“Who Gains”: Was Rand Paul’s Speech The Tea Party Response, Or Merely The Rand Paul Response?
After the State of the Union tonight, there was the Republican response. And after the Republican response? There was the Tea Party version.
Why does the Tea Party need its own response? It probably doesn’t, considering that the official Republican responder is Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who won a primary against a more establishment Republican thanks to the backing of the Tea Party. But the movement is not a unified group, as they often like to remind the press. Even if the response does nothing for the conservative grass roots movement, it makes perfect sense for those actually involved in it.
The response is organized by Tea Party Express, as it has been for the past three years (Rep. Michele Bachmann gave the first Tea Party response, when she famously failed to make eye contact with the camera). Tea Party Express bills itself as “the nation’s largest tea party political action committee.” This is a little odd, considering it’s not a PAC at all. In fact, as a disclaimer at the bottom of its website and all ads says, Tea Party Express is a brand of a real PAC called Our Country Deserves Better, which is in turn controlled by the Sacramento, Calif.-based GOP P.R. firm Russo Marsh + Rogers.
Like so many people involved in the Tea Party, Russo Marsh + Rogers saw an opportunity to cash in on the Tea Party movement and has done so adroitly, hitting up its members for small donations with incessant email solicitations, often from its numerous associated brands like “the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama,” which help the effort present a broader image.
The PACs started by Russo Marsh & Rogers then take much of the money they raise and — this is where it gets clever — use that money to pay Russo Marsh & Rogers huge consulting fees. The P.R. firm was both the No. 1 and 2 recipients of cash from Tea Party Express in the 2012 cycle, taking in almost $3 million, while the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama gave Russo Marsh & Rogers another $336,0000 (its third largest expenditure).
This is all by way of saying that Tea Party Express has very real incentives to remain relevant and present itself as speaking on behalf of the Tea Party movement.
The story is largely the same for Rand Paul, who is trying to take up the mantle left by his father, former Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, to lead a national libertarian grass roots movement that sometimes aligns itself with the Tea Party. Giving the “official” Tea Party Response lets Paul present himself as a leader of the movement and boost his cache with activists and the media.
So even if the Tea Party movement as a whole gains little from having a Tea Party response to the State of the Union on top of Rubio’s, Tea Party Express and Rand Paul certainly do, and the media is only too happy to play along, as it creates interesting GOP civil war drama and is another thing to write about.
So, what did Rand Paul actually say? Most of it was anodyne conservative talking points, very similar to what Rubio offered.
“Ronald Reagan said, government is not the answer to the problem, government is the problem. Tonight, the president told the nation he disagrees. President Obama believes government is the solution: More government, more taxes, more debt,” Rand Paul said.
“Presidents in both parties — from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan — have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle-class prosperity. But President Obama? He believes it’s the cause of our problems … You heard tonight, [Obama’s] solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more,” Rubio said.
“But we won’t be able to sustain a vibrant middle class unless we solve our debt problem,” Rubio said.
“The [debt] path we are on is not sustainable, but few in Congress or in this administration seem to recognize that their actions are endangering the prosperity of this great nation,” Paul said.
You get the idea.
But Rand Paul did break from Rubio in one major place — defense cuts. Congress is currently trying to head off the so-called sequestration, which will slash half a trillion dollars from the Pentagon. Republicans want to stop that, but Rand Paul doesn’t.
“Not only should the sequester stand, many pundits say the sequester really needs to be at least $4 trillion to avoid another downgrade of America’s credit rating,” Paul said tonight.
He also had some stronger rhetoric on immigration than Rubio. Despite being the GOP’s go-to guy on immigration, the Florida senator gave the issue barely a nod: Three sentences, one paragraph, and no specifics. He spent more time talking about his own biography and railing against Obama’s nonexistent plan to hike taxes.
While Rubio suggested that border enforcement would have to come before legalization of undocumented immigrations, Paul was more liberal, here saying, “We must be the party who sees immigrants as assets, not liabilities. We must be the party that says, ‘If you want to work, if you want to become an American, we welcome you.’”
The thing is, it’s hard to say if Paul is really speaking on behalf of the Tea Party here, or just his own idiosyncratic beliefs. There is strong widespread bipartisan belief that the sequester is bad and Rand Paul is likely the only member in the Senate who wholeheartedly supports it, let alone wants to go further.
While some polling suggests Tea Party members agree with Paul on defense cuts, he is at odds on immigration with the grass roots, which tend to be more restrictive than the elites. While the movement presented itself as something entirely new, it is largely just made up of the most committed conservative activists, and they seem to really care about fighting “amnesty.”
So the question is: Was Rand Paul’s speech the Tea Party response, or merely the Rand Paul response? Either way, it was a coup for Russo Marsh & Rogers.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, February 13, 2013
“Marco Rubio Is Thirsty”: Forget About The Dry Mouth, The Real Problem Was What He Said
It’s not his fault, really. Maybe it was understandable nervousness—after all, here he was just a few days after being anointed “The Republican Savior” in a Time magazine cover, following the president, but without an applauding crowd to feed off. Or maybe it was that the room was hot and dry. Whatever the cause, after trying to wipe the sweat from his brow and face for 12 long minutes and repeatedly moving his tongue around his mouth to get some moisture going, Marco Rubio decided he just had no choice but to bend down and grab that tantalizing little bottle of water that lay just out of reach.
So don’t blame him for that, even though he’ll no doubt get plenty of mockery for it today. You can blame him, however, for the insipid speech he delivered, a combination of calumny and cliché that demonstrated just why Republicans are having such problems appealing to voters. Let’s start with this:
Presidents in both parties – from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan – have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity.
But President Obama? He believes it’s the cause of our problems. That the economic downturn happened because our government didn’t tax enough, spend enough, and control enough. And, therefore, as you heard tonight, his solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more.
OK, so that’s not what the President said in his speech, and hearing from a Republican that Barack Obama hates free enterprise ceased to surprise a long time ago. And though Obama has certainly placed part of the blame for the economic downturn on insufficient government oversight of capital markets, the idea that he ever once blamed it on insufficient spending and taxation is obviously, plainly, absurdly false, a lie by any definition of the term. But that doesn’t surprise, either. What is remarkable is that just a few paragraphs after falsely attacking the president’s motives, Rubio says this: “There are valid reasons to be concerned about the president’s plan to grow our government. But any time anyone opposes the president’s agenda, he and his allies usually respond by falsely attacking their motives.”
Come to think of it, that mixture of dishonesty and self-pity may be just what Republican primary voters are looking for in 2016. And one thing they may also be looking for is the assurance that not only are we God’s favorite country, but life everywhere else is an unending nightmare of opportunities denied and dreams dashed. If so, Rubio is ready to oblige:
This dream – of a better life for their children – it’s the hope of parents everywhere. Politicians here and throughout the world have long promised that more government can make those dreams come true.
But we Americans have always known better. From our earliest days, we embraced economic liberty instead. And because we did, America remains one of the few places on earth where dreams like these even have a chance.
Really? America is one of the few places on earth where people can dream of a better life for their children? Oh, please. The truth is that economic mobility in America is lower than in many similar countries (the result of a decades-long trend, and not Barack Obama’s fault, for what it’s worth). The “only in America” canard is a longtime pet peeve of mine, so I have to ask: why is it necessary to extol our country’s virtues by claiming that those virtues are ours alone? Why is it so hard to say that we value hard work and opportunity, and so do many other societies?
Maybe Marco Rubio is the Republican savior. Lots of politicians have given one crappy speech and then gone on to great things, most notably Bill Clinton, whose speech nominating Michael Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic convention was panned for being both dull and ponderously long. Before you know it, this one will be little more than the source of the occasional chuckle, and Rubio will rise or fall based on what he does in a hundred other settings. But it just goes to show that with a few rare exceptions (like this one), delivering the opposition’s response to the State of the Union is likely to do your career more harm than good. If Rubio thought he’d be the one to buck that history, he didn’t get much more for his trouble than a dry mouth.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 13, 2013
“The Audacity Of Freedom”: President Obama Decisively Changes The Direction Of Our Politics
President Obama is a freer man than he has been at any point in his presidency. He is free from the need to save an economy close to collapse, from illusions that Republicans in Congress would work with him readily, from the threat of a rising tea party movement and from the need to win reelection.
This sense of freedom gave his State of the Union address an energy, an ease and a specificity that were lacking in earlier speeches written with an eye toward immediate political needs. It was his most Democratic State of the Union, unapologetic in channeling the love Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson had for placing long lists of initiatives on the nation’s agenda. Obama sees his second term not as a time of consolidation but as an occasion for decisively changing the direction of our politics.
Here was an Obama unafraid to lay out a compelling argument for the urgency of acting on global warming. He was undaunted in challenging the obsession with the federal budget — and in scolding Congress for going from “one manufactured crisis to the next.” By insisting that “we can’t just cut our way to prosperity” and that “deficit reduction alone is not an economic plan,” he brought to mind the great liberal economist John Maynard Keynes. He sought to add another big achievement to near universal health-care coverage, announcing a new goal of making “high-quality preschool available to every single child in America.”
And Obama made clear his determination to shift the center of gravity in the nation’s political conversation away from anti-government conservatism, offering a vision that is the antithesis of the supply-side economics that has dominated conservative thought since the Reagan era.
If supply-siders claim that prosperity depends upon showering financial benefits on wealthy “job creators” at the economy’s commanding heights, Obama argued that economic well-being emanates from the middle and bottom, with help from a government that “works on behalf of the many, and not just the few.”
The “true engine of America’s economic growth,” he said, is a “rising, thriving middle class.” He continued: “It is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country, the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, no matter what you look like or who you love.” With that last phrase, he linked gay rights to an older liberalism’s devotion to class solidarity and racial equality.
An Obama no longer worried about reelection was the worst nightmare of conservatives who feared he would veer far to the left if given the chance. In the GOP’s response, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) conjured that liberal bogeyman, declaring that the president’s “solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more.”
But Rubio’s rhetoric felt stale, disconnected from the Obama who spoke before him. Obama did speak for liberalism, yes, but it is a tempered liberalism. His preschool proposal, after all, is modeled in part on the success of a program in Oklahoma, one of the nation’s reddest states. Most of the president’s initiatives involve modest new spending and many, including his infrastructure and manufacturing plans, are built on partnerships with private industry.
Even the president’s welcomed call to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour and to index it to inflation was cautious by his own standards. In 2008, Obama had urged a $9.50 minimum wage, and it rightly ought to be set at $10 or above.
Moreover, the president’s words were carefully calibrated to the issue in question. On immigration reform — in deference to cross-party work in which Rubio himself is engaged — Obama kept the rhetorical temperature low, praising “bipartisan groups in both chambers.” But he invoked all of his rhetorical skills on the matter of gun safety, a more complex legislative sell. His gospel-preacher’s variations on the phrase “they deserve a vote” will long echo in the House chamber.
No, the liberated Obama is not some new, leftist tribune. He’s the moderately progressive Obama who started running for president before there was a financial crisis or a tea party. In his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope,” he proposed to end polarization by organizing a “broad majority of Americans” who would be “re-engaged in the project of national renewal” and would “see their own self-interest as inextricably linked to the interests of others.” On Tuesday night, creating this majority was what he still had in mind.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 13, 2013
“A Lesson Learned”: Obama’s Presidential Road Trip Annoys The GOP
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) complained on Fox News yesterday, “All [President Obama] does is go out and make speeches” instead of negotiating with lawmakers like him. Around the same time, on “Meet the Press,” Republican strategist Mike Murphy argued that the president should “stop the speeches” and “stop the politicization.” Also on “Meet the Press,” Republican pundit Michael Gerson complained about the “outside game [Obama’s] been pursuing,” in which the president hits the road, “beating up on the Congress.”
It’s not exactly subtle: Obama’s GOP detractors aren’t happy about the president taking his message directly to the public though outside-the-beltway events.
Then again, it appears the White House doesn’t much care. When Obama delivered a big speech on preventing gun violence, he did so not in Washington, but in Minnesota. When he spoke on immigration reform, the president skipped D.C. and traveled to Las Vegas.
The president will deliver the State of the Union from Capitol Hill tomorrow, but over the weekend, the White House announced the president’s plans for the rest of the week.
After Tuesday evening’s State of the Union address, the President will travel to three different communities to discuss proposals, unveiled in the speech, that focus on strengthening the economy for the middle class and those striving to get there. On Wednesday, February 13th, the President will travel to the Asheville, North Carolina area for an event. On Thursday, February 14th, the President will travel to the Atlanta, Georgia area for an event. On Friday, February 15th, the President will travel to the Chicago area for an event.
To be sure, this is hardly the first time a president has taken a post-SOTU road trip, but these excursions come against an interesting backdrop.
For one thing, we have Republicans urging Obama not to take his message directly to the public, which should probably be a sign that the president is doing the smart thing, since his detractors probably don’t have his best interests at heart.
For another, keep in mind, the president played the game for much of his first term the way the GOP wanted: staying in D.C., huddled in closed-door meetings trying to find new ways to meet Republican demands. It appears Obama has learned a lesson he intends to apply to his second term: the old way wasn’t constructive, didn’t pay dividends, and failed to make GOP policymakers more cooperative and/or interested in governing.
Whether the new strategy works or not remains to be seen, but it’s a deliberate shift — Obama hopes to change the political environment, and create new public pressures, by making his pitch outside Washington, whether Republican lawmakers and pundits like it or not.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 11, 2013
“Heads-Up”: Republican Post State Of The Union Whining Today
Here’s a heads-up: After President Obama delivers his State of the Union address tomorrow, Republicans will wave their hands in front of their faces and whine that it was viciously, horribly, frighteningly “partisan.” And what will this partisanship consist of? Hold on to your hat here. He’s expected to argue for the same policies he has been arguing for and pursuing for the last four years. If the Republican members of Congress restrain themselves from shouting “You lie!” during the speech, it’ll only be because of their superior breeding and manners.
This, of course, is a follow-up to Obama’s inauguration speech, which was condemned by Republicans not because he said anything mean about them, but because he talked about some of the policies he prefers. That, you see, is “partisanship,” and when the other side does it, it’s beyond the pale. So in today’s Politico, under the headline “Obama’s State of the Union: Aggressive,” we read, without any particular evidence for the assertion, that the SOTU “will be less a presidential olive branch than a congressional cattle prod.” Surely this will be the first time a president ever used the speech to encourage Congress to pass legislation he supports. “That strategy has its dangers,” the article goes on. “If Americans perceive Obama as too partisan, he’ll lose a serious share of his personal popularity.” All that’s missing is a quote from Bill Galston explaining how the President is courting doom by not adopting Republican policy positions (I assume Galston was busy over the weekend).
You might say that because he originally ran for office promising to bring Republicans and Democrats together, Obama has a special responsibility to be accommodating to the other side. But let’s not forget that nearly every president comes into office promising to bring Republicans and Democrats together. Remember George W. “I’m a uniter, not a divider” Bush? Bill Clinton said it, too. But Obama seems to get an unusual amount of criticism from both his opponents and folks in the media for doing the same things that every president does, with every article an opportunity to remind readers that in 2008 he ran promising to bring people together.
Let me offer a prediction about tomorrow’s speech. There will be a good deal of now-familiar language about how he’s open to ideas from anywhere, and how if we all just be honest with each other we can come up with common-sense solutions to our problems. He’ll make a couple of good-natured jokes at his opponents’ expense (something Ronald Reagan particularly loved to do in his SOTUs). And he’ll go into numbing detail about his policy agenda. In other words, it’ll be a lot like every other SOTU in the last 20 or 30 years. And afterward, Republicans will cry that it was the most partisan State of the Union speech they’ve ever heard, and claim that they were all ready to work with him, but after being so terribly insulted, they just have no alternative but to oppose everything Obama wants to do, hold up his nominees, and proclaim him to be the enemy of American values.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 11, 2013
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