“Don’t Govern On Fantasies”: A Prove-You-Can-Govern Strategy Will Inevitably Divide The GOP
When high-mindedness collides with reality, reality usually wins. Remember this when you hear talk of making the next two years a miracle of bipartisan comity.
Begin by being skeptical of the lists of what President Obama and the now Republican-controlled Congress should “obviously” agree on. Notice that liberal lists (including mine) start with immigration and sentencing reform while conservative lists focus on free trade and tax reform. Surprise! The election changed no one’s priorities.
And don’t be fooled by anyone who pretends that the 2016 election isn’t at the top of everyone’s calculations.
With Washington now so deeply divided philosophically, each side is primarily interested in creating a future government more congenial to getting what it wants. Republicans want to win total power two years from now; Democrats want to hang on to the presidency and take back the Senate.
Therefore, don’t misread the internal Republican debate. It is not a fight between pristine souls who just want to show they can govern and fierce ideologues who want to keep fighting. Both GOP camps want to strengthen the conservatives’ hand for 2016. They differ on how best to accomplish this.
The pro-governing Republicans favor a “first do no harm” approach. Thus did incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wisely rule out government shutdowns and debt-ceiling brinkmanship. He’s happy to work with Obama on trade because doing so advances a free market goal the GOP believes in — and because a trade battle would explode the Democratic coalition. For Republicans, what’s not to like?
The more militant conservatives are more candid about the real objective, which is “building the case for Republican governance after 2016.” Those words come from a must-read editorial in National Review, instructively entitled “The Governing Trap.”
“A prove-you-can-govern strategy will inevitably divide the party on the same tea-party-vs.-establishment lines that Republicans have just succeeded in overcoming,” the magazine argued. Also: “If voters come to believe that a Republican Congress and a Democratic president are doing a fine job of governing together, why wouldn’t they vote to continue the arrangement in 2016?”
They’re saying, in other words, that spending two more years making Obama look bad should remain the GOP’s central goal, lest Republicans make the whole country ready for Hillary Clinton. This is the prevailing view among conservatives. McConnell’s main argument with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), and his followers is not about ends but means. McConnell is no less focused than Cruz on bringing down Obama and discrediting Democratic governance, but McConnell needs to be more subtle about it.
Where does this leave Obama and the Democrats? The first to-do item on Obama’s list must be to repair his currently abysmal relations with his own party on Capitol Hill. He will need his party as the GOP goes after him in one “investigative” hearing after another. He also needs them if he goes ahead, as he should, with executive orders on immigration reform.
Obama has already drawn a red line on immigration from which there is no easy retreat. And exit polls explain why Republicans, particularly House Speaker John Boehner, have little reason to act before Obama’s gone.
Overall, 57 percent of voters favored granting illegal immigrants “a chance to apply for legal status,” while 39 percent preferred deporting them. But those who favored deportation voted for Republican House candidates by better than 3 to 1. Boehner won’t risk alienating this loyal group. Better for Obama to pick a fight in which he is taking action than to give way to passivity and powerlessness.
In the end, Obama needs to govern as best he can even as he and his allies prepare for the longer struggle.
Democrats were tongue-tied about economics in the campaign. They avoided highlighting the substantial achievements of the Obama years for fear that doing so would make them seem out of touch with voters whose wages are stagnating. But neither did Democrats come up with plausible answers and policies to win over these voters. They lost both ways.
A Democratic Party paralyzed on economics won’t deserve to prevail. The president and his party — including Clinton — must find a way of touting their stewardship while advancing a bold but realistic agenda that meets the demands of Americans who are still hurting. This encompasses not only defending government’s role in achieving shared growth but also, as Obama suggested Friday, restoring faith in how government works.
Solving the country’s economic riddle would be a much better use of their time than investing in the fantasy that McConnell and Boehner will try to make Obama look good.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 09, 2014
“The Animal House Republicans Take Control”: It’s Not About Helping You Or Me; It’s About Power
This too shall pass. In the bipolar Gong Show of Washington politics, it’s the Republicans’ turn. Count on them to opt for televised spectacle over governing. It’s what they do.
You think a guy like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will be dutifully attending committee meetings and painstakingly crafting legislation? Not as long as President Obama’s still in the White House and there are TV cameras on the premises.
There’s actually an editorial in the influential conservative magazine National Review entitled “The Governing Trap.”
It argues for two more years of Animal House Republicanism: “If voters come to believe that a Republican Congress and a Democratic president are doing a fine job of governing together, why wouldn’t they vote to continue the arrangement in 2016?”
See, it’s not about helping you or me; it’s about power.
Speaking of 2016, does anybody imagine the pendulum’s stopped swinging? Here’s the deal: the GOP made big Senate gains in 2004, 2010 and 2014, the Democrats in 2006, 2008 and 2012.
Comes the 2016 presidential election year, 24 of 34 incumbent senators will be Republicans — seven in states that Obama won twice.
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich is so old he can remember back when Rush Limbaugh’s personal hero became Speaker of the House:
“I was in the Clinton administration Election Day 1994 when Democrats lost both houses of Congress and Newt Gingrich became king of the Hill,” he writes. “It was horrible. But you know what? It created all sorts of opportunities. It smoked Republicans out. They could no longer hide behind blue-dog Democrats. Americans saw them for who they were. Gingrich became the most hated man in America. The 1994 election also marked the end of the coalition of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats that had controlled much of Congress since the end of the New Deal.”
Alas, Gingrich’s demise took several years. He was simply outmaneuvered politically by Bill Clinton, while widespread exposure to his grating personality and gigantic ego eventually forced him out. The Clinton impeachment doomed him.
Meanwhile, however, those blue-dog Democrats have nearly all become Republicans. I’d argue that the demise of regionally and ideologically diverse American political parties — i.e. of liberal Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats — has brought paralysis to Washington. The merger of GOP economic primitivism with Southern-style fundamentalist religiosity has badly damaged bipartisanship.
Always and everywhere, certitude is the enemy of compromise. After all, if God says that cutting tycoons’ income taxes infallibly leads to higher revenues and enhanced prosperity, it would be sinful to notice that it’s never actually happened in the visible world.
Gingrich got elected due to the Clinton tax increases of 1993, which every single Republican in Congress voted against amid universal predictions of doom. The actual result turned out to be 25 million new jobs and a balanced budget.
What’s more, does anybody remember that the supposed rationale for President Bush’s 2001 tax cuts was that paying down the national debt too soon might stifle investment? Certainly nobody in the Tea Party does.
Meanwhile, count me among those who think that even “red state” Democrats who ran away from President Obama as if he had Ebola made a big mistake. (Remember Ebola? It’s so last week, I know. However, I await apologies from readers of the Chicken Little persuasion who objected to my writing that politicizing a disease was contemptible and the danger of a serious outbreak extremely small.)
But back to Obama. It’s true that his overall approval rating stands at 43 percent. Also, however, that the Republican Congress checks in at 13 percent. The president remains quite popular among the kinds of Democrats who mostly sat out the 2014 election.
True, many voters don’t understand how deep and dangerous a hole the U.S. economy had fallen into in 2008; nor that unemployment’s dropping sharply; the stock market’s more than doubled; and that the Federal budget deficit’s dropped from 9.8 percent to a fiscally sustainable 2.9 percent of GDP on Obama’s watch. But they’ll never know if Democrats don’t tell them.
Probably a candidate like Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor was doomed anyway. But how could anybody imagine the rope-a-dope tactic would work? The same is true regarding Obamacare. Why not praise the law’s popular features and talk about fixing the rest? The Republicans have no health insurance plan except back to the bad old days of “pre-existing conditions” and get sick/get canceled.
On the defensive, Democrats have articulated no persuasive plan for fixing what New York Times economics writer Dave Leonhardt calls “The Great Wage Slowdown.”
“Median inflation-adjusted income last year,” he writes, “was still $2,100 lower than when President Obama took office in 2009 — and $3,600 lower than when President George W. Bush took office in 2001.”
Well, they’d better find one. Meanwhile, the GOP/Animal House plan is well known: Cut Scrooge McDuck’s taxes; keep yelling Obama, Obama, Obama.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, November 12, 2014
“Republicans Cloaking Their Extremism”: The Values Election We Didn’t Have — And Must Have
Tuesday’s elections have left us with a dismal political landscape in Washington, D.C. and exposed the deep dissatisfaction many Americans feel with the economy and the functioning of government.
The results also, let’s be frank, pay sad tribute to the dishonest genius of Republican Party strategists, who coached candidates to hide clear records of extremism, and who spent six years laser-focused on making Congress dysfunctional while managing to convince voters it was the fault of President Obama and the Democrats.
By cloaking their extremism, and by evading responsibility for anti-government and anti-governing obstructionism, Republican leaders kept voters from having a clear sense of the real contest this year’s elections represented. In 2008 and 2012, there was no denying that the elections were between two very different systems of values and ideas about the role of government in promoting and protecting the well-being of its people. This year’s election was largely a failure to the extent that it was not about values and policies but the personal unpopularity of President Obama, any and all government failings, and the dysfunction in Washington.
In fact, there’s a troubling paradox in the election results: some of the best news for progressives is also some of the most depressing, because it points to the depth and cost of our political failures.
Here’s what I mean. Voters in red states and blue cities alike voted to raise the minimum wage, which polls show has majority support across the political spectrum. But those same voters elected Republican candidates who have opposed efforts to raise workers’ wages. Colorado and North Dakota both rejected anti-choice “personhood” amendments, but voters elected officials in favor of “personhood” laws and hell-bent on closing down health clinics. Polls show support for equal rights for LGBT people way up, but many voters still supported candidates who are committed to resisting any gains toward legal equality.
Voters are rightly dissatisfied with an economy that leaves so many workers and families with stagnant or sinking wages and opportunities. Yet they voted for candidates most likely to make those problems worse. Americans who are hurting are not the ones who will benefit from further tax cuts for the rich, policies that give wealthy corporations and shadowy political groups more influence over elections than voters and ordinary people, and the gutting of regulations that protect consumers and communities from wrongdoing by unaccountable corporations. They’re concerned about climate change yet their votes yesterday hand the gavel of the Senate committee responsible for dealing with it to a climate change denier.
The deck was clearly stacked against progressives this year. Democrats faced contested races in a number of conservative states. There was seemingly no end to the bad news overseas, some of which found its way home. And President Obama’s popularity dwindled even as the economic picture brightened, because so many people were not feeling any of the benefits in their own pockets.
But that’s no excuse for the wave of defeats. Too many Democrats did not make a clear and convincing case about the consequences of policies pushed by far-right activists and promoted by Republican elected officials. And that allowed the debate to become a referendum on voters’ feelings about Barack Obama — and on an insider’s squabble about where the buck stopped on the lack of effective action in Congress.
We must not let Republicans continue to get away with the sleight-of-hand they used to distract voters from their extremism this year. Progressive leaders must make clear what values are at stake in the upcoming policy debates — and whose policies are aligned with the American values and the interests of American families. We must push Democrats to draw clear distinctions between the values of the far-right lawmakers who will make this the most ideologically extreme Congress in memory and the voters who believe our nation’s future depends on prosperity that is broadly shared, not funneled only to those at the very top. This also requires Democrats to have a clear agenda that excites the people who sat out this week’s elections.
Moving forward, the most important mission for President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders is not to show how well they can work with Republican congressional leaders, but to show voters that they can and will take principled stands when core values are at stake, and to help Americans understand how the policy agenda of far-right Republicans undermines the kind of communities and country they want to live in.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way; The Huffington Post Blog, November 5, 2014
“The Hostility Of Latter-Day Republicans”: For Obama, No Point In Being Conciliatory Now
I didn’t watch much TV last night, but I got the impression that whenever the gabbers ran out of steam in describing what was unfolding, they’d revert to blah blah blah about whether the results would re-inaugurate some sort of Era of Good Feeling in Washington.
It’s unclear to me if this sort of talk reflects incredible delusions about the hostility to compromise of latter-day Republicans, or the belief that Barack Obama and Democrats have no play but total surrender. Either way, it makes no sense, even if both sides make the obligatory cooing sounds about bipartisanship and “solving the country’s problems” for a few days.
Last night’s results, in fact, will enormously ratchet up pressure on Republican congressional leaders to act as though their party is already in charge. We’re much more likely to hear ultimatums than peace offerings. I’d figure Boehner and McConnell will let the White House know, privately and publicly, that life can get easier if Obama (a) approves the Keystone XL pipeline, (b) indefinitely delays any DACA expansion, and (c) indefinitely delays final action on climate change regs.
Maybe (a) is a viable option; for all any of us knows, the administration has already decided to approve Keystone. But pure merits aside, backing off on DACA would squander the most important political chip Obama can play for his party before leaving office, and backing off climate change regs might well kill prospects for doing anything on the most important long-range challenge facing the country for many years to come. I personally cannot see anything within the power of congressional Republicans to offer Obama that would justify either concession. Saying “no,” on the other hand, will almost certainly cause Republicans heartburn over the inevitable divisions of opinion about how, exactly, to respond (after the shrieks of rage have subsided). Add in the fact that an awful lot of Republican activists and opinion-leaders are going to vastly over-interpret the midterm results into either a “mandate” or a sign of manifest destiny, there’s little reason to think the GOP is going to listen to those who think the next two years must be devoted to changing the party’s image. At this point, it would be a terrible idea for Obama and Democrats to help Republicans achieve a “pragmatic” makeover they’re not willing to earn by disappointing the almighty “base.”
Besides, Democrats have another task that should absorb their time for the next year or so: coming up with a agenda for keeping the economic recovery going while boosting its tangible benefits for the 99%. Making progress on that front would be better medicine for the Democratic Party and for the country than considering concessions to the people who think there’s not enough inequality today.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, November 5, 2014
“Evangelical Myth Won. Wall Street Won. The Banks Won. America Lost”: Since Lies Worked So Well For Republicans, We’ll Have More
The Republican Party base is white evangelicals. So no wonder the GOP lies about the country, the economy and the president worked. The folks who base their lives on religious mythology have spent lifetimes being trained to believe lies. And if you point that out then they kick into victim mode and denounce people who question them as persecutors. Last night they won. Lies won.
As the New York Times noted:
“Republican candidates campaigned on only one thing: what they called the failure of President Obama. In speech after speech, ad after ad, they relentlessly linked their Democratic opponent to the president and vowed that they would put an end to everything they say the public hates about his administration. On Tuesday morning, the Republican National Committee released a series of get-out-the-vote images showing Mr. Obama and Democratic Senate candidates next to this message: ‘If you’re not a voter, you can’t stop Obama.’ The most important promises that winning Republicans made were negative in nature. They will repeal health care reform. They will roll back new regulations on banks and Wall Street. They will stop the Obama administration’s plans to curb coal emissions and reform immigration and invest in education.”
Since the economy has rebounded, health care reform has worked, all that remained for the GOP was to lie. And since the base of the GOP is white aging southern evangelicals the GOP was in luck. These are easy folks to lie to. That’s because they already accept an alternative version of reality. Also, of course since the lies are about a black man, that doesn’t hurt. Yes, race is “still” an issue.
The midterm election boiled down to xenophobia about the “Other.” Ebola was the president’s fault! ISIS was coming to get us! We aren’t safe!
None of this is true, but no matter. In fact judging by actual facts the Obama presidency has been successful in spite of the GOP obstruction. The economy is back. Jobs are up. Health care reform is working. We’ve been kept safe from terror attacks. America is strong.
What we’ll now see is a reinvigorated religious right. And since lies worked so well we’ll have more. Creationism, anti-gay initiatives, anti-choice initiatives, and of course pro-Koch-Brother-Financed lies upon lies to bury climate change debate is on the way.
The Republican-dominated Supreme Court stands ready to back corporate and religious right-financed attacks of the environment, pro-Wall Street laws and all the rest.
Racism won. Evangelical myth won. Wall Street won. The banks won. America lost.
By: Frank Schaeffer, The Huffington Post Blog, Movember 5, 2014
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