“What Might Have Been”: Republicans Continue To Ignore Results Of 2012 Elections
Greg Sargent had a good post this morning positing this counterfactual: Suppose Mitt Romney and his tax- and spending-cut agenda had won a decisive victory over President Obama last November and in reaction Senate Democrats (still controlling their chamber) had doubled down on a progressive agenda with calls for social safety net expansion, tax-hike-only deficit reduction, stimulus spending, and then had crowned that agenda with admonishments that President Romney had “failed to sincerely try to find common ground with them.”
This is, of course, the track Republicans have followed in the wake of their side’s 2012 loss: Steady on, refuse to adjust their policy course, and claim the other guy is being unreasonable and won’t compromise. But given the howls of outrage from the right at President Obama’s pursuing a liberal course after campaigning on it and winning, it’s not hard to imagine the what-might-have-been reaction to unabashed progressivism in the face of a Romney-Ryan administration. I don’t think that it’s a stretch to say that Obama’s victory was the main difference between the right declaring 2012 a clarion mandate election and a … uh … well, whatever they think the 2012 election was.
The fact is that if the old adage goes that “elections have consequences,” it might have to be rewritten thusly to take into account the modern GOP: “Primary elections have consequences.” For House Republicans (the group that is currently driving the party and its agenda) the past and future national elections hold less import than their 2012 and 2014 primary elections; the broad will of the voters—who by a solid margin re-elected a progressive president who campaigned on securing the safety net and increasing taxes—is less important than the desires of the GOP voters and activists in their carefully drawn congressional districts.
That’s why so many conservatives talk about responding to the 2012 elections with a more pronounced version of the same.
And, as I argued last week, to the extent that they acknowledge the 2012 elections, they seem to view it as an illegitimate expression of the national will: Too many city voters cast ballots, so it can be discounted.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, March 11, 2013
“The Obamacare Referendum”: Paul Ryan Is Using Shorthand Again In Selling Changes To Medicare
Did you know that on November 6, 2012, in conjunction with the national election, the United States also had a referendum on Obamacare that Republicans won? No, I didn’t, either, until Paul Ryan informed me of this, via this Think Progress report:
On Sunday morning, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) stopped by Fox News Sunday to preview his new budget, which will be released in full on Tuesday. As it had the past two years, this year’s version will call for massive cuts to social service programs, including food stamps, job training, Medicaid, and Medicare. Host Chris Wallace challenged Ryan on the viability of his plan, pointing out that he wants to repeal and replace Obamacare, and, “that’s not going to happen.”
Still, Ryan insisted that he and then-running mate Mitt Romney won the election on this issue because they “won the senior vote.”
Now I think we all understand that Ryan is using some shorthand here: many Democrats hoped, and Republicans feared, that Ryan’s budget, by proposing to change Medicare from an entitlement to publicly-provided health insurance into a premium-support system, would make his party vulnerable to losses it could not manage in its old-white-folks electoral base. Instead, by a variety of means (including over two years of insanely mendacious “death-panel” demagoguery about the impact of Obamacare on Medicare, and the systematic “grandfathering” of seniors from Ryan’s proposed Medicare changes), the GOP ticket managed to promote a health care message that nicely meshed with its overall pitch to old white folks that those people along with their atheist hippie allies were threatening to take away everything good virtuous retirees had worked so hard to secure for themselves, including Medicare (which they tend to regard as an earned benefit as opposed to Obamacare’s “welfare”).
I suppose it’s understandable that Ryan would view any success in selling big changes in Medicare to old folks would represent a political ten-strike, even if he’s now having to incorporate into his budget the same Medicare savings he implicitly attacked during the campaign as a token of Obamacare’s ultimate goal of sending seniors off to euthanasia camps. But it’s still bizarre that he’s touting an incumbent president’s re-election victory as a repudiation of his most important legislative accomplishment. It’s enough to give Dick Morris hope he can come back from ridicule and disgrace and claim he was right all along in predicting a big Romney-Ryan win.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 11, 2013
GOP Meltdown: Paul Ryan Doubles Down On His Losing Southern Strategy
After years of drifting apart, the jobs report and the stock market aligned this week, at least momentarily, as unemployment fell to the lowest level in over four years while the Dow and the S&P 500 continued to climb. We’re hardly out of the woods— the workforce participation rate remains stuck in neutral, overall growth remains sluggish, and worker income is still lagging behind the stock market gains—but there are signs of hope.
Yet some things don’t change. As the sputtering economy tries to get into gear, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan keeps talking about depriving hard working-taxpaying Americans of their retirement benefits, while offering nothing in return. This is the strategy that failed Mitt Romney and Ryan in November, and that alienates not just senior citizens, but voters over 45 — one of the few groups that’s so far remained reliably right-leaning as Asians, Hispanics, upscale Episcopalians, graduate degree holders and others have abandoned the shrinking GOP tent.
If the President’s electoral playbook called for uniting the rich and poor and treating the middle class as an afterthought, the Congressman has a more direct, if less palatable, approach: he simply attacks the middle class, by trying to gut their earned entitlement programs.
Harping on social issues and bashing the 47 percent, along with Mitt Romney’s antipathy on the auto bailout, is why Republicans got their clocks cleaned in the industrial Midwest last November, eking out just a 5-point plurality among non-college grad white voters in the Great Lakes (a group they won by 19 points nationally).
Apparently, the failed vice presidential candidate has not internalized these lessons. Instead, Ryan & Co. seems to be doubling down on 2012’s failed bet, and treating working Americans as little more than moochers. A year ago, Candidate Ryan called for voucher care instead of Medicare for Americans who were then 55 and under. Now, he is pressing the idea of setting the cut-off at 56 in an effort to force more Americans off of Medicare.
Polling data consistently show that voters disapprove of vouchers for seniors, and Ryan’s gambit may have even cost the Republicans Florida.
It’s no surprise, then, that the few standing members of the ever-dwindling cohort of centrist House Republicans are furious with Ryan’s latest suggestion.
Tenaciously, Ryan continues to press ahead. As an unidentified member told The Hill, the “big problem was that a lot of people have been telling people that it’s 55 and that’s the number . . . And if you change it, it’s going to make us look like [liars].”
The sole source of income for most Americans now turning 65 is their monthly Social Security check, which averages a little more than $1,200 and that is before paying $100 a month for Medicare Plan B.
The origins of Ryanism trace back to John C. Calhoun’s South and Herbert Hoover’s America—and that is a losing coalition. Indeed, for a southern-based party like the current iteration of the Republican Party to regain traction, it must reach out to and make inroads with the Northern working class. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both Bushes demonstrated that this task was doable. And yet, the current crop of Republicans just does not seem to get it. When the party of the South decides to go it alone, it fails.
Single women now rival white evangelicals as a voting bloc, and the former – which preferred Obama to Romney by a staggering two-to-one margin—is just not cottoning to the Republicans’ message on personal autonomy or anything else. With childrearing and marriage increasingly distinct and recent studies showing that the life expectancies of subgroups of women are declining regionally, even as life expectancy on the whole is rising, a call to replace a long-established safety net with faux personal responsibility is not a winning message.
Religion also has lost traction at the lower end of the income spectrum, particularly outside of the South. Rather, regular worship is now the province of married upper-income Americans, be they Republicans or Democrats. SMU families and their Scarsdale counterparts have more in common than either may realize.
If the Republicans stay on their present course, the fate of the old Democratic Party awaits them.
Between 1860 and 1932, the Democrats were a Southern-based party that managed to elect only two presidents in 18 elections.
And in fact, Ryan the Midwesterner does seem to look to the South. He supported relief for the victims of Katrina, but opposed aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. At least on disaster funding, the Congressman can whistle Dixie. The question for the Republican Party is whether it has the will to change. After losing five straight elections to FDR’s New Deal Coalition, the Republicans got their act together. Will history repeat itself?
One thing is for sure: Alienating your base when you need every vote that you can get is not smart politics.
By: Lloyd Green, The Daily Beast, March 10, 2013
“Dictatorship Vs Democracy”: Republicans Are Trying To Exercise Powers That Do Not Rightly Belong To Them
Readers familiar with my work know that one of my favorite quotes about the nature of politics, and democracies in particular, comes from Walter Lippmann’s Essays in the Public Philosophy, where the preeminent American journalist of the 20th century tried in 1955 to diagnose why fascism and other forms of dictatorship took root in democratic Europe in the early decades of the last century.
It is possible to govern a great state without giving the masses of people full representation, writes Lippmann. “But it is not possible to go on for long without a government which can and does in fact govern.”
If, because of gridlock, stalemate, partisanship and implacable polarization people find “they must choose whether they will be represented in an assembly which is incompetent to govern, or whether they will be governed without being represented, there is no doubt at all as to how the issue will be decided,” writes Lippmann. “They will choose authority, which promises to be paternal, in preference to freedom which threatens to be fratricidal.”
Because the truth is, says Lippmann, large communities cannot do without being governed. “No ideal of freedom and of democracy will long be allowed to stand in the way of their being governed.”
The standoff between President Obama and the Republican hardliners over the sequester is not, at the end of the day, about taxes and spending.
It is, rather, about whether America can remain a viable democracy in which the country is able to move forward with a program once that program has been put to a vote — as President Obama’s plan of a balance between spending cuts and tax hikes was in the last election — or whether a determined minority supported by little more than 20% of the public will still be able to leverage tools that were crafted two centuries before to arm the minority against majority “tyranny” in order to dictate surrender terms to that majority by holding the nation’s government and economy hostage.
Republicans who insist that President Obama show “leadership” in this crisis by “capitulating” to their political demands are engaging in the same cynical wordplay for which the GOP has become famous. For like those who said the only way to save the village was to destroy it, Republicans say the President must save the nation from the “devastating” consequences of $85 billion in budget cuts by cutting another $85 billion from the budget — only not from defense and without new taxes, which are “off the table.”
But the darker side of these calls for executive action to overcome legislative gridlock is the one that Walter Lippmann understood so well decades ago. It’s one the President referred to obliquely in his press conference when he reminded reporters who wanted to know why he did not just “do something” to end the standoff that presidents under our Constitution are not “dictators” (Obama used that word) who can dispatch the Secret Service like a Praetorian Guard to prevent legislators from catching their planes or forcing these duly-elected, if recalcitrant, democratic leaders to do a thing once they’ve made up their minds not to.
It does not take a genius — or unhinged conspiracy theorist – to imagine that one strategy a right wing authoritarian movement might employ to concentrate political power in the hands of a few would be to: First, allow the wealthy to make unlimited, untraceable political contributions; Second, strike down the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional as part of a broader strategy to disenfranchise the right wing’s opposition; and finally, make democracy so unworkable that a frustrated public chooses “authority to freedom” just as Lippmann predicted.
The rise of Hitler, as Lippmann points out, was fueled and facilitated by the German public’s frustration with a dysfunctional German parliament unable to govern because it had become a battleground between parties of the extreme left and right.
What’s been extraordinary in the recent stalemate over the sequester, however, is that the flight from democracy to dictatorship which Lippmann foretold if popular government proved incompetent to govern, has not been evident among the American people, who are standing solidly with the President.
Instead, it’s Washington’s political class who’ve blinked first, unnerved perhaps by the dysfunction of a political system they no longer understand nor control.
A good example is Ron Fournier, writer for the National Journal and former Washington Bureau Chief for the Associated Press, who says Obama makes a credible case that he has reached farther toward compromise than House Republicans. But, paraphrasing Bill Joel, Fournier nevertheless insists: “You may be right, Mr. President, but this is crazy.”
Even though the public sides with Obama and gives Republicans “pathetic approval ratings,” Fournier still blames Obama for the GOP’s stonewalling because “in any enterprise, the chief executive is ultimately accountable for success and failure.”
Even if Congress is factually to blame, Fournier says “there is only one president” and even “if he’s right on the merits, Obama may be on the wrong side of history. Fair or not, the president owns this mess.”
The impulse to let the bullies have their way also helps explain, I think, why Bob Woodward has made a fool of himself empowering Republican obstructionists as he, wrongly, accuses the President of “moving the goal posts” when Obama insists on the very same balanced package of deficit-cutting tax hikes and spending cuts the President has been pushing all along, ever since Republicans first pushed the nation to the brink of insolvency two years ago in an effort to win concessions on spending through extortion they could not win democratically at the ballot box.
As John Harwood writes in the New York Times, Republicans don’t seek to grind government to a halt so much as they aim “to shrink its size by an amount currently beyond their institutional power in Washington, or popular support in the country, to achieve.”
President Obama acknowledges that some entitlement cuts are needed to keep the programs solvent, says Harwood. He also based his reelection on the choice he gave voters for his smaller cuts combined with tax increases on affluent Americans versus the Republicans’ bigger ones without tax increases.
Americans chose Obama’s approach. Even surveys today show 50 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s job performance while only 29 percent expressed a positive view of the Republican Party, said Harwood. Among demographic groups, the only group that views Republicans more positively than negatively are white Southerners, and even then it was by just 39 percent to 35 percent.
“More than twice as many Americans credited Mr. Obama, as compared with Republicans, with emphasizing themes of bipartisan unity,” said Harwood.
Republicans today are trying to exercise powers that do not rightly belong to them, at least not democratically. So why are so many Beltway elites willing to let them?
It’s the nation’s political elites who seem to be abandoning democracy, not the masses, as they urge Obama to flex executive muscles he does not possess or surrender unconditionally to the non-negotiable demands of an ideological minority that knows it can’t win elections outright but also that the country can’t move forward without it just so long as its capacity for manufacturing crisis after crisis remains undiminished.
By: Ted Frier, Salon, Open Salon Blog, March 10, 2013
“About Those Real Problems”:The Odd Republican Preoccupation With White House Tours
Someone’s going to have to explain this one to me.
Fox News Host Eric Bolling on Thursday offered to pay for one week’s worth of White House tours after the administration temporarily suspended them due to cutbacks under sequestration. “If I can get the White House doors open, I will pick up the tab,” Bolling said on the Fox show “The Five.”
Soon after, Fox News’ Sean Hannity offered to also “pay for a week” of White House tours out of his own pocket.
If this seems familiar, it’s because the offers come on the heels of Republican outrage over the decision to scrap White House tours as a consequence of sequestration budget cuts. Apparently, the president and his team had a choice: cancel the tours or start Secret Service furloughs. They chose the former.
And the right apparently can’t stop talking about it, to the point that Fox personalities want to open their wallets to keep the tours going. By some accounts, Fox News has been more than a little preoccupied with the issue.
There may be some deeper symbolic meeting that eludes me — if there is, I’m all ears — or perhaps conservatives are vastly more attached to White House tours than I ever realized. Either way, I can’t help but wonder about the right’s priorities.
Jed Lewison noted today, for example, that the Army was forced to suspend a tuition-assistance program as a result of the sequester, but Bolling and Hannity aren’t offering to pick up the tab on this one.
Of all things for Republicans to be going nuts about, losing the White House tours is the last one. Sequestration is causing real harm to real people, whether it’s unemployed workers, children and mothers who need Head Start, or soldiers looking to enroll in the Army’s tuition assistance program.
They could make all these problems go away — including the loss of their precious tours — with the blink of an eye. All they have to do is repeal sequestration. If they just repealed the damn thing, they wouldn’t even have to raise taxes.
And if they want an equivalent amount of deficit reduction, they can get that too by replacing sequester with a combination of revenue and spending cuts. As President Obama has said more times than anybody cares to remember, his offer is still on the table. Republicans are the ones saying no, and even if White House tours are the only thing that pisses them off, they still have the option of doing something about it.
I have to admit, watching news events unfold, it’s sometimes easy to find myself saying, “Well, I bet Fox will have a field day with this one.”
But White House tours? When sequestration is causing real hardship on real people? I’m at a bit of a loss on this one.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 8, 2013
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