“Old Habits Die Hard”: Cutting Taxes Doesn’t Cut It For Republicans
If the GOP pushes the economy over the fiscal cliff, the party will go over too. The longer Republicans push for tax breaks for bankers and billionaires, the more trouble they’ll get themselves into. Republicans have enough problems morphing into the Tea Party, now the GOP is becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the Fortune 500.
The Election Day national exit survey demonstrates the fact that the GOP doesn’t have a good message for Americans who worry about the economy. The voters have spoken and the poll tells us what they have to say about the economy and taxes. Republicans will not like what they hear.
Voters heard the questions that Mitt Romney asked about the president’s handling of the economy, but the GOP nominee didn’t follow up with the answers. It should have been a plus for the challenger that almost half (45 percent) of the voters felt the economy was “not so good.” However, a majority (55 percent to 42 percent) of these distressed voters actually went for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Another illustration of the GOP’s failure to address middle class economic concerns was that nine of 10 voters (90 percent) who gave the economy a positive rating voted to re-elect the president but only six out of every 10 (60 percent) voters who gave the economy a negative rating voted for his challenger.
Cutting taxes doesn’t cut it for Republicans. There were more voters who worried about unemployment (38 percent) and rising prices (37 percent) than there were who were concerned about cutting taxes (14 percent). The good news for the GOP was that voters who worried about taxes voted overwhelmingly for Romney. The bad news was that there were too few of these voters to make much of a difference in the outcome. Along the same lines, almost half (47 percent) of the voters wanted to raise taxes on the wealthy and another small group (13 percent) favored raising everybody’s taxes. That’s six out of 10 voters who are open to raising taxes to stabilize the economy. Only a third (35 percent) of the voters wanted to hold the line on taxes.
The failure of Romney and the GOP to come up with anything but cutting taxes leaves Republicans in the lurch. Nature abhors a vacuum and the party’s neglect of jobs and inflation gives voters the chance to fill that vacuum with their feelings about the last Republican president. This isn’t good news for Republicans because a large majority (53 percent to 38 percent) of the electorate blames George W. Bush not Barack Obama for the condition of today’s economy.
Voters want to fight a class war and the president’s populist approach to the economy is just what they wanted. Trickle-down economics was a disaster for Romney and will continue to tarnish the Republican brand if the party doesn’t craft a more comprehensive economic message. More than half (53 percent) of the voters feel that the American economic system favors the rich and only a third (34 percent) think the system is fair to all Americans. A majority (55 percent to 39 percent) of voters also believe that Romney’s policies would have favored the rich over the middle class. A fifth (21 percent) of the voters wanted a president who cares about people and those voters supported the incumbent overwhelmingly (81 percent to 18 percent).
The party’s fixation on taxes means the GOP is riding a one trick pony into the ground. The debate on taxes only focuses attention on the GOP’s inability to come up with anything new. Old habits die hard so President Obama doesn’t have to worry that Republicans will come up with something that works better.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, November 26, 2012
“Take That Turkey Off The Table”: The Bush Tax Cuts For The Wealthy Are Un-American
Reading about the historic Johnstown flood of 1889 brought to mind the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy—and why the president must rid us of them now as the nation starts a new season, thankful yet sober.
The 1 percent of that era were the robber barons of the Gilded Age, with great steel, coke, and railroad wealth concentrated in Pittsburgh. They started an exclusive club, several industrial barons, including Andrew Carnegie, devoted to fishing and hunting, by the South Fork Dam. The dam the club constructed nearby overlooked several towns and villages in the rugged incline and valley below. On a terribly rainy spring day when the dam broke, an entire lake drowned those towns in torrents of water, debris and floating trees, and houses. Because the fancy club’s earthen dam was shoddy, roughly 2,200 people died in the worst natural disaster to befall an American town up to that point.
The robber barons’ summer recreation endangered the whole community’s safety and livelihood. People talked about the dam breaking all the time before it did. And that’s what I’m talking about. For too long we have lived under the yoke, under the treacherous dam of putting really rich people first. To recover from our own economic calamity, those tax cuts must be scrubbed, along with everything with George W. Bush’s name on it. Let it not be forgot, he’s the guy that took peace and prosperity and turned it all into desert dust and debt.
Taking that turkey off the table would not upset most wealthy people, who were content to live under the Clinton tax code. That is what President Obama wishes to do, but he has been thwarted once before by stubborn Republicans. This time around, he seems to have more mettle about getting rid of the significant tax break the rich have received, just for being rich. It will also bring substantial revenue badly needed by the Treasury. I grant you, there are hedge fund managers out there who see it differently than you and me.
As we mark the autumn harvest in a collective ritual that brings comfort, let’s resolve to rid ourselves of the most divisive policy remaining from the Bush years. A policy that is, in the end, unfair and un-American. And life will start looking up.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, Washington Whispers, November 20, 2012
“The Emperor Has No Clothes”: Shattering The Myth Of Karl Rove
To some he’s a hero, to others a villain, but everyone — right, left, and center — seems to agree on one thing about Karl Rove: He’s really really smart. Rove is, most political observers assume, one of the savviest operators in politics today, so when he speaks, people listen. After Citizens United and the 2010 GOP wave, when Rove ruled Washington from his non-perch at American Crossroads, I saw more than one very smart liberal go from mocking Rove as a liar and hack one minute to having the blood drain from the face when he made an ominous political prediction the next. Such is the power of the Rove.
Or at least it was. Tuesday night may have shattered the Myth of Rove, just as it shattered Rove himself when he had a meltdown in front of millions on Fox News viewers after the network called Ohio for Obama. The moment, which has since gone viral, was the perfect encapsulation of Emperor Has No Clothes realization that Rove is now experiencing. Rove was proven wrong. On live TV. By Fox News. And of course, that wasn’t the only thing he got wrong. He blew the whole election, predicting Romney would win.
But if you take a look at Rove’s record of prognostications, this should be no big surprise. Before Tuesday, Rove’s most famous wiff came in 2000, when he predicted that George W. Bush would beat Al Gore in a landslide. Rove predicted Bush would get “in the vicinity of 320 electoral votes” and even suggested that Bush had a shot at deep blue California. “I mean, the governor is going to start off in New Mexico, spend a day and a half in California, go to Oregon and Washington, go to Minnesota, go to Iowa,” Rove told CBS News host Bob Schieffer. Of course, 2000 came down to nail biter, with Bush winning 271 votes — just 1 more than necessary to win — and losing the popular vote (later, it turned out that Gore probably actually won).
He was so chastened by the blown call that when reporters asked him to make a prediction the night before the 2004 election, he refused. “Rub my nose in it,” Rove snapped at a reporter who brought up the 2000 prediction. “With a circle of tape recorders humming, Rove said he was making no such predictions this time around,” the New York Times reported on November 1, 2004.
After the election, Andrew Sullivan was actually prescient about this on CNN: “He didn’t get a majority of the popular vote in 2000, he squeezed a 51 percent victory in 2004. He’s been teetering on the brink ever since, and the base strategy now shows him not to be a genius but to be a real failure.”
But two years later, Rove was back to wildly miscalculating results. “Look, I’m looking at all these Robert and adding them up. And I add up to a Republican Senate and a Republican House. You may end up with a different math, but you’re entitled to your math. I’m entitled to ‘the’ math,” Rove said in a testy exchange with NPR host Robert Siegel the week before the 2006 election. Democrats ended up winning a huge wave that gave them control of both the House and Senate.
In 2008 Rove, who wasn’t involved in John McCain’s campaign, correctly predicted that Obama would win (but how you could you not that year?), though he was too bearish. In 2010, he correctly predicted that Republicans would take the House and make gains in the Senate (but how you could you not that year?), though he was overly bullish.
For conservative donors who entrusted millions with Rove and his American Crossroads groups, only to see a 1 percent success rate, the Rove bubble is bursting. “There is some holy hell to pay. Karl Rove has a lot of explaining to do … I don’t know how you tell your donors that we spent $390 million and got nothing,” a donor told John Ward. “The billionaire donors I hear are livid.”
If Rove needs something to do, perhaps he could join his former boss George W. Bush — in obscurity.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, November 8, 2012
“Big ‘Perilous’ Change”: Now More Than Ever, George W. Bush Is On The Ballot
It’s probably safe to say no publication has more consistently promoted the idea that “George W. Bush is on the ballot” in 2012 than the Washington Monthly. And that goes beyond the usual issue of the Bush administration’s responsibility for the Great Recession. We’ve argued that the 2012 campaign closely resembles the 2000 precedent in the specific policies and agendas of the GOP nominees, and the likely trajectory of the country if Romney wins. That’s why we’ve published and promoted the e-book, Elephant in the Room: Washington in the Bush Years. We’ve been here before.
But as election day approaches, there’s a final parallel that’s worth underlining: Romney is emulating Bush’s mendacious claim to be a “uniter not a divider,” and far more moderate than his party. As Paul Glastris reminds readers in the Editor’s Note in the upcoming November/December issue of the magazine (a sneak preview is available here), W. relied a lot on misleading voters about his relationship with his party:
One early summer day in 2000 I was summoned to the Oval Office along with several other White House staffers to get instructions from President Bill Clinton on what he wanted to say in his upcoming speech at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, a speech I was assigned to cowrite. But the president was in political strategist mode that day, and in the midst of downloading his thoughts on the speech he launched into a long soliloquy about the dynamics of the presidential contest and the nature of the man Al Gore was up against, Texas Governor George W. Bush. “Let me tell you something,” he said at one point. “Bush is a lot more conservative than people realize.”
The Big Dog certainly got that right, and the scary but unmistakable thing is that the Republican Party which Mitt Romney is trying to distance himself from at the last minute (rhetorically, though not substantively in any major way) is if anything considerably more conservative than it was in 2000. And if there’s any actual split between Romney and his party, it will only produce incompetent and dystfunctional government, as it often did when W. tried to exhibit “compassion” in order to appeal to swing constituencies:
The ideological contradictions unleashed within the GOP during those years have only grown. We see it in the increasingly stormy and dysfunctional relationship between the corporate and Tea Party wings of the party, in the freak show that was the 2012 GOP primary, and in the bottomless, robotic mendacity of the Mitt Romney campaign.
Yep, we’ve heard it all before. And as someone who was on to Bush’s game in 2000, and thinks he won (or to put it more accurately, succeeded in being inaugurated) because Democrats let him become the candidate of “safe change,” the possibility that Romney will succeed in the exact same scam is maddening.
Every voter should think about ol’ W. when they go to vote this year, and ask themselves: “Do we want to go back down that road again?”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 2, 2012
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