“The Power Of Personality”: “ObamaCares” And The Tea Party Doesn’t
Does anybody care that millions of Americans can’t afford health care? Does anyone care that before health care reform, insurance companies had the power to screw their customers royally? Does anyone care that Americans spend more per person on health care than people anywhere else in the world but are not nearly as healthy as the citizens of nations which provide comprehensive health care coverage to their residents?
Barack Obama does and the tea party doesn’t.
The most important stat that I saw in the 2012 National Election Day Exit Poll was the power of personality in the presidential race. A majority of the voters who looked for leadership, vision and shared values in 2012 supported Mitt Romney. The only other personal dimension measured by the exit poll was caring. The voters who sought compassion in their president supported Barack Obama by an overwhelming margin. The president’s advantage on empathy was so big that it overwhelmed the support that Mitt Romney had on the other three personality dimensions.
Compassion brings us to the Affordable Care Act or, as I like to call it, ObamaCares.
Many Americans who oppose ObamaCares also dislike the mean spirited nature of the tea party. You can talk about issues until the cows come home, but Americans vote for people, not issues. Voters use the candidates’ positions on issues to make personal judgments about their character. Many Americans may have philosophical reservations about the Affordable Care Act, but more than anything else they resent the tea party’s blind opposition to any proposal that improves the quality of health care available to the public. The tea party has demonstrated its indifference to the suffering of millions of Americans by its failure to offer its own plan to improve the floundering system of health care that undermines the health, wealth and well being of the United States
Politics is full of irony, which is what makes Washington so interesting. Republicans pushed hard on the budget because they wanted to use the threat of a shutdown as leverage against ACA. But on the same day that the wacko birds forced the federal government to close with dismal reviews, enrollment in Obamacare began with such a big demand that it overwhelmed computer systems. My guess is the wingnuts don’t see the irony, but do see a lot of red.
The early returns on the shutdown should worry Republicans. A CBS News survey conducted since the federal government closed for business early Tuesday morning indicates that a large majority (72 percent) of Americans oppose the shutdown over Obamacare. The tea party doesn’t seem to care about its electoral fortunes any more than it does about the well being of the working families who make this country great. The party’s indifference to people and politics will cost it dearly next year in the midterm elections.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, October 3, 2013
“See You In Hell Orange Man”: President Obama Should Have A “Come To Jesus” Talk With John Boehner
So at the risk of getting ahead of myself here just a bit, the appropriations crisis is merging with the debt limit crisis. And as everybody’s favorite source for GOP thinking, National Review‘s Robert Costa, tells us today, John Boehner is determined not to relent on what just about everyone is calling an insanely untenable position on the CR because he’s got to keep GOPers together for the real ball game, the debt limit. Why? Kathleen Parker says that’s the rainbow that yielded a pot of gold for Boehner last time it appeared:
What Republicans hope to accomplish by tying demands to the debt ceiling is a grand bargain to include a package of entitlement and tax reform. Sound familiar? The president can refuse to negotiate, but at 3 a.m. when the phone rings and it’s Angela Merkel inquiring just what the hell is going on, it won’t be John Boehner’s phone ringing. It will be President Obama’s. That’s leverage. During the last debt-ceiling battle, Boehner managed to secure more than $2 trillion in cuts and no taxes.
So the conviction that Obama will eventually cave on the debt limit is what is making it possible for Boehner to walk the path Ted Cruz and Jim DeMint and their House minions have laid out for him.
Now I don’t know anything about the president’s relationship with Boehner. But it’s becoming a matter of national security for him to find some way to take him aside, maybe give the Speaker a cigarette from his secret stash, and say: “I will see you in Hell before I negotiate over the debt limit. And if you let a default happen, I will devote the rest of my presidency to making sure you, personally, bear the blame, and go down in history with our most despised traitors and criminals. For generations, little school children in Ohio will cross themselves and make hex signs when your name is mentioned. So do not, do not, go back and tell your crazy people they can win if they just stick together.”
This sort of attitude adjustment needs to happen sooner rather than later, before Boehner takes another step down the path he is currently contemplating.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 2, 2013
“Can’t Touch This”: Dear Republicans, Happy Obamacare Day!
To Sen. Ted Cruz, House Speaker John Boehner and all the Republican hostage-takers who brought us the government shutdown, I offer a salutation: Happy Obamacare Day!
Smithsonian museums, national parks and the IRS may be closed, but the Obamacare health care exchanges are open for business starting today. The Affordable Care Act now begins to be implemented in earnest, mostly with funding in the “mandatory” category that last night’s insanity leaves untouched. Yes, the genius tacticians of the Tea Party, I mean the GOP, have managed to shut down everything except the program they were targeting.
To reach this point, the House majority made a travesty of the legislative process, throwing non-starter after non-starter against the wall in an absurd and vain attempt to get Obamacare defunded, delayed or defenestrated. Boehner looked miserable as he tried to lead his caucus of loose cannons.
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) summed it up with twisted grammar: ”The situation has been somewhat lost control of.”
The “situation” — a fight, mind you, over a bill that would fund the government for just six measly weeks — didn’t lay a glove on Obamacare but did close the Statue of Liberty. Now Boehner wants a conference with the Senate to work out a compromise. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should say, “Fine — as long as you understand that we’re starting fresh and all bets are off.”
Reid should demand funding for the government at least through the end of the year — and agreement from Cruz to allow a conference on a proper budget, which GOP obstruction has made impossible. He should demand an increase in the debt ceiling that takes us past next year’s election — thus avoiding another hostage-taking showdown later this month when federal borrowing authority runs out. And, while he’s at it, he should demand pre-sequester funding levels for needed programs such as Head Start.
Republicans would scream bloody murder. But there would have to be actual negotiations, actual give and take. And ultimately, the GOP would have to decide how badly it wants to get out of the mess it created.
Such a move by Reid wouldn’t be a power play, it would be an intervention. Republicans need to be forced to realize that not everyone agrees with them and that they can’t always get their way. As things stand now, with their delusions of omnipotence, they can only be considered a danger to themselves and others.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 1, 2013
“This Madness Will Never End”: So Long As There’s A Democrat In The White House, The Fever Will Never Break
I wish I could write something optimistic as we begin the government shutdown. I wish I could, but I can’t. In fact, this morning I can’t help but feel something close to despair. It isn’t that this shutdown won’t be resolved, because it will. It will be resolved in the only way it can: when John Boehner allows a vote on a “clean CR,” a continuing resolution that funds the government without attacking the Affordable Care Act. It could happen in a week or two, whenever the political cost of the shutdown becomes high enough for Boehner to finally find the courage to say no to the Tea Partiers in his caucus. That CR will pass with mostly Democratic votes, and maybe the result will be a revolt against Boehner that leads to him losing the speakership (or maybe not; as some have argued, Boehner’s job could be safe simply because no one else could possibly want it).
But the reason for my despair isn’t about this week or this month. It’s the fact that this period in our political history—the period of lurching from absurd crisis to absurd crisis, with no possibility of passing a budget let alone legislation to address any serious problems we face, with a cowardly Republican leadership held hostage by a group of insane political terrorists who think it’s a tragedy if a poor person gets health insurance and it’s a great day when you kick a kid off food stamps, a period where this collection of extremists and fools, these people who think the likes of Michele Bachmann and Steve King are noble and wise leaders—this awful, horrific period in our history, when these are the people who control the country’s fate, looks like it will never end.
OK, so “never” is an exaggeration. But does anyone see how it could end as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House, whether it’s Barack Obama or anyone else? Once the shutdown is over, we’re going to do it all over again with the debt ceiling in less than three weeks. And the CRs the House and Senate are passing back and forth now only fund the government for six weeks, meaning we could have a shutdown, followed by a debt ceiling crisis, followed by another shutdown. Whenever the next CR expires, we’ll do it again, and we’ll do it again the next time the debt ceiling has to be raised.
According to conservative reporter Byron York, this whole thing is being driven by 30 of the most radical GOP House members. And nothing will convince them that what they’re doing is crazy and wrong. Nothing. They’re zealots. They don’t care if the country suffers and they don’t care if their party suffers. They have an ideology that tells them that the only important things are fighting government and fighting Barack Obama, by any means necessary. If you can’t win at the ballot box, and you can’t win in the ordinary legislative process, and you can’t win at the Supreme Court, then it’ll have to be blackmail. And if that doesn’t work, then they’ll find some other method.
In June of last year, Obama expressed the belief that if he was re-elected, “the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that.” Once booting him from office was no longer a possibility, they’d settle down and oppose him in the ordinary way opposition parties oppose presidents, not in this insane berserker rage they’ve been gripped by since January of 2009. I don’t know if he actually believed that, or if he was just trying to be optimistic. But it was never going to happen. That’s not only because of their white-hot hatred of him, but also because, generally speaking, the crazier a Republican member of Congress is, the less they have to worry about political consequences from their craziness. The most radical members come from the most conservative districts, where the only question determining who gets elected is which candidate in a Republican primary is the most extreme, hates Barack Obama the most, and can talk with the most contempt about liberals and government and all the “thems” his constituents despise so much.
And even if the shutdown turns out to be a disaster for the GOP as a whole, those Tea Party members are going to be 100 percent sure that the only problem was that Republicans didn’t fight hard enough. They’ll come out of it more convinced than ever that government is evil and Democrats are the enemies of all that is right and good, and the good Lord himself put them in Congress to fight liberals and obstruct Obama and undermine government and scratch and bite and kick and scream. And that’s what they’re going to continue to do as long as they are privileged to serve.
Their fever will never break. Never. The only thing that will give it a temporary respite is if a Republican becomes president, at which time they’ll decide that crises aren’t such a great tool after all. Their nihilistic rage will be put away, behind a glass door with the words “Break in case of Democratic president” written on it. And then it will start all over again.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 2, 2013
“Conservatism Can Never Fail”: Why Tea Partiers Think They Will Win
Way back in the days when bloggers carved their missives out on stone tablets (by which I mean 2005), Digby noted, in response to the nascent trend of conservatives deciding that George W. Bush wasn’t a conservative after all, wrote, “Get used to hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren’t true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets.” We’ve seen that a lot in the years since—the interpretation of every election Republicans lose is that they weren’t conservative enough, and if they had just nominated a true believer or run farther to right, victory would have been theirs.
There’s already a tactical division within the Republican Party about the wisdom of shutting down the government in an attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act. The members who have been around a while understand that no matter what happens, Barack Obama is not going to bend on this one. He won’t dismantle his greatest domestic policy accomplishment, and he won’t delay it for a year. He just won’t. The members who are newer, particularly Tea Partiers who got elected in 2010 and 2012, think that if they just hold fast, eventually Obama will buckle.
And there’s another difference between the two groups. That first group of older members were around for the shutdowns during the Clinton years, and remember how badly things turned out for them. Here’s an excerpt from an NPR story aired this morning:
“It was a calculated gamble on the part of the speaker, Newt Gingrich,” says Steve Bell, who was a Republican congressional aide. The new Republican majority in Congress decided to push their spending fight with President Clinton to the limit, even if it meant shutting down the government.
“And at first, about half of us thought it was a bad idea and half of us thought it was a good idea,” says Bell. “But in the perfect example of groupthink, we talked ourselves into believing that, oh, the president will get blamed and we will be able to get our way.”
Bell, who’s now with the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, says the Gingrich gamble didn’t pay off, except for President Clinton.
“The president wasn’t blamed,” says Bell. And “the amount of money we saved over that government shutdown literally is almost a rounding error. So we went through all of this for almost no savings, net-net, and we successfully re-elected someone that we thought we were supposed to defeat.”
All the reporting I’ve seen says that is the perspective shared by John Boehner and others in the GOP leadership. The problem is that Tea Partiers in the House don’t see it that way. They believe the shutdown will be blamed on President Obama, and the only possible way for Republicans to lose is if they give in too soon.
That’s because the idea that conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed, extends beyond ideology to its tactical extension, eternal and maximal opposition to Barack Obama and everything he wants to do. Fighting Obama is a strategy that can never fail. If failure happens, it can only be because we didn’t fight him hard enough.
Once this is all over, they’ll be telling everyone the same old story. If only the party had been stronger, if only Boehner had stood firm, if only we had kept the government closed for another week or another month, everyone would have seen we were right, Obama would have been crippled for the remainder of his term, we would have won a smashing victory in the 2014 mid-term elections, and the blow that led to Obamacare’s inevitable death would have been struck. But we were betrayed by Boehner and the other cowards and quislings.
I wouldn’t even be surprised if come 2015, where you stood on the shutdown becomes a key litmus test Tea Party activists apply to GOP presidential contenders.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 30, 2013
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