“Basically Impossible”: Chris Christie Promised To Tell It Like It Is. Here’s What That Would Actually Sound Like
In his presidential campaign announcement Tuesday, the reliably brash and blunt Chris Christie vowed that “telling like it is” would be both his campaign motto and his promise to voters.
Even for Christie, whose entire political persona is based on no-nonsense candor, consistently “telling it like it is” is basically impossible. Can you imagine if the New Jersey governor — or any of the other Republican candidates — really told it like it is about the most important issues and challenges facing America? What would that even sound like? Well, maybe something like this:
“…and that’s why I am announcing my candidacy for president of the United States! [Applause.] Thank you! Thank you! Now during my campaign, I’m going to tell it like it is. I’m going to let ‘er rip! [Applause.] Hard truths need to be spoken, and I will speak them.
‘What are these truths?’ you ask. For starters, we Republicans are way too focused on President Obama. Trust me, I’ll have a lot to say during this campaign about the president’s mistakes. Heaven knows, there’s been a lot of them. [Extended applause.] But he’s gone in a year and half. [Extended applause.]
Here’s the thing: The U.S. economy didn’t run into trouble the day Barack Obama took the oath of office. Even before the Great Recession, there were signs something wasn’t quite right. The economy grew by 4 percent annually and created 20 million new jobs during both the Reagan and Clinton booms. But in the [candidate makes air quotes] “Bush boom” of the 2000s, we couldn’t even hit 3 percent growth. And we created only about seven million jobs. Income growth was also a lot slower. I could go on and on. Productivity growth has been terrible during Obama’s Not-So-Great Recovery, but the slowdown started in 2006, when we had a Republican president. We’ve had problems with jobless recoveries and middle-income job lag since the early 1990s. Heck, the new business startup rate in this country has been falling for 30 years!
You can’t blame ObamaCare or Dodd Frank for all that. [Confused murmurs from audience.] The truth is technological automation and global competition are presenting new challenges to American workers. To meet those challenges and to turn them into opportunities means embracing new approaches, not recycling old ones. Certainly tax reform is part of the answer. I mean, we’re Republicans after all. Tax cuts are what we do. But you have to be savvy about cutting taxes when you’re already $18 trillion in the red. You need to pick your spots and get the most bang for your buck, like tax cuts and credits that boost working-class incomes — a rising tide is not lifting all boats right now — and spur business investment.
You want to do deep, across-the-board tax cuts like President Reagan did? Fine. God bless you. But keep in mind that for every percentage point you cut from those tax rates, you lose about $70 billion a year in revenue. And don’t expect to make up anywhere near that in economic growth. Even the Reagan tax cuts lost money, and the tax code was in far worse shape back then. [Unintelligible shouts from audience.] Heck, 40 percent of Americans don’t even pay income taxes.
Oh, and while we’re thinking about tax reform, keep in mind the federal tax burden will almost certainly need to rise in the future because we’ll have a lot more old folks. [Booing.] And we’ll have to pay for their pensions and healthcare. Smart entitlement and healthcare reform can reduce that tax increase — in that way it’s like a future tax cut — but it’s highly unlikely to eliminate it. Democrats need to accept that projected future benefits will need reduction, and Republicans need to accept a higher tax burden. [Extended booing.] Republicans should also be in favor of spending less money on rich people through tax breaks for homes and health insurance. [Several fist-shaking audience members stomp out.]
There’s just too much short-term thinking in this country. I mean, I’m no scientist, but we are doing something new to our planet and it hardly seems crazy to take out some insurance against a worst-case outcome. [Boos continue, get louder.] Let’s invest more in basic clean-energy research and remove regulatory barriers to more nuclear power. Maybe also eliminate the corporate income tax and replace it with a carbon tax. I note that even my friends on the Wall Street Journal editorial page said the other day that might be a good idea. And let’s not let Corporate America off the hook here. Too much short-termism there, as well, not just in Washington. Too much cash being returned to investors rather than going to fund new investment and innovation.
Now turning to foreign policy… Wait, where did everybody go?”
By: James Pethokoulis, The Week, July 2, 2015
“The Many Rebrandings Of Rick Santorum”: In The Middle Of At Least His Third Rebranding, And He’s Just Not Very Good At It
Rick Santorum is often portrayed as a stubborn man of principle, an unusual politician who’ll run for president in the face of terrible poll numbers, and despite an electorate increasingly hostile to his unsettlingly passionate social conservatism. But this isn’t really true. Santorum, who announced his 2016 presidential candidacy on Wednesday, is in the middle of at least his third rebranding. He’s just not very good at it.
In his announcement speech in Western Pennsylvania, Santorum pitched himself as a defender of the working man who also happens to be a foreign policy expert. Santorum bragged that in an issue of ISIS’s online magazine, Dabiq, “under the headline ‘In the Words of Our Enemy’ was my picture and a quote. … They know who I am, and I know who they are!” To be clear, while it would be unsettling to find your face in an ISIS magazine, it’s not that hard to get ISIS to know who you are. You basically just have to talk about ISIS. In the same section, Dabiq quoted two other “enemies”: Virginia State Senator Richard Black and former CIA officer Gary Berntsen, a frequent Fox and Friends guest who has less than 1,600 followers on Twitter. Gary 2016!
For someone who is supposedly dedicated to what he thinks is right, not what is popular, a list of Santorum’s political books makes for a decent guide to the trends of the Republican Party of the last ten years. It Takes a Family, released in 2005, was a rebuttal to Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village. It is concerned with apparently controversial social issues such as women working outside the home. His 2012 book American Patriots, printed on faux antique paper, is a Tea Partyish celebration of Revolutionary War-era Americans “heroes and heroines from all walks of life” (not just white guys). Last year’s Blue Collar Conservatives is about helping the working class. (“There was a time not long ago when Americans without college degrees could expect to earn a decent and steady income in exchange for hard work.”) His publisher says, “Santorum provides a game plan for Republicans to bounce back, regain popularity, and return to the party’s original values.” It’s less a game plan for the party’s comeback than one for Santorum’s.
Santorum tried to remake himself in both of his last two losing campaigns, in 2006 and 2012. His political career began in the 90s, when Republicans were focused on welfare reform and teen moms and the crime rate, and he ran with those issues. He campaigned on welfare reform, he said single moms were “breeding more criminals” and that politicians shouldn’t be afraid of “kicking them in the butt.” The target of that kind of rhetoric was not lost on black voters at the time. But for a while, it worked really well. The Harrisburg Patriot News reported in July 2005, “A Santorum victory in a state that has voted Democratic in recent presidential elections would solidify his reputation within the GOP and with conservatives nationally. It would also add fuel to a rumored 2008 presidential run, party officials and analysts said.” Maybe that’s why Santorum keeps running these long-shot campaigns. He was promised this, and he can’t believe it didn’t work out for him.
But by summer 2005, Santorum was clearly in trouble, trailing opponents by as much as 14 points in polls. He was closely tied to the increasingly unpopular president, and his social conservatism had started to rub people the wrong way. In 2002, Santorum had blamed the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal on Boston’s liberal culture. In 2003, he suggested that if we allowed gay marriage, we’d have to allow “man on child, man on dog.” It was “man on dog” that led to Santorum’s greatest branding issue: his Google problem. Sex columnist Dan Savage held a contest to turn “santorum” into a sex term. Savage’s SpreadingSantorum.com rose in Google rankings to outrank the candidate’s campaign site. The top result is now a Wikipedia page for “Campaign for ‘santorum’ neologism,” where it remains a reminder of, if not the neologism, the way that Santorum was turned into an online joke by gay rights activists.
Going into his 2006 Senate reelection campaign, Santorum’s persona changed to reflect the times. Demographic trends meant bashing inner cities and women with jobs and gays had diminishing returns. The white share of the vote shrunk from 84.6 percent in 1992 to 76.3 in 2008, according to Pew Research Center. Opposition to gay marriage dropped more than 10 points from 1996 to 2006, though a majority still opposed it. In 2004, as Senate Republican Conference Committee chair, he met with presidents of historically black colleges and universities in an attempt to get the GOP to reach out to minorities. In 2005, The New York Times Magazine explained that Santorum was an earnest man of faith who’d earned endorsements from leaders in the African-American community in Philadelphia. In April 2006, his campaign staged a photo op in which Santorum packed up food for low-income people. (Alas, the TV news cameras did not show up.)
By July 2006, he was distributing a listicle titled ”Fifty Things You May Not Know About Rick Santorum,” which included warm and fuzzy items like cracking down on puppy mills. The New York Times reported:
He needs to reintroduce himself over the next four months, he said, to get beyond the stereotypes. …
A kinder, gentler Rick Santorum? ”People already know about the other stuff,” he said. ”You guys remind them every day about the other stuff. Let’s tell the rest of the story.”
The listicle did not stop the senator from losing by 18 points to now-Senator Bob Casey.
During the 2012 Republican primary, Santorum faced a very different electorate, and he reshaped himself to appeal to people hurt by the Great Recession, trying to distinguish himself as the voice of the working class. He called for manufacturing subsidies. He was the son of immigrants. His grandfather “sort of coal-mined his way to freedom.” (Back in 1994, Santorum talked about how his father got his “biggest break” with World War II; he escaped the mines through the G.I. Bill, which paid for his psychology degree.) He came out against the term “middle class” because it was some kind of class warfare. He even tried to recast his signature issues, telling a Michigan crowd in February 2012, “All reporters in the back, they say, ‘Oh there’s Santorum talking about social issues again.’ … No, I’m talking about freedom. I’m talking about government imposing themselves on your lives.”
Santorum stuck with his new blue-collar image after he lost to Mitt Romney. “When all you do is talk to people who are owners, talk to folks who are Type As who want to succeed economically, we’re talking to a very small group of people,” he said in 2013.
“I never went to a country club until I was in college,” Santorum told the National Review recently, like a true man of the people. But now he’s blue collar plus. National Review explained:
If he runs in 2016, he says, it won’t be as a candidate defined by his Catholic, socially conservative views. He’s been there and done that, he says. In 2016, he is more likely to define himself as an economic populist and foreign-policy hawk.
In the months before his official campaign announcement, Santorum started playing up the hawk thing. In April, Santorum said that in 2016, Republicans will be “going up against a secretary of state, someone with a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge in this area—most of it wrong—but someone who’s knowledgeable, someone who’s an expert.” That means they “need to look at someone to go up against Mrs. Clinton who has background experience and knowledge and has gotten it right when she’s gotten it wrong.” (They both supported the Iraq war.) He pointed to the eight years he served on the Senate Armed Services Committee. At the South Carolina Freedom Summit this month, Santorm said of ISIS, “If these folks want to return to a 7th Century version of Islam, then let’s load up our bombers and bomb them back to the 7th Century.”
“Going up against a potential nominee who’s a former secretary of state, it’d be good to have someone with more experience than just a briefing book for the debate,” Santorum told NPR recently. A couple weeks earlier, he told voters in Iowa, “We have to have a president who understands the difference between a friend and an enemy. … Iran, enemy. Israel, friend. It’s real simple.” Briefing book? No. Little Golden Book? Yes!
Given that he’s polling at about 2.3 percent, Santorum is likely hoping that the 2016 primary is something like 2012’s, and voters will cycle through alternatives to the mainstream moderate Republican candidate until they get to him. What can he do to get Americans’ attention? Voters rarely care that much about foreign policy. Santorum will try on a new identity. For the sake of entertainment, let’s hope he’ll try to compete with Hillary Clinton not on foreign policy but on being a champion of single ladies.
By: Elspeth Reeve, Senior Editor, The New Republic, May 28, 2015
“Jeb Bush Is Terrible At Foreign Policy”: Running As A Bush On Foreign Policy In 2016 Is Folly
There are many reasons George W. Bush was unpopular when he left office. A big one was the Great Recession, which crested and crashed down on the world in his last few months in office. Then there was Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 New Orleans debacle that helped kneecap Bush’s second term in office not long after it started. But the most enduring stain on Bush’s tenure is the Iraq War.
Not only is Iraq still a mess — worse, America’s mess — but the effects of toppling Saddam Hussein are being felt in everything from Iran’s expanding influence in the region to Islamic State’s rise. So it’s odd that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, making his case for following his older brother and father into the White House, would double-down on the Iraq War.
Even knowing that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, Jeb Bush told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on Sunday, he would have still invaded Iraq in 2003, “and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”
First, let’s dispatch with that pathetic blame-sharing nonsense. Hillary Clinton — if, for some reason, voters had elected her right after her husband — would not have invaded Iraq, and neither would President Al Gore. Both probably would have invaded Afghanistan, because, after all, that country’s Taliban government was sheltering the terrorist group that had just murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, destroyed a cluster of skyscrapers, and damaged the Pentagon.
But Iraq was a textbook war of choice. There was some faulty intelligence, but it was being pushed and exaggerated by a Bush White House that wanted to invade Iraq already. I don’t think that’s even in dispute anymore.
Nobody named Clinton has ever invaded Iraq — in fact, since Somalia’s “Black Hawk Down” incident, Democrats bomb countries; they generally don’t send in ground troops. Two presidents named Bush have invaded Iraq. Voters remember that.
And just how unpopular is the Iraq War now? Last summer, some major news organizations asked voters.
In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll from June 2014, 71 percent of respondents said the Iraq war “wasn’t worth it,” including 44 percent of Republicans. A CBS News/New York Times poll from the same month similarly found that 75 percent of respondents said the war was not worth the costs, including 63 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of independents. Another June 2014 poll, from Quinnipiac, was a bit more favorable, with only 61 percent saying that “going to war with Iraq” was “the wrong thing.” In all those polls, the Iraq War disapproval numbers have continued to inch upwards.
The biggest obstacle to a President Jeb Bush was always going to be his last name — a polite way of saying his brother. He knows that. He even jokes about it.
But because of family loyalty or pride, or the advisers he has hired from his brother’s administration, or core convictions, Jeb Bush isn’t willing to throw his brother under the bus. From a tactical standpoint, it must be helpful having a father and brother who have collectively won three presidential elections, but acknowledging in public that George W. Bush is your most influential adviser on Middle East affairs? That’s something different.
Jeb Bush seems determined to win this or lose this as a card-carrying member of the Bush dynasty.
Is that a deal-breaker? Well, people who care about foreign policy often lament that voters don’t. But that’s not going to help John Ellis Bush. Because while most voters probably do vote on pocketbook issues, Republican voters are fired up about foreign policy, especially the sort of engaged partisans who vote in primaries.
And they’re revved up about foreign policy because that’s what Republican lawmakers and politicians and pundits have been attacking President Obama on since the economy improved enough, ObamaCare started showing positive dividends, and Osama bin Laden’s death under Obama’s command became a part of American history.
“Attacking President Obama’s record on Israel and Iran is now one of the biggest applause lines for presidential candidates,” note Josh Kraushaar and Alex Roarty at National Journal, in a write-up on a poll about how Republicans believe 2016 will be a foreign policy election.
Jeb Bush is going to have to step up his game if he wants to ride the GOP’s foreign policy wave. His big coming out party on the subject wasn’t promising — even with his A-list of Bush-linked advisers, he “delivered a nervous, uncertain speech on national security,” reported Tim Mak and Jackie Kucinich at The Daily Beast, “full of errors and confusion.”
That’s something Jeb Bush can fix. After all, none of the Republican governors, former governors, senators, former CEOs, or celebrated pediatric neurosurgeons running against him have much experience with war or international diplomacy or other key elements of foreign policy, either.
But running as a Bush on foreign policy in 2016 is folly. Even if the Dick Cheney wing of the Republican Party pushes him through the primaries, it’s poison in a general election. Jeb Bush has a tough choice to make: Does he want to try to resuscitate his brother’s foreign policy reputation, or does he want a shot at the White House?
By: Peter Weber, The Week, May 11, 2015
“Minimum Wage Is A Self-Made GOP Problem”: Conservatives Believe Losing Now Means Losing Forever
Too bad George W. Bush is persona non grata among congressional Republicans. If he were less unpopular, they might find in the waning years of his presidency an example of what to do about a vexing issue facing them in 2016, an issue Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called that “gosh darn” minimum wage.
In their bid to take over the Congress in 2006, the Democrats vowed to raise a federal minimum wage that had remained unchanged since the second term of the Clinton administration. After sweeping midterm victories in both chambers, congressional Democrats put the issue on their agenda, calling for an incremental increase from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 by 2009.
That wasn’t enough for Barack Obama, who vowed to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011 if elected president. His promise, however, came before the Great Recession cast a pall over many of his campaign promises. The minimum wage has remained $7.25 since he took office. (It is now higher in some cities and states; New York State recently raised it to $15 an hour in the New York City metropolitan area and $12.50 upstate.)
So the push to raise the minimum wage isn’t new. That’s a bit counterintuitive given the attention being paid to economic inequality, an issue that arose in the aftermath of the 2007 financial collapse. Even Republican contenders for the White House are obliged at least to pay lip service to the issue. And to be sure, a stagnant minimum wage is the bedrock of economic inequality. But the thread of the debate began during the second Bush administration, which was hostile or indifferent to the law, and allowed the purchasing power of the base wage to erode while the cost of living continued to climb or, indeed, soar. (To briefly illustrate, using 2013 dollars: if the minimum wage were $7.25 in New York City, the actual value would be about $4 an hour.)
What did President Bush do that could serve as a model for today’s congressional Republicans? First, two observations. One, Bush’s presidency was nearing historic levels of unpopularity by 2007. Two, voters tend to punish the party in power in hard times. The 2008 election was going to be rough for any GOP candidate.
But also keep in mind the nature of the business wing of the GOP. It is against wage mandates, because wages cut into profits. But the faction is also politically canny. It was willing to concede to demands for a higher minimum wage, if conceding weakened Democrats in 2008. Put another way: if Republicans had continued to resist raising the wage, then the wage issue may have become more potent for Barack Obama. So the business wing of the Republican Party — including 82 members of the House, all but three senators, and the president — held its nose and supported a wage hike.
The conservative wing of the GOP, on the other hand, is the opposite of canny. It does not see the wisdom of conceding on the minimum wage, even as the minimum wage has taken on more significance than it had a decade ago. Conservatives believe losing now means losing forever, and losing is inconceivable given the righteousness of their cause. Therefore, the more they resist raising the minimum wage, the more potent it will be for the Democratic Party’s nominee. As Harry Reid told The Hill yesterday: “If Republicans don’t do something about it, it’s a major issue.”
Reid was commenting on the most recent effort to exploit conservative intransigence. In the past, the Democrats called for $10.10 an hour. Yesterday, Senator Patty Murray introduced a bill raising the wage to $12 by 2020. The Raise the Wage Act, she said, would affect 38 million workers. Moreover, she was clearly relishing the moment. “I want to hear what the Republican presidential candidates have to say about this,” she said.
And they responded in predictable fashion.
Ted Cruz said the bill would be a “job-killing” disaster. Marco Rubio warned that workers would be replaced by robots. Scott Walker questioned the validity of wage mandates in general. Rand Paul said a base wage is good for young people but nobody else. And Jeb Bush, who most represents the interests of the business wing of the Republican Party, punted to the “private sector.”
You’ve got to wonder whom they think they are speaking for. According to a February poll by the Associated Press, 6 in 10 favor raising the minimum wage, including 40 percent of Republicans. In 2013, Gallup found more than 71 percent in favor, including half of Republicans. Last year, a Washington Post/ABC News survey found that 50 percent of respondents are more likely to vote for candidates who favor raising the minimum wage.
Clearly, the Republican presidential field isn’t speaking for the majority, or even for members of their party who see the good in increasing the wage. Jeb Bush is speaking for a business faction that fears higher wages eating into profits, while the rest is speaking for conservatives who believe compromise equals surrender.
The smart thing would be to give in now to prevent the minimum wage from haunting the Republican candidate later. But don’t hold your breath. On the occasion last summer when Mitch McConnell complained about the Democrats proposing to raise that “gosh darn” minimum wage (once again!), he added one more comment suggesting there’s no returning to the political pragmatism the George W. Bush administration exhibited in 2007.
“These people believe in all the wrong things,” he said.
By: John Stoehr, Managing Editor of The Washington Spectator; The National Memo, May 8, 2015
“Cruz Tells Small Child, ‘Your World Is On Fire'”: Scare Them While They’re Young And You’ll Have Them For Life
For politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), fear is an important motivating tool. Listen to the far-right Texan deliver a typical stump speech and you’ll hear quite a few dire assessments from Cruz about nearly everything.
But as a rule, when politicians address small children, they dial it down a notch. It made a Cruz event in New Hampshire the other day that much more noteworthy.
[Cruz said,] “The Obama economy is a disaster. Obamacare is a train wreck. And the Obama-Clinton foreign policy of leading from behind – the whole world’s on fire!”
Julie Trant, a child in the audience, took this literally. “The world’s on fire?” she asked.
“The world is on fire, yes,” said Cruz, not missing a beat as the crowd chuckled. “Your world is on fire.”
Let’s note that the child in this story is just three years old. During the event, she was sitting on her mother’s lap.
Cruz quickly added, however, “But you know what? Your mommy’s here, and everyone’s here to make sure that the world you grow up in is even better.”
Let’s unpack this one:
- The “Obama economy,” in reality, is not a disaster. On the contrary, the president’s economic agenda ended the Great Recession, turned the economy around, and created the strongest job growth since the 1990s.
- The Affordable Care Act is not “a train wreck.” On the contrary, the ACA is actually succeeding beautifully, exceeding the expectations of many optimists.
- The whole world is not “on fire,” at least not any more than usual.
- Telling a three-year-old child, “Your world is on fire” is probably inappropriate at any time, but it’s especially unsettling when it’s wrong.
- Telling that same child that Republicans are going to “make sure that the world you grow up in is even better” is odd phrasing. “Even better” usually follows “things are good,” not “things are horrible.”
The child’s mother, for what it’s worth, describes herself as “a huge Ted Cruz supporter” and said during a radio interview this morning that she describes the senator as “Uncle Cruz” to her daughter.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, March 16, 2015
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