“2016 Versus 2014?”: Are 2016 GOP Presidential Candidates Rooting Against The Party in 2014?
Who’s afraid of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell? It may not only be the Obama administration, congressional Democrats and their allies. According to a new report from Time’s Zeke J. Miller, the ranks of people who are quietly rooting for Democrats to hold the Senate by the skin of their teeth include all manner of Republican presidential hopefuls. Miller writes:
Behind closed doors and in private conversations with reporters and donors, GOPers eyeing the White House in 2016 are privately signaling they wouldn’t mind seeing the party fall short in this year’s midterm elections. For all the benefits of a strong showing in 2014 after resounding defeat in 2012, senior political advisers to some of the top Republican presidential aspirants believe winning the Senate might be the worst thing that could happen.
Miller identifies GOP governors Chris Christie of New Jersey, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Rick Perry of Texas as being the prime movers in this, as they are all likely to contrast their can-do problem-solving with the feckless gridlock of Washington – gridlock that they’d have a harder time dealing with if the GOP controlled all of Congress. GOP senators too (Florida’s Marco Rubio, Texas’ Ted Cruz and Kentucky’s Rand Paul) would have a greater expectations problem if people actually expected them to do more than inveigh against Obama. Miller continues:
For candidates from either category, a GOP-controlled Senate and House would mean having to answer for their party’s legislative agenda in both a primary and a general election. Whether it be new fiscal deals struck with Obama or continued votes to repeal Obamacare, aides to potential candidates fear that congressional action may put a damper on their boss’ future campaigns by forcing them to either embrace or break with specific legislative proposal as opposed to general policy ideals.
All of these points are good and Miller’s article is worth a full read. I especially like the detail where he notes that GOP governors don’t talk so much about the GOP Congress (honestly little wonder given that the reviled Obamacare is way, way, way more popular than congressional Republicans).
But there’s another reason why Republicans should be wary of excessive success and it has to do with the schizophrenic nature of the modern electorate. The midterm electorate tends to be older and whiter than the presidential electorate and the electorate’s increasing polarization (where parties tend to run up steep margins among specific demographic groups, like Republicans among whites and Democrats among minorities) has produced off-year collections of voters that lean Democratic (because they’re younger and less white) in presidential years and lean Republican (because they’re older and whiter) in off-years. The upshot has in recent cycles been parties that have struggled to succeed with the other side’s electorate.
So while Republicans swore up and down that they were going to learn the lessons of 2012 about growing their base, success in 2014 could kill any steps in that direction (which, in fairness, haven’t much been in evidence).
National Journal’s Ron Brownstein explicated this phenomenon last June:
The peril for Republicans is that a good 2014 election could provide a “false positive” signal about their prospects for 2016, much as the 2010 landslide did for 2012. … The GOP can thrive in 2014 without solving [its youth voter] problem — but not in 2016. The same dynamic holds for Republicans’ minority problems. The GOP attracted 60 percent of white voters in 2010 and enjoyed a landslide. But because minority turnout increased so much just two years later, Romney lost badly while winning 59 percent of the white vote.
At The American Conservative, Scott Galupo (a former U.S. News contributor) sees something more than a “false positive” danger; he argues that GOP poobahs understand their party’s problem full well but are trapped.
Republicans, or at least a good portion of those who matter, know full well that the party has a problem going into 2016, quite apart from what happens this fall. The crux of it is this: there’s nothing they can do to change it in the near term. The adjustments they need to make in order to recapture the White House—find some way to deal with undocumented immigrants; give up on tax cuts for the wealthy; acknowledge the painful trade-offs of any serious Obamacare alternative—would jeopardize their grip on Congress.
It’s possible that Republican leaders are merely biding their time until the Senate is in hand. Why rock the boat when you can win by default? I suspect, however, that the truth is more inconvenient: Rocking the boat will be no easier in 2016 than it is now.
The bottom line of course is that deep down no one is going to root against their side winning – you take the victory in the hand rather than hoping that a narrow loss will bank-shot you to greater success in the future. But these considerations are a useful reminder that allied political interests aren’t always perfectly aligned and that sometimes short-term success can mask and even exacerbate long term problems.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, April 9, 2014
“A Theological-Political Vision Lies In Tatters”: Catholicism, George W. Bush, And The Cluelessness Of The Religious Right
Once upon a time, the religious right’s leading intellectuals told themselves an inspiring story. It went something like this: From the time of the Puritans all the way down to the early 1970s, American public life was decisively shaped by the moral and spiritual witness of the Protestant Mainline’s leading churches: The Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, and Episcopalians.
But then the Great Collapse began, as these venerable churches sold their souls to the counterculture, abandoned the moral and religious tenets of historical Christianity, embraced a series of increasingly left-wing and anti-American causes, and saw their numbers (and then their cultural influence) plummet. Today these churches are an intellectual and demographic shell of their former selves.
This was a potentially disastrous development, depriving America of the theologically grounded public philosophy that it needs in order to thrive. But as luck — or providence — would have it, the decline of the Mainline churches set in at the precise moment when two other monumental cultural and religious developments unfolded: The rise of a politicized form of Protestant evangelicalism and a revival of intellectual and spiritual energy in the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II. The time was ripe for evangelicals and Catholics to come together to form a successor to the Mainline churches.
The public philosophy promulgated by this new-fangled amalgam of evangelicalism and Catholicism (with the former supplying the foot soldiers and the latter providing the ideas) would be staunchly opposed to abortion and euthanasia. It would be strongly anti-communist. It would be passionately pro-capitalist. It would favor using military force to promote democracy. And it would re-describe the United States, its history, and its form of government in providential-theological terms, with the rights espoused in the nation’s founding documents declared to derive directly from medieval concepts of natural law.
Once the country (or at least a sizable majority) embraced this public philosophy — turning it into a governing philosophy — the United States would supposedly flourish as never before, protecting the unborn, unleashing economic liberty at home, defending democracy and fighting tyranny abroad, and most of all bringing the nation back to its properly Christian roots after the silly season of the 1960s.
It is exceedingly odd that Joseph Bottum has written a book — An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America — devoted to elaborating this story as if it were original to him, when in fact it is derived almost entirely from the writings of the man for whom both of us once worked: The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.
You see, I once edited Neuhaus’ monthly magazine First Things. When I quit to write a book denouncing the ideological project outlined above, Neuhaus brought on Bottum (then the literary editor of The Weekly Standard) as my successor. When Neuhaus died in January 2009, Bottum became editor-in-chief of the magazine. (Twenty-one months later he was summarily dismissed by its governing board for reasons that have never been publicly explained.)
Bottum, a published poet, is a gifted prose stylist. That gives a distinctive flair to his version of the story. But the story itself, in every detail, comes straight from the writings of Neuhaus and his small circle of ideological compatriots: Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Robert P. George foremost among them.
In Bottum’s hands, no less than in the essays and books in which it was originally formulated, the story has some explanatory power. The decline of the Mainline churches is indeed a significant event in recent American cultural and political history — and one that has received insufficient attention from both scholars and intellectuals. (My colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty’s thoughtful reflections on Bottum’s treatment of the topic can be read here.)
But the story also obscures far more than it clarifies. For one thing, Bottum can’t seem to figure out if the problems he identifies with post-Mainline America (including the absence of a unifying, overarching moral consensus and the subsequent rise in acrimonious conflict in our political culture) are a result of Protestant Christianity’s inability to defend itself against an aggressive form of secularism, or if, instead, what we call secularism is actually just a desiccated form of Protestantism (hence the reference to a “post-Protestant ethic” in his subtitle). Either way, Protestant Christianity is to blame for America’s problems.
Which is why Bottum (following Neuhaus and the others) turns to Catholicism for a solution.
The closest we’ve come to seeing this theological-political vision in action was in George W. Bush’s second inaugural address. You remember: It was a speech that consisted of a series of sweeping assertions about America’s God-appointed task to end “tyranny in our world.” (Bush made more than 50 references to “freedom” and “liberty” in a speech of 2,000 words.)
For Bottum, this was “the most purely philosophical address in the history of America’s inaugurations,” one that deployed “a Catholic philosophical vocabulary” rooted in natural law theory to “express a moral seriousness the nation needs.”
That’s one way to look at it.
Here’s another: The speech was a crude expression of American parochialism and pious self-congratulation — the kind of address you’d expect from someone who believed toppling Saddam Hussein was a sufficient condition for creating a functioning democracy in Iraq, and who thinks that presidential rhetoric can rise no higher than paraphrasing the lyrics to “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It was the speech of a simple-minded man leading a simple-minded administration.
The most interesting and original thing in Bottum’s book is a new-found pessimism about the practical prospects for the theological-political engagement he still favors. But I would be more impressed with this darkening mood if it grew out of a realization that great political leadership involves far more than moralistic sermonizing — and that something as partisan and sectarian as a Catholicized version of the Republican Party platform could never serve as the unifying, overarching moral vision of a pluralistic liberal democracy.
Instead, we’re left with vague, evasive statements about how “Catholicism as a system of thought proved too foreign” to play its appointed role as cheerleader for American exceptionalism.
Poor Joseph Bottum. Poor religious right.
They’re down for the count, splayed out on the mat. And they haven’t got a clue about what the hell happened.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, April 11, 2014
“As Dumb As It Is Predictable”: The Dumbest Thing The Right Is Saying About Sebelius’ Replacement
President Obama may have had troubles with the Healthcare.gov rollout, but he’s rolling out a replacement for departing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius nicely. Appointing Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who was confirmed last year to head the Office of Management and Budget 96-0, virtually insures he’ll get someone into Sebelius’ seat before midterm politics heat up.
That doesn’t mean the right won’t try to throw garbage at the centrist and well-respected Burwell. On PJ Tatler today they’re calling her “the person who shut down the veterans’ memorials,” because as OMB chief, she signed the memo telling agencies “to execute plans for an orderly shutdown due to the absence of appropriations” when Sen. Ted Cruz and the GOP shut down the government last year.
You’ll recall that Cruz and the right had the audacity to blame Obama and the Democrats for the shutdown, which backfired on them spectacularly. But not before Cruz, Sarah Palin and a Confederate-flag-waving moron challenged the closure of the World War II veterans’ memorial with a protest that moved to the White House, where Larry Klayman told President Obama “to put the Quran down … and come out figuratively with your hands up.” Good times.
So yeah, they’re going to try that whole thing again, but it’s not going to work. (An aside: this NBC News story calls Burwell “the woman who ordered the government shutdown,” which at the time probably seemed like a feature writer’s flourish to pull people into a dull story about the OMB director, but in hindsight didn’t accurately describe the way the mess unfolded.) Sen. John McCain immediately tweeted, “Sylvia Burwell is an excellent choice to be the next #HHS Secretary.” While righties are hoping that red state Democrats will turn on the woman who supposedly ordered the shutdown of veterans’ memorials, Sen. Joe Manchin praised Burwell’s appointment, too. (It probably helps that she’s from West Virginia.)
On the larger question of Sebelius’ legacy, we can only say that millions of people got health insurance, and millions more still need it. Ezra Klein trolled the right by declaring that it means “Obamacare has won,” which is pretty funny given that he helped lead the national freak-out over Healthcare.gov’s troubles back in October. Jonathan Cohn has a more balanced take in the New Republic. He acknowledges Sebelius’ management mistake in letting the federal exchange website’s troubles mount without letting the president know – there’s evidence she herself didn’t know – but he appropriately notes she’ll be remembered for the millions newly insured, particularly because she worked hard with Republican governors who bucked conservative constituencies to expand Medicaid.
Of course, confirming Burwell won’t mean the GOP stops trying to sabotage the Affordable Care Act. They had mostly stopped blaming Sebelius, because the new talking points say nobody could have made the law work, because by definition it can’t work. Having done everything in their power to insure it can’t work, which is literally costing American lives, they blame Obama for its shortcomings. However brilliant an HHS pick she may be, Sylvia Burwell can’t change that.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, April 11, 2014
“LePage Vetoes Medicaid Expansion For All The Wrong Reasons”: Maine’s Paul LePage Is One Uninformed And Paranoid Governor
Maine’s Democratic state House Speaker, Mark Eves, noted the circumstances this week surrounding Medicaid expansion. “We have a bipartisan plan for life-saving health care for tens of thousands of Mainers,” he said. “It creates jobs, it save lives, it saves money.”
All of this happens to be true. Every state north of Virginia has either embraced Medicaid expansion or is working towards doing so – except Maine, where Gov. Paul LePage (R) refuses to cooperate. More than 60,000 low-income Mainers would benefit from the policy, on top of the economic and fiscal benefits, but the Republican governor nevertheless vetoed Medicaid expansion yesterday.
The measure also would have established a managed care system for all 320,000 beneficiaries, an effort to control costs in the $2.5 billion program, which is Maine’s version of the Medicaid health insurance program.
Under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, the federal government offered to reimburse states for 100 percent of the cost of expansion for at least three years, then gradually reduce reimbursements rates to about 90 percent.
But in his veto message to the Legislature, LePage wrote that Maine could neither afford expansion nor trust the federal government to deliver on its promises.
The rejection didn’t come as a surprise, and Democratic state lawmakers will try to override LePage’s veto. By all accounts, however, they face an uphill climb – some GOP state lawmakers are on board with the policy, but probably not enough to generate a two-thirds majority.
But what was somewhat surprising was just how awful LePage’s defense was. The governor, struggling in his re-election bid this year, had plenty of time to come up with a credible rationale for blocking Medicaid expansion, but he didn’t come up with much.
“It is shortsighted to think federal funds will always be available, especially after watching the federal deficit climb and witnessing continual delays and changes from Washington,” he said in a statement.
I realize that Paul LePage sometimes struggles with policy details, but there are some rudimentary facts he should probably understand before telling 60,000 people they can’t have health insurance.
For example, if LePage is “watching the federal deficit climb,” he’s not watching closely enough. The federal deficit isn’t climbing; it’s shrinking. In fact, in recent years, we’ve seen the fastest deficit reduction than at any point since World War II. Does LePage not know that? Maybe he should have looked it up before issuing his statement?
What’s more, LePage is convinced federal funds may not “always be available” to finance Medicaid expansion. In other words, he’ll refuse the funds now because maybe, someday, far off in the future, Washington won’t offer the funds they’re promising to provide.
Sorry, 60,000 struggling Mainers. You can’t have access to affordable medical care because your governor is paranoid about a fiscal situation that may or may not materialize at some point.
These are the best arguments the governor’s office could come up with after having months to prepare?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 10, 2014
“Bringing The Shutdown Logic Home”: The Government Shutdown Crowd Has A New Target, John Boehner
The long knives are out for John Boehner on the right – again. National Journal’s Tim Alberta has a must-read today on a conservative plot to oust the House speaker next year … or put the squeeze on House Majority Leader Eric Cantor … or something.
According to Alberta, the frustrated right numbers in the “several dozen,” with the ringleaders all hailing from the House Liberty Caucus, from which came the core of the dozen GOP’ers who voted against Boehner for speaker last year. Alberta writes:
The conservatives’ exasperation with leadership is well known. And now, in discreet dinners at the Capitol Hill Club and in winding, hypothetical-laced email chains, they’re trying to figure out what to do about it. Some say it’s enough to coalesce behind — and start whipping votes for — a single conservative leadership candidate. Others want to cut a deal with Majority Leader Eric Cantor: We’ll back you for speaker if you promise to bring aboard a conservative lieutenant.
But there’s a more audacious option on the table, according to conservatives involved in the deliberations. They say between 40 and 50 members have already committed verbally to electing a new speaker. If those numbers hold, organizers say, they could force Boehner to step aside as speaker in late November, when the incoming GOP conference meets for the first time, by showing him that he won’t have the votes to be reelected in January.
They’re not gunning for Boehner alone. They’re pissed at Eric Cantor because he moved the Medicare “doc fix” through on a voice vote a few weeks back, a move which had the pragmatic virtue of passing needed legislation without forcing members to go on the record casting a vote which could have proved potentially troublesome in a primary. In short, Alberta writes, “conservatives find fault with the entire leadership team.”
So what’s the plan? They haven’t found someone to run against Boehner yet (conservatives like Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling and Ohio Rep. Steve Scalise aren’t interested, Alberta reports) and while “privately they define success as vaulting one of their own into any of the top three leadership spots,” they also tell Alberta that scenarios like Republican Study Committee Chairman Steve Scalise running for whip – which is, you know, one of the top three leadership spots – “would hardly qualify as the splash conservatives are determined to make.”
In short conservatives are all riled up and determined to make a splash; they’re eyeing a nuclear option – blocking Boehner from another term as speaker – but don’t have a clear end-game beyond that. But they’re pretty sure one will materialize when their opponents inevitably fold in the face of their show of will. They’re definitely going to make a splash because they’re really, really determined.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should – it’s the government shutdown logic transferred to the Republican civil war. The right wound itself up about Obamacare and then shuttered the government without a clear plan other than that Obama was going to inevitably fold in the face of their Keyzer Soze-like superior show of will. However it turned out, they were going to get something big out of the whole affair because they’d tried really, really hard. (“I don’t think our conference will be amenable for settling for a colletion of things after we’ve fought so hard,” New Jersey GOP Rep. Scott Garrett said at the time.) How’d all that turn out?
The tea party right’s problem here is that they echo chamber themselves into badly overestimating their leverage and end up with little more than egg on their collective faces. See the paltry dozen votes they managed against Boehner last time, for example, or the outcome of the government shutdown.
We’ll see. Maybe the wingers really will be able to produce 50 anti-Boehner votes and shut down the House. Or maybe they’re basting too long in their own tough and angry talk. Again.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, April 10, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 