“A Line-Up Of Cranks”: From Trump On Down, The Republicans Can’t Be Serious
This was, according to many commentators, going to be the election cycle Republicans got to show off their “deep bench.” The race for the nomination would include experienced governors like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, fresh thinkers like Rand Paul, and attractive new players like Marco Rubio. Instead, however, Donald Trump leads the field by a wide margin. What happened?
The answer, according to many of those who didn’t see it coming, is gullibility: People can’t tell the difference between someone who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about and someone who is actually serious about the issues. And for sure there’s a lot of gullibility out there. But if you ask me, the pundits have been at least as gullible as the public, and still are.
For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.
For example, Mr. Trump’s economic views, a sort of mishmash of standard conservative talking points and protectionism, are definitely confused. But is that any worse than Jeb Bush’s deep voodoo, his claim that he could double the underlying growth rate of the American economy? And Mr. Bush’s credibility isn’t helped by his evidence for that claim: the relatively rapid growth Florida experienced during the immense housing bubble that coincided with his time as governor.
Mr. Trump, famously, is a “birther” — someone who has questioned whether President Obama was born in the United States. But is that any worse than Scott Walker’s declaration that he isn’t sure whether the president is a Christian?
Mr. Trump’s declared intention to deport all illegal immigrants is definitely extreme, and would require deep violations of civil liberties. But are there any defenders of civil liberties in the modern G.O.P.? Notice how eagerly Rand Paul, self-described libertarian, has joined in the witch hunt against Planned Parenthood.
And while Mr. Trump is definitely appealing to know-nothingism, Marco Rubio, climate change denier, has made “I’m not a scientist” his signature line. (Memo to Mr. Rubio: Presidents don’t have to be experts on everything, but they do need to listen to experts, and decide which ones to believe.)
The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker, Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have is a lineup of cranks. And as I said, this is no accident.
It has long been obvious that the conventions of political reporting and political commentary make it almost impossible to say the obvious — namely, that one of our two major parties has gone off the deep end. Or as the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier … unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.” It’s a party that has no room for rational positions on many major issues.
Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious — not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.
Until now, however, leading Republicans have generally tried to preserve a facade of respectability, helping the news media to maintain the pretense that it was dealing with a normal political party. What distinguishes Mr. Trump is not so much his positions as it is his lack of interest in maintaining appearances. And it turns out that the party’s base, which demands extremist positions, also prefers those positions delivered straight. Why is anyone surprised?
Remember how Mr. Trump was supposed to implode after his attack on John McCain? Mr. McCain epitomizes the strategy of sounding moderate while taking extreme positions, and is much loved by the press corps, which puts him on TV all the time. But Republican voters, it turns out, couldn’t care less about him.
Can Mr. Trump actually win the nomination? I have no idea. But even if he is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that won’t be an improvement.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 7, 2015
“The GOP’s Recipe For Disaster”: A Highly Emotional, Politically Toxic And Take-No-Prisoners Agenda
Many people have noted that Republican candidates have completely abandoned the recommendation on reaching out to Hispanics about immigration reform in the autopsy they completed following their loss in the 2012 presidential election. But the autopsy also included statements like this:
When it comes to social issues, the Party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming.
If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues…
The RNC must improve its efforts to include female voters and promote women to leadership ranks within the committee. Additionally, when developing our Party’s message, women need to be part of this process to represent some of the unique concerns that female voters may have. There is growing unrest within the community of Republican women frustrated by the Party’s negative image among women, and the women who participated in our listening sessions contributed many constructive ideas of ways to improve our brand with women throughout the country and grow the ranks of influential female voices in the Republican Party.
The prospect of shutting down the federal government in an effort to defund Planned Parenthood is probably not one of the recommendations they heard from women in those listening sessions. And yet that is becoming a very real possibility.
Stan Collender at Forbes puts the odds of a government shutdown at 60% (up from his previous prediction of 40% ). Here’s his wonderfully descriptive way of saying what happened.
But the biggest change from last week in the odds of a government shutdown is because of the emergence of the one big thing that has been missing so far from the appropriations debate: a highly emotional, politically toxic and take-no-prisoners issue.
There are two ways that this is a political nightmare for Republicans. Previous to the emergence of the push to defund Planned Parenthood, they were making very little progress on putting together a budget to meet the October 1st deadline. Given that, the most likely scenario would have been the passage of a “continuing resolution” – which would have simply extended the current budget. That would have kept all their actual “governing” issues quiet.
But it’s not likely that will happen now. Instead, Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz – joined by the House Freedom Caucus – will do everything they can to cause a government shutdown over funding for Planned Parenthood. If they are successful, it will probably end the same way their similar effort did in 2013 over defunding Obamacare. That means that Boehner and McConnell will have to negotiate with Democrats on a budget – likely a continuing resolution. All Republicans will gain in the process is having to shoulder the responsibility for causing another government shutdown and the chaos that ensued. The one difference this time is that they now control both Houses of Congress (in 2013 Democrats controlled the Senate).
But this will also be a nightmare for Republicans when it comes to the presidential election. Simply note that last night the front-runner in that contest right now – Donald Trump – declared his support for a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood. Any candidate who had doubts about whether or not a government shutdown would be good for their campaign will now have to weigh in with that in mind.
We’ve already seen one example of a candidate making a mess of that when, in commenting about Planned Parenthood funding, Jeb Bush said yesterday that he was “not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.” His campaign pretty immediately tried to walk that one back. Overall it’s very likely that, in order to win the GOP primary, these candidates will all wind up taking positions that their own autopsy suggested were one of the causes of their defeat in 2012.
The spectacle we’re now witnessing is that a candidate who is leading the field by polling at 20-25% with Republicans has insulted Mexican Americans, called for a government shutdown over funding for women’s health care, and – in the midst of the #BlackLivesMatter movement against police killings – suggested that the police don’t have enough power. And yet he is driving the Republican agenda on the campaign trail. According to their party’s own analysis, that is a recipe for disaster.
By: Nancy Le Tourneau, The Political Animal Blog, The Washington Mnnthly, August 5, 2015
“Kinder, Gentler, Not In Substance, But In Tone”: Maybe Jeb Bush Doesn’t Have To Pander To The Right Wing After All
When Jeb Bush said last December that the Republican nominee would have to be willing to “lose the primary to win the general without violating your principles,” it sounded like either a starkly realistic assessment of the dynamics of Republican presidential politics or an awfully naïve statement of what was actually possible for a Republican candidate. Most observers — myself included — thought that he’d have no choice but to mirror the anger of committed Republican voters. As the candidate perceived by base voters and the most moderate of the contenders, he’d have to go through the same ritual that Mitt Romney did — genuflection to the right.
But so far, it doesn’t seem to be happening. Bush is offering a kinder, gentler conservatism than the other candidates — not in substance, but in tone. And even though he’s trailing Donald Trump in the polls, at this point it looks like his strategy might just pay off.
Let’s be clear about one thing: Jeb Bush is very, very conservative. His answers to almost every policy question are firmly within today’s Republican consensus. He wants a belligerent foreign policy, tax cuts and slashing of regulations, a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, raising the eligibility age for Medicare and possibly voucherizing the program, and so on. Even on immigration, Bush favors a path to “legal status” that would allow the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country to stay, but wouldn’t allow them to become citizens.
But Bush isn’t trying to sound mad, and he doesn’t seem particularly spooked by the Trump candidacy. He was candid in condemning Trump’s remarks about Mexican immigrants, and just did an interview with Telemundo — in Spanish — where he talked about how his family speaks Spanish at home, and about bigotry his children have faced. In an interview published today, he admits that human activity contributes to climate change, though like any good Republican he doesn’t actually want to do anything about it.
What this all adds up to is a candidate who in substance is almost indistinguishable from other Republicans, but sounds very different in tone. And what are the results? One way to look at it is that Bush can’t seem to break out. He’s been surpassed in the polls by Donald Trump, but he hasn’t really fallen — the Huffpost Pollster average has him at 13.9 percent, about where he’s been since people started polling this race.
But none of the other candidates have broken out, either. Trump, Bush, and Scott Walker are the only ones who ever score in double digits. Candidates who at various times were thought to have great potential, like Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz, don’t seem to be going anywhere. They’re trying desperately to find ways to get noticed — Paul takes a chainsaw to the tax code, Cruz calls Mitch McConnell a liar, Mike Huckabee compares President Obama to Hitler — but none of it seems to work.
If you’re Bush, your path to victory looks like this: Trump soaks up all the attention for a while, but eventually gets bored (and hasn’t bothered to mount an actual campaign that can deliver votes), and either fades or just packs it in. Meanwhile, the conservative vote is split. Once the voting starts, the failing candidates will begin to fall away one by one. But by the time most of them are gone and their supporters have coalesced around a single candidate like Scott Walker, it’s too late — Jeb has built his lead and is piling up delegates, has all the money in the world, and can vanquish that last opponent on his way to the convention in Cleveland.
It sounds perfectly plausible. And if it happens that way, the party’s conservatives will have the next chapter in their long narrative of betrayal already written. Once again, they’ll say, the establishment foisted a moderate on a party that didn’t want him, and the result was disaster. If only they had nominated a true conservative, then victory would have been theirs.
Unless, of course, Bush’s entire theory about winning the general by being prepared to lose the primary is correct, and he ends up gaining the White House. Either way — at least for the moment — it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea for Jeb Bush to keep sounding like a nice guy, and keep a lid on the most embarrassing pandering to the right wing.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 30, 2015
“Preparing To Engage In Political Hand-To-Hand Combat”: Chamber Of Commerce Will Go After Incumbent Republicans
One of the things a lot of people have been watching is what the business community – which has typically been pretty conservative – does in response to the Republican dissent into extremism. A lot of the shenanigans pushed by the tea partiers (i.e., debt ceiling crisis) are terribly destabilizing and that is not good for business. We also watched as the business community weighed in on cultural issues when they brought a halt to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana recently.
According to Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman, the Chamber of Commerce has about had enough with the nonsense. It’s interesting to note what finally pushed them to that point. It wasn’t the total obstruction employed by Republicans from the beginning of Obama’s presidency – or even the constant hostage crises they created. It’s something that has come more recently.
The early discussions by top-level Chamber operatives like Rob Engstrom and Scott Reed reflect a broad consensus among companies with business before Congress that the political dynamic needs to change on Capitol Hill.
The theory is simple: The Chamber spent some $70 million in 2014, mostly to help Senate Republicans build their majority. But many of their legislative priorities — immigration reform, the renewal of the Export-Import Bank and a long-term highway bill — have been held up by a clutch of conservative lawmakers in the House.
Apparently these business people thought that by giving control of Congress to Republicans – gridlock would end and some things would actually get done. They put the blame for that not happening on the kind of Republicans who joined the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus and have made Speaker Boehner’s life miserable. And so the Chamber is in the midst of developing a political strategy to challenge them in their re-election.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is gearing up to challenge some House Republicans in primary elections, frustrated after much of its agenda has been stymied by a small pocket of conservative GOP lawmakers.
The influential and well-heeled business group is already eyeing several races, but the plans are still in their infancy and the targets have not yet been decided upon, according to more than a half dozen Republican sources on K Street and Capitol Hill.
The group’s apparent new willingness to engage in hand-to-hand political combat to take out sitting Republicans would represent a major shift for the business community, which has largely shied away from targeting sitting lawmakers.
This will be an interesting story to keep an eye on over the next few months. It speaks to the growing divide in the Republican Party in its march towards extremism. What various entities with traditional ties to the Party do in response will likely tell us whether the GOP can survive and morph into something new or goes the way of the Whigs.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, The Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 1, 2015
“The GOP Is One Heck Of A Dysfunctional Family”: Republican’s Having A Lot Of Trouble Getting That Governing Thing Down
If you wonder why Congress is so feeble these days that it can’t even find a simple way to pass a transportation bill, look no further than Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who proffered a little resolution on Tuesday night to oust John Boehner from the speakership.
The move was quickly dismissed by Boehner loyalists as showboating by a second-term member, and Meadows himself said he might not even seek a vote on his own measure. His hope is to provoke a “family conversation” among Republicans. It’s a heck of a dysfunctional family. The GOP these days may have its advantages on the Lannisters of “Game of Thrones” fame, but it’s a very long way from the Brady Bunch.
Perhaps by crushing Meadows’s insurrection, which many of even the most rebellious right-wing Republicans thought was ill-timed, Boehner will strengthen his hand. The more likely outcome is that this resolution to “vacate the chair” will once again remind Boehner of the nature of the party caucus over which he presides. I use “preside” rather than “lead” precisely because his difficulty in leading these folks is the heart of his problem.
The House GOP (and this applies more than it once did to Senate Republicans as well) includes a large and vocal minority always ready to go over a cliff and always ready to burn — fortunately, figuratively — heretical leaders and colleagues. More important, a significant group sympathizes with Boehner privately but is absolutely petrified that having his back when things get tough will conjure a challenge inside the party by conservative ultras whose supporters dominate its primary electorate in so many places.
This means that Republicans have to treat doing business with President Obama and the Democrats as something bordering on philosophical treason. Yes, on trade, where Obama’s position is relatively close to their own, they will help the president out. But it’s very hard to find many other issues of that sort. Politicians of nearly every kind used to agree that building roads, bridges, mass-transit projects and airports was good for everybody. Now, even pouring concrete and laying track can be disrupted by weird ideological struggles.
The text of Meadows’s anti-Boehner resolution is revealing. He complains that the speaker has “caused the power of Congress to atrophy, thereby making Congress subservient to the Executive and Judicial branches, diminishing the voice of the American people.” Actually, Congress has done a bang-up job of blocking Obama’s agenda since Republicans won control of the House in 2010. How, short of impeachment, is it supposed to do more to foil the man in the White House?
Meadows also hits Boehner for “intentionally” seeking voice votes (as opposed to roll calls) on “consequential and controversial legislation to be taken without notice and with few Members present.” He has a point. But since so many Republicans are often too timid to go on the record for the votes required to keep government moving — they don’t want to be punished by Meadows’s ideological friends — Boehner does what he has to do.
On the other hand, Meadows’s charge that Boehner is “bypassing the majority of the 435 Members of Congress and the people they represent” is absolutely true.
But the logic of this legitimate protest is that Boehner should allow many more votes on the floor in which a minority of Republicans could join with a majority of Democrats to pass legislation, thereby reflecting the actual will of the entire House. If Boehner had done this with immigration reform, it would now be a reality. Boehner didn’t do it precisely because he worried about what Republicans of Meadows’s stripe would do to him.
Meadows’s move bodes ill for the compromising that will be required this fall to avoid new crises on the debt ceiling and the budget. Republicans already faced difficulties on this front before the “vacate the chair” warning shot, as Post blogger Greg Sargent noted Wednesday.
And Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.), another Boehner critic, reacted to the resolution by invoking the Lord Voldemort all Republicans fear. Jones expressed the hope that “the talk-show hosts who are so frustrated would pick up on this thing and beat the drum.” It’s enough to ruin a speaker’s summer.
Republicans are talking a good deal about the threat to their brand posed by Donald Trump’s unplugged, unrestrained appeal to the party’s untamed side. The bigger danger comes from a Republican Congress that is having a lot of trouble getting that governing thing down.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 29, 2015
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