became firmly politically entrenched, and tried to privatize it in the Bush years. Conservative activists have been plotting this move for years.
The political entrenchment of Social Security explains the slyness of their tactics today. Social Security is one of the most popular programs in the country, and attempting to privatize it was a political disaster for Bush. Thus, passing bill after bill scrapping the program altogether a la ObamaCare would be committing political suicide. Much better to use a manufactured funding crisis to force a complicated political bargain that most people don’t understand. Better still to maneuver Democrats into accepting cuts, and then blame them for it and run against them on the issue.
Let’s look at the policy. Are conservatives right about SSDI being riddled with fraud, as an episode of This American Life squirmily argued two years ago? They are not. As a Center for Budget and Policy Priorities analysis shows, the increase in disability payments is mainly due to demographic factors. There is little fraud in the program (in reality, a large majority of applicants are rejected). The program doesn’t pay out much per beneficiary. And the general Social Security fund can top up the disability fund with only a tiny overall effect.
How about Social Security in general? Contrary to Republican anti-tax zealotry, the problem with Social Security is that it is not nearly generous enough. American retirement security used to rest on pensions, the 401(k) system, and Social Security. The first of those is almost dead, the second has been an utter failure, and the third is simply not big enough to provide a genuine retirement for most people. Boosting the program substantially would be simple and good policy.
Many years ago, it was widely accepted that as our country got richer, we could afford to work less as a whole. Disabled people could be kept out of poverty, and old people could retire. But conservatives are increasingly abandoning this idea. There is no reason Paul’s logic about the disabled couldn’t be applied to retirees, too. Can your grandma stack shelves at Walmart? Maybe she should, the lazy parasite.
In reality, we can easily afford to boost Social Security. Indeed, we can easily afford to eliminate poverty altogether. That we don’t is a political choice, nothing more.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, January 20, 2015
“Republican Fear Campaign Running Out Of Steam”: Obama Dares GOP To Help The Middle Class In His State Of The Union
Can you remember a time when the political zeitgeist has ping-ponged the way ours has in just two months? The day after last November’s election, Barack Obama was finished. Now, two positive jobs reports and a 60-odd-cent-per-gallon drop in gasoline prices later, he’s the president again. And the Republicans have just taken power and have run Congress for only two weeks, but suddenly they’re kind of on the defensive.
Of course this isn’t to say that Obama is going to get a single plank of the ambitious agenda he laid out in the State of the Union Address through Congress. The Republicans still hold those cards.
But what’s happened in the last couple of months, and what Obama seized effectively with this speech, is this. The mood has changed. The public is open to ideas it wasn’t open to a year ago; even two months ago.
Politics in this country is really about only one thing at a time, and that one thing favors one party or the other. In 1981 and for a few years thereafter, it was about how oppressive the federal government was. Advantage Republicans. For a short time in the late 1980s, it was about how we’d vanquished the Soviet Union (and won a little side war). Advantage Republicans.
For a while in the 1990s, it was about building a future-oriented economy. Advantage Democrats. After 9/11, it was about security. Advantage Republicans. And so on. It’s a little more complicated than this, because thrown into these cycles we have the scandals and the social changes that all have some impact on how people think about things, but basically, this is how American politics rolls: We go through these eras, and the eras make the majority of people decide that one party or the other is better equipped to do something about the challenges.
And now, we seem to be—seem to be—entering an era in which the chief debate is going to be about expanding prosperity downward from the people who’ve enjoyed the lion’s share of the prosperity of the last 30 years. Not positive about that. But that’s the smell. Look at all those minimum-wage initiatives that passed on ballots last November, passed even by a comparatively conservative electorate. Look at Mitt Romney talking empathetically in recent days about the people he didn’t seem to care much about in 2012. Something has turned.
Obama has helped turn it—with a few speeches over the years, and certainly with some of his policies, like health care, which he defended in an impressively in-your-face way in this speech. But even a president can’t turn it himself. He needs luck. And finally he’s had some—the gas prices, the energy explosion, the jobs reports, all of them culminating in a sunnier public mood.
All that adds up to an atmosphere in which a majority of Americans are finally starting to add two and two and get four. The Republicans didn’t give them much. The Great Recession, most notably. Obama, to most of them, still hasn’t given them all that much either, but at least we’re out of that mess and things are finally looking up.
And when things are looking up, people are less anxious, and they can start thinking about things like free community college. In lousy economic times, free community college sounds to your average person like a bunch of airy-fairy liberal nonsense. Like something they’re going to be stuck paying for. In better economic times, it sounds to your average person like a not-half-bad idea, and something they or someone they know might even benefit from.
It’s all public psychology. We liberals have a hard time accepting this. That’s because of Keynes. Keynes, see, has taught us the concept of counter-cyclical investment: that when the economy is in dire straits, that is exactly when the government should be spending a boatload of money. It makes economic sense, to people who read a lot. But to average people, it doesn’t make any common sense. Common sense tells average people that when the economy is in dire straits, you tighten your belt and spend less. This is right for a family, but wrong for a government, which is the opposite of a family, economically speaking. And Lord did it infuriate liberals when Obama himself played into it. He gave these speeches—what, 2010, maybe—when he likened the government to a family sitting around the kitchen table deciding what expenses it needed to cut out.
No! Wrong, wrong, wrong, in economic terms. But in real-life political terms, he was right at least insofar as you can’t get people to think about longer-term economic goals when they’re out of a job, or underemployed. But once that’s turned, you can.
That is what’s turning now—not turned, but turning. And that is what is about to make our political conversation be about this new one thing: sharing the prosperity. The speech was not a great speech, a speech for the ages; but it did understand that, and it did tap into that. People are now willing to start thinking about longer-term economic goals. A quickie CNN poll found that the speech was extremely well-received: 51 percent very positive, 30 percent somewhat positive, only 18 percent negative.
That really should worry Republicans, no matter how many seats they have in Congress. Our politics is becoming about one big thing on which the Republicans have nothing to say. Actually, they do have something to say, and it’s “No!” They looked ridiculous, sitting on their hands, refusing to applaud simple and obvious things that have 60, 65 percent public support. I have a feeling more such moments await them.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 21, 2015
“One Presidential Speech, Many GOP Responses”: There Is No Clear Leadership In The Republican Party
Not too long ago, a president would deliver a State of the Union address… and that was it. Much of the country would see the speech, pundits would talk about it, and either the political world would respond favorably or it wouldn’t.
In the 1960s, Republicans decided it wasn’t entirely fair for a president to have all the fun, and the official State of the Union response was born.
But in the Obama era, as GOP politics went off the deep end, the number of speeches on the big night proliferated. Last year, in addition to President Obama’s actual SOTU, there was an official Republican response, an official Republican Spanish-language response, a Tea Party response, Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) self-indulgent response, and a “prebuttal” from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) because, well, why the heck not.
This year, the fact that Republicans tapped Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) for the party’s official response seemingly negated the need for competing conservative voices – Ernst is, after all, one of the most frighteningly right-wing senators in a generation. Why bother with a Tea Party response if the Republican address will be delivered by arguably the most radical voice in the Senate?
Apparently, that didn’t matter.
Rep. Curt Clawson (R-Fla.) will deliver the tea party’s response to President Barack Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address, the Tea Party Express announced Thursday.
“2015 marks a year of new beginnings for the Tea Party movement,” Tea Party Express executive director Taylor Budowich said in a statement. “These new Tea Party members of Congress are brimming with ideas to make America economically stronger with opportunity for all to realize the American Dream. We are honored to present Florida Congressman Curt Clawson, the first Tea Party Express victory for the 2014 cycle, as someone committed to making Congress deliver for the American people.”
To appreciate what makes the selection interesting, consider the impression Congressman Clawson has made over the course of his brief, seven-month career on Capitol Hill.
As Rachel noted on the show last night, it was Clawson who spoke to senior officials from the U.S. State Department and Commerce Department during a House Foreign Affairs Committee last July. Despite the fact that the officials are Americans representing the Obama administration – they were even introduced as former aides on the House Foreign Affairs Committee itself – Clawson assumed the Indian-American witnesses were literally officials from India.
“I’m familiar with your country; I love your country,” the Florida Republican said. When one of the U.S. officials gently tried to explain that they’re Americans working for the U.S. federal government, Clawson ignored the cues and stuck to his faulty assumptions. He later apologized.
Two weeks ago, Clawson raised eyebrows again, casting a vote for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) – yes that Rand Paul – to be Speaker of the House. That the Kentucky senator is not a member of the House apparently didn’t bother the congressman.
And now he’s the guy delivering a response to the State of the Union address, along with Ernst. (Freshman Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) is delivering the Republicans’ Spanish-language response, which will reportedly mirror the substance of Ernst’s speech.)
As we talked about last year at this time, let’s not forget that there used to be one Republican response because the party wouldn’t tolerate any other scenario. GOP lawmakers who deliberately chose to step on – or worse, contradict – their party’s scripted message risked raising the ire of party leaders and insiders. Only one SOTU response was given because no Republican in Congress would dare challenge – or even think to challenge – the party’s message operation.
Those norms have collapsed. “There is no clear leadership in the Republican Party right now, no clear direction or message, and no way to enforce discipline,” Mark McKinnon, a veteran Republican strategist, said last year. “And because there’s a vacuum, and no shortage of cameras, there are plenty of actors happy to audition.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 21, 2015
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