“No Sense Of Irony”: Don’t Be Fooled, Scott Walker Is No Reformer
Could there be irony greater than that of a career politician appearing before a gathering of political donors in a city far from his home state to declare that he is an outsider and a “reformer”?
Not likely.
Indeed, it would take a mighty tone-deaf politician to miss the surreal moment in which he found himself.
Meet Scott Walker.
The Wisconsin governor has spent much of the month of November scrambling around the television studios, luxury hotel suites and corporate-funded “think tanks” of Washington and New York, desperately attempting to position himself as a Republican presidential prospect. And he has done so without any sense of irony.
And an expectation that the national media will be gullible enough to believe that the most divisive governor in the modern history of Wisconsin—polls show that his classic swing state is almost evenly divided between those who approve and disapprove of the governor—can somehow run for the presidency as a consensus builder. Walker is now being pitched by the co-writer of the governor’s 2016 campaign book—Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge—as the ideal GOP candidate for the presidency.
Of all the “compelling potential standard-bearers” for the party, argues Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, “none is better positioned to energize the conservative grassroots while winning the center than Scott Walker.”
Thiessen imagines Walker “as an across-the-board, unflinching, full-spectrum conservative” with an ability to appeal “to persuadable, reform-minded, results-oriented independents.”
That may be what Walker says. But that’s not the assessment of state Senator Dale Schultz, a Republican who has worked with Walker for two decades and who enthusiastically backed Walker in 2010.
This year, Schultz opposed Walker’s approach to a state budget process that the senator said veered—on everything from school funding to academic freedom to tax policy to local control—into territory that was “way too extreme.”
Schultz, a veteran legislator from rural western Wisconsin, criticized Walker for “passing up an opportunity to show independent leadership.”
“No amount of rhetoric or sloganeering will cover up the influence of an out of state billionaire funded and driven agenda,” declared Schultz. “This is not the Wisconsin agenda I’ve fought for over 30 years, and it’s not the Wisconsin agenda I hear from people as I travel around my district and across the state.”
Walker and his allies are doing everything they can to foster the fantasy that the governor as an outsider, a reformer, the antithesis of poilitics as usual. That was certainly the agenda last week, when Walker appeared in New York City before a November 18 gathering of top check writers for Republican candidates, Walker ripped the Democrat he hopes to run against in 2016—Hillary Clinton—for her long record of public service. Hillary Clinton “wasn’t just secretary of state, wasn’t just a U.S. senator, wasn’t just the first lady. She’s been a product of Washington for decades.”
Always at the ready for some self-promotion, Walker told the Republican crowd in New York that “if we’re going to beat somebody like Hillary Clinton, we’ve got to have somebody from outside of Washington, who’s got a proven record of reform.”
So, let’s review: Clinton’s the insider and Walker’s the outsider, right?
Not so fast.
Though she spent many years in Arkansas, Clinton has certainly done her time in Washington. And she is certainly no innocent when it comes to the maneuverings and manipulations that take place in the capitals of states and nations. So even if she is not a “product” of Washington, she is certainly no newcomer to the political game.
And what of Walker?
The governor conveniently forgot to mention that he began his own political career at age 22 and has, since then, run twenty-three years primary and general election campaigns in twenty-three years—making him one of the most determined careerists in American politics. And even before he finishes his first term as one of the nation’s most embattled governors, Walker is bidding for the presidency—so much so that he did not bother to correct a questioner in New York who began: “Since you’re clearly running for president…”
The problem with careerists is that they are often more interested in their careers than in challenging power.
In a word, they are: intimidated.
But Walker says that’s not him.
The governor’s new book seeks to portray this would-be presidential contender as an fearless political warrior, ever at the ready to advance his ideals.
That, like Walker’s suggestion that his austerity agenda has been successful, is a fantasy grounded in his ambition rather than reality.
In fact, Walker is one of the most intimidated politicians in America.
When Walker ran for governor in 2006, he framed a reform message that talked about ending crony capitalism and addressing the influence of special-interest campaign money and lobbying on the state budget process. In meetings with the state’s newspaper editorial boards, he pitched himself as a different kind of Republican who would not play insider political games. Walker earned some high marks when he “vowed to run as an underdog battling party insiders”—except from party insiders, who were unimpressed with his campaign.
In March 2006, just days after Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman visited Wisconsin, and barely a week after a visit to the state by Vice President Dick Cheney, Walker folded his gubernatorial campaign.
No “unintimidated” stand against the Washington power brokers. No fight to the end on behalf of his ideals. No faith that a grass-roots campaign could beat the money power.
Four years later Walker was back, with a better fundraising operation. This time, he had all the right connections. National donors, like Charles and David Koch, made maximum contributions to his campaign, and then gave even more money to groups making “independent” expenditures on Walker’s behalf.
He won, and in February 2011, when he got a call from someone he thought was David Koch, Walker played along with the caller’s talk about “planting some troublemakers” to disrupt peaceful protests against the governor’s anti-labor policies. Walker writes in his book that “we never—never—considered putting ‘troublemakers’ in the crowd to discredit the protesters.” Yet, when he was talking to someone he thought was a billionaire campaign donor, the governor said: “We thought about that.” If we take Walker at his word—that he never considered using agents provocateurs—then why didn’t he say so at the time? Was he intimidated by someone he thought was a major campaign donor?
The same question arises regarding Walker’s conversation with Beloit billionaire Diane Hendricks, who gave $500,000 to his 2012 campaign. Walker has said he has “no interest in pursuing right-to-work legislation” to weaken private-sector unions. Yet, when Hendricks asked him about right-to-work legislation, Walker did not say, “We’re not going to do that.” Rather, he told Hendricks his “first step” would be to attack public-sector unions as part of a “divide-and-conquer” strategy.
Walker wants a frequently obtuse national media and grassroots Republicans to imagine that he is “unintimidated.” And perhaps that is the case when he is picking on teachers and nurses and anyone who might dare to join a public-employee union. But when the party bosses and billionaire donors come calling, he’s just another politician telling the money power what it wants to hear.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, November 26, 2013
“Getting Secret Money Out Of Campaigns”: It’s In The Public Interest To Disallow Sleazy Secret Money In Campaigns
The Internal Revenue Service spent years averting its eyes while clever campaign operatives abused the tax code for political purposes. Advocacy groups, mostly on the right, wanted to run attack ads while concealing the source of their money, and they came up with a brilliant way to do it: claim to be “social welfare” groups, which are allowed to hide donors.
Federal statutes say these groups can only engage in social welfare activity, but the tax agency decided political activity was fine as long as it wasn’t the primary purpose of the group. That helped create the torrent of secret money that poisoned the last few federal elections. The I.R.S. never explained, though, what kinds of activities are considered political, or why these groups, also known as 501(c)(4)’s, should be allowed to participate in campaigns at all.
On Thursday, long after the abuse became too rampant to ignore, the I.R.S. took the first tentative steps at reining in the problems it helped create. It proposed a definition of “candidate-related political activity,” an important starting point in determining what tax-exempt groups are really allowed to do. But it will have to do much more than that if it wants to be taken seriously as a regulator on this battlefield.
According to a press release from the Treasury Department, the agency said the new definition of political activity would include ads or other communications that clearly advocate for a candidate or party, or ads that mention a candidate within 60 days of a general election (30 days for primaries). That’s a good start for a definition, though 60 days is far too narrow a window — many of these attack ads air a full year or more before voting begins.
Once political activity is defined and separated from social welfare activity, 501(c)(4)’s will no longer be able to claim, as Karl Rove and others have, that “issue ads” mentioning candidates are for social welfare purposes. (These are the kinds of ads that say, “Dog-kicking is terrible. Call Senator Jones and tell her to stop doing it.”)
But a definition alone won’t do any good unless the I.R.S. tells these groups how much political activity is permitted. The ideal answer would be: zero. Social welfare groups have no business meddling in politics. Any group with a political interest has its own place in the tax code — they can be a 527 political organization. Those groups, which include political parties and official campaign organizations, also get tax exemptions, but there is one crucial difference: they have to disclose their donors, and 501(c)(4)’s don’t.
Conservatives immediately claimed that the I.R.S. was trying to take away their free-speech rights, which is laughable. Absolutely nothing is stopping advocacy from running ads, and the Supreme Court, in the Citizens United case, even granted corporations the right to make unlimited donations to independent groups that produce political ads. But there is no right to keep these donations a secret.
The Treasury announcement, tantalizingly, said the I.R.S. would consider comments from the public on how much political activity should be permitted for a social welfare group, suggesting that decision was farther down the road. It’s in the agency’s interest to end the confusion surrounding 501(c)(4)’s, which has led to charges that it has been arbitrary in its audits. But it’s in the public interest to do even more, and disallow sleazy secret money in campaigns.
By: David Firestone, Editors Blog, The New York Times, November 27, 2013
“A Pope’s Pointed Message”: Our Sacred Responsibility Is To One Another
“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”
That passage is not from some Occupy Wall Street manifesto. It was written by Pope Francis in a stunning new treatise on the Catholic Church’s role in society — and it is a powerful reminder that, however tiresome the political trench warfare in Washington may be, we have a duty to fight on.
The full implementation of Obamacare matters. Raising the minimum wage matters. Reforming a financial system that, as Francis noted, “rules rather than serves” matters. Hearing the anguished voices of those left hopeless by poverty matters; answering their pleas with education, health care and employment matters even more.
Francis, the first Jesuit and first non-European in the modern era to be named pope, clearly intends to make a real difference in the world — too much of a difference, it appears, for some conservatives: Sarah Palin, a born-again Christian who attends a nondenominational church, said recently that Francis’s open-arms attitude on social issues “has taken me aback.” Would that a few more words might take her all the way aback to the obscurity from which she came.
Francis’s remarks on economics and poverty came in a 50,000-word Apostolic Exhortation, released Tuesday, that gives the clearest vision to date of how he sees the church and how he intends to reshape it. In its boldness, the statement suggests that, just as Pope John Paul II played a political role in the fall of communism, so might Francis try to help shape events by obliging the faithful to recognize, and resist, a growing pattern of inequality throughout the world.
“To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed,” Francis wrote. “Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”
Francis explicitly calls for “financial reform,” though he wisely does not lay out a policy agenda. But in a passage likely to make libertarians want to hide amid the dense thickets of Ayn Rand’s prose, where no light can penetrate, Francis wrote that “the private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good; for this reason, solidarity must be lived as the decision to restore to the poor what belongs to them.”
The basic positions Francis takes on economic and social justice are not new; all recent popes have expressed a similar critique of modern capitalist society, including John Paul II, whose views on poverty and the need for community are often conveniently overlooked by those who would paint him as Ronald Reagan in robes.
But no recent pope has been so forceful in denouncing the “idolatry of money” and making the inexorable rise of inequality one of the church’s central concerns. Francis intends his message to be heard. I hope leaders everywhere, and especially in Washington, are listening.
Jesus commanded his apostles to give to the poor. Yet many elected officials who claim to follow Jesus’s teachings are determined to keep the poor from receiving health care, food assistance, housing subsidies and a host of other benefits. Inequality is celebrated as a virtue. Life, we are told with a shrug, is sometimes unfair.
But for Christians, Francis reminds us, life is supposed to be as fair and compassionate as we can make it. Money is a false idol, a golden calf. Our sacred responsibility is to one another.
Amen, Your Holiness. Amen.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 28, 2013
“The First Step Of A Long Journey”: Now’s Not The Time For Liberals To Say “I Told You So” About Obamacare
It has been a rough two months for the Affordable Care Act and its defenders. Having spent years fighting ridiculous allegations about socialized medicine and “death panels,” supporters of near-universal coverage now face something different. The performance failures in the rollout of healthcare.gov have triggered cries of “I told you so!” from some liberals. This wouldn’t have happened, they say, if only Obama had supported some form of single-payer plan, such as Medicare for all. The anger over the botched rollout is understandable, but these recriminations are poorly timed—and just plain wrong.
For starters, the ACA is working reasonably well in some places—California, Connecticut, Kentucky, Washington, and the District of Columbia, for example. These under-reported success stories show that insurance exchanges can work, if properly administered. Exchanges are successfully determining applicants’ eligibility for Medicaid or private insurance, enabling consumers to choose among competing plans, and computing the tax credits to which people are entitled. The human benefits are real, from California to Breathitt County in rural Kentucky. These successes make the federal government’s dismal rollout even more embarrassing. Republicans may have done everything within their power to dynamite the ACA, but the administration fell inexcusably short in launching Obama’s domestic-policy centerpiece.
It doesn’t help that health reform is really complicated. The U.S. health-care system is far and away the most complex in the world, one that includes employer-sponsored coverage, Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare, the Indian Health Service, and small-group and individual insurance coverage—and that’s before Obamacare was implemented.
Given that complexity, some on the left say, life would be simpler if only Congress had been willing—which it was not—to scrap all current arrangements and replace them with a single, federally administered health insurance plan. Those on the right regard this complexity and say that life would be simpler if only Congress had been willing—which it was not—to scrap all current arrangements and replace them with income-related vouchers people could use to help pay for private insurance of their choice.
Those positions enjoy loud support in the blogosphere, Twitter, and cable TV, but only niche support at each end of the political spectrum. Although their ideological values could hardly be more different, these polar-opposite camps each disdain the kludgy fixes of incremental politics. And yet, incrementalism is what most Americans want. Most people are reasonably well-insured. They like their coverage, and they want it to remain affordable. They fear legislation that threatens it. Proposals, whether from the left or right, that force most people into radically different arrangements are fated to remain politically marginal in America.
That the right, which predicted Obamacare would mean the death of liberty and ruination of the U.S health care system, feels vindicated by Obamacare’s initial woes is no surprise. But the troubles with healthcare.gov have rekindled attacks from the left, too. Consider a recent essay by American Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner, in which he writes, “The colossal mess that Obamacare has become reflects both the character of the legislation and that of the president who sponsored it.”
We understand Kuttner’s frustration. We do not share his disdain for the ACA or for Obama. The law ended a century of legislative failures in the search for universal health insurance coverage, and enacted important reforms of our healthcare delivery system. Obama bet his historic legacy on a reform that, however imperfect, brings health insurance to millions, improves its quality, and helps slow spending growth.
The real beef of those who seek a more radical rewiring of our healthcare system is not with the president. It is with the coalition of labor, healthcare, disability, and anti-poverty groups that coalesced during 2007 and 2008 around a health reform model that later became the ACA. Candidates Hillary Clinton, Obama, and John Edwards endorsed similar health plans. They all included Medicaid expansion, regulated markets (health insurance exchanges), premium subsidies, strengthened insurance regulation, and an explicit or de facto individual mandate. Many Democrats would have preferred single-payer, but the candidates and even most single-payer supporters understood that politically this just wasn’t possible.
We wish ACA had gone farther. It could have provided more generous premium assistance and cost-sharing for working families. It could have allowed people near retirement to buy into Medicare. Alas, senators such as Joe Lieberman—not Obama—scuttled these possibilities. The ACA is only the first step in a long journey of needed health reforms.
Kuttner goes on to write: “Medicare for All would be simpler to execute, easier to understand, and harder for Republicans to oppose.” Nancy Folbre, writing in The New York Times, took the same position. Kuttner and Folbre are correct that Medicare for All would be much easier to understand. Perhaps, as Obama among others has said, Medicare for All would be preferable to our current system, were we designing that system from scratch.
But we aren’t. The slogan “Medicare for all” was never incorporated in a well-crafted legislative proposal. Had it been, it would have been even easier than Obamacare for Republicans to oppose. And implementation would have been formidably difficult. Had the transition to single-payer ever been specifically mapped out, it would immediately have become apparent that this process requires wholesale replacement or rewiring of employer-based coverage, major changes in the relations between states and the federal government. Hundreds of billions of dollars in transfers and new taxes would have been necessary. Enterprising constitutional conservatives surely would have identified plausible court challenges. What’s more, a phalanx of providers—hospitals, doctors, insurers, drug companies and device manufacturers—opposed single-payer proposals. Even such incremental moves as the public option evoked profound unease among insurers, community hospitals, and other key parts of the coalition that supported the ACA.
The backlash against the ACA is occurring because it disrupts coverage of several million people in the individual and small-group insurance market. Transition to single-payer would have been far messier, disrupting coverage for hundreds of millions of Americans, with a much larger and more explosive mix of winners and losers.
There was and is no alternative to the messy incremental politics that produced Obamacare. Liberals such as then–House Majority Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t make unpalatable compromises because they held pallid aspirations for health reform. They compromised because they knew that they could not impose their will on querulous colleagues, because they needed 60 Senate votes, because millions of Americans needed help, and because it is better to win messily than to lose gloriously.
Much now rides on the government’s ability to fix healthcare.gov. Definite progress has been made. The federal exchange will be better by year’s end, but it will be months, not a few weeks, before the website really works the way it should. The White House’s cautionary messages on enrollment efforts and its one-year delay in online small business enrollment exemplify the many challenges with getting Obamacare off the ground. So these are anxious times. If the ACA fails, hopes for universal coverage will be set back a generation. Now’s not the time for liberals supporters to turn against Obamacare, or against each other.
By: Henry Aaron and Harold Pollack, The New Republic, November 28, 2013
“Those For Whom It’s Always 1938”: The Republican Tirades Sound Rather Familiar
Some of the initial pushback to the Iranian nuclear deal has faded, but for much of the right, the outrage lingers. A few too many conservatives – in Congress, in the media – seriously want Americans to see a good deal as tantamount to Nazi appeasement.
Indeed, for much of the right, the players have been cast in their proper historical roles: Obama is Chamberlain; Iranians are Nazis; and Netanyahu is both Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. (Don’t think about this too much; conservative historical analogies are deeply odd.)
But Peter Beinart raises a good point this morning: the tirades sound rather familiar.
Over the past quarter-century, there’s hardly an American or Israeli leader the Kristol-Netanyahu crowd hasn’t compared to Chamberlain. In 1985, Newt Gingrich called Reagan’s first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.” When Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, hawks took out newspaper ads declaring that “Appeasement is as unwise in 1988 as in 1938.”
Then, when Israel moved to thaw its own cold war with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yitzhak Rabin assumed the Chamberlain role…. Then it was Bill Clinton. “The word that best describes Clinton administration [foreign] policy is appeasement,” explained Robert Kagan and Kristol in 1999. Then, of course, it was the opponents of war with Iraq. “The establishment fights most bitterly and dishonestly when it feels cornered and thinks it’s about to lose. Churchill was attacked more viciously in 1938 and 1939 than earlier in the decade,” wrote Kristol in a 2002 editorial, “The Axis of Appeasement.”
The Munich comparison is offensive on a variety of levels, but Beinart raises an important criticism: those pushing the analogy are also lazy.
For much of the right, there are simple, shorthand responses to almost every question that are intended to end debates in their favor. Can we bring health care security to millions of American families? “No, because it’s socialism.” Can we talk about income inequality and the concentration of wealth at the very top? “No, because it’s class warfare.” Can we talk about expanding investments in education and infrastructure? “No, because it’s big government.”
Can we reduce the nuclear threat – for us and the world – by engaging Iran in constructive diplomacy? “No, because it’s Munich.”
These are knee-jerk responses intended to circumvent thought. But they’ve also become tired and predictable, so much so that when it comes to diplomacy and national security, conservatives keep reading from the same script, making up new Hitlers, new Chamberlains, and new Munichs. The only thing that stays the same is the role of Churchill – a role they hold for themselves.
No one, least of all President Obama, should take the rhetoric seriously, though he can at least take comfort in knowing he’s in good company.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 27, 2013
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