“If Cheney Wants A Conversation About Iran…”: He Needs To Appreciate The Role He Played In Creating This Mess
Even most Republicans will concede that the GOP campaign to derail the international nuclear agreement with Iran is going poorly, and barring any major developments, the diplomatic deal will move forward over the objections of far-right lawmakers.
But Politico reports that one die-hard critic still has something to say.
Dick Cheney will speak out against the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran during a speech next month at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. […]
Cheney will speak on Sept. 8 – just a week ahead of the Sept. 17 deadline for Congress to vote on the deal’s authorization.
The White House hasn’t officially said anything in response, but I have to assume officials in the West Wing are delighted to see the failed former V.P. take the lead in condemning the agreement. It makes it that much easier to deliver a simple message to congressional Democrats: when it comes to national security in the Middle East, and the prospect of yet another war, do you want to partner with Dick Cheney or with President Obama?
But even putting all of the political wrangling aside, what the former vice president just doesn’t seem to appreciate is the role he played in creating the mess that the president is cleaning up.
Revisiting our discussion from several weeks ago, let’s not forget that Iran didn’t have a meaningful nuclear weapons program until Tehran developed one – during the Bush/Cheney administration. It was on Cheney’s watch that Iran’s total number of centrifuges grew from 164 to 8,000.
What kind of price did Iran pay for taking these provocative steps? Actually, Cheney didn’t do anything – he was busy watching his Iraq policy destabilize the entire region while allowing North Korea’s nuclear weapons program to expand without any pushback from Cheney’s administration.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), an aggressive hawk and no ally of Democrats, conceded not too long ago, “I think the Bush administration, they were a miserable failure when it came to controlling Iran’s nuclear ambition.”
I suppose it’s possible that Cheney has scheduled his AEI speech to deliver a public apology and acknowledge the ineptitude of his approach. But I have a hunch that isn’t what he has in mind.
About a year ago, Cheney appeared on a Sunday show and was asked about his stunning failures while in office. “If we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago, we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face,” he replied.
In other words, the failed former V.P. can’t be bothered to defend his own record – probably because it’s indefensible. The fact remains, however, that Cheney stood by and watched as Iran’s nuclear program expanded, and it’s President Obama who didn’t just talk about addressing the problem; he’s actually doing it.
The less Cheney has to say on the subject, the better.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 24, 2015
“The Equivalent Of Thinking The Iraq War Would Be A Cakewalk”: Why The GOP Presidential Candidates Can’t Reform Health Care
In the last few days, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio released health care plans, and other Republican candidates are sure to follow soon. Most will probably be pretty similar, even if some are more fully fleshed out than others.
But they’ll all share one feature, the thing that tells you that they aren’t even remotely serious about this issue: they will take as their starting point that the entire Affordable Care Act should be repealed.
I say that that shows they aren’t serious not because I think the ACA has done a great deal of good, though I do think that. I say it because it shows that they’re completely unwilling to grapple with both the health care system as it exists today, and how incredibly disruptive the wholesale changes they’re proposing would be. Walker’s plan even says, “unlike the disruption caused by ObamaCare, my plan would allow for a smooth, easy transition into a better health care system.” This is the health care equivalent of thinking the Iraq War would be a cakewalk.
The reality is that repealing the ACA now that it has been implemented would mean a complete and utter transformation of American health care. Republicans have often lamented that the law was so terribly long and included many different rules and regulations — yet now they act as though the law amounts to just a couple of rules here and there that can therefore be tossed out without too much trouble. But they were right the first time: the law is indeed complex, and has brought hundreds of changes big and small to American health care, not just in how people get insurance but in how Medicare and Medicaid work, how doctors and hospitals are paid, and in all sorts of other areas.
The ACA established health care exchanges. It brought millions of people into Medicaid, it closed the Medicare prescription drug “doughnut hole.” It gave subsidies to small businesses. It funded pilot projects to explore new means of providing and paying for care, it imposed new regulations on insurance companies. It created new wellness and preventive care programs, it provided new funding for community health centers. It did all that, and much more. You can argue that each one of these was a good or a bad idea, but you can’t pretend that unwinding them all would be anything resembling a “smooth, easy transition.”
We know why every Republican health care plan has to start with repealing the ACA: politics. Republicans have spent the last five years telling their constituents that they’re going to repeal it any day now, and they’ve held over 50 repeal votes in Congress. They’ve refused to admit that a word of it has any merit, even as they try to incorporate some of its more popular reforms (like protections for people with pre-existing conditions) into their own plans. So they’ve backed themselves into a corner where whatever any Republican offers has to start with repeal.
Which is why all their plans, the ones that have been released and the ones yet to come, are absurdly unrealistic. They pretend that it will be no problem to completely transform the American health care system — and there will be no losers in such a transformation, only winners — which shows that they have no intention of actually doing so. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if a Republican gets elected next November, he’ll be relieved when his health care plan dies in Congress.
Let’s contrast that with how Democrats acted in 2008, when there was a vigorous debate in the presidential primary over health care. The three leading candidates, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards, all had very similar plans, similar because they reflected the Democratic consensus on health care reform that had evolved in the decade and a half since Bill Clinton’s reform effort failed. One major disagreement was over whether there had to be an individual mandate — Clinton’s plan had one, and Obama’s didn’t — but when he took office, Obama accepted that the mandate was necessary to make the entire plan work. It wasn’t a fantasy plan that just pandered to liberal hopes, it was something that could actually pass and be implemented.
Whenever liberals told Obama that a single-payer health plan would be far superior to what he was proposing, he would respond that if we were starting from scratch, that would probably be true. But, he’d say, we aren’t starting from scratch, so the ACA has to accommodate itself to the health care system that already exists. The result was a gigantic kludge, new complexity layered on top of an already complex system in an attempt to solve its varied shortcomings. Like all kludges, it seemed like the realistic option given the situation we confronted, but it left us with something that was far from perfect.
A Republican who actually wanted to pass real health care reform would have to approach the problem the same way: by saying that for better or worse, the Affordable Care Act has already affected the system in profound ways, so any realistic plan has to understand what those changes are, and find the most efficient way to keep the ones that are working and change the ones that aren’t. That doesn’t mean that repeal is impossible, just that it would be a spectacular upheaval, one that I promise you Republicans have no genuine appetite for. Remember all the screaming and shouting they did over the people on the individual market whose previous plans didn’t qualify under the new regulations, and who had to shop for new plans? Multiply that by ten or twenty times, because that’s how many people would likely lose their existing coverage if you repealed the ACA in one fell swoop.
And that would be only the beginning. So when any Republican candidate says he or she has a plan to reform health care, take a close look. If it starts with repealing the ACA — and it will — then you’ll know it isn’t serious and it’s never going to happen.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The PlumLine, The Washington Post, August 20, 2015
“Significantly Ambivalent On Key Issues”: The White Working Class As “Yes, But” And “No, But” Voters
I think we are beginning to understand this year more than in the past that non-college white voters–a.k.a. the “white working class” are currently bifurcated into those who intensely dislike government but aren’t sold on conservative economic panaceas and those who are very angry about the “rigged” economy but aren’t sure they trust government to do anything about it. The former are heavily represented in the current support base of Donald Trump, while the latter should be targets for Democrats. That proposition about the latter was, of course, the main message in Stan Greenberg’s essay on the white working class in the current issue of the Washington Monthly, which also served as the basis for the roundtable discussion WaMo sponsored in conjunction with The Democratic Strategist.
In his WaPo column yesterday, E.J. Dionne grasped the importance of this realization in writing about “yes, but” voters who may have partisan voting habits but are significantly ambivalent on key issues. After discussing some polling from WaPo and Pew, Dionne noted:
[A] third study, a joint product of the Democratic Strategist Web site and Washington Monthly magazine, points to the work Democrats need to do with white working-class voters.
One key finding, from pollster Stan Greenberg: Such voters are “open to an expansive Democratic economic agenda” but “are only ready to listen when they think that Democrats understand their deeply held belief that politics has been corrupted and government has failed.” This calls for not only “populist measures to reduce the control of big money and corruption” but also, as Mark Schmitt of the New America Foundation argued, “high-profile efforts to show that government can be innovative, accessible and responsive.”
This ambivalent feeling about government is the most important “yes, but” impulse in the American electorate, and the party that masters this blend of hope and skepticism will win the 2016 election.
Yessir. The broader lesson is that the stereotype of swing voters as Broderesque, Fournierite “centrists” looking for bipartisan compromises that don’t upset elites misses the real swing voters, who may not be as numerous on the surface as is years past, but who could move political mountains in response to the right combination of messages that take seriously their concerns.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 27, 2015
“Donald’s Trump Card”: His Candidacy Is A Headache For The GOP, But A Third Party Run Would Be A Catastrophe
Donald Trump. For Democrats who care about this presidential election cycle, the infamous Republican candidate has been the gift that keeps on giving. And now, he’s threatening to give Democrats more than they could have possibly hoped for in the form of a third party run.
According to an interview with The Hill, Trump may consider a third party bid if he doesn’t feel the Republican Party has been fair to him during the primary process. When asked about the possibility of the independent run, Trump said, “I’ll have to see how I’m being treated by the Republicans. Absolutely, if they’re not fair, that would be a factor.”
Understandably, Trump’s run for the nomination has been a thorn in the side of the national GOP. He’s monopolizing the press coverage, leading the polls, and has been a menace on the campaign trail. His inflammatory comments – most recently disparaging Sen. John McCain’s, R-Ariz., status as a war hero – are garnering the wrong kind of attention for his party. He’s also really starting to annoy the other candidates – just ask Sen. Lindsey Graham.
However, as tough as his candidacy has been for the Republican party thus far, a third party run would make things 10 times worse.
Third party candidates are usually a spoiler in presidential contests. They rarely have the resources to win, but if they run well, they can draw enough support to thwart one of the major party candidates. Trump has been fashioning himself as a mostly conservative candidate who has appeal among conservative voters. According to the New York Times, he has “become the new starring attraction for the restless, conservative-minded voters who think the political process is in need of disruption.”
Due to this appeal, it’s fair to say that, in a three way race, the candidate most likely to be thwarted by Trump’s run would be the Republican nominee. An independent Trump candidacy would mean the Republican nominee would be battling on two fronts. He would be fighting the Democratic nominee for the all-important swing voters, and he would also be fighting Trump for votes among his conservative base. In a close race, the support lost to Trump could be enough to cost Republicans the entire race and put a Democrat in the White House.
However, Trump’s ability to be such a spoiler depends entirely on whether he makes it out of his primary run with any political juice left. Some of the other 15 candidates vying for the Republican nomination are starting to realize they can break through Trump’s hold on the press by attacking him. Rick Perry, in particular, has been taking this approach. Earlier this week, the former Texas governor called Trump’s candidacy a “cancer on conservatism,” and said that the billionaire presidential candidate could lead to the demise of the Republican Party. How long before the other candidates start following suit?
Harsh and persistent criticism from his own party could damage Trump’s credibility as a candidate and start to limit his appeal. Trump may also yet prove to be his own worst enemy. He appears to have faced few consequences for his recent attacks on McCain, but he’s proven to be a candidate with a penchant for speaking without thinking. Eventually, that could prove to be his undoing. The less popular Trump is when the primaries end, the less impact he will be able to have as a third party candidate.
And yet, even with limited potential for effectiveness, a third party run for Donald Trump would not be a good scenario for the national GOP. Trump would continue to dominate press coverage and would undoubtedly still be able to compete at some level with the Republican nominee for support and resources. It’s also likely that if he runs because he feels the national party has treated him unfairly, he would direct most of his ire at the Republican candidate. All of that adds up to a huge headache that will divert party attention away from the quest to win the election. For Democrats, it all adds up to a huge advantage.
By: Cary Gibson, Government Relations Consultant with Prime Policy Group; Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, July 24, 2015
“Hey, Middle Class; Hillary Gets It”: Linking The Concepts Of Fairness And Growth
Here’s one thing I’m sure of about the economic speech Hillary Clinton gave Monday morning at the New School: If a relatively unknown Democratic governor of Illinois or Michigan were running for president, and he gave the speech Hillary Clinton gave Monday morning at the New School, rank-and-file liberals would be turning rapturous cartwheels. She correctly identified the central economic problem of our time; she talked very clearly about the kinds of solutions she’d pursue to address it; she even tossed a few threats in Wall Street’s direction.
The problem is the wages of middle-class workers. The solutions are varied but boil down to a range of policies that would do two things: one, give corporations incentives to share profits and think less about short-term profit-maximization; two, help middle-class families meet the life expenses (college tuition, day care, etc.) that have increased greatly over the last 20 years while wages have remained stagnant. And as to Wall Streeters who gamble with middle-class people’s money, she said, “We will prosecute individuals and firms” who do so. She used the word “criminal” in this context more than once.
My hypothetical governor giving exactly this speech would be showered with liberal praise. But Clinton says it, and it’s like so what. She faces too much distrust from liberals over her past centrism; and for the moment everybody’s all Bernie Bernie Bernie. And that’s all fine. Sanders is fun and sometimes exhilarating, and a primary contest needs a candidate who can speak the unvarnished truth.
But it’s the speakers of varnished truth who usually win presidential nominations, and Clinton is at least 90 percent likely to win this one. And as varnished truths go in Democratic presidential politics, Clinton’s are about as liberal as any liberal could reasonably hope for. There’s an art to taking it right up to line, but not an inch past, and she’s doing that.
One way of testing whether proposals have any ideological bite to them is to imagine whether anyone from the other party could put them forward. Everyone can and will say they want to help the middle class. But how? Jeb Bush says with 4 percent growth into infinity. First of all this is a big fat lie of a promise, and he’s surely smart enough to know he’s lying. From 1975 to 2014 (for 40 years), annual GDP growth in the United States averaged 2.79 percent, according to World Bank data (the stuff I used came in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, so there’s no URL, but Google something like “Real Historical Gross Domestic Product” and you’ll find it). So it doesn’t happen. The best years of sustained GDP growth we’ve ever had were under—yep—Bill Clinton, but even in the late 1990s, we had only four straight years of plus-4-percent growth, and that’s a modern record (there was a three-year run under Ronald Reagan from 1983-1985).
So it’s a lie, number one, but more importantly, it means nothing as a measure. No, actually, it means something, and what it means is toxic: It means that if we actually do experience growth at 4 percent but without taking any of the ameliorative measures Clinton is talking about, the main impact of that growth will be to give us more inequality, more wage stagnation, more corporate profit-hoarding, more stock buybacks, and more roulette-wheel banking. Bush’s is a flawed way of looking at the economy, and this is a very old point of contention between right and left; As Robert Kennedy once said, GDP “measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Clinton is talking about growth too, but she’s emphasizing equitable growth. And she puts forward numerous proposals that no Republican would touch, from raising the minimum wage—remember, Bush wants no federal minimum wage—to strengthening unions to offering paid family leave to cracking down on employers who misclassify workers as contractors to expanding on Dodd-Frank to endorsing the Buffett Rule, which applies a minimum effective tax rate of 30 percent on earners north of $1 million.
She left a lot of the details for later, and she was fuzzy here and there—she was noncommittal on trade, and it will be interesting to hear what “defending and enhancing” Social Security actually means.
But for now, it’s enough that she’s linking the concepts of fairness and growth and that she’s making that link the centerpiece of her economic agenda. This is important because until very recently, the economics profession hasn’t regarded fairness as anything it should care about. But that has begun to change. This was the big question in my mind last year as I contemplated Clinton’s candidacy last year. Believe me, I had no small amount of doubt about how aggressively she’d embrace the equitable growth proposition. I’d say she’s answered my questions. Last year, on her book tour, she pooh-poohed paid family leave. Now it’s a centerpiece of her platform.
It’s still going to take time for liberals to believe this, and of course some never will. This is where Clinton still has some work to do. When it comes to economics, liberals don’t really want to hear policy proposals. They want to hear FDR-style attacks on the economic royalists. This is not something Clinton is known for, to put it mildly. I don’t think anyone expects her to be Elizabeth Warren, but in her own way, she has to go there, especially when you consider that she might become the wealthiest president in modern times.
This, from the speech, started moving in that direction, and it’s the first time I recall her talking like this: “And while institutions have paid large fines and in some cases admitted guilt, too often it has seemed that the human beings responsible get off with limited consequences—or none at all, even when they’ve already pocketed the gains. This is wrong and, on my watch, it will change.”
Maybe if she keeps this up and the royalists start attacking her, and she stands her ground, the Warrenites will finally come around. In the meantime, liberals ought at least to recognize that the old cautious Hillary they have in their minds would never have gone this far this fast.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 14, 2015
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