“A Good Time To Take Stock”: Don’t Count Out Angry White Guys Quite Yet
Earlier this week, John Boehner opened his fiscal cliff counteroffer to President Obama by claiming that it had been a “status quo election in which both you and the Republican majority in the House were re-elected.” Democrats and progressives, who have spent the last month crowing about Republican’s self-marginalization as the party of aging white men, obviously beg to differ — both about who holds the leverage in the ongoing tax rate and debt ceiling standoffs and how the election plays into it. Are they being overconfident, or will the Obama coalition we saw turn out a month ago hold?
As the last of the post-election data sifts and behind-the-scenes campaign reveals trickle out and the political class tries to figure out the new normal, it’s a good time to take stock.
Liberals are thrilled to see a toughened Obama use his strengthened hand against Republican intransigence, which they see as bolstered by an election day mandate. Greg Sargent at the Washington Post put it this way: “The argument is straightforward: This isn’t 2011 anymore. Last time, Republicans had won an election; this time, Obama and Democrats won. Polls show the public increasingly sees Republicans as the intransigent party and the primary obstacle to compromise in Washington.” And Frank Rich was equally dismissive of the Republicans’ bargaining power: “Everyone knows the Republicans are going to fold — the Republicans know they are going to fold — and the only question to be resolved is when and on what terms. They have zero leverage. It’s not only that they lost the election; they continue to decline in national polls, with the latest Pew survey showing that 53 percent of Americans will blame the GOP (and only 27 percent will blame President Obama) if there’s no deal by January.” Even plenty of Republicans are pessimistic: “Now more than ever, Republicans should know better than to pretend polls aren’t telling them something,” wrote John Podhoretz glumly.
But House members aren’t elected by national polls, and thanks to gerrymandering into safe districts that helped Republicans hold the House last month, they still may have more to fear from their right flank in the event of a compromise. And the prior particulars of this current skirmish favor the Democrats: Taxes going up on everyone on January 1 over their desire to keep tax cuts for the rich looks bad just after you lost by running an out-of-touch rich guy for president. As Republican Rep. James Lankford admitted to the Times, “It’s a terrible position because by default, Democrats get what they want.” This is a crisis of Republicans’ making that they’ve boxed themselves into; future battles might not be so deliciously karmic.
Of course, the long-term demographic trends that, combined with a killer turnout game helped re-elect the president — despite Republicans’ innumerate overconfidence — still exist. Just how that created (or confirmed) an “Obama coalition” is elucidated in a just-released report by Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, who can justly claim to have called those trends long before Republicans had to remember that Latino voters exist.
While many pollsters erroneously believed that the share of the white vote, for example, would remain stable, their 2011 report, “The Path to 270” projected that in 2012, the following math would favor Obama: an increase of 2 percent in the share of voters of color, fewer white working-class voters, and a small uptick in white college graduate voters. “According to the 2012 exit polls, that is exactly what happened,” they write in the new report. “With the re-election of President Barack Obama in 2012, this progressive coalition has clearly emerged, albeit in an early and tenuous stage.”
That last qualifier also matters in figuring out just what that progressive coalition can do and how it can be harnessed, especially with coming state-level and local races and in future legislative battles that may divide those disparate constituencies — or leave them disengaged. For example, much was rightly made of the gender gap, but specificity matters: As Teixeira and Halpin note, President Obama actually lost white college-graduate women after winning them in 2008: “Among women in this demographic, his margin declined from 52 percent to 47 percent in 2008, to 46 percent to 52 percent in 2012.” (Romney also won the white working class, where he gained men compared to McCain, but not enough working class white women were in his ranks to make a difference from 2008.) As John Cassidy pointed out just after the election, white women overall have broken with the overall “gender gap” dynamic: Bush won 55 percent of white women in 2004.
The most reliable Obama voters turned not to be all women, but young women and women of color, in part because young people and people of color in general turned out and voted for the president. (Younger people and people of color are also generally less likely to be married, which partly explains how Obama won single women by 36 points; unmarried women also made up a larger share of voters in the election, 23 percent versus 21 percent in 2008.)
Unfortunately, those are the same demographics who largely stayed home in 2010, when we got many of the looniest members of the Republican caucus. They’re the same ones that brought the debt ceiling debate to the brink, after they held the government hostage over defunding Planned Parenthood. By the way, those positions on women’s health also proved politically toxic last month, at least according to the organization’s own action fund, which just released polling showing that it had managed to make 64 percent of all voters aware that Romney planned to defund it, which 62 percent of them disagreed with. Their research also found that Latinos and African Americans were more likely to side with Obama after hearing his views on “affordable birth control,” abortion, and Planned Parenthood funding. Republicans may have lost their appetites on that kind of fight, except that they still have right-to-life absolutists to appease in their coalition and in their districts.
Soon after the election, Michael Tomasky proposed that some rich liberal donor throw cash at this perennial problem: In off-year elections, “The 20 percent who leave the system are almost entirely Democrats. This has been true all my life. It’s basically because old people always vote, and I guess old white people vote more than other old people, and old white people tend to be Republican. So even when white America isn’t enraged as it was in 2010, midterms often benefit Republicans.” Meanwhile, according to Politico, it’s looking like the vaunted Obama database is going to be kept in the president’s hands mainly to channel support for legislation, despite the desperate entreaties of Democratic candidates up for election in 2013 and 2014, though it might also be used for an entirely new organization that could support candidates. (It’s also up for debate whether that database is already obsolete, anyway.)
None of this means that Democrats should be folding to a compromise which well could include draconian cuts to programs like Medicaid and Social Security that are crucial to that coalition. In fact, it probably means the opposite: Those voters need to be reminded why it matters for them to come back to the polls and to stand up for the policies that motivated them on November 6, from social insurance to ensuring access to reproductive health to comprehensive immigration reform, even without Obama’s name on the ballot.
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, December 6, 2012
“Just Another Shell Game”: John Boehner’s Medicare Proposal Is Sleight Of Hand, Not Cost Control
Denying Medicare to seniors until they reach age 67 will shift costs to seniors, states, and employers without reducing the actual cost of healthcare by one penny. It’s a shell game, and it should not be an option in the fiscal showdown talks.
While it would reduce Medicare expenditures, those costs won’t vanish. Yes, the federal government would save $5.7 billion in 2014, but that would be offset by an additional $11.4 billion spent by states, employers, and seniors, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s a cost shift and a cost increase.
The Congressional Budget Office assumes that half of 65- and 66-year-old seniors would continue employer-sponsored coverage at a cost of about $4.5 billion in 2014. That would likely accelerate the long-term decline in corporate benefits for retirees.
States would also pay because low-income uninsured seniors would be eligible for Medicaid. Even if the federal government would pay 100 percent of the cost of the new beneficiaries, states would still be on the hook for an additional $700 million in 2014 alone.
And, of course, seniors lose in the deal. Two thirds of those ages 65 and 66 would each average $2,200 more in out-of-pocket costs ($3.7 billion total) in 2014, even when accounting for subsidies to buy a plan on a health insurance exchange.
There’s another significant but less obvious cost shift through increased premiums in Medicare and in the exchange. Seniors ages 65 and 66 are the healthiest and least expensive Medicare beneficiaries, and they help lower premiums for all enrollees. Moving them to private coverage, where they would be the least healthy and most expensive health plan members, would drive up premiums for everyone else in the exchanges.
Boehner’s proposal seems more sleight of hand than legitimate cost control. It’s about weakening Medicare, not strengthening the program for future generations.
If we really want to think big about Medicare reform, let’s consider lowering the age of eligibility. Letting people as young as 55 buy into Medicare would improve the risk pool for seniors and strengthen Medicare’s bargaining power without raising program costs.
By: Ethan Rome, Executive Director of Health Care for America Now, U. S. News and World Report, December 6, 2012
“Pretending To Negotiate”: Basic Arithmetic For Republicans Just Doesn’t Add Up
If President Obama honestly wants to negotiate an agreement with Republicans before the year-end fiscal deadline, he must be deeply frustrated. And if he doesn’t really want to negotiate with them, then he should be delighted, for the same reason: Their latest “offer” laid before him by House Speaker John Boehner demonstrates again their refusal to reveal their true intentions — and their inability to do simple arithmetic.
Consider their treatment of Medicare, the popular social insurance program for seniors that Republicans have always despised. They have just emerged from a long national campaign in which they repeatedly and falsely claimed to “protect” Medicare from the president — whom they accused of wanting to slash $716 billion from the program — but now they complain that he won’t cut it enough. The Obama cuts were mythical, but the Boehner budget proposal includes at least $600 billion in Medicare and Medicaid reductions.
Worse still, the Republicans propose to perform this crude surgery on Medicare without the slightest explanation of where they would cut. Washington rumors suggest that they would achieve some of those cuts over the next 10 years by raising the eligibility age by two years to 67 and by increasing premiums for more affluent beneficiaries.
As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out on Tuesday, however, those changes would not begin to achieve the savings required by the Boehner proposal.
The same problem undermines the other aspects of Boehner’s proposal, which includes $600 billion in additional unspecified cuts. Either their arithmetic doesn’t work — or, as Greenstein worries, they mean to inflict severe cuts in health and other services that would harm elderly and poor Americans, but want to conceal those consequences from the public.
Yet there is an even deeper problem with Boehner’s arithmetic. The Republicans are fighting to extend all the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest two percent along with everyone else — but their alternative proposals are utterly inadequate to compensate for the $1.3 trillion in revenues lost by continuing those cuts for the rich. To “offer” $800 billion in new “revenues” obtained by eliminating deductions rather than raising rates simply doesn’t work, as a matter of basic math. It isn’t nearly enough money.
If Republican leaders cannot do the arithmetic, then it is impossible to negotiate with them. If they can do the arithmetic but insist on falsifying the answers, then it is both unwise and impossible to negotiate with them.
Unless and until the Republicans start talking about real numbers that can actually add up, there is nothing to be gained from pretending to negotiate. Nor should the president start negotiating with himself, as he has sometimes done in the past. Instead, he ought to make sure that the opposition understands what will happen when they fail to act responsibly. After January 1, he will bring them an offer they cannot refuse, to restore cuts for the 98 percent — and they will be held accountable for any consequences caused in the meantime by their stalling.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, December 5, 2012
“It’s Just A Matter Of Math”: President Obama Rejects John Boehner’s “Out Of Balance” Fiscal Cliff Proposal
Sitting down for his first interview since the election, President Barack Obama remained optimistic about reaching a deal on the fiscal cliff, but not before rejecting House Speaker John Boehner’s “out of balance” proposal.
Obama reiterated the need for a balanced approach, dispelling the notion that he was driven by politics—“It’s not me being stubborn, not me be partisan; it’s just a matter of math,” Obama told Bloomberg News’ Julianna Goldman. The full interview can be viewed here.
The president said he was “prepared to make some tough decisions on this issue,” and allowed that he would not get “100 percent” of his demands, but stated that he would not “agree to a plan in which we have some revenue that is vague and potentially comes out of the pockets of middle-class families in exchange for some very specific and tough entitlement cuts that would affect seniors or other folks who are vulnerable.”
Speaker Boehner’s proposal yesterday called for slashing $600 billion in federal health care programs—driven partly by increasing the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67—$200 billion in savings by modifying how the government calculates inflation estimates for increasing Medicare and Social Security benefits, and extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
Obama restated the need for increasing top tax rates, while maintaining current rates for those making less than $250,000. “We’re going to have to see the rates on the top 2 percent go up, and we’re not going to be able to get a deal without it,” he said. The Republican plan proposed generating new revenue by closing special-interest loopholes and deductions while lowering rates. But Obama soon rejected that approach. “If you do not raise enough revenue by closing loopholes and deductions, it’s going to be the middle-class families that make up the difference,” the president said. “And that would be bad for business.”
By: Axel Tonconogy, The National Memo, December 4, 2012
“Blatantly Undemocratic”: Republican Thugs In The House Hope To Derail President Obama’s Tax-Hike Bill
As you ponder whether the Obama tax hike can pass the House, I bet you think something like, “All he needs is a few Republicans.” Right? I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it. Obama himself said last week: “If we can just get a few House Republicans on board, we can pass the bill in the House, it will land on my desk, and I am ready—I have got a bunch of pens ready—to sign this bill.” That’s how it works, right—218 votes? Friends, you’re hopelessly behind the times. The Republicans won’t allow measures to pass with just any 218 votes. It has to be mostly Republicans. Welcome to the little-discussed but possibly pivotal concept of the “majority of the majority.”
What does this mean? Pretty much just what it says: For Speaker John Boehner to bring any measure to the House floor, he has to see that a majority of the majority—that is, a majority of his GOP caucus—will support it. You might have in theory a bill that could pass with the support of 109 Democrats and 109 Republicans to reach the needed 218. You couldn’t ask for more bipartisanship than that. But 109 is not a majority of 241, so if Boehner and his whips were counting noses accurately in the run-up, this perfectly balanced measure would never see the light of day for a vote.
Sounds like madness? Yes, it does, and it is. But surely this is something, you say, that goes back a ways, and something both sides have done. Well, not really. It goes back, says congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, only to Denny Hastert, the GOP speaker during the Bush years who was the first to use the phrase. “It was a Hastert original,” Ornstein explained to me Monday. “In earlier eras, it would never have worked—too much heterogeneity in caucuses, to start. Hastert was a different Speaker, in another sense, seeing himself as more a field general in the president’s army than as first and foremost leader of the independent House, but to him that meant creating a majority party machine. More than anything, it formed the parliamentary party mindset.”
Sarah Binder, the congressional scholar at Brookings, notes that in fairness, the pseudo-parliamentary mindset began to develop in the 1970s and 1980s. “I think its parliamentary roots actually stem from liberal Democrats’ effort to challenge the power of conservative committee chairs who dominated the House agenda for a good portion of the 20th century,” Binder says. The Democrats started using the powerful House Rules Committee more aggressively to control the flow of what could and could not get to the floor.
So the Democrats certainly managed the action, but all we have to do is look at history and see that the Democrats didn’t follow this majority of the majority nonsense. Exhibit A: NAFTA. It passed with a minority of the Democratic majority but an overwhelming majority of Republicans.
Nope—it was Republicans who instituted this noxious rule, during the Bush era, probably at Karl Rove’s behest, to ram through every wedge issue they could. Just another manifestation of turning legislating into warfare by other means and making compromise impossible. In spirit, it’s like a House version of the filibuster. A minority of the body gets to block the potential will of a majority, and on a purely and unashamedly partisan basis.
So what does it have to do with the fiscal cliff? It means that you can forget the idea of 20 or so non-wild-eyed Republicans joining the Democrats in passing the higher tax rates. As Republican Tom Cole said last week—and Cole, remember, is one of the reasonable ones here, one of the few GOPers who has declared that he’d vote with the Democrats on such a measure: “You’re not going to come up here and be able to put together a deal with 170 Democrats and 40 Republicans—that’s just not in the cards.” The number, for the record, would have to be at least 26 Republicans in December. If they wait until the next session starts in January, the required number would go down to 18, since the GOP lost eight seats in the election.
But all that is academic because under GOP rules—and this by the way is an unwritten rule; no American political party could ever get away with putting such a thing in print and making it official—the tax-hike proposal would need to have the support of the majority of the House Republican caucus even to reach the floor. It’s blatantly undemocratic, and not enough people know that this is how the Republican Party operates, and I suspect a lot of them wouldn’t even believe it if you told them. It doesn’t help matters when even the president misrepresents the actual facts when he’s out on the stump.
There’s one possible way out of this, a wrinkle reported on Monday by ABC News. It seems that some Republicans are now talking about a scenario whereby they would allow a bill to come to the floor—the bill the Senate already passed, keeping the Bush tax rates on all dollars earned except above $250,000, but raising the rates at that end—and simply vote “present,” allowing it to pass on entirely Democratic votes.
I think that if they vote “present” on something 60-plus percent of the people support, they’ll look like complete idiots to your average American. Voting “present” on the biggest fiscal vote in years, to keep Grover Norquist happy and their caucus united? Hey, if that’s how they want to play it, fine by me. It’ll be nice to see their foolishness outweigh their malevolence.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 4, 2012
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