“A Media Staple Under Bush”: Where Are The ‘Comeback’ Columns About Obama?
For a “lame duck” politician who’s supposed to be licking his wounds after the Democratic Party’s steep midterm losses, President Obama these days probably doesn’t mind scanning the headlines each morning. Instead of confirming the slow-motion demise so many in the pundit class had mapped out for him, the headlines paint a picture of a president, and a country, in many ways on the rebound:
–U.S. Economic Confidence Index at 17-Month High
–America is Free of Ebola Cases
–G.O.P.-Led Benghazi Panel Bolsters Administration
–What The Huge Drop In Gasoline Prices Means For America
– Dow Hits Another Record Close
That’s probably more good news for Obama in one month than he had in the previous three combined.
And that selection of headlines doesn’t cover news of the most recent smooth and efficient enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act, the announcement of Obama’s executive action to deal with the languishing issue of immigration, his high-profile endorsement of net neutrality, or the United States’ landmark agreement with China to confront climate change.
As for Obama’s approval rating, it has remained steady in recent months, just as it has for virtually all of 2014. But aren’t lame ducks supposed to tumble after tough midterm defeats, the way President George W. Bush did right after the 2006 votes?
Meanwhile, the assumption that Republicans had boxed Obama in politically via their midterm momentum and would be able to bully him around (impeachment! a government shutdown!) hasn’t yet come to fruition. To date, their main response to the immigration executive order that Obama issued has been for Republicans to cast a symbolic vote of disapproval (i.e., Obama called their bluff).
Already the bloom seems to be coming off the GOP’s win. “According to the survey, 50 percent of Americans believe the GOP taking control of the House and the Senate next year will be bad for America,” CNN reported this week.
None of this is to say that Obama’s surging or that paramount hurdles don’t remain on the horizon. But some recent developments do undercut a widely held consensus in the Beltway press that Obama’s presidency effectively ended with the midterms and that his tenure might be viewed as a failed one.
Right after the election, a November Economist editorial announced, “Mr. Obama cannot escape the humiliating verdict on his presidency.” Glimmers of hope after the midterms were no reason to think Obama had “somehow crawled out of the dark place that voters put him,” the Washington Post assured readers. (Post columnist Dana Milbank has recently tagged Obama as a hapless “bystander” who’s “turning into George W. Bush.”) And a McClatchy Newspapers headline declared, “President Obama Is Now Truly A Lame Duck.”
But as the facts on the ground now change, many in the press seem reluctant to drop its preferred script and adjust to the headlines that suggest Obama’s second term is not shaping up to be the wreck so many pundits hinted it would be.
It’s worth noting that during Bush’s failed second term, which ended with his approval rating hovering around 20 percent, the same Beltway press did the opposite. Back then the press appeared overly anxious to proclaim a Bush comeback underway. Unlike Obama who’s actually rebounding, the D.C. press often touted Bush’s comeback, even though one never materialized.
At the time of the 2006 midterm elections, NBC’s Chuck Todd predicted that “if Democrats get control of Congress, President Bush’s approval rating will be over 50 percent by the Fourth of July next year.” Democrats did win the House and the Senate in 2006, but Todd’s predication was off — by 20 points. Bush was floundering with a 30 percent approval rating on Independence Day, 2007.
Todd was hardly alone. Earlier in 2005, Time got a quick jump on the Bush-is-back competition, announcing that the president had “found his voice” and that relieved White House aides “were smiling again” after a turbulent 2005. That year, according to the Gallup numbers, Bush’s approval rating remained submerged, falling as low as 31 percent. When it briefly climbed to 40 percent, the Baltimore Sun quickly asked, “Is Bush The New Comeback Kid?”
Even when Bush’s approval rating trended down again after the Republicans’ 2006 midterm wipeout, pundits were back on the hunt for the elusive comeback. In early 2007, Washington Post columnist David Broder, the dean of the Beltway press corps, typed up the White House spin and claimed, “It may seem perverse to suggest that, at the very moment the House of Representatives is repudiating his policy in Iraq, President Bush is poised for a political comeback. But don’t be astonished if that is the case.” Broder was sure, “Bush now shows signs of renewed energy and is regaining the initiative on several fronts.” Thirteen months later, Broder finally conceded the Bush comeback hadn’t materialized. (In fact, the opposite had unfolded.)
The media’s “comeback” double standard seems to reflect the misguided Beltway consensus that America’s a center-right country, so of course it was only a matter of time before Bush regained his footing (he didn’t) and that Obama would likely fade away during his second term (he hasn’t).
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, December 4, 2014
“How Obama Boxed In Republicans With His Immigration Order”: Revoking It In 2017 Will Be A Lot More Complicated
If there’s an elected Republican who thinks it wasn’t a bad idea for President Obama to take executive action on immigration, he or she has yet to make that opinion known. Not surprisingly, the 20 or 30 men (and one woman) hoping to get the GOP nomination for president in 2016 have been particularly vocal on the topic. But while thunderous denunciations of the Constitution-shredding socialist dictator in the White House may seem to them today like exactly what the situation demands, before long they’re going to be asked a simple yet dangerous question: If you become president, what are you going to do about it?
Although they haven’t actually answered that question yet, their feelings have been unambiguous. Ted Cruz said Obama has “gotten in the job of counterfeiting immigration papers, because there’s no legal authority to do what he’s doing.” Rand Paul compared the order to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Rick Perry threatened to sue over it. So did Scott Walker. So did Mike Pence.
Because these guys would all like to be president, we have to place their opposition in a different context from their current jobs as senators and governors. So let’s imagine it’s January 2017. You, Republican candidate, have just been sworn in as president. Two years ago, Barack Obama made this policy change, and as a result, millions of undocumented immigrants registered with the government, submitted to background checks, paid back taxes, and obtained work permits. They’re now working legally and not living in fear of immigration authorities. You have to decide what’s going to happen to them. This is a very different situation than it was back in 2014 when the move was announced. Instead of wondering whether we should give legal status to a group of undocumented immigrants, we’re now wondering whether to take away legal status from a group of people who are documented, even if they’re not actually on a path to citizenship.
And don’t forget, these are pretty sympathetic folks — they’ve been in the United States for at least seven years now (under the order, only those who came before 2010 are eligible), and they were either brought here as children and grew up in America, or are the parents of children who were born in the U.S., or are legal residents. Deporting them would mean breaking up families. Just think how that’s going to play on the evening news—the image of children crying desperately as their parents are carted off by law enforcement on your orders isn’t exactly going to go over well.
That’s what the next president will confront. So what are the possible answers a Republican candidate could give to the question of what they will do about Obama’s order? They might say what a lot of Republicans fear, which is that however much they opposed the move in the first place, by 2017, undoing it will be impractical and cruel. But saying that would pretty much doom them with the extremely conservative white Republican primary electorate, because it both capitulates on the substance and reflects a stance of less than maximal opposition toward something Barack Obama did.
Alternatively, they could say they’ll immediately reverse the order and start deporting these immigrants. In fact, if they believe as they say that the order is illegal, wouldn’t they have no choice but to revoke it? And immediately? The trouble is that saying so would risk both alienating and mobilizing Latino voters, for whom undocumented people aren’t an abstraction or an invading horde but individual human beings.
If the eventual nominee said explicitly that he’ll revoke Obama’s order, it could remind a lot of people of 2012, when Mitt Romney suggested that given the impracticality of rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants, the way to deal with the problem was “self-deportation” — in other words, making life so miserable for them that they decided to return to the countries from which they fled. Even RNC chairman Reince Priebus later called that comment “horrific” because of the message it sent to Latinos. Pledging to start breaking up families would be even worse.
Since both those answers are extremely unappealing, the GOP candidates might try to retreat to a dodge — something like, “I’ll sit down with congressional leaders to determine a way forward.” Any reporter or debate monitor with a pulse is likely to follow up with, “O.K., but legislation can take time, and there’s little appetite among Republicans in Congress for immigration reform that goes much beyond building fences. So in the meantime, would you leave Obama’s order in place or issue your own order revoking it?” And they’d be right back where they started.
There are times when it’s perfectly reasonable for a candidate to answer a tough question with “It depends,” and this could be one of those times; for instance, how a Republican president would address the issue could depend on how many people actually sign up for this new legal status. But let’s be realistic: Republican primary voters are unlikely to accept that as an answer. They’re going to want a declaration of resolve and commitment, a signal that the candidates feel the same way about undocumented immigrants that they do. And there is bound to be at least one candidate (Ted Cruz, I’m guessing) who will open the bidding with an emphatic pledge to reverse Obama’s order on his first day in office. That will raise the pressure on all the other candidates to follow suit.
If they do, it will send a message of hostility that Latino voters will hear loud and clear, a message the GOP has been trying (unsuccessfully) to avoid for the last couple of years. Barack Obama sure boxed them in on this one, didn’t he?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 1, 2014
“Gridlock Only Gets You So Far”: Voters Will Catch On To The Fact That The GOP Is Using Obstruction To Win Elections
There are three reasons that the Republicans pursue gridlock: ideological purity, hatred of President Barack Obama and because it helps them win elections. The first two they may be able to get over, but not the third.
Republicans discovered in 2010 that by opposing anything and everything of any consequence that Obama proposed, gridlock would ensue and the public’s anger and cynicism toward Washington would grow. Rallying around the tea party’s themes and the deep economic frustrations from the near depression, they swept out incumbent Democrats by the score.
Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell made it known that his number one goal was the defeat of Obama in 2012. That did not work out so well, but the Republicans quickly pivoted to 2014, where there was clearly fertile ground to elect more of their party. Part and parcel of this strategy was to not pass any meaningful legislation on immigration reform, job creation, education, tax reform or to improve America’s infrastructure and, finally, doing their very best to rally the base against anything having to do with government. The growing anger towards Washington and the party in control of the presidency – the Democrats – provided another windfall.
The difference now is that the anger which pollsters determined in 2010 created a majority for “standing up for principle” has now shifted to “it’s time to compromise, to get things done.” In short, voters want government to work and are sick and tired of the obstruction and gridlock.
Despite their efforts to shift blame, the Republicans now are boxed in, because it is pretty clear that they are the problem, not the party proposing solutions. Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, respected political analysts, have laid this out very clearly in their writings, including the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” So even if Republicans decide that the “shut the government” caucus led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz should be hidden away in the basement of the Capitol, they are still confronted with many political players who believe they were elected by being obstructionists.
The goal of the Democrats, then, should be to revise and reinvigorate the plans to legislate and solve America’s problems and convince the voters that the Congress, controlled by Republicans, is once again blocking progress. When the Republican leadership is convinced that gridlock is now a losing game politically, they may actually change their behavior. Their rigid ideology and their hatred for Obama will give way to a new political reality – the public is on to them and, much like President Harry Truman in 1948, the “do-nothing Congress” label will be laid at their feet.
The Republicans have to confront these past six years and change their behavior. They will only do so only if it becomes crystal clear that the public understands and is sick and tired of their embracing of Washington gridlock.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, November 26, 2014
“Stick A Fork In It, It’s Done”: When Even ‘Definitive’ Isn’t Enough For The House GOP
Towards the end of the House Intelligence Committee’s report on the 2012 attack in Benghazi, the document notes that the panel’s findings were the result of two years of “intensive investigation,” which included careful review of thousands of pages of materials, 20 events and hearings, and extensive interviews.
“The report,” the Republican-led Committee concluded, “is therefore meant to serve as the definitive House statement on the Intelligence Community’s activities before, during and after the tragic events that caused the deaths of four brave Americans.”
And yet, even now, the House Republican leadership just doesn’t care.
House Speaker John A. Boehner announced Monday he will re-appoint Rep. Trey Gowdy as chairman of the Select Committee on the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya in the 114th Congress.
“On September 11, 2012, four Americans were killed in a brutal terrorist attack in Libya. Two years later, the American people still have far too many questions about what happened that night – and why,” Boehner said in a statement.
To date, Boehner, who didn’t want the Select Committee in the first place, has failed to identify even one of these questions that has not already been answered.
Several Senate Republicans don’t care, either.
Senate Republican leaders are under pressure from GOP lawmakers with presidential ambitions to join the House in investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), three young rising conservative stars who are weighing 2016 bids, say the Senate should participate in a joint investigation with the House.
This really is getting embarrassing.
As we talked about yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, and the State Department’s independent Accountability Review Board have all published reports on the 2012 attack, and each found the same thing: none of the conspiracy theories are true.
In addition, the attack has been scrutinized by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Homeland Security Committee, the House Oversight Committee, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, each of which has held hearings, and each of which failed to find even a shred of evidence to bolster the conspiracy theorists.
Do Boehner and other Republicans believe their own allies are somehow in on the conspiracy? That GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate have somehow been co-opted into hiding imaginary evidence?
The “definitive” report, prepared by House Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, makes it painfully obvious that this story has run its course. It’s over. Done. Stick a fork in it.
And yet, there’s the hapless House Speaker, pointing to questions he can’t identify, saying what the nation really needs is … another committee.
The irony is, the far-right went looking for a scandal, and in the process, they created one themselves. The political scandal isn’t the attack that left four Americans dead in Libya, it’s the ugly exploitation of the tragedy by mindless partisans looking for electoral and fundraising gimmicks, raising the prospect of important questions that have already been answered repeatedly.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 25, 2014
“Forcing The Contradictions Of The GOP”: With Immigration Action, Obama Calls His Opponents’ Bluff
Obama’s decision to back away from our government’s policy of ripping apart the families of undocumented immigrants has called forth utterly contradictory responses from Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives. It should now be clear that the two sides don’t see the facts, the law or history in the same way.
Conservatives say the president’s executive actions on immigration are uniquely lawless and provocative. Progressives insist that Obama is acting in the same way that President Reagan and both presidents Bush did. They recall that after the second President Bush’s immigration reform bill failed in the Senate in 2007 — it was very similar to the 2013 bill Obama supports — White House spokeswoman Dana Perino declared flatly of the administration’s willingness to use its executive powers: “We’re going as far as we possibly can without Congress acting.”
Yet perhaps facts are now irrelevant. There was an enlightening moment of candor when Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) visited MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on the morning of Obama’s immigration speech. “The president ought to walk into this a lot more slowly, especially after an election,” Coburn said. “This idea, the rule of law, is really concerning a lot of people where I come from. And whether it’s factual or perceptual, it really doesn’t matter.”
Yes, for many of the president’s foes, the distinction between the “factual” and the “perceptual” doesn’t matter anymore.
But mainstream Republicans seem as angry at Obama as the tea partyers. They argue repeatedly that by moving on his own, Obama has made it impossible for Congress to act.
You’d think that Republicans who genuinely support immigration reform would want to prove the president wrong in a different way: by passing a comprehensive bill. That only a few of them are saying this is an obvious sign to the president’s supporters that Obama is right in suspecting that the House GOP would continue to bob and weave to avoid the issue — as it did for the one year, four months and 24 days between the passage of the genuinely bipartisan immigration reform bill in the Senate and Obama’s announcement.
In a superb reconstruction of why the president decided to move on his own, Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin, Ed O’Keefe and David Nakamura note that the last straw for Obama was House Speaker John Boehner’s refusal to say after the election that he would bring up an immigration bill if the president agreed to postpone executive action. In the absence of concrete pledges that something would get done, there was no point in waiting any longer.
All this explains the jubilation among progressives. They not only agree with the substance of what Obama did but also see him as finally calling his opponents’ bluff. He has forced the contradictions of the Republican establishmentarians into the sunlight.
Such Republicans were counting on Obama to be an enabler. He’d once more accept their quiet (and now obviously hollow) promises of goodwill and thus allow them to avoid a straight up confrontation with the right wing of their party.
Now, they can no longer have it both ways. Many of them claim they agree with the substance of what Obama did and also that Congress should pass a broader immigration bill. If this is true, then why should they spend all their energy trying to undo the constructive steps he has just taken? If they punt and simply join the rancid attacks on Obama as an “emperor” and a “monarch,” they will demonstrate for all to see that the GOP really is dominated by its right wing and that those of more measured views are simply too timid to take on their internal adversaries.
No wonder they’re so angry with the president.
For the six years since Obama’s election to the presidency, the Republican right has been on offense, continually blurring those distinctions between the “factual” and the “perceptual.” They keep charging that Obama is a dangerous radical even when he pursues middle-of-the-road policies. Their supposedly more temperate colleagues go along because they don’t have to pay a price.
Obama has just told them their free ride is over. The stakes in American politics will be much clearer because he did.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 23, 2014
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