“We Can’t Handle The Truth!”: House GOP Leaders Scramble After Accidentally Telling The Truth
With a tip of the hat to Michael Kinsley, it appears half the House Republican leadership committed gaffes in recent days by accidentally telling the truth. They’re now scrambling to reverse course.
Late last week, for example, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the chair of the House Republican Conference, conceded to her local newspaper that the Affordable Care Act is unlikely to be repealed. Though she wants to “look at reforming the exchanges,” the local report added that McMorris Rodgers “said the framework established by the law likely will persist and reforms should take place within its structure.”
This was a perfectly sensible position for a House GOP leader to take. Yesterday, the congresswoman’s office assured the right she has no use for such reasonableness.
“The headline is not an accurate or representative portrayal of what the congresswoman said in the interview, what her voting record reflects, or what she believes. She will continue fighting to repeal Obamacare at every opportunity moving forward and replace it with patient-centered reforms,” McMorris Rodgers spokesman Nate Hodson said.
Also last week, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) conceded that opposition from rank-and-file House Republicans is to blame for the demise of immigration reform, and he was filmed openly mocking their reluctance to work hard. This morning, he walked it all back.
House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) reiterated Tuesday that he believes that the major impediment to moving forward with comprehensive immigration reform is a distrust of President Obama, and not an unwillingness of the members of his caucus to take up the legislation. […]
Boehner reassured members of the GOP House caucus during a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning that he was not mocking them and that he believes Obama is the reason immigration reform has not moved forward.
The message from Boehner and McMorris Rodgers couldn’t be more obvious: they’re awfully sorry they got caught accidentally telling the truth.
This isn’t even a close call. In McMorris Rodgers’ case, what she told her local paper made perfect sense. The Affordable Care Act isn’t going anywhere, so it stands to reason policymakers should move past trying to destroy “Obamacare” and start looking for how best to make the system work effectively.
So why does her office insist she’ll “continue fighting to repeal Obamacare at every opportunity”? Why bother? How many millions of Americans will lose coverage if she succeeds?
As for Boehner, what the Speaker said last week was entirely true: the “blame Obama” talking point is transparently dumb, so Boehner’s candor about who ultimately bears responsibility was a welcome change of pace. Why run back to Capitol Hill now to deny what is plainly true?
Worse, Boehner told reporters, “There was no mocking.”
Mr. Speaker, there’s no point in fibbing when we’ve seen the video.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 29, 2014
“Rhetoric Won’t Patch The GOP Up”: It’s Hard To Patch Things Up When You Have Diametrically-Opposed Goals
Over at the National Review Kevin Williamson has penned a column we are all familiar with. It’s a rallying cry for conservatives to get over their differences and rally behind the Republican Party. In the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, there were countless articles of this type written by pragmatic liberals. All you have to do is reverse the names, and it looks completely familiar.
And though I reject the notion that Mitt Romney wasn’t good enough for true-believing conservatives, let’s say, arguendo, that that was the case. Unless you are ready to give up entirely on the notion of advancing conservative principles through the ballot box, you might consider looking at things this way: Even if you do not think that it matters much whether Republicans win, it matters a great deal that Democrats lose.
Maybe you were not that excited that 2012 gave you a choice between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. I sympathize — I liked Rick Perry. But how is President Romney vs. President Obama a hard choice? How is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vs. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a hard choice? How is Speaker of the House John Boehner vs. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi a hard choice?
It isn’t.
I don’t think these types of columns are ever very convincing, but that doesn’t mean that they are incorrect. If we were to give this genre a name, it would be Vote-for-the-lesser-evil essays. They don’t exactly get people fired up and ready to go.
And it’s not a great sign that people feel that they are necessary to write because it indicates that there are some rather strong divisions. Back in the 2005-6 period, Democrats became unified, and they did an adequate job of patching things up after the 2008 primaries. The divisions among Republicans are more fundamental. There’s a glaring generation gap on gay rights. There’s a yawning gulf between the businessmen who want comprehensive immigration reform and the nativist base that wants an end to all non-white immigration, whether it is legal or illegal. There’s a growing chasm between the libertarian non-intervention wing of the party and the John McCain bomb-em-first-ask-questions-later wing of the party. There’s also a Main Street/Wall Street divide over tax policy and social/religious issues.
In all these cases, important factions within the GOP simply want different things. It’s hard to patch things up when you have diametrically-opposed goals.
Interestingly, Mr. Williamson says he quit his membership in the Republican Party during the Bush years because he couldn’t abide belonging to the same club as Arlen Specter. He also says that “the Affordable Care Act, [is] the worst domestic defeat for the cause of limited government in a generation,” which is a nice admission. It shows the real reason that conservatives keep bad-mouthing a law that is working very well and is already covering seven million people. We can understand, now, why conservatives have fought the law with so much fury. They believe, correctly, that the mere existence of the law is a tremendous ideological defeat. Whether it works well or not is completely beside the point for these folks.
Going forward, that’s going to be an increasingly suicidal political position to take. There will be divisions on that, too.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 30, 2014
“Rand Paul’s ‘Youth’ Snow Job”: Why He’ll Never, Ever, Ever Win Over Young Voters
With a Chris Christie comeback looking less likely and a Jeb Bush shadow campaign only just now entering its preliminary stages, the political media that isn’t tethered to the Hillary Clinton beat — where news of no news is treated as news — has turned its eyes to Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul, the man who will singlehandedly bring his party into the 21st century by referencing modern cultural touchstones like Pink Floyd, Domino’s pizza and Monica Lewinsky. The narrative, pushed by Paul’s office and accepted by bored, middle-aged members of the press, is that the 51-year-old libertarian is just what Republicans needs to win over millennial voters and reclaim the White House in 2016.
To be blunt: This is a stupid narrative and everyone who isn’t being paid by the Republican Party to promote it needs to stop.
Before getting into why the idea of Millennial Man Rand Paul is nonsense, it’s worth unpacking the argument. To be fair, it’s a bit more sophisticated than what I’ve described above. As Joe Gandelman put it in a deeply unpersuasive article for the Week, the curly-haired lover of liberty “has appeal to millennials disillusioned by intrusive government surveillance and aggressive drone strikes,” and that means he “could really boost his numbers in GOP contests if he’s able to mobilize young voters…” This could “snowball,” Gandelman writes, so long as Paul can convince the kids that he’s “truly a candidate of change,” a proposition made all the more likely by the fact that “Paul would be the first GOP nominee whose ideology is genuinely anchored in libertarianism, with positions that often can’t be neatly categorized.”
Putting those last two assertions aside — I’d say Barry Goldwater’s ideology was quite clearly “anchored in libertarianism” and that libertarian positions can, in fact, be “neatly categorized” as, well, libertarian — Gandelman’s argument boils down to the following: Young people don’t like the NSA and drones, so they might vote for Paul, who is also a skeptic of the post-9/11 national security paradigm. Yet while he’s right that millennial voters are far less comfortable with spying and drone strikes than the rest of the electorate, Gandelman exaggerates the intensity of their disaffection.
On spying, for example, it’s true that young voters are more concerned with civil liberties; but as a 2013 Washington Post poll found, 18- to 39-year-old Americans still think investigating terrorist threats is more important than preserving civil liberties, by a breakdown of 52 to 45 percent. On drone strikes, meanwhile, a 2013 Fox News poll finds the conventional wisdom to be even more out of touch: by a score of 65 to 32 percent, respondents under the age of 35 said they approve of the U.S. using drones to kill suspected terrorists on foreign soil. In fact, the only scenario for which a majority of the under-35 crowd disapproves of drone strikes is if the suspect is an American citizen and the strike takes place on U.S. soil. Even then, it’s hardly a blowout, with 44 percent registering their approval.
So Gandelman’s pretty wrong, any way you slice it. But a better argument for Paul’s appealing to young voters is possible, and was indeed offered by Ross Kaminsky in the American Spectator. Instead of leaning so heavily on the assumption that kids these days hate Big Brother, Kaminsky notes that on issues where millennial voters really stick out from the rest — marriage equality and immigration reform — Paul has tried to “thread the needle” by adopting positions that are slightly more nuanced than the GOP norm. Paul’s against same-sex marriage, yes, but he thinks it’s an issue best “left to the states” and has argued that a reform of the tax code, “so it doesn’t mention marriage,” would save the country from having to “redefine what marriage is…” On immigration reform, too, Paul ultimately votes with the rest of his party, but does so while leaving some wiggle room for expanding the work visa program and legal immigration in general.
Better is a relative term, however. While it’s true that Paul doesn’t usually sound like an unreconstructed homophobe on the issue of gay marriage, it’s also true that Paul has jokingly compared same-sex marriage to polygamy and bestiality, putting himself in the same company as that noted champion of individual rights, Rick Santorum. Moreover, while nuance is nice, the fact remains that Paul is, objectively, against marriage equality. Why would a millennial voter who cares about LGBTQ issues support the guy who opposes marriage equality, and compared same-sex partnerships to bestiality, over a candidate who doesn’t do either of those things? Because nuance? Further, why would a millennial voter who wants to see immigration reform happen in this country support a candidate who doesn’t? Because he’s willing to accept immigrants as a source of labor, even if he doesn’t think they deserve a path to citizenship? Because, again, nuance?
Granted, Kaminsky and his fellow travelers would probably say that while Paul won’t win millennials over on these issues, his “balanced” approach might be enough to keep them from dismissing him before listening any further. There’s probably something to that. But there’s still a problem: It’s not like millennials are exactly in sync with Paul’s views on economic issues, either. Kaminsky’s implication that younger voters would thrill to Paul’s doctrinaire laissez faire approach to the economy, if they could only look past social issues, just doesn’t withstand even a little bit of scrutiny.
It’s true that millennial voters are not nearly as enthusiastic about the positive role government can play in promoting social and economic equality as they were in the early days of the Obama era. Back then, according to a 2009 report from the Dem-aligned Center for American Progress, as much as two-thirds of young voters said that government should provide more services, while three-fourths said there were more things the government could and should be doing. A half-decade of Democratic incompetence and Tea Party obstruction has definitely taken its toll.
Nevertheless, a Pew Research Center report put out earlier this month found that the majority of millennials still want to see their government do more, not less, to even the playing field. Asked to choose between smaller government with fewer services and bigger government with more services, 53 percent of millennials chose the latter while only 38 percent picked the former. And even though 54 percent of them oppose Obamacare, only 44 percent agree with Paul that it’s not the government’s job to ensure health insurance coverage for all. Perhaps the most telling finding of the whole report in this regard concerns Social Security, that longtime bugaboo of Paul and libertarians like him. Despite the fact that a whopping 51 percent of millennials believe they’ll receive no Social Security benefits by the time they’re eligible, and despite the fact that 53 percent of millennials think government should focus spending on helping the young rather than the old, a remarkable 61 percent of young voters oppose cutting Social Security benefits in any way, full stop.
Persuasive as they can be, though, polls can’t tell us everything. As mentioned earlier, History happens, and people’s views can change. Demography may be a more reliable metric, then (even if too many Democrats have succumbed to the fallacious “demography is destiny” belief that a more racially diverse rising electorate will guarantee Dems a permanent majority). Paul certainly appears to be thinking about the country’s demographic changes; he seemingly can’t go 10 minutes into an interview or public statement without noting that his party must be more “inclusive” and “welcoming” to what Republicans like to call, in a triumph of euphemism, “non-traditional” voting blocs.
But as his much-discussed speech last year at Howard University — and his recent decision to chide Obama for failing to remember how Martin Luther King was spied upon — can attest, Paul’s version of outreach is not without its blemishes. He deserves some amount of credit for recognizing that non-white voters matter, too, I guess. But as is the case with immigration and same-sex marriage, Paul’s attempts at nuance are more than outweighed by his concrete policy stances. Simply put, I doubt that a young voter of color is going to look sympathetically at the image of a white, Southern conservative whitesplaining Martin Luther King to the first African American president — especially if that voter happens to know that Paul supports modern versions of the voter suppression tactics King and other civil rights heroes risked their lives to end. And what do you think the chances are that a Democratic presidential candidate would bring up Paul’s infamous attack on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 during a national campaign? I’d say they’re pretty, pretty, pretty good.
To recap, here’s the case for Rand Paul, millennial hero: He’s against surveillance and drone strikes, two issues on which the millennial vote is divided; he’s against comprehensive immigration reform and same-sex marriage, two things that millennial voters strongly support; he’s against big government and universal health care, two more things a majority of millennial voters back; and he likes to talk about getting people of color to vote for him, despite supporting voter suppression and the right of businesses to engage in race-based discrimination. Oh, and he’s comfortable telling the first black president, the one who “surrounds himself with Martin Luther King memorabilia in [the] Oval Office,” how he’s failing to live up to King’s legacy.
So can we stop with this nonsense now? Please?
By: Elias Isquith, Assistant Editor, Salon, March 22, 2014
“Demographic Death Spiral”: 2014 May Be White Enough For The GOP, But What Comes Next?
Overshadowed amid Sarah Palin’s unique interpretation of Dr. Seuss, Wayne LaPierre’s overheated vision of America’s apocalyptic decline, and all of the other craziness at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference, Republican pollster Whit Ayres gave a fact-based presentation to the gathering of right-wing activists. What he said should terrify the GOP.
Ayres, whose firm counts the RNC, NRSC, NRCC, and several influential Republican politicians among its clients, appeared on a panel on Saturday to discuss electoral trends and the future of the GOP.
The slides from Ayres’ presentation, which are available on his firm’s website, reiterate something that many Republicans have long warned: America’s changing demographics leave the increasingly white GOP at risk of entering what Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) memorably described as a “demographic death spiral.”
In short, as the Republican pollster explained, the white proportion of the American electorate is declining at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, Republicans are performing much worse among non-white voter groups. If the party doesn’t change something — Ayres suggests immigration reform as a good place to start — it will cease to be viable in national elections.
One particular point in the presentation stood out, however. Turning to the midterm elections, Ayres declared to hearty applause that “we’ve got some good news: We’re going to have a great 2014. We’re going to hold the House, we’re going to pick up the Senate, it’s going to be a great 2014.”
“One of the reasons why,” he explained, “is that the percentage of whites in the electorate is about five points higher in the off-year elections.”
Perhaps Ayres — who, like most pollsters, does not have a spotless record when it comes to predicting elections — should remember what he said in 2012 before asserting that the whiteness of the midterm electorate will bring his party certain success in 2014. Back then, he explained his party’s failure to elect Mitt Romney as president by noting that “it is a mistake to place rosy assumptions on a likely electorate that are at variance — and substantial variance — with recent history.”
Democrats immediately called foul on the crowd’s warm reception to Ayres’ assertion.
“It says a lot that top Republicans believe that lower minority participation in the electoral process is something to celebrate. They know that when the electorate represents more Americans and more voices, they lose,” DNC Director of Voter Expansion Pratt Wiley said in a statement.
In fairness to Ayres, he made it perfectly clear that Republicans need to diversify their party, instead of relying on shrinking the electorate.
“Some people see it as a problem,” he said of America’s demographic shift. “I see it as a real opportunity.”
“Conservative values of free markets, and limited government, and low taxes, and good education, and reward for hard work appeal across all boundaries regardless of race, color, religion, or national origin,” Ayres argued. “Conservatives can be very successful in the new America if we reach out and adopt an inclusive tone, bring people into our coalition, and aggressively campaign in their communities.”
That theory sounds very good on paper — and very familiar. That’s because it’s almost identical to the RNC’s post-election “autopsy report,” which was released almost exactly one year ago. Back then, the RNC suggested that “if we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them, and show our sincerity.”
Indeed, one has to wonder whom Whit Ayres thought he could convince that America’s ascendant minority populations could be a positive development. Certainly not the white nationalist-led group manning an English-only booth at the conference. Or racial provocateur Ann Coulter, who used her CPAC speech to decry the “browning of America,” and warned that if immigration reform passes, “then we organize the death squads for the people who wrecked America.” Or the CPAC attendees who delivered a resounding victory in the conference’s presidential straw poll to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who has spoken out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Ultimately, Ayres may be right, and the combination of a whiter electorate and a friendly electoral map could deliver a big win for the Republican Party in 2014. But it couldn’t be clearer that the GOP’s broader demographic problem hasn’t been solved — and in fact, it’s actually getting worse.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, March 11, 2014. Graph via Northstaropinion.com
“GOP Like The Dog That Chases A Car”: Republican’s Can’t Do Better Than ObamaCare No Matter What They Would Like You To Believe
We are all familiar with the spectacle of a dog frantically chasing a car, which strikes us as stupid because, after all, what on Earth would the dog do with the car if it actually caught it?
That’s basically what we’re witnessing with the Republicans’ monomaniacal war on the Affordable Care Act:
The GOP’s message may well evolve between now and November, but the most tangible early indicator — advertising spending by conservative groups against Democratic candidates — shows how intensely it is focusing on the health-care law.
“It has been the predominant focus of both our grass roots and our advertising efforts,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, the primary political operation of a donor network backed by billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch.
Of the roughly $30 million the group has spent on ads since August, Phillips said, at least 95 percent has gone toward spots about the health-care law.
Democrats have been tracking that spending to help gauge what their candidates will be facing.
In Senate races, where control of the chamber is on the line, all but $240,000 of the $21.2 million that super PACs are spending on television advertising has gone into attacks centered on the health-care law, said Matt Canter, deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The exceptions were ad buys in three states that criticized Democratic senators for supporting President Obama’s judicial nominees.
There is a lot of polling data about ObamaCare, and you can pick and choose which numbers you want to focus on. I like the fact that 57% of self-proclaimed independents think we should either keep the law as it is or make improvements to it, versus 33% who think it should be scrapped. I don’t like that 29% of voters say that they have been negatively impacted by the law versus 17% who say that they have benefitted.
Overall, you could fairly say that the law is slowly becoming less unpopular. This is a victory in itself, considering how much money the Republicans have spent on trashing the law, and how little money the Democrats have spent defending it. If the law were to become popular, the Republicans’ entire midterm strategy would collapse.
As I’ve noted in recent days, the Republicans are so focused on using ObamaCare as a weapon in the midterms that they don’t want to take on tax or immigration reform because either issue would divide their caucus and take the country’s focus off their war on health coverage.
But, I think the public is going to notice that they are like the dog that chases the car. If you elect them to dismantle ObamaCare, they will have no solutions. They can’t do better than ObamaCare no matter what they would like you to believe. Their proposed reforms would cost more money, insure less people, and take away plans from people who like their plans. Everything they claim not to like about the law, they would make worse.
So, while I am nervous about the differential in firepower and resources being dedicated to arguing about ObamaCare, I think the Republicans are putting all their eggs in one basket full of lies and distortion and that we ought to be able to outflank such a clumsy, plodding, charge.
By: Martin Longman, Ten Miles Square, Washington Monthly, February 27, 2014
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