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“Rubio’s Embargo Anger Plays To The Past”: Representing The Views Of Only The Most Reactionary Portion Of The Community

Is Marco Rubio the stupidest politician in Washington? Okay, probably not. The House of Representatives is bursting to the rafters with contenders for the title. But after watching Rubio’s comical response to the Cuba announcement, we should all begin to consider his credentials.

The Florida GOP senator stormed out of the gate Wednesday in the highest of dudgeons. “This president is the single worst negotiator we have had in the White House in my lifetime,” Rubio thundered, adding that Congress will never lift the embargo and that he will do all within his power to undo Barack Obama’s treachery. Grrrrr.

As Bugs Bunny used to say, what a maroon. Now I know, you think I’m being harsh, or that I’m simply wrong, because Rubio is from South Florida and of Cuban stock and I am neither of those things, so doesn’t he maybe know better than I? Actually, no, not this time. He is not reflecting here the views of the Cuban-American community of South Florida as they’ve been repeatedly expressed in polls. He is instead representing the views of only the most reactionary (and rapidly aging and, to be blunt about it, dying off) portion of that community. If he somehow finds himself running against Hillary Clinton in 2016, he—some 25 years her junior—will have masterfully turned the neat trick of being on the side of the past while she speaks to the future.

The polling that supports my contention is voluminous. The Cuban-American vote has changed dramatically in the last decade. In 2002, Pew found back in June, Cubans in the United States identified themselves as being Republicans over Democrats by a margin of 64 to 22 percent. By 2014, that advantage still existed but was statistically meaningless: 47 percent Republican, 44 percent Democratic. In 2012, Obama narrowly beat Mitt Romney among Florida Cubans, according to exit polls. Likewise, in this year’s gubernatorial race, Democrat Charlie Crist beat Republican incumbent Rick Scott among Cuban voters by 50-46 percent.

Get the picture? Things have changed, and seismically. The Florida Cuban vote simply is not very Republican anymore, and it’s not a conservative bloc. Now let’s look at those voters with specific reference to their views on Cuba.

The most comprehensive set of numbers comes to us from Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute, which has been polling on such questions for 20 years now. The institute put out new numbers just this past summer (PDF), and they are eye-popping. And this is a poll, remember, not of Latinos, or of Cuban-Americans across the country. This is 1,000 Cuban-Americans living in Miami-Dade County—the subgroup that we would expect to be the most anti-Castro one imaginable.

Start with the embargo. It’s close, but a majority opposed continuing it, by 52-48 percent. Most age cohorts still supported it, but those who left Cuba after 1995 were against the embargo by 58-42 percent. Eighteen-to-29 year olds wanted to end the embargo by a whopping 62-8 percent. And when the Pavlovian word “embargo” was dropped from the questioning and respondents were asked if the United States should expand commerce with Cuba in specific realms, the yeses were overwhelming: increase business relations, 76-24; sell more food, 77-23; sell more medicine, 82-18.

And how about the matter at hand, the restoration of diplomatic relations? Well, 68 percent favored, and 32 percent opposed. The only age cohort that came out against relations were those 65 and older; among those 64 and under, more than three-quarters supported full diplomacy.

So who is Rubio representing with his outrage? A shrinking and increasingly irrelevant sub-constituency that is understood by most Americans with awareness of the issue to have held our Cuba policy hostage quite long enough. And what deepens the mystery to me is what his hard-line position gets him.

Is it money? There’s money in the Cuban-American universe, certainly, but there’s Senate-race money, not presidential-race money. Is it their votes in a 2016 GOP presidential primary in the state? It could be that. I guess he feels he has to compete now with Jeb Bush for this vote, so he’s running around firing pistol shots into the air to prove he’s the real Castro-hater. But even there I wonder if the Cuban vote in Florida, even the Republican Cuban vote, is going to be strongly against this. By 2016, people will have had time to adjust to this, and they’ll see that the sky didn’t fall in. In fact, they might well see in these next two years that an influx of Yankee dollars and iPads and all the rest will have perhaps not toppled the regime but done more to open up the society than the hard line ever did.

Time will prove Rubio’s reaction to have been a major error. And it won’t be his first. He thought he’d roll the dice and be a leader on immigration, but it collapsed, and he got spanked by Laura Ingraham (metaphorically I mean!) and somersaulted to the safe reactionary position. Then he tried to win back some centrist cred with a few speeches on squish topics like community colleges, which is actually a fine thing to pay attention to and more people should, but the experts in the field whom I consult found his ideas to be reheated leftovers.

So now here he is, pandering to a constituency that by 2016 will be thinned and by 2020 functionally won’t exist. Compare to Rand Paul, who, as The Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi reports, came out in favor of the deal. And compare, as noted up top, to Secretary Clinton, who spent years quietly pushing a modernized Cuba policy. This is intelligence and vision. Rubio’s stance is pure cowardice.

And speaking of intelligence and vision, you’ve got to give it up for Obama on this one. If Syria is his foreign-policy low point—and it is; the butchery of the dictator with whom we have no gripe continues apace with little notice—then the Cuba shift is arguably his high point.

The highest form of political courage is doing the right thing when the mob is against it. This isn’t quite that, as the above polling shows. On the other hand, it’s not as if Americans were clamoring for this change. That’s a kind of courage, too: doing the right thing when the only people who really care are the ones who are going to despise you. But time and history will render an unambiguous verdict on this matter, as Rubio shall soon see.

 

By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 19, 2014

December 21, 2014 Posted by | Cuba, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Pretending They’ve Come To The Rescue”: Republicans To Play Blame Game On Obamacare Subsidies?

I’ve been saying for a while now that Republicans could be in a jam if the U.S. Supreme Court announces a decision in June invalidating the insurance premium subsidies for people living in the 36 states utilizing federally establishment exchanges under Obamacare, if only because the immediate impulse of rank-and-file conservatives will be to dance and sing even as millions are in danger of losing affordable health care coverage.

Perhaps behind the scenes conservatives are beginning to plan an education campaign to explain to The Troops via Fox News or other “trusted” sources why they can’t just let the subsidies die. Last week I noted that Ramesh Ponnuru had begun talking about Republicans agreeing to fix the subsidy problem while pivoting (presumably as part of some national “deal”) rapidly to an Obamacare “replacement.” But he didn’t sound terribly confident about selling this strategy to the GOP. Since we’re unlikely to find out where SCOTUS is going until June, there is time for sober reflection on the consequences of taking away the subsidies among a constituency that’s a lot more likely to include a lot of Republican voters than the subjects of a Medicaid expansion. The question is whether it can be effectively and quickly communicated to people who have been told since 2010 that the Affordable Care Act is the work of the devil.

Now one of Ramesh’s reformicon colleagues from National Review, Yuval Levin, has (with his collaborator on one of hte Obamacare “replacement” proposals, James Capretta) written a careful message to conservatives via the Wall Street Journal suggesting they get ahead of the curve:

In essence, if the court rules today’s subsidies illegal, those state officials could face a choice between creating a state exchange (and so reinforcing ObamaCare) or seeing some residents lose coverage they now have. ObamaCare’s opponents in Congress should give them a third option: a viable alternative to the Affordable Care Act.

The first step is to introduce legislation that would allow any state to opt out of all of ObamaCare’s mandates, regulations, taxes and requirements, and instead opt into a far simpler and more flexible alternative system. In that system, state residents not offered health coverage by their employers could receive a federally funded, age-based credit for the purchase of any state-approved health-insurance product—including those bought outside of any exchange and regardless of whether they meet ObamaCare’s coverage requirements.

Anyone who remains continuously insured in this system would be shielded from higher premiums or exclusions from coverage based on an existing condition. This would give consumers a strong incentive to buy coverage without a mandate to do so. All other insurance regulation, however, would happen at the state level.

States that opt for this approach would also be permitted to transform their Medicaid programs into premium-support systems for lower-income households. These would function as add-ons to the credit and allow eligible residents to buy the same kind of coverage everyone else can purchase.

The credit could be large enough to allow anyone to purchase at least catastrophic coverage—enabling the uninsured to be covered and everyone to be protected from the most extreme health expenses. Alternatively, it could be used to supplement the purchase of more comprehensive coverage. In essence, the credit would extend to everyone else the same benefit that many people have long received in the employer system. It would do so without disrupting the employer system, the coverage most Americans have.

What they are describing is pretty much the Burr-Coburn-Hatch “PCARE” proposal offered early this year as a suggested Obamacare “replacement,” with some transitional rules that would let Obamacare subsidies stay in place through the end of 2015. And they think Obama would be forced to accept something like this “solution” since otherwise he, not Republicans, will look like the one standing in the way of restored insurance for the people afflicted by the Court.

It’s all pretty clever, but a comment from Ponnuru shows its central flaw:

My only quibble is with the headline, “Time to Start Prepping ObamaCare Reforms.” What they’re talking about is better described as preparing an exit ramp from Obamacare.

Reforms, “exit ramp,” whatever. Such terms are meant to obscure the fact that such plans would keep Obamacare in place until such time as a new system could be implemented–again, before “the base” can make it all moot by forcing GOP policymakers to celebrate the carnage instead of repairing it. And if I know that and you know that, so too would the president, and I think it’s very predictable that well before congressional Republicans could be united behind such a proposal Obama would let them know the only non-disruptive course of action is to restore the intended subsidy system and then talk about what’s next. Pretending they’ve come to the rescue of people in danger of losing their health insurance by eliminating all the provisions that make it good coverage at an affordable price isn’t likely to work. But nice try.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, December 19, 2014

December 20, 2014 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, Republicans | , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

“Barack Obama, Set Free”: He Isn’t Going To Let These Last Two Years Go To Waste

Here’s a little blast from the recent past, a meeting of the minds between Bill O’Reilly and Brit Hume in October 2013:

O’Reilly asked Hume, “Is he just not interested? Is he bored with it? Is it deniability?”

Hume said that unlike some past presidents, Obama is “not a micromanager” and prefers to rely on others. O’Reilly charged that right now, Obama’s performance is so bad, he’s in “major trouble on the history front” and has to be “in the bottom ten” in a ranking of all the U.S. presidents.

This was a major theme in conservative and not-so-conservative media for quite some time: Obama is passive, he’s bored, he just doesn’t care anymore, he’s like a senior two weeks from graduation who just can’t wait to get it over with. Here’s a piece from June by Ron Fournier passing on complaints about Obama from anonymous Democrats, including “his disengagement from the political process and from the public.” “He’s bored and tired of being president,” Fournier cites one as saying. Not long after, Fox News actually took a poll asking people, “Do you think Barack Obama wants to be president anymore?”

I suppose that six months ago Obama might have been bored with some parts of his job. One certainly couldn’t blame him for being bored with the process of trying to get something out of Congress. But I always thought the charge was absurd. People do all kinds of armchair psychologizing of the president based on the occasional snippets they see of him in public, combined with the opinions they hear from other people who, like them, have no access to the actual person. I’m not saying I haven’t been guilty of that from time to time, but you have to be careful about imputing attributes and psychological states to him just based on whether you approve of the things he’s done or hasn’t done lately. And that’s what it usually comes down to.

But with today’s announcement that we’ll be undertaking a normalization of relations with Cuba—a mere 54 years after the embargo began—combined with other recent moves on immigration and climate change, Obama is looking pretty engaged. The approaching end of his term and the loss of both houses of Congress seem to have liberated him. While the Cuba deal was apparently in the works for many months, it wasn’t something in the headlines like immigration. Who knows how many other surprises Obama may have in store.

And while it’s true that there are limits to things the president can do just with executive action, this could be a new model for a way to use the bully pulpit. Obama can’t actually end the embargo entirely—that would require an act of Congress. But by taking some concrete action where he can, he’s forced the issue onto the agenda. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a move in Congress to finally bring the embargo to an end. For some time, there have been Democrats and Republicans who favored it; because of what Obama has done, they might have the opportunity to move that legislation forward. He could try to create the same kind of evolution in other areas.

In any case, the man certainly looks like he’s been set free. He doesn’t have to worry about getting reelected or about losing Congress (done both), so he can go back to see what fell off the to-do list and do things that he’s always wanted to, whether they were politically risky or not. This might be an interesting two years after all.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 18, 2014

December 19, 2014 Posted by | Cuba, Politics, President Obama | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“McCain vs. McCain On Cuba”: Whatever President Obama Supports, John McCain Opposes, Whether It Makes Sense Or Not

When Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) angrily disagrees with President Obama, it’s about as common as the sunrise. But when McCain reject his own views from a few years ago, something more important is happening.

Yesterday, for example, McCain issued a joint press statement with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), offering a rather predictable condemnation.

“We agree with President Obama that he is writing new chapters in American foreign policy. Unfortunately, today’s chapter, like the others before it, is one of America and the values we stand for in retreat and decline. It is about the appeasement of autocratic dictators, thugs, and adversaries, diminishing America’s influence in the world. Is it any wonder that under President Obama’s watch our enemies are emboldened and our friends demoralized?”

To be sure, the rhetoric is stale and tiresome. Almost all of this, practically word for word, has been a staple of McCain press releases for six years. The point is hardly subtle: when it comes to foreign policy and international affairs, whatever President Obama supports, John McCain opposes, whether it makes sense or not.

That’s not the interesting part. Rather, what McCain neglected to mention yesterday is the fact that he used to support the very changes the Obama White House announced yesterday.

In May 2008, the Arizona Republican was his party’s presidential nominee, and he traveled to Miami to endorse the same U.S. policy towards Cuba that’s been in place since 1960. The Wall Street Journal ran this report at the time, noting the degree to which McCain had “evolved” on the issue.

Sen. McCain’s stance on Cuba appears to have evolved since the 2000 presidential primaries, when he faced Mr. Bush, then the Texas governor. At the time, Mr. Bush played to the Cuban-American exile community and Mr. McCain acted the moderate, recalling his role in normalizing relations between the U.S. and Vietnam and saying the U.S. could lay out a similar road map with the regime.

What’s more, as long-time readers may recall, the Miami Herald reported in 1999 that McCain was the only Republican presidential candidate that cycle who believed “there could be room for negotiation on the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.”

A year later, McCain told CNN, “I’m not in favor of sticking my finger in the eye of Fidel Castro. In fact, I would favor a road map towards normalization of relations such as we presented to the Vietnamese and led to a normalization of relations between our two countries.”

Going back further, to 1994, McCain opposed cutting off remittances because it punished people “whose misfortune it is to live in tyranny.”

In other words, what McCain used to believe is largely the opposite of what McCain said yesterday. One can only speculate as to why the senator shifted – perhaps McCain reflexively opposes everything Obama supports, maybe he’s moved much further to the right in recent years, perhaps it’s a little of both – but the previous versions of the senator probably would have been quite impressed with the president’s announcement yesterday.

 

By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 18, 2014

December 19, 2014 Posted by | Cuba, Foreign Policy, John McCain | , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Forced To Take A Position”: On Cuba, GOP Presidential Hopefuls Trapped By Older Voters And The Past

For a guy who was supposed to be mired in unpopularity and bored with his job, Barack Obama is sure making life hard for Republicans, not to mention complicating their task in winning the White House in 2016. The Republican reaction to his decision to normalize relations with Cuba may have been exactly what everyone expected, but it shows just how trapped those who want to get the GOP presidential nomination are. They’re snared by the past, by the need to oppose everything that Obama does, and by what we might consider the base of their base — older voters for whom Cold War antagonisms still feel fresh, even as the rest of the country is leaving them behind.

Every Republican contender who found himself facing a microphone yesterday condemned the decision to normalize relations, none more so than Marco Rubio, who appeared on over a dozen TV programs to condemn it. While there’s no doubt that Rubio’s position is sincere (he’s the child of Cuban immigrants), consider what position you’d be in if you were a GOP contender who actually thought this move was overdue. While both parties have supported the embargo and a policy of unceasing antagonism toward the Castro regime for decades, your party held that belief particularly close to its heart. In order to win the nomination, you’re going to need the support of lots of older voters. For them, the Cold War defined their political coming-of-age and most of their lives. Vigorous anti-communism was at the core of what it meant to be a conservative, along with support for low taxes, small government, and traditional social values. Their kids and grandkids may see opposition to communism as an issue that’s in the past, but it’s still important to the way those older voters think about the world.

This means that while some Republican politicians (like Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona) may support normalizing relations, if you want to get the GOP presidential nomination, it just isn’t an option. And that’s despite the fact that not only is normalization supported by a majority of Americans, but also in some polls even a majority of Republicans support it, or if not a majority then nearly so. For instance, in this 2009 Gallup poll (they haven’t asked recently), 42 percent of Republicans supported re-establishing diplomatic relations, 44 percent supported ending the trade embargo, and 57 percent supported ending travel restrictions. Or look at this poll from the bipartisan Atlantic Council earlier this year:

As on many other issues, the passage of time and the change of generations make a move away from the traditional Republican position all but inevitable. Even a majority of Cuban-Americans in Florida now support ending the embargo. In the time period in which so many Republicans still live psychologically — the 1980s, when Reagan was president, we knew who our enemies were, and everything was going great — such a thing would have been inconceivable. It’s happening because the children and grandchildren of those who fled Castro’s regime don’t have the same intense feelings that the immigrant generation had, and they don’t see what continuing Cuba’s isolation will accomplish.

Despite these changes in the broader population and among Republican voters in particular, a candidate seeking the presidential nomination can’t take the risk of alienating the older voters who will play such a key role in the GOP primaries. And by bringing the issue to the front pages and the top of the policy agenda, Barack Obama has forced them to loudly take a position that will hurt whoever the nominee is in the general election. Not bad for a lame duck.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, December 18, 2014

December 19, 2014 Posted by | Cuba, GOP Presidential Candidates, Marco Rubio | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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