“Very Well-Insured Critics”: Serving The Smug, Shortsighted, Dopes And Demagogues, Obamacare Will Be There Even For Its Enemies
Obamacare’s enemies are right about the disastrous Web site launch and the president’s misleading mantra about “keeping your plan.” I’m furious at the White House myself for having botched these technical and messaging challenges — issues that anyone could have seen coming three years ago and whose amateur handling has given needless ammunition to the foes of expanded health coverage.
But for those of us who think the health security the Affordable Care Act provides marks a fundamental advance in America’s social contract, these White House failures don’t come close to the vices of Obamacare’s adversaries. Let’s just say it: To judge by their behavior, the Affordable Care Act’s enemies couldn’t care less about helping millions of low-income workers achieve health security, and every time they open their mouths, it shows.
When conservatives rant about the latest mess-ups attending the rollout, they never add the obvious empathetic refrain. It would be simple, really. They’d just need to preface or append to their daily attack a line like this: “Of course we all agree we need to find ways to get poor workers secure health coverage that protects their family from ruin in the event of serious illness.”
That’s all it would take. But they don’t say that. None of them. At least none that I can hear. A single omission might seem an oversight. A few might be a sign of distraction. But when day after day you wait in vain to hear such empathy amid the torrent of anti-Obamacare venom being spewed, you realize something bigger psychologically is at work.
Obamacare foes are more than just angry with the “lying” and the bungling they disdain. They are Very Well-Insured People. We all know about “VIPs.” Well, these are VWIPs. Or at least, a certain conservative species of VWIP.
For many on the right, being a VWIP seems to bring with it a certain blindness. They see the Web site comedy of errors and cry (rightly) “incompetence!” They see some people who have to change their health plan and cry (with some fairness) “liar!”
But that’s all they see. What they don’t see is nearly 50 million uninsured Americans, 20 million or so of whom stand to have relatively desperate lives made immeasurably more secure thanks to this law. These Americans will finally know what it’s like to go to bed at night certain that they can’t be wiped out financially by illness — and that free or affordable preventive care may help their loved ones uncover disease while there’s a chance for a cure.
Obamacare’s well-insured critics don’t see these Americans at all. And they seem unable to imagine what it would feel like to be one of them.
I want to be careful here. I know this isn’t the outlook of every Republican or conservative. John Kasich’s Medicaid expansion makes him the most prominent exception (though even Kasich can’t see the benefit for many Ohioans of Obamacare’s big private insurance expansion). Meanwhile, in yet another case in which your zip code seals your fate in the United States, millions of citizens who could have had Medicaid coverage will remain vulnerable, abandoned by well-insured GOP governors who think their job involves tending to well-insured GOP voters.
Poor uninsured workers didn’t make U.S. health care the costliest, most inefficient system on the planet. But these workers are the ones who suffer most under it. And VWIPs on the right don’t care.
New rule (as Bill Maher would say): Politicians and pundits who bash Obamacare should have displayed under their talking head or byline the source of their own coverage. Let’s caption Ted Cruz in flashing neon that reads, “Enjoys Gold-Plated Health Coverage from Goldman Sachs Spousal Plan.” Let’s have the subtitles for John Boehner and Eric Cantor read, “Has Never Worried About Going Broke From Illness A Day in His Life Thanks To Federal Government Insurance.”
And let Obamacare supporters begin their response to absurd claims that “Obamacare is the enemy” with this simple line: “Spoken like a Very Well-Insured Person.” (I’ve tried this on radio and TV — not only is it accurate, but it feels great to say so, too.)
My wife and I discovered we were uninsurable in the individual market in 2003. It was scary. And we’re the lucky ones — bona fide members of the Lower Upper Class with the wherewithal to maneuver to protect our family (and with access to the New York Times Magazine to write about the experience).
Obama said, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”
The Very Well-Insured Obamacare critic effectively says to the uninsured, “If you enjoy being vulnerable to financial ruin or death from serious illness, under our plan you can keep that, too.”
Both of these positions are wrong.
But which, at the end of the day, seems more like a hanging offense?
The irony is that Obamacare’s protections will be there even for its enemies if, God forbid, they (or someone they love) find themselves sick, unattached to a large employer and looking for coverage in the individual market. I suppose that’s the beauty of the rule of law — it serves the smug and the shortsighted, the dopes and the demagogues along with the rest of us. Might be a more just world if it didn’t now and then, but them’s the breaks.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 6, 2013
“Highlighting The GOP’s Worst Qualities”: For Democrats, Raising The Minimum Wage Is Good Policy, Better Politics
As Congress considers raising the minimum wage for the first time since 2009, Democrats have a golden political opportunity to pressure congressional Republicans on an issue that splits the GOP’s base — and highlights the GOP’s worst qualities.
The battle is currently being led by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA), who have crafted a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, up from the current level of $7.25. The bill, titled the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, would immediately raise the minimum wage to $8.20 an hour, then to $9.15 an hour after one year, $10.10 an hour after two years, and tie it to the Consumer Price Index thereafter.
There is a litany of evidence backing up the value of such a proposal. The current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has lagged far behind productivity growth over the past decades, and falls short of most living wage standards. A worker employed full-time at the current minimum wage would make $15,080 for a full 52-week year, 19 percent below the poverty line for a family of three. As over 100 economists agreed in a June 2013 letter supporting a $10.50 hourly minimum wage, raising the wage “will be an effective means of improving living standards for low-wage workers and their families and will help stabilize the economy. The costs to other groups in society will be modest and readily absorbed.”
Opponents of raising the minimum wage generally argue that such a policy would hurt job growth. “When you raise the price of employment, guess what happens? You get less of it,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) declared in response to President Obama’s call to raise the minimum wage at his 2013 State of the Union address. Contrary to the Speaker’s claim, however, there is little to no evidence that modest increases in the minimum wage actually eliminate jobs.
As strong as the economic case for raising the minimum wage is, however, the political case is even more persuasive. The Harkin-Miller bill has almost no chance of becoming law during the 113th Congress; it will almost certainly be blocked in the Senate, and even if Democratic leadership can round up 60 votes, the bill stands no chance in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. But the GOP could pay a steep price for killing the measure.
Americans strongly favor raising the minimum wage. According to a Hart Research Associates poll conducted in July, an overwhelming 80 percent of Americans support raising the minimum wage to $10.10, then adjusting it for the cost of living, as the Harkin-Miller plan proposes. The basic parameters of the bill are supported by 92 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of Independents, and even 62 percent of Republicans.
The poll also suggests that the issue could prove critical in the 2014 midterms. The Hart poll found that 74 percent of registered voters believe that raising the minimum wage in the next year should be an important priority for Congress, and 38 believe it is very important — 51 percent of registered voters would be more likely to support a candidate for Congress who favored raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, while just 15 percent said they would be less likely. Furthermore, 37 percent believe that — should Congress fail to raise the minimum wage this year — Republicans would be to blame. Just 15 percent would blame the Democrats.
In the wake of the Republican Party’s disastrous government shutdown strategy, it finds itself in a very precarious political position — especially on the critical question of whether they are actually interested in what’s best for the country. A high-profile act of obstruction to block a minimum-wage hike — a raise that is supported by four-fifths of Americans, and almost two-thirds of Republicans — would surely compound that problem. If Democrats want to paint congressional Republicans as elitists who are out of step with the needs of average Americans, this is how they do it.
On Friday, the Obama administration signaled its support for the Harkin-Miller bill, and it would be wise to be very vocal about that position. If the White House throws its full weight behind congressional Democrats’ efforts, then the minimum wage could form the backbone of an effective economic pitch for the 2014 midterms.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, November 8, 2013
“Wanted, A Brain, A Heart And A Little Courage”: Do Republican Moderates Have The Guts To Take Back The GOP?
Establishment Republicans feel pretty good about their wins yesterday in New Jersey and Alabama. (Many are also quietly saying “I told you so” about Ken Cuccinelli’s loss in the Virginia governor’s race.) For those in the traditional Chamber of Commerce wing of the party, the next year will be about regaining control from the Tea Partiers who have been driving the party’s policies since 2010.
But where have they been for the last three years, as the degradation of the Republican trademark became increasingly obvious?
A new Republican group called “Main Street Advocacy” is about to begin running ads against the hard-liners who have done so much to embarrass the party. One of the ads puts losing candidates like Todd Akin and Sharron Angle in a “Hall of Shame,” and ends with the word “defund” — a reminder of the failed attempt to end health care reform, which led to a widely reviled government shutdown.
“We want our party back,” the group’s leader, former Representative Steven C. LaTourette of Ohio, told Eric Lipton of The Times. “And we are going to do what it takes to accomplish that.”
The vast majority of Republicans in the House, however, allowed that shutdown to happen. Most establishment lawmakers have sat by quietly for years as the party was pushed to the extremes, too afraid of a primary to speak up. Many benefited from secret super-PAC spending provided by the likes of the Koch brothers, or took Tea Party stands without ever really believing in them, all because they liked being back in power and didn’t particularly care what kind of bargain would keep them there.
At any point prior to the shutdown, for example, Republicans could have rejected Speaker John Boehner’s meek compliance with the right wing and told him they could no longer go along with the futile campaign to “defund Obamacare.” They could have signed a discharge petition to reopen government long before it finally happened — after 16 days of damage to the economy.
Even now, real moderates could tell the speaker that they will back a discharge petition to bring the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to a vote, which Mr. Boehner has refused to allow. Standing in the way of basic protections for gays and lesbians is only going to hurt their party in the long run. They could also force a vote on the Senate’s immigration bill, which has languished in the House for months, or end the highly unpopular sequester.
But that hasn’t happened. Standing up to the speaker and taking a public position on divisive issues would require actual courage, which is rarely on display in the Republican Party. Instead, the moderates would rather raise corporate money and hide behind the anonymity of a TV ad, making fun of easy targets like Christine O’Donnell, notorious for declaring that she was “not a witch.”
There’s only one way for the party to regain the public’s trust. Taking action is much more effective than running ads.
By: David Firestone, The New York Times, November 6, 2013
“The Radicals Are Actually Gaining Ground”: Sorry, There’s No Evidence Big Business Has Abandoned The Tea Party Or GOP
The current conventional wisdom floating around the media, seemingly extrapolated largely from quotes to the press from businessmen and their surrogates, is that “Big Business [is] trying to unseat the Tea Party.” However, there’s no evidence that this is happening.
Remember the first time Tea Party House Republicans held a gun to the US economy, refusing to pay America’s debts unless Democrats accepted a wide-ranging set of demands, and as a result, business leaders promised to spend big to defeat hostage-taking radicals?
“We’ll get rid of you,” said Tom Donohue, president of the US Chamber of Commerce to the Tea Party lawmakers.
That was 2011, during the first debt ceiling stand-off. And the following election year, none of the threats materialized.
In 2012, the Chamber ended up spending millions in undisclosed business funds to help elect Todd Akin, Ann Marie Buerkle, Dean Heller, Connie Mack, Denny Rehberg and other lawmakers who supported taking the debt ceiling hostage. Political action committees for the largest corporate interests in America, including General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, the American Bankers Association and Honeywell, gave several million in direct donations to Tea Party hostage-takers, helping many survive the election last year and repeat their antics this year.
Now, it seems big business is bluffing again and advancing a false narrative that they are flexing their political muscle against the Tea Party. The storyline, boosted by ThinkProgress, Bloomberg, National Journal and the Associated Press, among others, is that corporate America has lost influence with the GOP and is helping to defeat lawmakers who threatened to push America into default.
So far, the spin makes the business community appear moderate, though there is nothing backing it up. Despite making statements and sending letters voicing their concern, the Chamber has failed to spend a single penny in advocacy against the Tea Party hostage-takers. It hasn’t rescinded any of its so-called “Free Enterprise Awards,” either. (The award has been given to many Tea Party lawmakers, including repeat hostage-takers like Representatives Steve Scalise (R-LA), Tom Graves (R-GA), and Morgan Griffith (R-VA), who encouraged a debt default by comparing it to a second American Revolution.)
Contrast this with how the Chamber behaved in 2009, when Democrats controlled the House of Representatives. By November of that year, twelve months before the midterms, the Chamber launched an onslaught of attack advertisements against House Democrats who did not vote their way, after months of issue ads in targeted districts.
Then, after helping the Tea Party seize the House and several governors’ mansions during the midterms, business groups pumped funds into an effort to gerrymander the Tea Party into permanent rule. CitiGroup and the US Chamber—both of which now complain about flirting dangerously close to default—provided huge donations to the RSLC, the political committee devoted to gerrymandering seats to the House GOP and Tea Party caucus’ advantage.
Will we see a reversal? Next year, there are a handful of high-profile primary races in which establishment Republicans are challenging incumbents, but none of them are proof that there is a concerted effort by business to drive out the Tea Party. Representative Justin Amash (R-MI) is being challenged on social issues and for his outspoken views on foreign policy, not on the debt ceiling. Representative Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI) has been a target for a primary well before his vote to shut down the government, largely because he is seen as a political novice who doesn’t know how to raise money. Representative Walter Jones (R-NC) is facing an establishment challenge, once again, but because he is an outsider within the party for his persistent votes to regulate Wall Street and crack down on political corruption.
Finally, Representative Scott DesJarlais (R-TN) may lose his seat because of revelations that he pressured a patient with whom he was having an affair to seek an abortion—not for his vote over the debt ceiling.
In fact, in terms of primary challenges, it looks like well-heeled GOP interest groups will successfully oust Boehner Republicans to make way for additional Tea Party–style politicians. Politico reports that Republican Representatives Mike Simpson (R-ID), Pete Sessions (R-TX), Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Bill Shuster (R-PA) face challenges from the right next year. Challengers in these races are calling for more debt ceiling hostage-taking. The Club for Growth, a pro-government shut down group funded largely by wealthy investors and businessmen, is leading the charge.
Here’s the reality: the large political action committee and trade associations that control much of corporate America’s campaign spending decisions will help the Tea Party and House GOP win re-election next year.
Big business political operatives lean Republican, and will stick with the party even if Republicans disrupt the economy for political reasons. Over the years, congressional Republicans waged a multifaceted effort to place partisans in their party in charge of the most influential lobby groups within the Beltway.
In the nineties, a mid-career John Boenher helped oust US Chamber president Richard Lesher—a moderate who sided with Democrats at times—to pave the way for Tom Donohue, a known GOP loyalist. During the George W. Bush era, Rick Santorum, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, Ed Gillespie and others created the “K Street Project” to install GOP operatives into key business lobbying positions.
Tom Perriello, a former one-term House Democrat from Virginia who was one of the first to be targeted by the US Chamber in attack ads aired a year before his re-election, says business leaders are too cozy with the GOP. Now the leader of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, he tells me that he’s “disappointed but not particularly surprised in the business community’s failure to force the Republicans to act reasonably on the CR, default or immigration, for that matter.… there seems to remain a broad cultural and political aversion [among lobbyists] to do anything that seems to help the Democrats and President Obama in particular.”
Still, Perriello thinks a change could be on the horizon. Many traditionally Republican business groups in Virginia have sat out the gubernatorial race, partially out of disgust for Ken Cuccinelli’s Tea Party extremism. Even GOP corporate lobbyists like John Feehery have been vocal in calling for the business community to do more to challenge the Tea Party.
But right now, it’s too early to say if 2014 will be any different than the last few congressional elections. The evidence suggests in fact that radicals are gaining ground within the GOP while facing little accountability. When it comes to taking on the Tea Party, business leaders have a lot of bark and no bite.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, October 30, 2013
“A Very Low Bar”: How A Crazy Senator Became A Sudden Darling Of The So-Called Respectable Right
Fanfare! Trumpets! There has been a Big Important Speech on the Future of Conservatism. Let’s take it Really Seriously. Sen. Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, went to the Heritage Foundation Tuesday and spoke. Milton Friedman and Irving Kristol were namechecked! Russell Kirk was quoted! The gas tax was proposed to be slashed 80 percent! Oh wait, I am supposed to still be mentioning the Serious parts.
I shouldn’t make fun, maybe. There are serious parts. Lee’s concern for “immobility among the poor,” the middle-class squeeze, and “cronyist privilege at the top,” and his desire to fashion a conservative response to them, is the right note for a Republican senator to strike. Amen to calls for “a new conservatism of the working and middle class,” because either we will get one or the failed attempt to give us one will prove it to be a contradiction in terms. Conservative intellectuals of a reformist bent welcomed the speech—Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam (they co-wrote a book on these themes), Rich Lowry, Jennifer Rubin. BuzzFeed political editor McKay Coppins called it a “lofty, agenda-setting speech” for its ringing declaration, “frustration is not a platform. Anger is not an agenda. And outrage, as a habit, is not even conservative” and for its forceful denunciation of the House Republicans’ sociopathic shutdown tactic, which futilely damaged the U.S. economy and very nearly caused the federal government to default—a narrowly evaded catastrophe.
Except, of course, Lee didn’t do that last thing. Lee was pro-shutdown! Other than Ted Cruz, he was probably the House Republicans’ most important ally in the Senate. And he did not denounce—or, in his case, repudiate—the shutdown tactics. So now you see why I couldn’t help but make fun.
I suppose if we set the bar low enough that insects can do the limbo with it, you could read his speech as endorsing a less insane way forward. But here is what happened Tuesday: One of Washington’s most staunchly pro-shutdown politicians, appearing at maybe Washington’s most important pro-shutdown organization, pointedly refused to condemn the shutdown or suggest he would not support a future shutdown if it meant trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.
On the contrary, Lee said, “I am proud of my friend Ted Cruz and the dozens of others—including Speaker John Boehner and the House Republicans—who fought Obamacare, continue to fight it, and will not stop fighting it.” At the outset, he narrated, “It began with our effort to stop Obamacare—a goal that all Republicans share even if we have not always agreed about just how to pursue it.” Absent a declaration that he no longer agrees with how he pursued it, one is forced to conclude that he feels the same way now. Douthat, Salam, and Lowry do not mention this.
There is a broader point here. If I ever found the bulk of my political views articulated by somebody whose most prominent action ever—undertaken in the past month and unrepudiated—was as grotesquely irresponsible as what Cruz, Lee, and the House Republicans put us through, it would cause me to question my views. I would reflect upon the fact that Lee and I share these beliefs, and that he logically extends them toward something totally self-destructive and crazy. I would have to conclude either that he is correct to do this, and therefore that my views must be wrong and that I must change them, or that he is not worth listening to, because he takes perfectly good ideas and warps them into something powerfully hazardous. There is apparently no such reckoning among the right’s respectable intellectuals—most of whom did oppose the shutdown itself, and not only for pragmatic reasons.
But in the meantime, let’s stick to the matter at hand. Can’t all reasonable people agree to ignore Mike Lee completely until he says he was wrong about the shutdown? Should this be a controversial suggestion? Given the gravity of the threat of a future shutdown, isn’t that the only responsible response?
Salam highlights several promising policy sketches that Lee offered; and truly, it is hard not to appreciate a Republican concerned with work-life balance issues. But Salam and the others misrepresent Lee—who, Salam notes, holds a relatively safe seat, and so presumably may speak his mind. Giving parents greater flexibility isn’t Lee’s foremost priority. According to Lee, “The first and most important policy goal Republicans must adopt to improve the lives of middle-class families is, and will remain, the full repeal of Obamacare.” How? Again, we have no choice but to presume that Lee believes that a legitimate tactic for repealing Obamacare is, and will remain, shutting down the government and threatening its default. How about we hear Lee out, and maybe even talk to him, sometime after he puts his gun away.
By: Marc Tracy, The New Republic, October 30, 2013
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