“The Boehner Bunglers”: The Truly Incompetent Can’t Even Recognize Their Own Incompetence
The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?
The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
But there’s one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect — the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence — reigns supreme.
To see what I’m talking about, consider the report in Sunday’s Times about the origins of the current crisis. Early this year, it turns out, some of the usual suspects — the Koch brothers, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation and others — plotted strategy in the wake of Republican electoral defeat. Did they talk about rethinking ideas that voters had soundly rejected? No, they talked extortion, insisting that the threat of a shutdown would induce President Obama to abandon health reform.
This was crazy talk. After all, health reform is Mr. Obama’s signature domestic achievement. You’d have to be completely clueless to believe that he could be bullied into giving up his entire legacy by a defeated, unpopular G.O.P. — as opposed to responding, as he has, by making resistance to blackmail an issue of principle. But the possibility that their strategy might backfire doesn’t seem to have occurred to the would-be extortionists.
Even more remarkable, in its way, was the response of House Republican leaders, who didn’t tell the activists they were being foolish. All they did was urge that the extortion attempt be made over the debt ceiling rather than a government shutdown. And as recently as last week Eric Cantor, the majority leader, was in effect assuring his colleagues that the president will, in fact, give in to blackmail. As far as anyone can tell, Republican leaders are just beginning to suspect that Mr. Obama really means what he has been saying all along.
Many people seem perplexed by the transformation of the G.O.P. into the political equivalent of the Keystone Kops — the Boehner Bunglers? Republican elders, many of whom have been in denial about their party’s radicalization, seem especially startled. But all of this was predictable.
It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.
For a while the party was able to compartmentalize, to remain savvy and realistic about politics even as it rejected objectivity everywhere else. But this wasn’t sustainable. Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect political strategy, too.
Remember what happened in the 2012 election — not the fact that Mitt Romney lost, but the fact that all the political experts around him apparently had no inkling that he was likely to lose. Polls overwhelmingly pointed to an Obama victory, but Republican analysts denounced the polls as “skewed” and attacked the media outlets reporting those polls for their alleged liberal bias. These days Karl Rove is pleading with House Republicans to be reasonable and accept the results of the 2012 election. But on election night he tried to bully Fox News into retracting its correct call of Ohio — and hence, in effect, the election — for Mr. Obama.
Unfortunately for all of us, even the shock of electoral defeat wasn’t enough to burst the G.O.P. bubble; it’s still a party dominated by wishful thinking, and all but impervious to inconvenient facts. And now that party’s leaders have bungled themselves into a corner.
Everybody not inside the bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a terrible thing.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 6, 2013
“An Extreme Miscalculation”: Government Shutdown, The Tea Party’s Last Stand
If the nation is lucky, this October will mark the beginning of the end of the tea party.
The movement is suffering from extreme miscalculation and a foolish misreading of its opponents’ intentions. This, in turn, has created a moment of enlightenment, an opening to see things that were once missed.
Many Republicans, of course, saw the disaster coming in advance of the shutdown. But they were terrified to take on a movement that is fortified by money, energy and the backing of a bloviating brigade of talk-show hosts. The assumption was that the tea party had become invincible inside the GOP.
People who knew better followed Sen. Ted Cruz down a path of confrontation over Obamacare. Yet even before the shutdown began, Republicans stopped talking about an outright repeal of Obamacare, as House Speaker John Boehner’s ever-changing demands demonstrated.
The extent of the rout was then underscored in the hot-microphone incident last week when Sen. Rand Paul was caught plotting strategy with Sen. Mitch McConnell. Paul’s words, spoken after he had finished a television interview, said more than he realized.
“I just did CNN. I just go over and over again: ‘We’re willing to compromise, we’re willing to negotiate,’ ” Paul said, adding this about the Democrats: “I don’t think they’ve poll-tested, ‘We won’t negotiate.’ ”
Tellingly, Paul described the new GOP line this way: “We wanted to defund it, we fought for that, but now we’re willing to compromise on this.”
It’s revealing to hear a politician who is supposed to be all about principle mocking Democrats for failing to do enough poll-testing. It makes you wonder whether Paul poll-tests everything he says. But Paul’s statement raised a more important question: If just days after it began, a shutdown that was about repealing Obamacare is not about repealing Obamacare, then what is it about?
Actually, it’s what even conservatives are calling the Seinfeld Shutdown: It’s about absolutely nothing, at least where substance is concerned. Moreover, Paul and his friends need to explain why, if they are so devoted to “negotiation,” they didn’t negotiate long ago. Why did they relentlessly block negotiations over a Senate Democratic budget whose passage, according to a now-discarded pile of press releases, they once made a condition for discussions?
Only now can we fully grasp that politics on the right has been driven less by issues than by a series of gestures. And they give up on even these as soon as their foes try to take what they say seriously.
What the tea party and Boehner did not reckon with is that Obama and the Democrats are done being intimidated by the use of extra-constitutional means to extort concessions that the right cannot win through normal legislative and electoral methods.
Obama doesn’t just want to get past this crisis. He wants to win. And win he must, because victory is essential to re-establishing constitutional governance, a phrase that the tea party ought to understand.
Obama didn’t need to “poll-test” his position because the poll that matters, the 2012 election, showed that the tea party hit its peak long ago, in the summer of 2011, when it seemed to have the president on the defensive.
The slowly building revolt among Republicans against the tea party shutdown is one sign of how quickly the hard-right’s influence is fading. So is the very language they are being required to speak. Having talked incessantly about how useless and destructive government can be, House Republicans are now testifying to their reverence for what government does for veterans, health research, sick children and lovers of national parks, especially war memorials.
Appreciation for government rises when it’s no longer there. By pushing their ideology to its obvious conclusion, members of the Cruz-Paul right forced everyone else to race the other way.
Yes, the tea party will still have its Washington-based groups that raise money by bashing Washington, ginning up the faithful and threatening the less ideologically pure with primary challenges. But no Republican and no attentive citizen of any stripe will forget the mess these right-wing geniuses have left in their wake.
We now know that the tea party is primarily about postures aimed at undercutting sensible governance and premised on the delusion that Obama’s election victories were meaningless. Its leaders abandon these postures as soon as their adversaries stand strong and the poll-testers report their approach is failing. This will give pause to anyone ever again tempted to follow them into a cul-de-sac.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 6, 2013
“The New Three-Party System”: Democrats, Republicans And The De Facto Radical Ted Cruz Party
Why another shutdown? Our government has three parties these days: Democrats, Republicans and the new radical Republicans.
That “radical Republican” label has some history. The old radical Republicans were the Grand Old Party’s progressive wing. They were opposed during the Civil War and through Reconstruction by the party’s liberals and conservatives.
They strongly opposed slavery, demanded harsh policies against ex-Confederates and pushed civil rights and voting rights for newly emancipated slaves. Abraham Lincoln and other moderates sought compromise and unity for the party and the nation. Today’s radical right would probably call Lincoln an appeaser or a “RINO” — Republican in Name Only.
Today’s radical Republicans are quite the opposite in ideology, if not in temperament, of the originals. Today’s Tea Party-era radicals call themselves “conservative” but they radically challenge, block and overturn established laws, policies and traditions that get in the way of their ideological goals — even if it means a federal government shutdown or a possible default on the nation’s debt obligations.
Long-running partisan battles over taxes, spending, deficits, the debt ceiling and other fiscal concerns have come to a head this season in pitched, last-ditch battles by Republicans to block, repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare.”
Democrats believe that their hard-won Obamacare law — having survived congressional opposition, the Supreme Court and a presidential election in which it was a central issue — should be given a chance to work.
Republicans like Texas senator Ted Cruz fear that once Obamacare kicks in, as he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in July, it “will never, ever be repealed” after Democrats “get the American people addicted to the sugar.”
In other words, if people get a chance to try Obamacare, they might like it as much as they like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs long decried by conservatives as socialistic.
They have a right to hold objections to programs they don’t like. But conservatives do their country a disservice by holding the normal functions of government hostage to their tests of ideological purity. That’s not just coming from me. It also comes from many of their fellow conservatives.
Some of the party’s best known conservatives have come under attack from the GOP’s Tea Party wing for failure to be conservative enough. The Senate Conservatives Fund, for example, has been running ads that attack Republican senators Jeff Flake of Arizona, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Their sin: reluctance to support their party’s self-destructive strategy against Obamacare.
“Tell Senate Republicans to stand with Ted Cruz and [Utah senator] Mike Lee,” says the group’s website, “not [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell [of Kentucky] and [Senate Minority Whip] John Cornyn [of Texas].”
Other conservative groups, including the Tea Party Patriots, For America and Heritage Action have mounted ads attacking Republicans in both houses who don’t rigidly support their efforts to defund Obamacare.
Over on the House side, Cruz has thumbed his nose at traditional protocols by plotting strategy with Tea Party House members — against Speaker John Boehner’s wishes.
But what is Boehner to do? He’s been warned by the Tea Partiers that he’ll be voted out of his speakership if he passes any major legislation with less than a majority of House Republicans. The radical right may be a minority of the House but they appear to leverage a majority of the power against Boehner’s lack of a counter-strategy.
Cruz has taken de facto leadership of the new radical Republican assault on Obamacare, most visibly by speaking for more than 21 hours in a pseudo-filibuster about his objections to the program. This has won soaring support for him in the party’s right wing, setting him up for what most likely will be a presidential run in 2016. One wonders whether he cares more about Republicans or the Ted Cruz Party.
So far, the strident GOP push to overturn Obamacare, even as Americans in need of health care sign up for its state insurance exchanges, shows Republicans to be holding on to the same self-defeating strategy that lost the 2012 presidential race: Talking ceaselessly to themselves.
Worse, they’re arguing among themselves, battling for their party’s political soul instead of real solutions to the problems that voters sent them to Washington to solve.
By: Clarence Page, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 7, 2013
“The Party Making No Demands”: Republicans Just Can’t Seem To Recognize Reality
Charles Krauthammer sticks to his party’s script in his new column this morning, complaining about President Obama’s “refusal to compromise or even negotiate.” It got me thinking about how best to explain to conservatives why this makes so little sense.
Maybe it’s time to flip the script to better illustrate the point. After all, when it comes to funding the government and protecting the integrity of the full faith and credit of the United States, we’re describing an inherently cooperative process — the White House needs Congress to pass legislation, the Congress needs a president to sign the legislation. One without the other doesn’t work.
With this mind, imagine a hypothetical.
Let’s say President Obama, feeling good after winning re-election fairly easily, adopted an overly confident posture with lawmakers. He started boasting about the fact that his approval rating is four times higher than Congress’ approval rating; his policy agenda enjoys broader public support than Republicans’ policy agenda; and he decided it’s time they start rewarding him before he considered engaging in basic governance.
“Sure,” Obama said to Republicans in this imaginary scenario, “I’ll sign the spending measures to prevent a government shutdown, but first you have to raise taxes on the wealthy. And end the sequestration policy. And pass comprehensive immigration reform. And approve universal background checks. The American people are with me, so I expect you to compromise and negotiate with me on these matters.”
The president then said to GOP lawmakers, “And sure, I’ll sign a bill to raise the debt limit, paying the bills you already piled up, but I’m not ready to sign a ‘clean’ bill. Instead, I also expect Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill, a public option for the health care system, universal pre-K, and billions in infrastructure investments. If you refuse, I’ll have no choice but to tell the public you refuse to compromise and negotiate.”
Much of the political establishment has come to accept a certain frame: the White House is going to have to accept some concessions to make congressional Republicans happy. Obama won’t like it, but voters did elect a House GOP majority.
What I’m suggesting is that this assumption is incomplete. No one seems to question, or even consider in passing, what Republicans will be asked to do to make the White House happy. Boehner & Co. won’t like it, but voters did elect a Democratic president.
Of course, the point of this apparently silly hypothetical is to help Krauthammer and others who share his ideology understand a basic truth: Obama isn’t making any demands. He’s offered no threats. There is no presidential wish list, filled with progressive goodies — unrelated to the budget or the debt ceiling — that Obama expects Congress to pass before the president fulfills his duties.
This notion that Obama “refuses to compromise or even negotiate” isn’t just deliberately misleading; it’s demonstrably silly. If the president was making extravagant demands, threatening to veto every bill lacking liberal treats, Republicans and their pundits would have a point.
But until then, can we at least try to recognize reality as it exists?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 4, 2013
“Pride Goeth Before The Shutdown”: The “Special Role” Of Boehner And The Screaming Tykes
It’s remarkable how much the current crop of House Republican radicals seems bent on repeating the mistakes of their Gingrichian forebears. First, of course, they shut down the government. The ostensible reason was implacable opposition to Obamacare in the name of “ the American people” (even if the American people actually support neither rolling back the Affordable Care Act nor shutting down the government), but as the New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman detailed Saturday, that message has gotten muddled in a GOP talking points funhouse mirror where conservatives are suddenly defenders of government and seekers of compromise.
But the most plausible reason enunciated to this point – now openly verbalized by at least two Republican House members – also happens to be the most offensive: pride.
Florida GOP Rep. Dennis Ross told Weisman that the shutdown is imperiling the “significant gains” conservatives have made on cutting spending because – wait for it – “there’s no connection now between the shutdown and the funding of Obamacare.” So what’s going on then? “I think now it’s a lot about pride,” said Ross, a tea party conservative who has elsewhere acknowledged that the GOP has already “lost the [continuing resolution] battle.”
Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman, another denizen of the conservative fringe, told the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker that “we’re not going to be disrespected. … We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
Side note to Congressman Stutzman: While it’s often said “respect must be earned,” that’s actually not the case in Washington. Inside the beltway titles and offices get their due respect – disrespect must be earned. And there’s no surer way to do that than shutting down the government and refusing to reopen it on the grounds that “we have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
In any case, Stutzman later issued a statement trying to walk back his comment, saying that he had “carelessly misrepresented the ongoing budget debate.” But if he was careless it was only in the sense of committing the classic Washington gaffe: telling the truth. As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote on Thursday:
Stutzman is right. The fight over the shutdown has become unmoored from any particular policy demands the GOP believes it can secure. It’s become an issue of pride and politics. At this point, Republicans simply need something so they can tell themselves, and their base, that they didn’t lose. They don’t know what that something is, exactly. But it needs to be something.
Decoupled from Obamacare, the shutdown has become about soothing the flustered tea party wing of the GOP. These pols have adopted a kindergarten-esque view of legislating: they deserve some sort of reward just because they tried really hard and because they really, really want it. The government’s been shut down? It’s all good because, in the memorable words of Minnesota GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann, “This is about the happiest I’ve seen members in a long time, because we see we are starting to win this dialogue on a national level.” (Given the initial polling of the shutdown, she seems to have a unique definition of winning.)
As I noted yesterday, the Times reported that Boehner and his team know that they’ve got an untenable position but are determined to drag the showdown on long enough wrap the debt ceiling fight into it. They want to minimize the number of tantrums the caucus’s conservative fringe throws over its inability to win on either of its quixotic quests.
This view of shutting down the federal government as some sort of tea party therapy strategy brings us back to the ghosts of 1995. One of the turning points of the first government shutdown came when the New York Daily News (a corporate cousin, as both it and U.S. News & World Report are owned by Mort Zuckerman) published a famous front page portraying then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich as a cry-baby. Gingrich had complained to reporters about feeling slighted after he had been made to sit at the back of Air Force One and exit through the rear door when he flew back with President Clinton from the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “This is petty,” Gingrich said. “I’m going to say up front it’s petty, but I think it’s human.” The public got the basic pettiness of bringing the work of governance to halt over personal pride.
John Boehner, with his endearing crying jags and carefully timed minor profanities isn’t so stupid as to articulate the reasons for shutting the government down in terms of personal or movement pride. But if the Daily News recycles its famous front page some time in the next few days it won’t be a caricature of one giant crybaby but instead one of a hapless Boehner surrounded by dozens of screaming tykes. How long will it be before more members of the tea party fringe, empowered by their unshakable belief in their own special role of spokesperson for “the American people,” follow the lead of Stutzman and Ross?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 6, 2013
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