“A Potential Third-Party Run?”: Ron Paul’s Long Game
Ron Paul has coyly batted away questions about a potential third-party run, prompting frequent speculation that he might launch an independent bid. But Paul is almost certainly just trying to increase his leverage. He has been a loyal ally to Mitt Romney, his influential chief ad-maker is married to a Romney consultant, and, as Amy Gardner reports, Paul and Romney have developed a close friendship:
Despite deep differences on a range of issues, Romney and Paul became friends in 2008, the last time both ran for president. So did their wives, Ann Romney and Carol Paul. The former Massachusetts governor compliments the Texas congressman during debates, praising Paul’s religious faith during the last one, in Jacksonville, Fla. Immediately afterward, as is often the case, the Pauls and the Romneys gravitated toward one another to say hello.
Not to mention the fact that a Confederacy-loving, pro–John Birch Society, 1964 Civil Rights Act and Martin Luther King Day–hating paleolibertarian who feels ideologically comfortable with white supremacists (all for entirely non-racial reasons, of course!) is not going to want to help reelect Barack Obama, which a third-party candidacy would all but guarantee.
Paul’s game is to trade his supporters for a seat at the Republican table. Gardner has some good reporting about his efforts to cultivate serious long-term sway within the GOP. His followers are burrowing within party organizations across the country.
This will create an interesting tension within the existing party coalition. There’s little direct disagreement within the Republican coalition about policy — neoconservatives dominate foreign affairs, supply-siders control economic policy, and religious conservatives hold sway over the judiciary and other social policy. The disputes arise in settling priorities. Economic conservatives have increasingly come to dominate the party, and the growing influence of Paul raises the possibility that the party will come to be defined almost entirely in economic terms. That is the explicit goal of figures like powerful senator Jim DeMint, who welcomes Paul’s influence:
The debate in the Republican Party needs to be between libertarians and conservatives, that’s what our party needs to be about. There’s no longer room for moderates and liberals because we don’t have any money to spend, so I don’t want to be debating with anyone who wants to grow government.”
Meanwhile, you have figures like Bill Kristol, who cares mostly about foreign policy, some about social issues, and is pretty much willing to go along with any economic policy that advances those other goals. Kristol sees his allies being relegated to second-class status, and he does not like it one bit:
“A lot of people when they criticize Ron Paul have to preface their criticism by saying, ‘you know, he’s good guy, he brings a lot to the debate,’” Bill Kristol said on C-SPAN. “I actually don’t buy that. I do not think he’s a particular good guy . . . I think it would be better for the Republican party, if he left the Republican party.”
That’s not going to happen, at least not during this election cycle. The question will arise if Romney wins, and Paul has to decide where and how to exert his newfound influence. Romney might offer some nice words about Paul’s goldbuggery now, but there’s no way he would ever give even a smidgen of influence to a crank economic theory if he’s in office and has political skin in the game. He’s also taken a staunchly nationalistic, hawkish line on foreign policy. Would Paul have a fuss over these things, or be content to just push harder for tax and spending cuts?
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 2, 2012
The Success Of Mitt Romney’s Health-Care Pander
Last year, at the University of Michigan, Mitt Romney gave a speech on health care to address his prior support for the individual mandate—the linchpin for the Affordable Care Act and Romneycare in Massachusetts. The core of his speech—and of his message on health care since then—was that it’s unacceptable for the federal government to require health insurance for its citizens. As he said:
Our plan was a state solution to a state problem. And his is a power grab by the federal government to put in place a one size fits all plan across the nation.
Of course, this isn’t true. The Affordable Care Act maintains the private health-insurance market and requires people to buy into it if they don’t have insurance or qualify for Medicaid. If the ACA is a “one size fits all” plan, than by dint of similarity, Romneycare is the same.
It’s for that reason that, at the time, I was skeptical of this whole maneuver. There was no way that conservatives could really believe Romney when he made the bogus distinction between his plan and the administration’s. In the same way that discrimination is discrimination, whether it’s practiced by local, state, or federal authorities, if the requirement to purchase health insurance is tyranny, then it’s tyranny everywhere, regardless of how it’s implemented.
As it turns out, I was completely wrong. Not only has Romney escaped any serious harm for his (huge) role in setting the template for “Obamacare” but his constant denunciations of the law have given him credibility with actual conservatives, who now endorse the former Massachusetts governor’s logic on Romneycare. Here’s Ann Coulter, for example:
As The New York Times put it, “Mr. Romney’s bellicose opposition to ‘Obamacare’ is an almost comical contradiction to his support for the same idea in Massachusetts when he was governor there.” This is like saying state school-choice plans are “the same idea” as the Department of Education. […]
As Rick Santorum has pointed out, states can enact all sorts of laws—including laws banning contraception—without violating the Constitution. That document places strict limits on what Congress can do, not what the states can do. Romney, incidentally, has always said his plan would be a bad idea nationally. [Emphasis mine]
It should be said that, before he flipped to the right in preparation for a presidential run, Romney insisted that his plan would make a good model for the country.
That aside, it’s simply incredible to me that conservatives would buy Romney’s ridiculous logic. But it seems that they trust Romney enough on health-care repeal to let the issue slide. Which should put a damper on liberal hopes that, if elected, Romney won’t try to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. For as much as the public is skeptical of politicians—especially presidential aspirants—students of the presidency have found that presidents genuinely try to fulfill the promises they made as candidates.
If you want to know how Mitt Romney will govern, all you have to do is listen to him. And in that case, a President Romney would cater to the rich, return to the bellicose foreign policy of George W. Bush, and dismantle the social safety net, Obamacare included.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, February 2, 2012
Political, “Dumb And Deadly”: A Black Mark On The Pink Ribbon
Hard as I try, I can only conjure up two words to describe the decision on the part of Susan G. Komen For The Cure to pull its support of Planned Parenthood.
Dumb and…Deadly.
For years, Komen and Planned Parenthood have worked together to improve the opportunities for women to discover and get treatment for one of the most insidious of diseases—women’s breast cancer. And they’ve made a great pair. Together, these organizations have done an enormous amount of good when it comes to bringing the illness to the public’s attention and providing the services that have, undoubtedly, saved a great many lives.
Today, this partnership has been torn apart and, contrary to what one might have anticipated just twenty-four hours ago, it is not Planned Parenthood who finds itself struggling to make up the lost funding. The organization has benefitted from a massive inpouring of contributions since the news broke.
Rather, a review of the Susan G.Komen Facebook page makes it all too clear that their own organization is likely in line for a very bad year on the fundraising front given the large number of people who are deeply offended and distressed by the decision and have sworn to cut off their contributions to the group.
While it is tempting to say that the ‘good guy’ in this sad tale has emerged victorious, nothing could be further from the truth.
You see, the big loser in this story will be future breast cancer victims who may not get the diagnostic services or treatment required to save their lives as a result of what is sure to be a drop in funding for the Komen effort.
That is a true tragedy and one that certainly never had to be.
Despite the severe backlash being heaped on Komen For The Cure by one-time supporters, the organization continues to argue that there was nothing political about its decision. But nobody is buying this because it’s simply too hard to swallow.
Komen is sticking to the story that they had no choice but to pull the funding once Republican Congressman Cliff Sterns, a long-time opponent of Planned Parenthood, began a Congressional investigation to determine if Planned Parenthood has violated the rules that prohibit them from spending taxpayer money on abortion services. The Komen group argues that their governing principles do not permit them to contribute money to any entity under Congressional investigation.
But stupid is as stupid does. And, as noted, Komen For The Cure has behaved with shocking stupidity.
If Komen believes that Planned Parenthood provides a valuable service to the women Komen seeks to help and believed that PP did so before the investigation commenced last fall, why in the world would they permit such a congressional investigation—and one that has no time limit and could drag on until Democrats return to power and take over the investigating committee—to interfere with something as important as helping women with breast cancer? At no time has Komen suggested that Planned Parenthood was failing to use the money provided by Komen for the intended purpose. Had this been their position, their decision would have made a great deal more sense.
Are Komen’s rules of operating more important than the very purpose of their existence? If they believed that Planned Parenthood played an important role in helping women with breast cancer before, why would they do anything to interfere with that work, let alone use an investigation into whether or not PP is misusing taxpayer money for abortions – not breast cancer services—as a reason to withdraw their aid?
What if Rep. Sterns’ investigation does turn up some instances of Planned Parenthood breaking the rules? Does this mean that the work they do in support of women with breast cancer no longer ‘counts’? Are women who are in danger of losing their lives suddenly not deserving of help because some others may have received an abortion with some taxpayer money?
Anyway you look at it, this is an illogical and remarkably (here’s that word again) stupid decision.
I understand that there are many people who vehemently oppose abortion and that this would lead them to have a big problem with Planned Parenthood for providing the same.
But these people claim that they are ‘right to lifers’, devout in their desire to protect life. This, once again, causes us to wonder why these folks would take so strong a position when it comes to the lives of the unborn yet are unwilling to take such a position on behalf of a woman who has walked on the planet for a few years already. I simply don’t understand why right to life organizations everywhere are not imploring Susan Komen For The Cure to reinstate the funding to Planned Parenthood so that lives of affected women can be saved – just as they want to save the lives of the unborn.
While Rep. Sterns has taken the time to deny any involvement with Komen’s decision, and I take him at his word, why has he not acknowledged that, while he may be seriously opposed to abortion services, he can still support the work of Planned Parenthood—and Komen’s contribution to that work—when it comes to helping women facing a deadly disease? It is, after all, saving lives that Congressman Sterns proclaims himself to be all about.
Shame on the Susan G. Komen For The Cure for forgetting their mission and the reason so many people have financially supported their efforts and walked so many miles in support. Shame on Congressman Sterns along with any other opponent of Planned Parenthood’s involvement in abortion who cannot see the sheer hypocrisy of hating PP for taking lives while remaining unwilling to stand up for the services of PP that save lives.
I can’t think of a better example of how far afield we have gone when a charity devoted to fighting cancer allows politics to become its guiding force.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributing Writer, Forbes, February 1, 2012
RomneyCare: Conservatives Attempt To Rescue Mitt From His Past
Now that Mitt Romney is well and truly inevitable, it is becoming imperative for conservatives to begin the arduous work of explaining why his Massachusetts health care plan is in no way similar to the evil, bureaucratic, freedom-destroying Obamacare monstrosity. Ann Coulter gives it a go, as do Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review.
The latter brush aside any purported similarities by quickly noting that “policy experts of various political stripes have claimed that Obamacare is essentially Romneycare taken national.” Right, one of those policy experts is Jonathan Gruber, the guy who designed Romney’s health care plan and then designed Obama’s. Let’s see what he has to say:
He credited Mitt Romney for not totally disavowing the Massachusetts bill during his presidential campaign, but said Romney’s attempt to distinguish between Obama’s bill and his own is disingenuous.
“The problem is there is no way to say that,” Gruber said. “Because they’re the same fucking bill. He just can’t have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it’s the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he’s just lying.
Any attempt to explain why Romneycare is so vastly different than Obamacare really ought to explain why the economist who designed both plans thinks they’re the same fucking bill.
Coulter, Levin, and Ponnuru all defend Romney by arguing that he was operating within the constraints of a distorted federal system. “There’s not much governors can do about the collectivist mess Congress has made of health care in this country,” writes Coulter. But of course Obama was also operating within the confines of a distorted system, including many interest groups and voters deeply resistant to change.
Levin and Ponnuru urge Romney to vigorously press the argument that his plan has no resemblance to Obama’s. Their advice centers on the one area of difference:
So what, then, should Governor Romney say, if he is the nominee and President Obama suggests that his health-care plan is modeled on the one the Republican enacted? Something, we suggest, like the following:
“Nice try. Your health-care plan, Mr. President, spends a trillion dollars on yet another uncontrollable federal entitlement program and on a massive expansion of a failing Medicaid system. It has an unconstitutional rationing board cut hundreds of billions from Medicare without being answerable to the public, without giving seniors more options, and without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit. It raises hundreds of billions in taxes on employment, investment, and medical research; and after all of that, it wouldn’t even reduce the growth of health-care costs, which is the heart of the problem. And your defense of all that is that it was based on a state program that doesn’t actually do any of those things?
But that is what Romney is already saying, right down to the “nice try.” And what it’s saying, basically, is that Obama was fiscally responsible. Romney, owing to a quirk of federal funding, was able to finance his plan with a windfall grant from Washington, meaning he didn’t need to come up with any painful cuts to cover his insurance expansions. Obama raised taxes and found inefficient spending within the Medicare system to finance covering the uninsured. And one of the biggest elements of his tax increase was a reduction in the tax deduction for expensive private plans – basically, the strongest version Obama could get through Congress of a staple idea urged by conservatives, which is to eliminate the tax code’s favoritism for employer-sponsored insurance.
Now, you could argue that this should go even further, and I’d agree. If you had Republicans willing to continue advocating the health care principles they used to advocate before Obama tried to implement them, you could form a stronger political coalition for tearing up the status quo and combining market pressure with universal coverage. But rational reform is pretty hard when the opposition party is able to convince itself that anything you do, including things they favored just the other day, are the death of freedom.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 2, 2012
Mormons, Mitt and Conservative Evangelicals
At Rolling Stone, the distinguished political historian Rick Perlstein provides some history about the regular trumping of theology by politics in the process of making his case that fear or hostility towards the LDS faith won’t keep conservative evangelicals from pulling the lever for Mitt Romney in November (or earlier than that in the primaries, once he is the putative nominee). Evangelicals used to say the same things or worse about Catholics, Perlstein notes, until they found a common cause—and common enemies—in the culture wars.
I definitely agree that Christian Right types will support Mitt against Obama, though I do not necessarily share Rick’s belief that the main factor at play here is unreflexive obedience of the rank-and-file to their political and religious leaders. So long as Gingrich and Santorum are still in the race, a few of their theocratic backers will use anti-Mormon prejudice as a tactical weapon. And some (though not many) low-information evangelical voters may refuse to go along in the general election.
The key factor here is the common-enemy issue. Conservative evangelicals may not like Mormonism, but they tend to like “Mormon values” a lot. And more importantly, the LDS and its believers are a lot less threatening to Christian Right foot soldiers than the “secular-socialists” they believe are hell-bent on eventually wiping out Christianity as we know it—less threatening, in fact, than the mainline Protestants that many evangelicals don’t consider actual Christians (e.g., the President of the United States) insofar as they deny biblical inerrancy and don’t understand that legalized abortion is the Second Holocaust.
As the old proverb says, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Whether politically active conservative evangelicals are entirely comfortable with Mormons or with Mitt, they qualify on those grounds.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 31, 2012
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