“Obamacare Horror Stories Aren’t So Horrible”: Republicans Struggling To Find Real-World Victims Of The Health Care Law
There are real and substantial problems with the Affordable Care Act’s website, serious enough to warrant remarks this morning from President Obama and “tech surge” at HHS. But for the law’s critics, there’s still an underlying problem: websites can be fixed. The merits of “Obamacare” are unaffected by online snafus, however meaningful they may be.
And with this in mind, the right realizes it can’t just jump up and down about a website that will get better; conservatives still need to go after the health care system itself.
That’s proving to be difficult. We talked last week about a recent Fox News segment, hosted by Sean Hannity, featuring three real-world couples who presented themselves as victims of the Affordable Care Act. As Eric Stern reported in Salon, the problem with the segment was that none of the claims made by the couples stood up to any scrutiny. One of the horror stories was apparently entirely fictitious.
As it happens, this larger public-relations scheme is quickly shaping up to be an unsettling pattern. Robin Abcarian reported on a similar problem in the L.A. Times.
Maybe you’ve heard about the beloved local ice cream company that’s been forced to close its doors because of Obamacare?
Earlier this week, Newt Gingrich shared the dreadful news with Sean Hannity on Hannity’s radio show. It’s awful, just awful, the two men agreed, that small businesses are being driven under by the “job-killing” Affordable Care Act.
It didn’t take me long to identify the company: Bonnie Doon Ice Cream Corp., an Indiana ice cream maker that also operated a chain of drive-in diners in Mishawaka, South Bend and Elkhart. Or to figure out that the Affordable Care Act probably has nothing to do with the business’s failure.
Now, it is true that Bonnie Doon Ice Cream Corp. is permanently closing its doors. The problem is, Republicans want to blame this on the Affordable Care Act. Indeed, the local Indiana congresswoman representing the business’s headquarters specifically connected the law and the business’ demise on her Facebook page.
Reality, I’m afraid, is pointing in a different direction. For one thing, Bonnie Doon only had around 30 employees, so the law’s mandates didn’t affect it anyway. The employee total increased after it was bought by BD Acquisition, but even then health care mandates wouldn’t kick in until 2015 at the earliest.
“It seems highly, highly implausible that someone would be closing a business now in anticipation of projections around health costs 15 months from now,” Ken Jacobs, chairman of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, told Abcarian. “Any business that says it’s shutting down because of Obamacare is likely going out of business anyway.”
The point isn’t just to poke holes in poor anecdotal arguments. Rather, the key takeaway from stories like these is that Republicans are struggling mightily to find any real-world victims of the health care law.
For the right, these victims should be **everywhere**, eager to tell their stories, because that darned “Obamacare” is such a public menace. If so, why do these stories keep falling apart, replaced with nothing?
“The Original Naysayer”: Obstructionist Mitch McConnell Totally Said No Before Saying No Was Cool
A number of journalists have been casting about desperately for sources of hope, and some of them have settled on moderate Republicans, especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Paul Kane calls him “perhaps the most accomplished congressional dealmaker of his time.” McConnell hasn’t been shy about portraying himself as a savior, either. “I’ve demonstrated, once again, that when the Congress is in gridlock and the country is at risk, I’m the guy who steps forward and tries to get us out of the ditch,” he told Robert Costa.
McConnell has no right to say that about himself. He has engaged in as much obstructionism as the worst of them, and his ideas are partly responsible for bringing Republicans to their current state of disarray.
The senator from Kentucky was the original naysayer. Soon after President Obama’s election, McConnell instructed Republicans to oppose Obama at every opportunity. The goal appears to have been to make sure that the country was chaotically governed for four years so that the president would not win a second term. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell said. “If he was for it, we had to be against it,” former Sen. George Voinovich (R-Oh.) told Mike Grunwald. McConnell “wanted everyone to hold the fort. All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.”
This is the kind of dealmaker McConnell is. He will make a deal or put a halt to legislative action altogether, depending where he believes the political advantage lies.
It also seems that McConnell’s strategy of opposition has seriously damaged his party’s ability to develop and propose their own original ideas. Conservatives do have plenty of good ideas, but when constructive legislating is off the table for electoral reasons, it’s easy to speculate that legislators and their staffs will devote less time and fewer resources to thinking about those ideas — how to implement them and how to include them as part of a complete legislative agenda. It does seem clear that the Republicans in the House are simply taking their cue from McConnell, even though he chides them for their ineffectiveness in his interview with Costa. It was McConnell who first declared uniform opposition to be the mark of loyal conservatism.
When a party has no ideas of its own, negotiations become impossible. The cause of the most recent crisis was that Republicans had no positive demands to offer — no new policies they wanted to see enacted. They could only offer negative ones — existing policies they wanted postponed or terminated, specifically, the health care law — which, of course, Democrats did not accept. Had there been a positive, thoughtful G.O.P. agenda, Democrats could have conceded one or more of its elements, allowing Republicans to save face without engaging in brinksmanship and perhaps even implementing a worthwhile program or two.
McConnell insisted on putting politics before policy, which is exactly the kind of thinking that has crippled his party. He can be credited for rescuing Republicans, but only from his own mistakes.
By: Max Ehrenfreund, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 19, 2013
“More Problems Than Just The Tea Party”: Too Much Attention Being Paid To The Gladiator TV Hard Core “Stars” Of The Republican Party
I am not talking about poll numbers. I am not talking about the Republicans’ record unpopularity. I am not talking about declining support for the tea party. I am not even talking about election results.
I am focusing on the following numbers: 85, 49, 87 and 87 again.
Those are not Powerball numbers … well, in a sense maybe they are!
What are they? These are the “YES” votes from Republican members of the House of Representatives on four pieces of legislation that Speaker John Boehner brought to the floor of the House, ignoring the Hastert rule. That, of course, is the rather absurd self-imposed rule that says you shouldn’t bring up a bill if it does not have majority support from your caucus.
Here are the bills:
- 85 Republican votes to approve the fiscal cliff deal at the end of 2012.
- 49 Republican votes to approve emergency funding for hurricane Sandy.
- 87 Republican votes to approve extending the Violence Against Women Act.
- 87 Republican votes to approve opening the government this week.
Combined with nearly unanimous support from Democrats, all these bills passed.
Now, that meant that 151 votes, 179 votes, 138 votes and 144 votes were cast against these four bills, respectively, by Republican House members.
The point here is that the problem with Republicans is not just several dozen Tea Party activists – it is a caucus that won’t truly stand up to those extreme elements of the party. Too much attention is being paid to the gladiator TV hard core “stars” of the Republican Party such as Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and Reps. Raul Labrador, Michele Bachmann, Steve King and a handful of others.
They have somehow convinced the House Republican caucus that the best way to take on Obama and the Democrats is scorched earth.
The real question now is whether the pragmatic, reasoned, responsible gene present in many Republican House members will assert itself. Will they negotiate bills on fiscal matters, immigration reform, entitlements and taxes that lead to progress? Or will they let the tea party members role them over and over again?
The hope for many is that this horrendous shutdown and brinkmanship may have taken many members to the edge – they see the absurdity and suicidal nature of the action – and they are ready to stand up to the extremists within their own party. When we start seeing the numbers switch and more than 100 Republican members begin to accept reasonable legislation then we will know that they are no longer going to kow-tow to the Tea Party. We can all hope for that day.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, October 18, 2013
“The President’s Pivot”: The Tactical Move To Immigration Reform Is Brilliant, And Republicans Know It
“Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.”
That quote, from Sun Tzu’s ancient Chinese treatise “The Art of War,” perfectly captures President Obama’s strategic victory over Tea Party members of Congress on the government shutdown and the debt ceiling debate. It also explains his immediate pivot to another topic that Tea Partyers hate and over which their obstinacy is likely to get the party hammered again: comprehensive immigration reform.
This is a brilliant tactical move on the president’s part. And Republicans know it.
As the G.O.P. was nearing its moment of collapse on the shutdown and debt ceiling, Representative Raúl Labrador, Republican of Idaho, said, “I think it’d be crazy for the House Republican leadership to enter into negotiations with him on immigration.” He continued: “And I’m a proponent of immigration reform. So I think what he’s done over the last two and a half weeks — he’s trying to destroy the Republican Party. And I think that anything we do right now with this president on immigration will be with that same goal in mind: which is to try to destroy the Republican Party and not to get good policies.”
The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer laid out the president’s calculus more bluntly on Fox News: “With immigration, he wins either way. I’m not sure he thinks he can get it passed, seeing the resistance among the Republicans to the deal over the budget. I think he knows he’s not going to have a good chance of getting immigration through, but he thinks — and he’s probably right — that he can exploit this for the midterm election as a way to gin up support, for the Democrats to portray the Republicans as anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, etc.”
Republicans have a tough choice.
They can ride shotgun once again with the politically suicidal Tea Party faction, a group that the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found this week to be “less popular than ever.” They can allow the most strident voices on the far right that oppose comprehensive immigration reform — Rush Limbaugh has likened it to the Republican Party’s “authoring its demise” — to direct their path and further alienate Hispanic voters, who are increasingly coming to see the party as an unwelcoming place. Mitt Romney lost the Hispanic vote by 44 points last year, and the Republican National Committee’s own autopsy on that loss surmised:
“If Hispanic Americans perceive that a G.O.P. nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e., self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”
Or Republicans can take the less likely path and demonstrate that they’ve been cowed enough to move ahead on a major piece of legislation that is supported by the majority of the American people — a July Gallup poll found that 71 percent of Americans believe that passing immigration reform is important. And that would be good not just for the president’s legacy but for the health of the country as a whole.
In a 2012 paper published by the Cato Institute, Raúl Hinojosa Ojeda, director of the North American Integration and Development Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, used computing models to estimate the following:
“Comprehensive immigration reform generates an annual increase in U.S. G.D.P. of at least 0.84 percent. This amounts to $1.5 trillion in additional G.D.P. over 10 years. It also boosts wages for both native-born and newly legalized immigrant workers.”
Comprehensive immigration reform is the right thing and the thing that Americans want. But the far right is hardly concerned with what’s right and has little appetite for agreeing with the will of the majority of the American people (despite talking ad nauseam about standing up for the American people).
The far right is angry at the government and the man at the top of it. According to a Pew Research report released Friday: “Anger at the federal government is most pronounced among Tea Party Republicans. Fully 55 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who agree with the Tea Party say they are angry with the federal government — about double the percentage among non-Tea Party Republicans (27 percent) and Democrats and Democratic leaners (25 percent).”
They have been blinded by that anger. The president knows that. And he knows that blind soldiers don’t often win battles. In choosing to pivot to immigration reform, he has created a win-win scenario for himself and the Democrats. Clever, clever.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 18, 2013
“Invincible Arrogance”: Ted Cruz’s Conceit And Fringe Politics Is A Recipe For A Very Scary Personality
Since we are for the time being required to think of Sen. Ted Cruz as a significant force in American politics, it’s helpful now and then to consider how the world looks from his perspective. TPM’s Josh Marshall suspects that being told his whole life how incredibly smart he is has not been good for his character:
[B]ack when he showed up at Harvard Law School in 1992, he stunned his fellow classmates by putting up flyers around campus for an ‘elite study group’ with the instructions ‘only magnas from top Ivys need apply.’ In other words, at a place where arrogance is like air and self-awareness a precious commodity, Cruz managed to stand out on day one as a triple-ply arrogant ass.
Cruz never seems to have grasped that there are people every bit as sharp as him who didn’t go to an Ivy League School (even a ‘top Ivy’). My read on Cruz, from talking to people who knew him very well in college and law school, is that he’s so confirmed in his belief in his own rectitude and genius that he’s likely impervious to what most of us would interpret as rejection or failure. This didn’t work? Well, too many stupid people or cowards who didn’t flock to my banner. That seemed to be the gist of his speech before the vote. And my guess it wasn’t just puffing but represented his genuine belief.
Moreover, in a “populist” wing of the Republican Party that is very self-conscious about its lack of ethnic diversity, its transparent anti-intellectualism, and its tendency to lionize pols that are aggressively proud of their ignorance, Cruz has been an all-purpose antidote, and hears more testimony to his brilliance every day than most very smart people hear in a lifetime.
His situation reminds me of the central character in Walker Pecy’s novel Lancelot, who gets an unearned reputation for brilliance among his teammates on the LSU football team:
Being “smart” on the football team meant that you read Time magazine and had heard of the Marshall Plan. (“You don’t believe he can tell you about the Marshall Plan? Ask him! He’s one more smart sapsucker.”) They, my teammates, admired “smartness” more than anybody I’ve met before or since.
Now add in the fact that Ted Cruz happens to espouse a political philosophy (and for that matter, a religious faith) based on a very rigid concept of what’s right and wrong at all times and in all circumstances, along with Cruz’s legendary rhetorical skills, and you have a recipe for a very scary personality.
I once read a letter to the editor from a man who explained that in opposing legalized abortion and homosexuality he was expressing “the mind of God.” “Now that’s self-confidence,” I thought. Add into that equation a mind that’s used to being described as almost God-like, and invincible arrogance–if not an actual God Complex–will be the result every single time.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 18, 2013
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