“There Are Definitely People Jumping Ship”: The Republican Party Poobahs Are On The Brink Of Panic
Gov. Chris Christie (R) is scheduled to attend some political events in Florida over the weekend, where he’ll connect with Gov. Rick Scott (R). (The two will not appear in public with one another, raising questions as to which one might be more embarrassed by the other.)
The New Jersey governor will not necessarily receive a warm welcome from every Republican in the Sunshine State. Brian Ballard, Mitt Romney’s Florida finance chairman in 2012 and a major Rick Scott fundraiser, told the Wall Street Journal he sees Christie as a “colossal ego” and a “maniacal bully,” traits he said would make Christie “too dangerous to be our nominee.”
And in response, the governor’s aides sent theWall Street Journal a 5,600-word collection of positive remarks from Republicans and conservative commentators – evidence, a spokesman said, “of an outpouring of support across the country.”
So, who’s right? Is Brian Ballard’s criticism an aberration against the backdrop of a party that broadly supports Christie or are those negative sentiments more widely held? McKay Coppins has an interesting report suggesting, at a minimum, GOP trepidation. Indeed, Coppins talked with “a dozen party officials, fundraisers, and strategists,” and found “party poobahs … on the brink of panic.”
“My sense is they’re hoping against hope there aren’t more shoes to drop,” said Keith Appell, a Republican strategist with ties to the tea party who has been critical of Christie’s moderate streak. “They really want to support him … but they can’t control anything if another shoe drops.”
A Republican operative at a large super PAC used the same metaphor – a favorite among political observers at the moment – to describe the unease in the party.
“Everyone thinks there’s probably a 60% chance the other shoe will drop,” said the operative, who like many of the people quoted in this story, requested anonymity to speak freely about a situation that is still evolving. “When I saw the press conference, I said, I don’t think he’s lying… But for the deputy chief of staff to do something like that requires a culture in the office that he would have set, and it probably requires other examples that would have made her feel like that was acceptable to do.” He added, “My gut is that they’ll probably find something else.”
Coppins talked to one Republican fundraising operative who has met with Christie who said of donors, “There are definitely people jumping ship.”
This afternoon’s news probably won’t help matters.
Because today, some subpoenas landed in some interesting hands.
The state Assembly committee investigating the George Washington Bridge scandal released a partial list of names of the 17 high-level Port Authority and Christie administration officials who received subpoenas within the last 24 hours.
The subpoenas request documents concerning: “All aspects of the finances, operations and management of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey , including but not limited to, the reassignment of access lanes in Fort Lee, N.J. to the George Washington Bridge, and any other matter raising concerns about of abuse of power.”
Among those subpoenaed? The Office of the Governor, in addition to Christie’s spokesperson, communications director, incoming chief of staff, and former chief of staff (who now also happens to be the governor’s nominee for state attorney general).
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 17, 2014
“The Same Tired Arguments”: Paul Ryan’s Proposed War On Poverty Is Hobbled By Conservative Ideology
On Monday, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan gave a brief address on poverty and economic mobility at the Brookings Institute. His goal? To present the GOP as a party committed to alleviating poverty. And he gestured toward ideas—straightforward cash payments and an end to means-testing—that would sit well with liberals.
But his rhetoric revealed the extent to which this concern for poverty is still bound by the right-wing, anti-government ideology that drove his budget blueprints, and continue to dominate the Republican Party.
To wit, during the question and answer session, Ryan chose to distance himself from the phrase “compassionate conservatism.” “I don’t like that term or the premise of it,” said Ryan, “Since it presumes that conservatism itself isn’t compassionate. I believe conservatism, or what I call classical liberalism, is the most compassionate form of government because it respects the individual.”
Ryan wants to present this as a kind of reform conservatism, but it’s too similar to what he’s offered before, and what we’ve seen from Republicans in the past. Indeed, like many of his predecessors, he sees existing anti-poverty programs as ineffective—despite evidence to the contrary—and the War on Poverty as a failure. “Just as government can increase opportunity, government can destroy it as well. And perhaps, there’s no better example of how government can miss the mark is LBJ’s War on Poverty.”
Why has the government missed the mark? Because it doesn’t understand that poverty is “isolation” from civil society as well as “deprivation.” To bring the poor back to their communities, Ryan wants to eliminate the “hodgepodge” of existing programs and craft a “simpler” system that provides straightforward cash transfers. He doesn’t offer any detail, but when you consider these critiques in the broader context of the GOP, it’s clear what he means: “Reforms” that would reduce spending and redirect what’s left to smaller, state-controlled programs that would be at risk of additional cuts.
Indeed, what Ryan has offered is a more attractive version of the GOP’s long-standing narrative on poverty: That it has as much to do with individual choices as it does anything else, and facilitating better choices—though marriage promotion, job training, and other programs that enhance civil society—is the core job for government.
This gets to a core divide that makes poverty a tough topic for liberals and conservatives. The former see poverty as the product of structural economic and social forces that create certain incentives and shape individual behavior. People can make bad choices, yes, but they play out differently depending on where you stand in the structure. A lazy, irresponsible rich kid can still become a stable professional, a lazy, irresponsible poor kid might find himself in jail.
Conservatives, on the other hand, are less likely to acknowledge the role of environment, and more likely to focus on choices. Yes, you can be trapped in poverty by circumstances beyond your control, but if you make the right decisions—get educated, get married, have kids—then you’re likely to escape, or at least create the conditions for your children to escape.
Speaking as a liberal, there seems to be a real limit to what the Wisconsin congressman—or any Republican—can do. An anti-poverty agenda that focuses on individual behavior and individual communities is one that can’t accommodate the fact of systemic discrimination and deep racial inequality—two realities that shape the physical and human geography of poverty.
In other words, while I think Ryan is sincere about wanting to alleviate poverty, but he’s bound by an ideology—and a party—that doesn’t want to acknowledge the role that structure plays in all of this, and remains committed to a vision of government that isn’t equipped to deal with those kind of problems.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, January 14, 2014
“Arguing In The Alternative”: The Nefarious Conservative Conspiracy To Save Obamacare
Like me, you were probably under the impression that bashing Obamacare was a party-wide Republican obsession and pretty much the GOP’s central talking point for 2014. That made sense not so much because it’s a big general election crowd pleaser, but because it’s proved to be the most effective Republican Establishment prophylactic device for keeping the Tea Folk from wreaking havoc in Congress. You know: “Get out of the way and let Obamacare collapse of its own weight.”
But no, Erick Erickson knows better. Behind all the rhetoric, he perceives a GOP conspiracy to undercut conservative opposition to Obamacare:
Conservative and Republican affiliated groups have started the 2014 assault against Democrats who support Obamacare. At the very same time, it is increasingly clear Republicans are laying the groundwork to abandon their opposition to Obamacare.
The Business Roundtable, which has a great relationship with Republican Leaders, is now listing Obamacare as an entitlement worth preserving.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former economic advisor to John McCain and who opposed passage of Obamacare, has started a think tank premised on keeping, but fixing, Obamacare. Holtz-Eakin has the ear of Republican leaders. In 2009, Mitch McConnell appointed him to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
The Chamber of Commerce is declaring it will work to fix, not repeal, Obamacare. In fact, just last week the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said, “The administration is obviously committed to keeping the law in place, so the chamber has been working pragmatically to fix those parts of Obamacare that can be fixed.”
Concurrent to this, the Chamber of Commerce has begun funding candidates to beat conservatives in Republican primaries.
I guess Erickson has never heard of the concept of “arguing in the alternative,” by which prudent opponents of a proposition or program develop a fall-back position of accepting it but arguing for a different way of interpreting or implementing it.
It is true that Holtz-Eakin along with Avik Roy penned a column nearly a year ago arguing that Obamacare might actually be an effective platform for achieving larger conservative health policy goals such as the privatization of insurance and service delivery under Medicaid and Medicare. It’s pretty much the mirror image of the belief of many single-payer advocates that the Affordable Care Act (particularly if it had included a strong public option) might pave the way to their own health care nirvana.
Still, the “Plan B” approach to Obamacare is an exotic plant being tended in exotic hothouses of conservative think-tankery. What Erickson’s doing is to insinuate that any business group that in any way resists the intra-Republican power of Obamacare-obsessed groups or individuals is secretly plotting to embed the ACA permanently into the American governing landscape.
The Republican Main Street Partnership, headed by former Congressman LaTourette — who is a friend of Speaker John Boehner — is working with the Chamber and party leaders to target conservatives the party leadership finds troublesome. LaTourette has been parroting talking points from the National Republican Senatorial Committee about the Senate Conservatives Fund, Club for Growth, and others.
Ben Sasse, the conservative candidate in Nebraska on the most recent cover of National Review and who has the backing of the Senate Conservatives Fund, RedState, and others, suddenly finds Mitch McConnell and the NRSC holding fundraisers for his opponent. Sasse, it should be noted, is widely considered a brainiac opponent of Obamacare and healthcare policy expert.
This “anybody in my way supports Obamacare” is reminiscent of the old southern segregationist tactic of accusing all political enemies on any subject of being secret race-mixers. (One corruption-tainted Georgia governor of the 1950s, Marvin Griffin, deployed what a political journalist called the “If You Ain’t For Stealing, You Ain’t For Segregation” argument). It’s the most lethal weapon Erickson can use. But it’s not terribly convincing at a time when Republicans of every hue from coast to coast are grinding away like cicadas at the anti-Obamacare message.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animan, January 16, 2014
“The Trouble With Christie”: It’s More Than Ordinary Narcissism
I was there in Tampa in August, 2012, for Governor Chris Christie’s keynote address at the Republican National Convention, and from the first line I knew this guy was trouble: “Well! This stage and this moment are very improbable for me.” For twenty-four overwrought minutes, Christie spoke, proudly, glowingly, about the subject that really gets him fired up, which is himself—how he always faces the hard truths; how he wants to be respected more than loved; how, of his two parents, he’s much more like his tough, brutally honest Sicilian mother (“I am her son!”) than like his good-hearted, lovable Irish father. It was later observed that the Governor almost forgot to mention the Party’s Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, whose nomination Christie was in Tampa to kick off; less widely remarked was that he also practically disowned his sole surviving parent, who was in the audience listening, and presumably didn’t mind.
The trouble with Christie has to do with more than ordinary narcissism, which, after all, is practically an entry requirement for a political career. When Barack Obama used to tell crowds during the 2008 campaign, “This is not about me. It’s about you,” I always interpreted the words to mean that it actually was about him. But Obama, whose ego is so securely under control that his self-sufficiency has become a point of criticism among Washington pundits, would never devote more than a paragraph to his own personality (as opposed to his biography)—which was the subject not just of Christie’s convention keynote speech but of his entire political career. What struck me in Tampa even more than his self-infatuated lyrics was the score they were set to—the particular combination of bluster, self-pity, sentimentality, and inextinguishable hostility wrapped in appeals to higher things. (After declaring that Democrats “believe the American people are content to live the lie with them,” Christie waved the flag of bipartisanship, saying, “We lose when we play along with their game of scaring and dividing.”) Those are dangerously combustible elements in a political personality. Americans older than fifty are all too familiar with them.
The engineered traffic nightmare in Fort Lee, New Jersey, is, of course, being called Bridgegate. The suffix has been used, overused, and misused for almost every political scandal since a “third-rate burglary” at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters on the night of June 16, 1972. In the case of Bridgegate, there are several key limiting factors. It’s a state scandal, not a national one. A potential Presidency might be at stake, but not an actual one. No evidence ties the Governor directly to the havoc visited on one of New Jersey’s five hundred and sixty-six municipalities—not yet, anyway. On the scale of Teapot Dome and Iran-Contra and even Monica, the four-day closing of two approach lanes to the George Washington Bridge is very minor league.
So why do I keep having flashbacks to 1972? Some of the parallels are weirdly exact. Whether or not he ordered the Watergate bugging, Richard Nixon ran a campaign of dirty tricks for two reasons: he wanted to run up the score going into his second term, and he was a supremely mean-spirited man. Nixon’s reëlection campaign reached out to as many Democrats as possible (not just elected officials but rank-and-file blue-collar workers and Catholics). Nixon ran not as the Republican Party’s leader but, in the words of his bumper sticker, as just “President Nixon.” His landslide win over George McGovern translated into no Republican advantage in congressional races—the Democrats more than held their own. The Washington Post’s David Broder later called it “an extraordinarily selfish victory.”
Christie’s 2013 reëlection tracks closely with this story: an all-out effort to court Democrats in order to maximize his personal power, and a landslide victory in November, with all the benefit going to the Governor, not to his fellow-Republicans in the state legislature. On Christmas, the Times published a piece about Christie’s long record of bullying and retribution. In it, the Fort Lee traffic jam was mentioned as just one of many cases (and, I have to admit, not the one that stayed with me) of vengefulness so petty that it inescapably called to mind the American President who incarnated that quality, and was brought down by it.
In the e-mails that went public last week when the scandal broke, the tone of Christie’s aides and appointees displays the thuggery and overweening arrogance that were characteristic of Nixon’s men when the President was at the height of his popularity—utter contempt for opponents, not the slightest anxiety about getting caught. In both cases, whether or not the boss sanctioned these actions, the tone came from the top. It’s the way officials talk when they feel they have nothing to fear, when there’s a kind of competition to sound toughest, because that’s what the boss wants and rewards. Once all hell broke loose, Christie insisted, in a compelling and self-indulgent press conference that, like his keynote speech, was all about himself, that he was the scandal’s biggest victim. “I am not a bully,” he said, in an echo of one of Nixon’s most famous remarks.
Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them. Warren G. Harding surrounded himself with corrupt pols and businessmen, then checked out, leading to the most sensational case of bribery in American history. Ronald Reagan combined zealotry and fantasy, and Oliver North acted them out. Bill Clinton was libidinous and truth-parsing but also cautious, while George W. Bush was an incurious crusader who believed himself chosen by God and drove almost the entire national-security establishment into lawlessness without thinking twice. Christie, more than any of these, is reminiscent of the President whose petty hatefulness destroyed him—which is why, as NBC’s newscaster said when signing off on an early report on that long-ago burglary, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this.
By: George Packer, The New Yorker, January 14, 2014
“One Trick Pony”: Ted Cruz Cements His Position As The GOP’s Master Troll
On the Internet, a troll purposely inflames anyone he can to attract attention to himself, in hopes of wasting everyone’s time and energy. In the Republican Party, a troll does the same thing and he becomes a hero of the far right and a frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) announced on Monday that he had hired Paul Teller as his deputy chief of staff.
Teller — a favorite of outside conservative groups like Club for Growth — was swiftly fired from his position as executive director of the far-right Republican Study Committee in December after leaking conversations between House members.
Cruz’s new hire immediately won praise from Red State’s Erick Erickson, a leader in the movement to push the Republican Party further to the right by demanding continued standoffs in Congress and supporting primary challenges to incumbents, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) joined McConnell in speaking out against outside conservative groups in December, after several opposed the budget deal Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) negotiated with Senator Patty Murray (D-WA). By hiring Teller, Cruz cements his allegiance with the groups who championed his effort to shut down the government over Obamacare, which he was able to pull off with the help of the House GOP’s so-called “suicide caucus,” many of whom are members of the Republican Study Committee.
Cruz’s willingness to spurn his party’s leaders represents just one trick in his impressive arsenal of trolling tactics.
The Harvard-educated lawyer, who argued in front of the Supreme Court nine times, recently published a 10,000-word article in the Harvard Law Review that speaks to one of the darkest fantasies of the Tea Party movement: How the United Nations is coming to take our golf courses.
The Daily Beast‘s Ben Jacobs points out that Cruz is artfully speaking to the fear of a world government, a fringe idea that’s surprisingly widespread among the Republican base. If he spoke about his concerns about the UN on network television, he would be deemed “wacky” or “wackier.” So instead, he’s presenting them in one of the most prestigious law journals in the world.
The senator’s immense intellect gives him the ability to frame his extremism in acceptable venues. And it also enables him to make convenient arguments against the president that serve his agenda but crumble under scrutiny.
In an attempt to brand Obama as “imperial,” Cruz attacked the president for ignoring federal law in effectively allowing Colorado and Washington state to legalize marijuana.
This critique raised the hackles of Jacob Sullum at Reason.com, who points out that the federal government has virtually never prosecuted personal marijuana use. The Department of Justice has retained the right to crack down at any time, something the senator decided not to point out. But for now, the DOJ has decided to use its “limited investigative and prosecutorial resources to address the most significant threats in the most effective, consistent, and rational way” — as it always has.
But since Cruz lumped his concerns about marijuana legalization in with a screed against Obamacare, he knows that few in the audience he’s trying to reach will parse out what he’s saying.
The shutdown that the senator championed has led to new lows in popularity for the Republican Party.
However, a big chunk of the GOP’s unfavorable rating comes from the party’s base.
In a recent YouGov/Economist tracking poll, 37 percent of Republicans viewed the members of their own party unfavorably, compared to 10 percent of Democrats. Many Republicans believe the party actually gave up too soon in the government shutdown standoff. They want constant, unwavering opposition and charges of lawlessness against the president.
Essentially, they want the party to be made up entirely of Ted Cruzes.
We’ve been telling you about the remarkable descent of Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) from Republican savior to Tea Party troll.
But Rubio’s problem is that compared to Cruz, he’ll always be a squish. He’s dabbled in bipartisanship and proposed “amnesty” for “illegals.” Even if the junior senator from Florida ultimately votes against his own bill, he’ll still be the kind of Republican Ted Cruz lives to crush, even if the senators agree on almost every conceivable issue.
This isn’t because Rubio is not intent on being disruptive or contentious or a “walking press release announcing a no vote.” It’s because he’ll always be in the shadow of a true master of the form.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, January 14, 2014
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