“Getting Democracy Backwards”: McConnell Digs A Hole On Social Security, Falls In
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), in the midst of the toughest race of his career, still isn’t quite sure how he wants to present himself to voters. On the one hand, the longtime Republican senator is proud to be the nation’s top obstructionist, helping create the most dysfunctional Congress in modern history. On the other hand, McConnell wants the public to see him as the consummate dealmaker.
To help prove the latter point, the GOP incumbent cited an interesting example last week.
Though he hasn’t mentioned it much on the campaign trail over the past year, McConnell specifically touted his effort to push President George W. Bush’s plans to reform Social Security in 2005, which would have set up private accounts for retirees.
“After Bush was re-elected in 2004 he wanted us to try to fix Social Security,” said McConnell. “I spent a year trying to get any Democrat in the Senate – even those most reasonable Democrat of all, Joe Lieberman – to help us.”
We now know, of course, that Democrats weren’t interested in privatizing Social Security. Neither was the American mainstream, which hated the Bush/Cheney idea. But the fact that McConnell brought this up, unprompted, was a clumsy error from a senator who’s usually more disciplined.
With time running out in Kentucky, Mitch McConnell decided to remind the state that he wanted to effectively eliminate the popular and effective Social Security system. Indeed, it’s been part of McConnell’s governing vision for many, many years.
When local reporter Joe Sonka asked McConnell whether voters should expect the senator to push Social Security privatization after the midterms, McConnell replied, “I’m not announcing what the agenda would be in advance.”
Wait, he’s not?
I’m starting to think Republicans have collectively forgotten the point of a political campaign. Last week, Scott Brown told voters in New Hampshire, “I’m not going to talk about whether we’re going to do something in the future.” Around the same time, McConnell said he’ll only announce Senate Republicans’ agenda after the election.
This is a little nutty, even by 2014 standards. Call me old fashioned, but in a democracy, candidates are supposed to tell voters what they’d do if elected. Then, after the election, the winning candidates are supposed to pursue the agenda endorsed by the electorate.
When McConnell says “I’m not announcing what the agenda would be in advance,” he’s getting democracy backwards. The longtime incumbent is asking voters to give him control of the Senate first, at which point he’ll tell everyone what he intends to do with his power.
It’s an odd pitch. Either McConnell still intends to eliminate Social Security, replacing it with private accounts, or he doesn’t. The senator brought this up as an example of his bipartisan outreach, so it’s not unreasonable to ask whether he still intends to pursue an anti-Social Security agenda if McConnell gets a promotion.
This probably isn’t the issue McConnell wanted to deal with in the campaign’s final week, but he opened the door, and shouldn’t be too surprised when others walk through it.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 27, 2014
“The Real Chris Christie”: A Power-Hungry Demagogue Indifferent To Truth
Cgovernor’s behavior even more despicable is the way Christie’s response to his critics revealed that, for him, the relevant criteria have precious little to do with public health. In a circumstance like this, during which the public’s degree of knowledge about a threat is paltry when compared to its capacity to freak out, a politician interested in displaying real leadership — the one attribute the very serious among us have decided is most vital, and one Christie has implicitly claimed for himself on multiple occasions — would work to educate the people and maintain calm and order. Perhaps mindful of the way that this undramatic style will lead to vapid, narcissistic criticism from a press corps hungry for a flashy headline, the ever media savvy Christie has decided to go in the opposite direction.
“My first and foremost obligation is to protect the public health and safety of the people of New Jersey,” Christie said, defending his grandstanding and obscuring the fact that his actions were contrary to those recommended by experts in the field of public health. “So I’m sorry if in any way [Hickox] was inconvenienced, but the inconvenience that could occur from having folks who are symptomatic and ill out and amongst the public is a much, much greater concern of mine.” As if to make sure everyone could hear the subtext of these remarks — that Hickox was somehow acting fecklessly, despite the fact that she followed normal procedure and determined she was not an Ebola carrier — Christie added, citing no evidence whatsoever, that Hickox was “obviously ill.”
To her credit, Hickox fired back and reminded CNN viewers that Christie is not a doctor, had “never laid eyes on her,” and that she’d been asymptomatic since she arrived back in the States. And if Christie were taking his job as governor seriously, you’d figure her comments might make a dent. But as has been obvious since at least year two of his first term, Chris Christie’s overriding priority has little to do with running New Jersey and everything to do with getting himself elected as president of the United States. Keenly aware, as he no doubt is, that this will be a tall order so long as the GOP’s Tea Party base holds him in contempt, Christie is treating the Ebola, which the GOP base fears disproportionately, as an excuse to differentiate himself from someone Tea Partyers hate even more: President Obama, whose response to Ebola hysteria has, from the start, been a model of responsibility.
By that standard, Christie’s been an overwhelming success. The national discourse on Ebola is dumber, more hysterical and more politicized today than it was just 72 hours ago; and it’s primarily Christie (with an assist from the aforementioned Cuomo) whom the Tea Party should thank, and the rest of us should blame. In the pursuit of winning over a chunk of voters he’ll need to accrue further power, Gov. Christie has stoked irrational fear, demonized a member of a politically unpopular group (Ebola-fighting doctors and nurses) and added heft to some of the most rabid conspiracy theories of a Democratic president lying about a lethal threat for short-term electoral gain. This supposedly brave speaker of truth is reaching out to some of the worst forces in American politics, and he’s telling them malicious nonsense. Why? Because he knows that’s exactly what they want to hear.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, October 27, 2014
“Life Is Hardly Imitating Art”: Fear May Win Elections, But It Makes Governing Hard
According to Hollywood, most disasters feature government or institutional figures who try to downplay the scale of catastrophe, at least publicly, in order to prevent mass panic. Rightly or wrongly, these fictional leaders want to shield the public from the facts because they believe disseminating the truth would only provoke hysteria.
Right now, though, life is hardly imitating art. As the midterm elections approach, some leading political figures — most of them Republicans — are actively spreading half-truths, distortions and just plain lies in order to increase voter anxiety. They believe exploiting public fears will boost their chances.
It is a sinister and shameful use of the political soapbox, a detrimental exercise that misleads people about the risks they face from threats as different as Islamic jihadists and an exotic virus. It also damages the reputations of institutions that are indispensable in a crisis.
Shouldn’t our political leaders be the responsible ones who distribute facts, dampen panic and model rational decision making? Isn’t it part of their job to coach the rest of us to keep cool? Apparently not, if exaggerating threats is the better campaign strategy.
The use of fear as a political weapon isn’t new, of course. It is as old as the earliest political gatherings and has been used by feudal lords, despots and democratically elected premiers and presidents. There’s a reason for that: Fear is among the most powerful of human emotions, more likely to motivate people to react than sorrow, joy or even anger.
For some Republican candidates, Ebola arrived in the United States just in time. While the murderous jihadists of the Islamic State group had helped to push President Obama’s approval ratings to new lows, they were still a faraway threat. But the tragic death of Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian national who died in a Dallas hospital, lent itself to hyperbole and fearmongering.
Several Republicans have found a way to work the Ebola virus into criticisms of their Democratic opponents, usually linking an alleged weakness on border security to an enhanced threat from infected persons. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has suggested that the Obama administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are hiding the truth about the transmission of Ebola.
But the prize may go to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who suggested in an interview with the right-wing media organization Newsmax that Islamic State fighters might use Ebola as a biological weapon.
While the GOP has taken the lead on the fear bandwagon, a few Democrats have also jumped aboard, scared to be left behind. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Kay Hagan (D-NC) are among the Dems who have joined the call for travel bans from some West African countries, although health officials have repeatedly said such restrictions would be counterproductive.
Perhaps our elected leaders would be more responsible if the nation were facing an existential threat, as it did in World War II. Perhaps they’d put aside partisanship if Ebola were really poised to create a worldwide pandemic, spiraling through affluent countries as well as poor ones.
History shows us examples of bipartisan cooperation to fight not only Nazi Germany but also the communist threat that lingered for a half-century after that. Unfortunately, that same history shows us many examples of politicians only too willing to inflame passions, incite fear and create panic for personal gain. Sen. Joe McCarthy’s crazed commie-hunt went on for years, destroying not just livelihoods but also lives.
In my lifetime, politicians have used the fear of racial integration to incite white voters and scare them to the polls. For decades, the worst stereotypes about black students were used to agitate white parents; the most pernicious lies about black homeowners used to panic white neighborhoods. While those segregationist pols didn’t invent racism, they primed it and pandered to it. And we are still trying to recover from the havoc they wrought.
Yes, you can win elections by inspiring fear and panic, unfortunately. But you will have created another breach in the social fabric — another ruinous tear that will make it more difficult to govern from the post you’ve won.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, October 25, 2014
“Trouble Behind The Lines”: Sam Brownback, A Mad Scientist Whose Lab Has Blown Up
The strangest thing about the battle for the Senate going on this year is how much trouble Republicans are having in states won by Mitt Romney, and not necessarily the ones where they expected trouble. Contests in South Dakota, Kentucky and Georgia have all spent some time panicking Republicans, and none of those states has been put away by the GOP in the interim. But the biggest surprise still has to be Kansas, a profoundly Republican state with multiple struggling statewide Republican campaigns. Playing off Mark Benelli’s fine profile of events in Kansas for Rolling Stone, I discussed the plight of the GOP there at Washington Monthly today:
[Benelli’s] precis of how Sam Brownback made the state an experiment for the discredited fiscal theories of doddering supply-siders is an instant classic:
Back in 2011, Arthur Laffer, the Reagan-era godfather of supply-side economics, brought to Wichita by Brownback as a paid consultant, sounded like an exiled Marxist theoretician who’d lived to see a junta leader finally turn his words into deeds. “Brownback and his whole group there, it’s an amazing thing they’re doing,” Laffer gushed to The Washington Post that December. “It’s a revolution in a cornfield.” Veteran Kansas political reporter John Gramlich, a more impartial observer, described Brownback as being in pursuit of “what may be the boldest agenda of any governor in the nation,” not only cutting taxes but also slashing spending on education, social services and the arts, and, later, privatizing the entire state Medicaid system. Brownback himself went around the country telling anyone who’d listen that Kansas could be seen as a sort of test case, in which unfettered libertarian economic policy could be held up and compared right alongside the socialistic overreach of the Obama administration, and may the best theory of government win. “We’ll see how it works,” he bragged on Morning Joe in 2012. “We’ll have a real live experiment.”That word, “experiment,” has come to haunt Brownback as the data rolls in. The governor promised his “pro-growth tax policy” would act “like a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the Kansas economy,” but, instead, state revenues plummeted by nearly $700 million in a single fiscal year, both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the state’s credit rating, and job growth sagged behind all four of Kansas’ neighbors. Brownback wound up nixing a planned sales-tax cut to make up for some of the shortfall, but not before he’d enacted what his opponents call the largest cuts in education spending in the history of Kansas.
Brownback added political to fiscal risk by securing big bags of money from friends like the Koch Brothers and using it in a 2012 primary purge of moderate Republican state senators who didn’t support his fiscal plans. And it’s all blown up on him this year, with the shock waves potentially engulfing the state’s senior U.S. Senator. Binelli’s portrait of Pat Roberts as an “unloved Beltway mediocrity” who stands by trembling with fatigue as more famous and charismatic conservatives campaign to save his bacon is as acute as his portrayal of Brownback as a mad scientist whose lab has blown up.
Because of the nature of the state and the year and the outside (and inside, from the Kochs Wichita HQ) money flooding Kansas, Brownback and Roberts may survive–Brownback to preside over the damage he’s done to the state’s fiscal standing and schools, and Roberts to return to a final stage of his long nap in the Capitol. But both men have richly earned the trouble they are in.
At a minimum, Browback’s presidential ambitions are now officially laughable, and moderate Republicans have gotten his full attention. But it would be nice to see an object lesson taught in the limits of Republican extremism.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly; The Democratic Strategist, October 24, 2015
“The Same Supply-Side Ideas”: Republicans Have Known All Along That Their Jobs Plan Wouldn’t Work That Well
If you’ve read my work over the past few months, you’ve probably heard me argue that Republicans don’t have a jobs plan. I’ve said it a few times. Never has that point been clearer than in the New York Times Thursday morning, where economists on both sides of the aisle—and even House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman—admit that the Republican “jobs” plan wouldn’t actually help the economy very much.
“Some of those things will help,” Matthew J. Slaughter, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, told the Times about Republican economic ideas, “but, it just struck me as sort of a compendium of modest expectations. If you ask me, ‘What’s your ballpark guess for how many jobs are going to be created?,’ it’s just not many.” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist and former director of the Congressional Budget Office said, “I don’t think any of these are particular game changers.”
The traditional Republican ideas to boost the economy—cutting spending, reducing regulations, and reforming the tax code—represent a misunderstanding of the underlying problems with the economy. Those are all supply-side policies, intended to boost investment and improve productivity. Those aren’t bad goals, of course, but they don’t solve the demand-side issues that are actually holding back growth.
When the Great Recession struck, households cut back on their spending, forcing businesses to fire workers, who then cut back their own spending—thus, a lack of demand. This creates a nasty cycle of reduced spending and job losses. The government’s role in these situations is to fill the hole in demand by using fiscal or monetary policy. We did both and they were moderately successful. But they weren’t sufficient to fill the entire hole in demand and we’ve had a lackluster recovery as a result, made even worse by a premature turn to austerity.
The most revealing quotation in the Times article came from Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Boehner. When asked about the 46 bills that Boehner has outlined as the Republican jobs package—most of which would cut regulations and taxes—Smith said that the bills were not “a cure-all, but they would be a good start for our economy; we need to do more.” In other words, after six years of critiquing Obama’s economic policies, House Republicans still don’t have an economic agenda to fix the economy’s ills.
In some sense, that’s OK right now. The recovery has taken a step forward this year and we no longer need a big jobs package to save the economy (although more infrastructure spending would help). But during the beginning of the Obama presidency that wasn’t the case. Then, we did need a big jobs plan, but Republicans offered the same supply-side ideas they’re proposing now. Based on Smith’s comments, it seems the GOP was aware of this too.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, October 23, 2014
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