By: Paul Kane and Rosalind S. Helderman, The Washington Post, March 10, 2012: Contribution by Ed O’Keefe
“A Campaign Of Denial”: Mitt Romney Meets “Peasants With Pitchforks”
Political revolutions leave chaos in their wake. Republicans cannot shut down their presidential nominating contest just because the party is in the midst of an upheaval wrought by the growing dominance of its right wing, its unresolved attitudes toward George W. Bush’s presidency, and the terror that the GOP rank and file has stirred among the more moderately conservative politicians who once ran things.
When Pat Buchanan ran for president in the 1990s, the conservative commentator lovingly referred to his partisans as “peasants with pitchforks.” The pitchfork brigade now enjoys more power in Republican politics than even Buchanan thought possible.
Mitt Romney is still the Republican front-runner by virtue of the delegates he relentlessly piles up. But Romney keeps failing to bring this slugfest to a close. No matter how much he panders and grovels to the party’s right, its supporters will never see him as one of their own.
One senses that the conservative ultras are resigned to having to vote for Romney in November against President Obama. They are determined not to vote for him twice, using the primaries to give voice to their hearts and their guts. They will keep signaling their refusal to surrender to the Romney machine with its torrent of nasty advertisements and its continuing education courses in delegate math designed to prove that resistance is futile.
The more they are told this, the more they want to resist.
Rick Santorum is a superb vehicle for this cry of protest. He is articulate but unpolished. He has pitifully few resources compared with the vast treasury at Romney’s disposal, but this only feeds Santorum’s David narrative against the Goliath that is Team Romney.
Santorum’s purity as a social and religious conservative is unrivaled, and his traditional family life — he’s always surrounded on primary nights by a passel of kids — contrasts nicely with Newt Gingrich’s rather messy personal history. It is no accident that, while Gingrich narrowly carried the ballots of men in Tuesday’s Alabama and Mississippi primaries, he was routed among Republican women who were decisive in Santorum’s twin triumphs. It was the conservative version of the personal being the political.
And while Republicans shout to the heavens against class warfare, they are as affected as anyone by the old Jacksonian mistrust of the privileged whose football knowledge comes not from experience or ESPN but from their friendship with the owners of NFL franchises. In Mississippi and Alabama, Romney again prevailed among those with postgraduate educations and incomes of more than $100,000 a year. He was defeated by those with less money and fewer years in school.
The revolt of the right-wing masses means that Romney stands alone as the less than ideal representative of a relatively restrained brand of conservatism. The growing might of the conservative hard core, reflected in its primary victories in 2010, led other potential establishmentarians to sit out the race in the hope that the storm will eventually pass.
But having decided to run, Romney must wage a campaign of denial. He buries his old Massachusetts self and misleads about what he once believed. He even tries to run to Santorum’s right. Recently, he denounced Santorum for voting in favor of federal support for Planned Parenthood, a group to which Romney’s family once made a donation. It is an unseemly spectacle.
Bush’s efforts to craft a “compassionate conservatism” friendlier toward those in the political middle collapsed into ruins years ago. This year’s Republican candidates almost never speak Bush’s name. It is to Santorum’s discredit that he did not dare defend his perfectly defensible vote in favor of Bush’s No Child Left Behind education program. Santorum, too, fears the pitchforks wielded by those who see any exertion of federal authority as leading down a road to serfdom.
And so it is on to Illinois, the next place Romney has to win to keep the resistance at bay. The Land of Lincoln would be a fine setting for a stand in favor of a more measured form of conservatism. But it won’t happen. Romney is anxious about the power of the Republican right in downstate Illinois — the very region that opposed Honest Abe in his celebrated Senate race 154 years ago.
Once again, Romney will take the moderates for granted, ignoring the last remnants of the old Lincoln party as he chases after an elusive right. And once again, Santorum’s battle cry will challenge conservatives to have the courage to complete the revolution they started the day Barack Obama took office.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 14, 2012
“Invested In Economic Failure”: The GOP Plans To Sink The Economy
We’re just under eight months away from Election Day now, which means that the GOP is starting to run out of time to think up new ways to ruin the economy so that Barack Obama doesn’t get reelected. The Republicans have to do this delicately, of course; they can’t be open about it lest it become too obvious that harming the economy is their goal. But they have to be aggressive enough about it for their efforts to bear some actual (rotten) fruit. There are three fronts—gas prices, jobs, and the budget—on which we should keep our eyes open for signs that the Republicans are trying to achieve Mitch McConnell’s No. 1 goal for America.
Let’s take them in order. The Republicans received joyous news Monday in the form of the Washington Post poll that showed Obama’s numbers sinking in inverse proportion to rising gas prices. The gas situation is perfect for the GOP for two reasons. First, there’s very little a president can actually do about gas prices. Second, even though those prices don’t really tell us much about the more general economy, most people have the impression that they do, so for the out-party, it’s just a free whack.
No one can blame Republicans for using Obama as a piñata on the issue. But here’s what they can be blamed for. What is causing these high prices? Not low supply and high demand, which is what they teach you in school. In fact, supply is high—domestic oil production is at its highest point in years, higher under this allegedly business-hating president than under oilmen Bush and Cheney. And demand has been low because of the economy, although it’s now picking up.
No, experts blame a lot of the increase on fervid speculation in the oil markets, and a chief reason for a lot of that speculation is anxiety in those markets about a possible war with Iran. Said anxiety, in turn, is heightened every time a politician blusters about how we have no choice now but to go start that war. So this kind of rhetoric is a nice little two-fer for Republicans, who get to sound like tough guys and can also take comfort in knowing that the more they talk up attacking Iran, the more they’re doing their small part to keep prices high.
Now let’s look to jobs. As you may know, while we’ve been getting these hopeful job reports these last few months, there is one sector that’s been lagging notably: the public sector. In fact, during 2011 the public sector across the country—state and local governments, in addition to the feds—laid off massive numbers of people. Public-sector job losses averaged 22,000 a month in 2011. State and municipal governments are laying people off mainly for two reasons: the economy, which means they’re bringing in less revenue, and the drastic cuts in federal aid, which have forced the layoffs and firings of nearly half a million public-sector workers in the last two years.
True, Republicans want smaller budgets on ideological grounds. But they also know very well that the more domestic discretionary spending cuts they can force, and the more public employees they can make states and cities shave off their payrolls, the greater the negative effect on the overall employment picture. If those nearly half-million people were still working, what would the unemployment rate be? Maybe down to a flat 8 percent.
Lately, though, things are starting to look worrisome on that front for Republicans. In February, the public sector cut just 6,000 workers, well down from last year’s average. This indicates that the party might not be able to count for long on the public-sector numbers dragging down the private-sector ones. Hmmm. What to do about that?
Interestingly and conveniently, exactly what the Republicans on Capitol Hill are doing right now! They have been signaling lately that the budget numbers they agreed to with Democrats last year in the debt deal need to be revisited, and the cuts must be even deeper. Speaker John Boehner is open about the possibility of reneging. He has sent some mixed signals—he’s also talked about trying to get the House to accept a transportation bill that the Senate has already passed by the eye-poppingly bipartisan margin of 85–11. New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer says the bill can create 3 million jobs. The House returns to Washington next Monday. Where would you put the odds that this House of Representatives will vote, less than eight months before the election, to support a bill that Chuck Schumer boasts can produce 3 million jobs?
Every out-party does a little discreet cheering for the economy to be weak. But the GOP has put itself in a unique position. By opposing everything Obama wanted with such ferocity; by saying all those thousands of times that he had no clue about the economy; by sending out a parade of presidential candidates, from the semi-serious to the clown posse, all of whose central criticism of Obama is that he killed the economy—in all of these ways the party has more invested in economic failure than any out-party I can remember in my lifetime. Its best hope for now is gas prices, but even they eventually get lower, usually by late summer. Beyond that, all the GOP has to rely on is Mitt Romney’s unstoppable charisma.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 13, 2012
“Republican Hostile Challenge To Women”: Romney, Santorum, And Gingrich Need A Lesson In Women’s History
Disaffected women are packing up to flee the Republican Party in the wake of the War on Women, The Washington Post reported on its front page. Meanwhile, President Obama’s re-election campaign is sending out a massive signal to energize pro-choice women and welcome them into the Democratic Party, The New York Times said on its Sunday front page.
Good, good. Women are clearly the critical constituency to choose the next president. That’s just what the Republican Party deserves for its hostile challenge to women and girls making their own decisions about their own lives. Sometimes you wonder if Republican candidates know that women actually have the right to vote. Let’s face it, neither Mitt, Rick, nor Newt is exactly a woman’s man. They are out-and-out men’s men.
Has former Gov. Mitt Romney or former Sen. Rick Santorum or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich ever read Virginia Woolf? Do they even know who Margaret Sanger is? What about the spitfire Quaker Alice Paul? She led the women suffrage movement to victory over seven or more years of struggle. This happened in 1920, like 92 years ago, gentlemen. Paul took women’s suffrage public, to the streets and to the White House gates, where the strategy was to remind President Woodrow Wilson what the right thing to do was. Paul and other suffragettes were arrested, abused, and force fed in jail. Nothing would stop them until women won the right to citizenship in our democracy.
Note: women suffrage was not given; it was taken. We women today should study pages from Paul’s book on civil disobedience, especially if the War on Women continues to close in on overturning Roe v. Wade, the cornerstone Supreme Court decision that makes reproductive rights—human rights—legal and private.
Margaret Sanger brought you and me birth control. She made up the useful phrase in the interest of saving women’s lives. As a nurse, she was outraged to see young married immigrants on the Lower East Side dying in childbirth or from botched abortions. The death of Sadie Sachs was the catalyst, she said, a 28-year-old mother who begged a doctor to tell her how to prevent another pregnancy. “Well, it can’t be done,” he answered. “I’ll tell you the only thing to do….Tell Jake to sleep on the roof.”
Months after witnessing that predicament, Sanger answered a call to the Sachs home, where she found Sadie Sachs on her deathbed, surrounded by a scene of her weeping family.
Sanger’s cause came from that personal encounter. “The sun came up and threw its reflection over the house tops. It was the dawn of a new day in my life,” she declared. “I would tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women.” In 1916, she opened a women’s health clinic in Brooklyn and founded the organization that became Planned Parenthood, the gleam in the eye of one spirited, determined woman. Like Roe v. Wade, it has been besieged lately, as another front in the War on Women.
Sanger’s life is an incredible mirror of her times, especially the free-thinking, defiant mood of Roaring ’20s. Like her contemporary Paul, she too got arrested and spent time in jail in 1917. Under a court order not to give a public speech, she gagged herself and stood next to the eminent historian and Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. as he read her words. She traveled the world to seek ways of safe birth control. Unfortunately, she subscribed to an intellectual trend called eugenics (before the Nazi era.)
Paul and Sanger would ask, what’s wrong with us, defending what’s already been done? If I were to interview them today, they would be eager to know what progress women have made. And what would I tell them—President Clinton’s Family and Medical Leave Act?
They might say to me that their endeavors went beyond the ballot and women’s health. These were vehicles to empower women to speak with their own voices and to determine their own destinies to make this more truly a democracy.
Virginia Woolf, the brilliant English novelist, essayist, and diarist, created the feminist metaphor of a room of one’s own in a manifesto on furthering women’s liberties in life. She lived in the same age as Sanger and Paul. Such a shame these three never met.
Getting back to Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich, well might we ask how much room there is for women in their Americas.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, March 13, 2012
“It’s Always In The Future”: When Do We Get To See Obama’s Radicalism?
Last week I wrote a post mocking conservatives for their relentless search for the next secret videotape that will expose Barack Obama as a dangerous radical, the latest of which was the shocking revelation that as a law student, he supported his professor Derrick Bell’s efforts to diversify the Harvard Law School faculty. Unsurprisingly, conservatives reacted by saying that I just didn’t get it (here‘s a sample). It’s worth saying a bit more about this phenomenon, because we surely haven’t seen the last of it, both in the campaign and in Obama’s second term, should he win one.
The search for the radical associations in Obama’s pre-political history began almost as soon as Obama’s presidential candidacy began in 2007. Some conservatives (and that’s an important qualifier; many conservatives understand that this stuff is nuts) have been positively obsessed with uncovering Obama’s radical associations. They have also insisted that those associations are closer than anyone thinks. So it isn’t enough that Obama once served on a charitable board with former ’60s radical Bill Ayers; some want us to believe that Ayers actually ghostwrote Obama’s books! Obama didn’t just speak at a rally supporting Derrick Bell; he hugged Bell, which just shows how close they were!
And all of this is supposed to lead to something, something about Obama’s presidency. Not even the craziest among the conspirators thinks that Obama is, today, taking orders from Ayers. But they would no doubt assert that he doesn’t have to, because in his youth Obama drank so deeply from their cup of extremist America-hating that he will be doing what the likes of Ayers want anyway.
So here’s my question: When do we get to see Obama’s radicalism?
I’m not talking about Affordable Care Act-type radicalism. I mean the real radicalism. The Weather Underground radicalism. The Black Panther radicalism. The dismantling of capitalism, the closing of the Defense Department, the demotion of white people to second-class citizenship. When is that going to come? Can they give us the litany of Obama policies that represent the realization of the visions of the ’60s radicals who supposedly control his mind across the decades?
Because after all, the point of the supposedly shocking revelation about Obama’s past isn’t to help us understand what has already happened but to give us a preview of what is to come. For instance, some conservatives believe the auto bailout is a key component of Obama’s nefarious socialist plan. But you don’t need to know when Obama spoke with Bill Ayers 15 years ago or what he said about Derrick Bell 20 years ago to understand the auto bailout. You can look at the actual auto bailout. No, the shocking revelation is supposed to warn us about new radicalism, the radicalism to come that can only be appreciated if you grasp the full implications of the people Obama was hanging around with a couple of decades ago.
So what exactly is it that they’re warning America about? When do we get to see this crazy radical Obama? If they’re pressed, there is an answer to this question: In his second term! That’s when the mask will be torn off, and the true Obama revealed. Sure, he might be governing like your average center-left Democrat now, but that’s only because he’s been lulling us into a false sense of security, so he can get re-elected and then begin his true project of remaking America, when Angela Davis gets nominated to the Supreme Court, private property is outlawed, and half the public gets herded onto collective farms. Or something.
To people who have a grip on reality, the things Barack Obama will do in a second term aren’t particularly mysterious. We don’t know exactly what will happen, of course, but we’ve got a pretty good idea. He’ll try to solidify the ACA, his signature legislative accomplishment. He may try to achieve tax reform, which could involve slightly higher rates for the wealthy, although he’ll need Republican cooperation to do it. He’ll try to extricate us from Afghanistan, and he doesn’t seem too keen on starting a war with Iran. And so on. Conservatives will dislike most of what he does, and liberals will like most (but not all) of it. In short, though the details aren’t easy to predict, in its broad strokes a second Obama term will probably be a lot like the first Obama term. You’d have to be pretty crazy to believe otherwise.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 12, 2012
“Abandon Ship”: While Waiting For Dust To Settle, GOP Leaders Sharpen Case For Their Own Re-Election
Watching with growing unease as the GOP presidential nomination fight promises to stretch into the spring, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill are making moves to protect their own reelection prospects in the fall.
The aim is to fashion a political and legislative agenda to sharpen the party’s case against President Obama and Democrats, and make a coherent argument for why the Democratic-controlled Senate, and not the GOP-led House, is to blame for the congressional gridlock that has disheartened the public. A side benefit is that the legislative strategy might shift public attention away from some of the social issues that have recently dominated their party’s presidential contest.
While most congressional leaders continue to believe that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney will be the nominee, they worry about how long it will take to secure the nomination and the political costs of a drawn-out battle.
“Every day that goes by [without a nominee] is a day that plays to President Obama’s advantage,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has endorsed Romney and was the party’s 2008 standard-bearer.
While GOP leaders are eager for a nominee to emerge so they can begin a coordinated campaign against the Democrats, they are increasingly convinced that they must move ahead with an agenda of their own.
Last week, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said that regardless of who the nominee is and when he assumes the role, the core of the GOP argument against the president will be the same.
“Listen, one thing is clear here,” Boehner said Thursday. “ . . . This year’s election is going to be a referendum on the president’s economic policies. . . . The American people are concerned about our economy and concerned about jobs, and that’s going to continue to be my focus.”
And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has sketched out what a joint agenda should look like. “ ‘Obamacare’ should be the number one issue in the campaign,” McConnell told the Weekly Standard. “I think it’s the gift that keeps on giving.” The other top issues, as McConnell sees them, should be the deficit and national debt.
Bread-and-butter topics
One main concern going forward, key Hill Republicans say, is to avoid falling into more social-issue debates, which have hurt the broader party image and could affect down-ballot races for the House and Senate.
“To the extent that the focus in this cycle is on the economy, it’s better for Republicans. I think that’s probably where the stronger case for Republican change can be made,” said Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.), who managed presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s 1994 campaign for the Senate but remains neutral in the presidential race. “I think we’re stronger when we’re talking about economics.”
The result is a congressional party determined to show action on bread-and-butter issues that can serve as the core of a unified economic agenda.
“We’ve got plenty of things to worry about here in the House. We’ve got a transportation bill, we’ve got Iran, we’ve got debt and deficit,” said Rep. Allen B. West (R-Fla.). “ Whatever happens with the presidential race will happen with the presidential race. People sent me up here to focus on being a good congressional representative, not worrying about being a cheerleader in a food fight.”
House Republicans will move legislation later this month to repeal a key portion of Obama’s health-care law, days ahead of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on the legislation. Next week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is expected to unveil a budget proposal that will slash federal spending and stick closely to last year’s controversial proposal to alter Medicare with private options. Both of these efforts could flow seamlessly into whatever coordinated effort emerges once there is a nominee.
But, while it is widely acknowledged that tax reform will be a key point of argument in the fall campaign, Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, said last week that he will not wait to for a presidential nominee decide how to move ahead on the issue.
“I’m going to continue to do that regardless of when we get a nominee,” Camp said. “I’ve got an agenda that I’ve been working on for a year and a half, and I’m going to keep doing that.”
House Republicans had hoped to be able to take some of the presidential nominee’s proposals and offer them on the chamber floor, while Senate Republicans might use their rights to offer them as amendments. If the nomination fight lasts deep into the spring, there will be little to no time for such stage battles in Congress.
Hedging on health care
One area of legislative indecision has already emerged. While the House GOP is moving ahead with its health-care debate, Senate Republicans have not decided whether to push for another vote repealing the health-care law. Action in the Senate could shine a spotlight on what Republicans believe will be a key issue of the fall campaign, but another vote could also give embattled swing-state Democrats the chance to vote for repeal, bolstering their independent credentials.
There is deep division between House and Senate Republicans about the consequences of a long primary season. Some, like McCain, thinks it hurts Republicans. Others, including McCain’s close friend Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), say the lengthy process has made Romney a better candidate, who will benefit from having had to fight for the nomination.
GOP leaders had anticipated that Romney would wrap up the nomination by Super Tuesday, and they would then begin the routine cooperation in which the presidential candidate defines a daily message that members of Congress amplify. For the immediate future, they will have to wait on that.
Gingrich’s top ally in Congress, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), is trying to build support by arguing that his candidate can energize the base and give down-ballot candidates something to rally around. Barton says that when he first ran, in 1984 on the same ticket as Ronald Reagan and Phil Gramm, he linked his candidacy to the popular president and the Senate candidate from Texas.
“Everything I did was Reagan, Gramm, Barton. They didn’t know me. But they knew them,” he said.
Contraception debate
And lawmakers acknowledge that the GOP message got derailed in February, when the issue of contraceptive coverage in the health-care law consumed the presidential campaign. As the discussion focused on whether the federal government could compel institutions connected to the Catholic Church to cover contraception costs in insurance programs, Republicans thought they were on high ground, and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) introduced an amendment to allow exemptions.
Then when Santorum publicly declared his opposition to the use of contraceptives, the tables began to turn. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on contraception, in which no women testified; the optics of that miscalculation were amplified by the politics of the presidential primary debate with adverse consequences for the GOP on the Hill.
Blunt, a key Romney backer, said that the other candidates in the race must decide how much longer they want to deprive Romney of the chance of assuming the mantle of the nominee. “They have to decide on their own that they’re no longer serving a positive purpose,” Blunt said.
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