“Can This Campaign Be Constructive?”: Republicans Should Offer Specifics Or Shut Up
What might a reasonable, constructive presidential campaign look like?
To ask the question invites immediate dissent because we probably can’t even agree across philosophical or political lines what “reasonable” and “constructive” mean.
But let’s try an experiment: Can we at least reach consensus on the sort of debate between now and November that could help us solve some of our problems? I’ll let you in on the outcome in advance: Ideology quickly gets in the way of even this modest effort.
Start out by defining goals everyone could rally around. We need to get the economy moving faster and bring unemployment down, an all-the-more-urgent imperative after last week’s disappointing jobs report. We want all Americans to share prosperity and to reverse the trend toward widening inequality. We want a sustainable budget where, in good times, revenue more or less matches expenditures. And we want an education system that prepares members of the next generation for productive and rewarding lives.
Notice a few things about this list. It does not include social issues. Many Americans on both sides of politics legitimately believe that matters such as abortion, gay marriage, gun control, contraception and religious liberty (I could mention others) are of absolutely central concern. Some of them would reject my agenda at the outset. I’d defend it by insisting that the vast majority of Americans, whatever their views on any of these vexing subjects, want to get to certain basics first. They know the social issues won’t go away.
Conservatives might rebel against the way I frame our objectives. In talking about the budget, I do not even bring up reducing taxes. That is because I think the evidence shows that if we are serious about balancing the budget, government needs more revenue. The brute facts of (1) the steady rise in the costs of health care and (2) the aging of the baby boomers mean that we can’t just hack our way to a balanced budget without eviscerating programs such as Medicare and Social Security that most Americans want.
Thus a challenge to conservatives: If cutting taxes is really more important to you than fiscal balance, why not just say so? Why pretend that balance matters when your real goal is a sharp reduction in the size of government? Alternatively, if we could agree that revenue is needed, let’s argue about the right mix between spending cuts and tax increases, and about which taxes to raise.
And can politicians and commentators stop hiding behind vague promises of “tax reform”? Offer specifics or shut up about tax reform. Let’s also agree that slashing programs for poor people — and I’m one who thinks we should spend more — won’t come anywhere close to resolving our fiscal difficulties.
Job creation is at the heart of the campaign, and it is the issue about which we will have the least clarity. To me (and, I would say, to most non-ideological economists), it is perfectly obvious that rolling back government, both here and in Europe, has been exactly the wrong thing to do in a time of high unemployment. To save words, I refer you to a pile of fact-rich Paul Krugman columns.
The unemployment numbers would be much better without the massive loss of government jobs, and private-sector job growth would, in turn, be higher as those public workers spent money. It would be helpful if conservatives who disagree would offer evidence for why they are so certain that government austerity will make things better.
I’d like to hope we’ll get somewhere on education, but as for rising inequality, many on the right don’t even think it’s a problem. So let’s debate over whether greater inequality impedes faster growth or promotes it. Again, I think the evidence shows that when inequality gets out of hand (see 1929 and now), it’s a drag on the whole economy. Forgive me for noting that conservatives seem to believe that the rich will work harder if we give them more, and the poor will work harder if we give them less. But let’s have it out. Arguing in a serious way about the single question of economic inequality would make all the other nonsense of the next five months endurable.
What I do know is that if we don’t use this campaign at least to define the problems we face, we will end up wasting the $2 billion or so this campaign will cost, and a lot of time.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 3, 2012
Former Supreme Court Justice Stevens: “President Obama Right To Criticize Court Ruling On Citizens United”
President Barack Obama ruffled some feathers two years ago when he lambasted the Supreme Court for its Citizens United decision during a State of the Union speech. It was unusual for a president to criticize the justices as they sat before him.
Now, retired Justice John Paul Stevens has taken the equally unusual step of saying the president was right in challenging the court’s opinion.
Obama said the 5-4 ruling freeing corporations to spend unlimited sums on elections “reversed a century of law,” adding it would “open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.”
“In that succinct comment, the former professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago made three important and accurate observations about the Supreme Court majority’s opinion,” Stevens said in a speech Wednesday evening. “First, it did reverse a century of law; second, it did authorize unlimited election-related expenditures by America’s most powerful interests; and, third, the logic of the opinion extends to money spent by foreign entities.”
Stevens dissented from the 2010 decision, and he said again Wednesday that he could not understand why, if “corporations have no right to vote,” they should have the right to sway elections.
The justice also said he did not see why those with the most money should be permitted to dominate the airwaves during election campaigns. “During the televised debates among the Republican candidates for the presidency, the moderators made an effort to allow each speaker an equal opportunity to express his or her views,” he said, speaking in Little Rock, Ark. If there were six candidates, he said, they were given roughly the same amount of time to speak.
“Both the candidates and the audience would surely have thought the value of the debate to have suffered if the moderator had allocated the time on the basis of the speakers’ wealth, or it they had held an auction allowing the most time to the highest bidder,” Stevens said.
The 92-year old retired justice has reason to feel kindly toward Obama this week. He was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House on Tuesday, and Obama described his “signature style: modest, insightful, well-prepared and razor-sharp … always favoring a pragmatic solution over an ideological one.”
Stevens retired in 2010, and Obama chose Justice Elena Kagan to replace him.
By: David Savage, McClatchy-Tribune News Service, May 30. 2012
“Competing Traditions And A Series Of Scandals”: Wisconsinites Running The RNC Double Down On Walker Recall Fight
It’s not just because the attempt to recall conservative Gov. Scott Walker is a ground-game test case that foreshadows the super PAC–funded fight between big business and big labor in the fall presidential election.
It’s because the Wisconsin GOP dominates the Republican National Committee right now. This is a time of national influence for Badger State conservatives—and this recall effort is a personal challenge not just to Scott Walker, but to Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus and his team at the top of RNC.
Priebus was the chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party from 2007 through 2010 while also serving as the RNC’s general counsel. Under his leadership, the GOP took control of the Wisconsin statehouse as well as the Governor’s mansion. Walker and Preibus are personally close, talking and texting frequently, with a friendship that goes back more than a decade to when Walker served in the State Assembly and Preibus ran unsuccessfully for the State Senate.
Politics is about personal relationships, and the Wisconsin ties within the RNC run deep right now. For example, RNC Political Director Rick Wiley served as executive director of the state party. RNC counsel Jonathan Waclawski previously was finance director and chief counsel of the state party. Press Secretary Kirsten Kukowski worked as communications director of the state party. And National Field Director Juston Johnson was the campaign manager for Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson (no relation) as well as political director of the state party. The august offices of the RNC are now a paradise for Cheeseheads.
None of this is unprecedented or improper. It’s common for executives to bring in trusted team members from their home state. But the disproportionate influence of Wisconsin Republicans reflects how personally invested members of the RNC apparatus in this Tuesday’s recall results. This is personal—an ideological fight playing out on their home turf. And it shows how the national Republican Party has been uniquely well positioned to push back on attempts to undo the 2010 election results, beginning with state Senate special elections in April 2011.
The Republican Party’s history in Wisconsin, is deep and reflects the party’s competing conservative and progressive traditions. The GOP’s birthplace is regarded as Ripon, Wis., where it was formed in a small schoolhouse an antislavery alternative to the Whig Party in 1854. In the early decades of the 20th-century, “Fighting Bob” LaFollette and his sons were nationally known as Republican senators and leaders of the progressive movement. But a different, darker Republican tradition also emerged in Wisconsin by the mid-20th century, characterized by conservative Sen. Joe McCarthy and the establishment of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis. Rabidly anticommunist and reactionary in ways that helped give rise to both the book and term “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” their influence on mainstream debates faded after McCarthy’s deserved disgrace. But in the 1990s, the Wisconsin Republican Party came back into national prominence with the pioneering welfare reform initiatives of Gov. Tommy Thompson, who won reelections by nearly 60 percent margins. And even before the elections of 2010, perhaps the brightest rising star and intellectual leader of the Republican Party was Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.
But Scott Walker’s election in 2010 signified a decided shift to the right for statewide Republican candidates, and his collective bargaining reforms for public-sector unions—which he didn’t mention on the trail but introduced just after taking office—spurred weeks of protests at the state capital. The petition effort required to get a recall effort on the ballot returned more than a million signatures—twice the number needed. By early April, a stunning 46 percent of state residents strongly disapproved of his performance in office. The latest polls show Walker, despite marinating in sky-high disapproval numbers, with a slight edge over his challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett—but it’s all going to come down to the ground game on Election Day.
Buoyed by his national ties, and the national prominence of Tuesday’s recall contest—Walker has raised almost $15 million from out-of-state donors, as well as $10 million from those within Wisconsin. As of May 1, Walker had raised more from donors in Texas, Illinois, Florida, California, Missouri, and New York than Barrett had raised in total. Among the highest profile big-dollar Walker donors are Newt’s onetime super PAC sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson, who cut a $250,000 check, and Rick Santorum’s super PAC benefactor Foster Friess, who kicked in $100,000.
But while national prominence and connections have helped Walker’s bottom line, a series of local scandals threatens to add to the recall momentum. A “John Doe” investigation into improprieties when Walker was county executive is still being conducted, and six onetime Walker aides have been confronted with criminal charges and 13 individuals granted immunity. The public charges range from evidence that a separate wireless email router was installed in the county executive office to allow campaign-related business and fundraising to be conducted on government time to the far more serious and salacious charge that onetime Walker deputy chief of staff and economic development director Tim Russell embezzled more than $60,000 from a veterans charity.
To date, Walker has transferred $100,000 from campaign funds into legal defense funds. The ongoing nature of this investigation could continue to dog Walker and his allies even if he passes the recall text on Tuesday. Wisconsin Republican politics is a small world, and indictments could affect local figures well known to the Badger State crew running the RNC. This is the considerable downside that comes when local politics reaches the national level.
All the more reason to watch the results of Tuesday’s recall in Wisconsin closely.
While Wisconsin is regarded as a swing state that leans Democrat in presidential elections, progressive forces’ focus on pushing back against the Tea Party in this particular state could seem ill-timed and ill-advised in retrospect. The national party’s strong ties to Walker and knowledge of the state’s politics helps account for why Democratic efforts, first to stop Walker’s policies and then to push him from office, have been unsuccessful to date despite the governor’s extraordinarily polarizing presence. This RNC team knows Wisconsin cold and has helped direct national resources to what might have been otherwise a remote local fight in 2015.
The Republican Party’s history in Wisconsin, is deep and reflects the party’s competing conservative and progressive traditions. The GOP’s birthplace is regarded as Ripon, Wis., where it was formed in a small schoolhouse an antislavery alternative to the Whig Party in 1854. In the early decades of the 20th-century, “Fighting Bob” LaFollette and his sons were nationally known as Republican senators and leaders of the progressive movement. But a different, darker Republican tradition also emerged in Wisconsin by the mid-20th century, characterized by conservative Sen. Joe McCarthy and the establishment of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis. Rabidly anticommunist and reactionary in ways that helped give rise to both the book and term “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” their influence on mainstream debates faded after McCarthy’s deserved disgrace. But in the 1990s, the Wisconsin Republican Party came back into national prominence with the pioneering welfare reform initiatives of Gov. Tommy Thompson, who won reelections by nearly 60 percent margins. And even before the elections of 2010, perhaps the brightest rising star and intellectual leader of the Republican Party was Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.
But Scott Walker’s election in 2010 signified a decided shift to the right for statewide Republican candidates, and his collective bargaining reforms for public-sector unions—which he didn’t mention on the trail but introduced just after taking office—spurred weeks of protests at the state capital. The petition effort required to get a recall effort on the ballot returned more than a million signatures—twice the number needed. By early April, a stunning 46 percent of state residents strongly disapproved of his performance in office. The latest polls show Walker, despite marinating in sky-high disapproval numbers, with a slight edge over his challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett—but it’s all going to come down to the ground game on Election Day.
Buoyed by his national ties, and the national prominence of Tuesday’s recall contest—Walker has raised almost $15 million from out-of-state donors, as well as $10 million from those within Wisconsin. As of May 1, Walker had raised more from donors in Texas, Illinois, Florida, California, Missouri, and New York than Barrett had raised in total. Among the highest profile big-dollar Walker donors are Newt’s onetime super PAC sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson, who cut a $250,000 check, and Rick Santorum’s super PAC benefactor Foster Friess, who kicked in $100,000.
But while national prominence and connections have helped Walker’s bottom line, a series of local scandals threatens to add to the recall momentum. A “John Doe” investigation into improprieties when Walker was county executive is still being conducted, and six onetime Walker aides have been confronted with criminal charges and 13 individuals granted immunity. The public charges range from evidence that a separate wireless email router was installed in the county executive office to allow campaign-related business and fundraising to be conducted on government time to the far more serious and salacious charge that onetime Walker deputy chief of staff and economic development director Tim Russell embezzled more than $60,000 from a veterans charity.
To date, Walker has transferred $100,000 from campaign funds into legal defense funds. The ongoing nature of this investigation could continue to dog Walker and his allies even if he passes the recall text on Tuesday. Wisconsin Republican politics is a small world, and indictments could affect local figures well known to the Badger State crew running the RNC. This is the considerable downside that comes when local politics reaches the national level.
All the more reason to watch the results of Tuesday’s recall in Wisconsin closely.
“Throwing Crumbs To The Bottom Feeders”: Mitt Romney, The “Fighting Moderate”
The latest meme making the Beltway rounds at the urging of Mitt Romney’s staff is that their candidate has really pulled a fast one on the “conservative base” of his party: he’s a “moderate” (you know, like Bill Clinton) who’s figured out he can keep the wingnuts happy just by being a Breitbartian badass towards Obama. Give’ em Solyndra photo ops, the meme suggests, and they won’t make Romney endorse the Gold Standard or a Personhood Amendment. McKay Coppins wrote up the meme today for Buzzfeed:
The conventional wisdom of the chattering class has been that Romney is captive to the Republican Party’s conservative base, desperate and anxious to maintain their tepid support. But his new appeal to the right marks a recognition that he can court conservatives without, in any traditional sense, “tacking right.” His aggressive tactics stand in for the sort of policy compromises that could damage him in November; better, his advisers argue, to court conservatives with a press conference shouting match than with a high-profile fight over abortion or gay marriage. What’s more, they say, the media obsession with Romney “pandering” to the right represents a misunderstanding of conservatives, who can live with Romney’s moderate record – as long as he’s a fighting moderate.
So the idea here is that every time Romney pleases the crazy people by echoing one of their favorite attack lines on Obama, or simply looks the other way when they pursue craziness (e.g., Trump’s neo-birtherism), it’s a sign Mitt is actually being faithful to his “moderate” course, giving the Right bread and circuses while intending to offer swing voters—and America—that fine “moderate” governance.
If anyone buys this meme, then they’re falling for a stunt a lot more transparent than the base-tending hijinks that have supposedly fooled the right-wing rubes.
It should be enough for anyone that Romney has endorsed two large and violently immoderate measures: the Ryan budget, and Jim DeMint’s Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, those twin substantive litmus tests for a candidate’s commitment to a long-term agenda focused on a radically reduced government at all levels supported by a more regressive tax system. He’s also promised to try to make abortion and same-sex marriage illegal through federal policy if possible and judicial appointments if necessary; there is nothing “moderate” about reversing 40 years of legalized abortion. And don’t get me started on Romney’s foreign policy views, which seem to combine the worst features of Dick Cheney and John Bolton.
Are there right-wing policy positions too extreme for Romney to embrace unless he has to? Of course; there always are and always will be; we’re living in a moment of movement conservative triumphalism so powerful that no one is safe of the charge of being insufficiently pure. That doesn’t make Mitt some sort of safe “centrist” alternative to Obama who’s managed to outmanuever a weak field and trick the Right into accepting his nomination, and is now tricking hard-core conservatives again by giving them the sizzle of the psychotic campaign they crave instead of the steak.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 1, 2012
Kevin’s Gift: “I Only Need One Reason To Oppose Mitt Romney’s Policies, And His Name Is Kevin”
At my father’s funeral, the presiding minister, Ebb Munden, was a man who had been one of my dad’s closest friends. Ebb talked about how the last time he had gone to see my dad before he lost consciousness, he had been very emotional but that my dad had comforted him by gripping his hand and telling him it would be alright, that my dad was at peace and Ebb should be too. The lesson was that even at our physically weakest we could still be helping other people and making things better in the world.
I was thinking of that this past weekend when I went to see my brother Kevin back home in Lincoln, Nebraska. Kevin is one of those people who followers of Ayn Rand’s philosophy would call a leech on society — Rand believed that people with disabilities were leeches and parasites on society, and that the “parasites should perish.” Kevin’s birth father broke a chair over his head and gave him brain damage, making him developmentally disabled and making it hard for him to speak clearly. He came to my family when we were both 11 years old, and has been not only my brother but one of my closest friends ever since. As an adult in recent years, his body has continued to betray him as he is hard of hearing, can’t see well, and has muscular dystrophy. Recently he had to go into the hospital for major surgery and then developed pneumonia — his muscular dystrophy makes it especially tough to recover from all this.
For all of that, though, Kevin still contributes to the world around him, just as he always has. He has always shown great tenderness to the people around him, and still does. He can’t talk right now because he is on a ventilator, but his expressive hands still say a great deal. After I was watching him go through strenuous rehab exercises, I came over to him after he was done and asked how he was doing, and he just grinned and patted me on my too-big tummy, not only telling me he was okay, but that maybe I should be doing more exercise too. Even with all the tubes attached to him, he was still up for playing catch with a plastic ball in his room. He still had smiles for, and played ball with, a 5-year-old girl who came to see him. One of the nurses at the Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital told me how touched she had been when he gave her a hug even though she was doing painful rehab exercises she knew he didn’t like. He still gave me all kinds of trouble, taking delight in showing me two stuffed dogs people had given him because he had named the big dog Kevin and the little dog Mike. And when I had to leave to go the airport and had tears in my eyes as I was leaning down to hug him goodbye, he rubbed my head to comfort me. I had come to comfort him in his time of pain, and he had comforted me even more. Kevin being a part of my life has been such a gift to me, and has made me 100 times better a person.
Kevin has also shaped my values and philosophy of life, and given me a perspective on policy issues. Conservatives are obsessed with the idea that somewhere, somehow there are lazy “undeserving” welfare recipients, but more than 90 percent of government support dollars go to the elderly, people working hard but are still below the poverty line because of low-wage jobs, and very disabled people like Kevin — those whose middle-class families like mine would be plunged into poverty if we had to pay for all their medical costs on our own.
It is Kevin who I think of when I see that the Ryan-Romney budget slashes money from Medicaid and from the Social Services Block Grant, a fund specifically targeted to help states meet the needs of their most vulnerable citizens. It is Kevin who I thought about when the audience at a Republican debate cheered about a man who had no health insurance dying. It is Kevin who I thought of when an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference laughed and cheered when Glenn Beck gleefully proclaimed that “in nature, the lions eat the weak.”
A society that does not value my brother Kevin at least as much as it does the Wall Street titans who grow rich as they speculate with other people’s money, and use the tax code to write off the debt they use to buy and sell companies regardless of the consequences to the families who work there, is a sick society. A government that would cut support to middle-class families trying to support their disabled children so the wealthy can get more tax breaks — a government that actually decides to help the wealthy and powerful more than the poor and disabled — would be a government with no decency. That is what Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and the Republicans are proposing for us. Their hero Ayn Rand would be proud.
I have many reasons for working to oppose Romney’s policies. I think his economic policies are a disaster for an economy still weakened by allowing Wall Street to run roughshod over the rest of us for the first decade of this century. I’d like for people to have access to contraceptives, and all of us to have access to quality health care. The idea of appointing more Supreme Court Justices who support cases like the Citizens United ruling that have allowed “corporations are people, my friends” is destructive to our democracy. But even if all of that wasn’t there, I would only need one reason to oppose Romney’s policies, and his name is Kevin.
By: Mike Lux, Partner, Democracy Partners, Published in The Huffington Post, May 29, 2012
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