“Pretending To Be Something They’re Not”: Election Season; Time For GOP Halloween Masquerade Ball
It’s lucky for the Republicans that most general elections fall so close to Halloween. That gives them an excuse for their great bi-annual GOP Halloween Masquerade Ball.
This year the Republicans are doing their very best to prevent the voters from remembering who they really are and what they really stand for. They’re putting on their “moderate masks” and the costumes of ordinary middle class Americans.
Why do they have to pretend to be something their not? Their problem is that most Americans disagree with their positions on just about every economic and social issue of the day. Voters disagree with Republicans on economic issues like:
GOP opposition to raising the minimum wage;
GOP refusal to renew unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed;
GOP obstruction of Democratic proposals to lower payments and cut interest rates on student loans;
The incredibly unpopular GOP proposal to eliminate the Medicare guarantee and replace it with a voucher for private insurance;
The failed GOP proposal to privatize Social Security;
GOP opposition to making oil companies, CEO’s of big corporations and Wall Street Banks pay their fair share of taxes;
GOP proposals to cut funding for public education;
GOP proposals to cut funding for medical and scientific research and development;
Republican support for eliminating and weakening regulations that limit the ability of Wall Street speculators to cause another financial collapse like the one that created the Great Recession;
Republican support for tax laws that provide an incentive for corporations to outsource U.S. jobs to other countries;
The Republican refusal to do anything that would address the fundamental economic fact that even though Gross Domestic Product per person in the U.S. has increased 80% over the last 30 years, all of that increase went to the top 1% and left everyone else with stagnating incomes.
Dressing up Republican candidates to disguise these positions is especially difficult because so many of their candidates personally embody these deeply unpopular stances.
Take the GOP candidate for Governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner. Rauner made $61 million last year — that’s $29,000 an hour. Yet he said he would like to abolish the minimum wage or at the very least get the Illinois legislature to cut the Illinois minimum wage from $8.25 to the national rate of $7.25 per hour.
Rauner made his money as a Wall Street speculator who basically took over companies and bled them of cash. Along the way his 200-facility nursing home chain was accused of malpractice for patient neglect. Rather than apologize and pay the claims, Rauner’s investment firm sold the firm to a shell company that was actually owned by a nursing home resident and declared bankruptcy so Rauner’s investment firm could dodge paying the claims of abused residents.
That’s just one of many stories about how Rauner made his money. Rauner owns nine residences — including a penthouse on Central Park in New York and three ranches. Pretty tough to put a “middle class” costume on Rauner and pretend he has the interests of ordinary Americans at heart.
Or then there’s the GOP Senate candidate in Georgia — David Perdue. Early in the campaign — and well before the GOP masquerade ball — Perdue actually admitted that he had “spent most of his career outsourcing” American jobs to other countries.
Those pesky electronic media that save comments like that make it awfully hard to dress up people like Perdue as a “neighborhood businessman” when elections come around.
The economy may be the issue that is most important to the majority of voters, but women’s health isn’t far behind. And there the GOP has candidates that look downright weird in their “hi, I’m a moderate” Halloween outfits.
Jodi Ernst, the Republican candidate for Senate in Iowa supports the “personhood” amendment. That’s a proposal that would make most forms of hormonal birth control — like the birth control pill and the IUD — illegal.
Cory Gardner, the GOP candidate for Senate in Colorado also supports the “personhood” amendment.
Earth to Jodi and Cory — your positions are way out of the mainstream in the United States, since over 98 percent of American women use birth control sometime in their lifetime. If they really wanted to wear something appropriate to the GOP Halloween masquerade ball this year they would wear space suits — since their positions are pretty much in outer space. But in fact they have donned costumes aimed at making them look every so “mainstream.” Don’t bet on closing ads from these guys asking voters to support them because they would ban the most popular forms of birth control.
Then there are candidates like GOP House Members Tom Cotton and Bill Cassidy, running for Senate in Arkansas and Louisiana, respectively. These guys voted for the Ryan budget that would eliminate Medicare and replace it with a voucher for private insurance — costing seniors thousands per year in increased out-of-pocket costs.
They try to hide their positions behind a “Big Lie” mask that Democrats voted to “cut $700 billion” from Medicare with the Affordable Care act. In fact, far from cutting benefits for seniors, the Affordable Care Act closed the “donut hole” for prescription drug coverage and provided free preventive care to complement guaranteed Medicare benefits. It paid for these benefits partially by cutting subsidies to big insurance companies. Those are the “cuts to Medicare” Cotton and Cassidy are talking about. Not one senior had benefits cut. It’s nothing but a big lie. But what do you do if your real position is as unpopular as their vote to eliminate the Medicare guarantee?
And we can’t forget about Thom Tillis, the Speaker of the state house who is running for Senate in North Carolina. He led passage of an incredibly unpopular series of measures to curtail voting rights and also prevented the expansion of Medicaid that would provide health care to many in the state. Now he’s trying to weave and bob to disguise his position on these and other way-out GOP positions.
And of course, there is the unpopular Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who is running for his political life in Kentucky. He claims to want to rip out “Obamacare root and branch” while maintaining he would support continuation of the very popular and effective Kentucky version of “Obamacare” — “Kynect.” This, of course, is an impossibility. Guess he’s counting on a magician’s costume to make the contradictions in his positions disappear.
These are just the highlights from the “red carpet” at the GOP Halloween Masquerade Ball. There are many other attendees:
Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin — now desperately trying to explain how his state’s austerity program could have failed to produce its promised 250,000 new jobs, when neighboring Minnesota progressive policies have led to a much more robust recovery.
Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan — whose “emergency manager” program stripped democratic local government from much of the state’s minority population.
Michigan Senate Candidate Terri Lynn Land, whose conservative economic policies are very popular among plutocrats on Wall Street, but have landed her well behind her Democratic opponent in the polls of ordinary citizens.
Governor Mike Rounds of South Dakota whose Wall Street-oriented economic policies have run into trouble among the prairie populists of South Dakota where he’s now running for Senate.
Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas whose tax cuts for the wealthy have almost bankrupted the state government and are helping to drag down long-time Republican Senator Pat Robertson.
And there’s Florida’s multi-millionaire governor Rick Scott. Scott has dutifully taken the side of the oil industry and the billionaire Koch Brothers even though their opposition to proposals to curb carbon pollution could sink a good portion of Florida’s most populous communities into the ocean.
And there are dozens of Republican House Members who are trying desperately to get voters to forget about their votes to shut down the government, end the Medicare guarantee, and cut funding for education.
Of course economic, social and environmental issues aren’t the only turf where the GOP has the low political ground.
Almost 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks when someone buys a gun. Not the Republicans.
Most Americans support campaign finance reform that would prevent a few dozen billionaires from dominating our elections. Not the Republicans.
Most Americans want us to invest more funds in health research to protect us from diseases like Ebola, cancer and the flu. Not the Republicans.
Most Americans support comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. Not the Republicans. This year, the GOP even prevented a vote in the House on a bill that overwhelmingly passed the Senate. House GOP Speaker Boehner wouldn’t allow a vote because he knew it would pass. Basically he is thwarting the will of Congress.
Will the Republican Halloween Masquerade Ball deceive enough Americans into thinking the GOP represents them, instead of the coalition of Wall Street Bankers and radical extremists who want to ban birth control and scapegoat immigrants that provide the foundation for the Republican Party? Will their costumes and masks convince enough voters to allow them to gain control of the Senate, win more seats in the House and overcome Democratic leads for key Governor’s mansions around the country?
We’ll all know a week from Tuesday. But the truth is that there would not be a chance that their disguises would succeed if everyone in America went to the polls.
The truth is that, in the end, this election is all about who votes and who stays home.
The big Wall Street banks and CEO’s don’t want ordinary people to wake up. They want us to sleep through the election so they can elect Republicans who will allow them to siphon more and more of the fruits of our economy into their own pockets.
Don’t let them steal your family’s security while you sleep through the election. It’s really up to us. Vote early. Vote by mail. Vote November 4.
But whatever you do, don’t let them win their game of deception. Vote.
By: Robert Creamer, Political Organizer, Strategist, Author; Partner Democracy Partners; The Huffington Post Blog, October 26, 2014
“The Government We Deserve”: In The End, The Ultimate Responsibility Lies With The Voters Themselves
This may be the most expensive midterm election in history, but it isn’t necessarily the dumbest. That’s not because it’s smart in any way, just that elections in America are always dumb. To take just one tiny data point, the hottest Senate race in the country may be in Iowa, where everything turns on just how mad the Democratic candidate got when his neighbor’s chickens kept crapping in his yard. Madison and Jefferson would be so proud.
Commentators with brows set high and low periodically try to redeem a public that falls for this kind of stuff, with varying degrees of success. Political scientists often point out that accumulating detailed political knowledge is an inefficient use of time, when you can just use party identification as a proxy and almost all the time your decisions will be the same as they would if you knew as much as the most addicted political junkie. Perfectly true. But other attempts are less successful. I point your attention to a piece today in the Times by Lynn Vavreck, an extremely smart person, arguing that political ads aren’t necessarily so bad. From what I can tell it’s only about three-quarters serious, but still:
A functioning democracy needs an electorate that makes informed choices. Much as we dislike them, political ads, especially in midterm elections, convey information to voters about candidates, particularly those who are unknown to most people.
For example, evidence from recent midterm elections showed that in places where candidates advertised with greater frequency, voters on average knew more objective things about the candidate. The effects are notable for something as straightforward as helping voters identify who is actually running in the race. And just like campaign spending generally, challengers’ ads have greater impact than those of incumbents.
The evidence she’s able to marshall all comes from studies where the dependent variable is knowing who the candidates are. That TV ads can produce this kind of “knowledge” isn’t surprising — if you saw 500 ads saying, “Congressional candidate John Beelzeberg: He’d eat your children if he got the chance,” by the end you’d probably know that John Beelzeberg is running for Congress.
And it’s surely important to know who the candidates are. But if that’s about all we can expect of voters, it’s pathetic.
Meanwhile, Mark Leibovich has a useful essay about the “bumpkinification” of the midterms, in which every contender competes to claim the mantle of the most inexperienced candidate who knows nothing about what legislators actually do, and will somehow “change Washington” with their down-home common sense:
Candidates themselves don’t deserve all the blame for their bumpkinizing. Much of that rests with the blizzards of money being blown from wealthy donors and super PACs to a growing oligarchy of media consultants, who typically live on the coasts and work for multiple candidates at once. In a D.C. twist, those bumpkins we see on our screens are often not even real bumpkins so much as some rich guy’s idea of what a bumpkin should be. One telltale signal is how familiar the props are—the livestock, the guns, the motorcycles, the dogs and, of course, the flannel. An ad for Rob Maness, a Louisiana Republican running for the Senate, features a trifecta: a gun, an airboat and an alligator.
In large part, this is what we have to show for the nearly $4 billion that is expected to be spent in this campaign, the most of any midterm election in history. “When you have this much outside spending, way too much of the advertising has no soul,” acknowledged Todd Harris, a partner at Something Else Strategies, who is based in Washington, far from his clients Ernst and McFadden. The people who are creating these spots, in other words, don’t have much connection to the state they’re working in. It’s a good bet that few at Something Else Strategies have spent much time on hog farms. They are paid either way.
I wouldn’t want to excuse Washington consultants, but let’s not forget that responsibility is not zero-sum. Everybody who takes part in this is to blame. There are the candidates, who serve up a ten-course meal of drivel. There are the outside groups that swoop in and try desperately to distract and confuse. There are the reporters who decide that it’s really important that they write another ten stories about somebody’s chickens or somebody else’s “gaffe.”
But in the end, ultimate responsibility lies with the voters themselves. It is within their power to say to candidates, “Look, I’m upset about Congress’ inability to solve problems too, but the fact that you put on a flannel shirt and told me a story about the wisdom of your grandpappy does nothing to convince me you’ll actually be able to solve those problems.” They could do that. But they don’t.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 28, 2014
“Bad Politics And Worse Policy”: GOP’s Minimum Wage Disaster; How Chris Christie And Scott Walker Are Stepping In It
Buoyed by surveys showing that voters overwhelmingly support raising the federal minimum wage, Democrats have held Republicans’ feet to the fire this year, pressing GOP candidates and officeholders to take clear stands on the issue. Most have — and they’re overwhelmingly opposed to raising the federal wage above its current level of $7.25 an hour. And as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie attest, it’s exceedingly difficult for Republicans to discuss the issue without sounding both callous and clueless.
Christie’s minimum wage flub came today — during a speech before a well-heeled crowd at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, no less. “I’m tired of hearing about the minimum wage,” Christie said, according to The Hill. “I really am. I don’t think there’s a mother or a father sitting around the kitchen table tonight in America saying, ‘You know, honey, if our son or daughter could just make a higher minimum wage, my God, all of our dreams would be realized.’”
“Is that what parents aspire to for our children? They aspire to a greater, growing America where their children have the ability to make much more money and have much greater success than they have and that’s not about a higher minimum wage,” Christie added.
Set aside for a moment the fact that a dismal labor market leaves many workers with no choice but to take minimum wage jobs. It’s true, as Christie argues, that most parents aspire to far more for their children. But in a socially stratified America with limited upward mobility, that’s an argument for measures to redistribute wealth and opportunity and to invest in disadvantaged communities with increased education funding, public works projects, and the like. Don’t look for a GOP conservative like Christie to endorse such policies.
Then there’s Walker, who faces a tough reelection battle in Wisconsin against Democrat Mary Burke. Earlier this month, Walker’s administration rebuffed a workers coalition’s effort to raise the state’s minimum wage in accordance with a state law that calls for the minimum to be a “living wage.” The administration responded to their effort by asserting that $7.25 an hour is a living wage — even though MIT calculates that a single parent would need to earn $21.17 an hour to make a living wage in the state capital of Madison. But don’t bother Walker with such figures. The minimum wage, he asserted last week, doesn’t even “serve a purpose,” explaining that he’d rather help Wisconsinites secure higher-paying jobs than the raise the minimum wage. OK, but what about the 500,000 workers in the state who’d see a raise if the minimum wage went from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour?
The GOP, it seems, is functionally incapable of talking about the minimum wage without botching basic facts or seeming downright insensitive. No, minimum wage hikes don’t kill job growth, and no, Joni Ernst, most minimum wage earners aren’t high school students who just need a little “starter wage.” The callousness caucus, though, will hear none of it.
By: Like Brinker, Deputy Politics Editor, Salon, October 22, 2014
“Deception Carries No Meaningful Risk”: Mega-Blitz Of Ad Spending Makes It Easier For Candidates To Lie
Today the New York Times reports that Republicans are benefiting from a money surge that could give them a boost in all those tight Senate races, and the article probably brought a smile to many Republican faces. The truth is that it’s probably too late for money in these amounts to change much of anything either way.
But this is significant, because it highlights how current campaigns are now getting hit by such a massive blizzard of spending and advertising that for candidates, accountability has become all but impossible and deception carries no meaningful risk.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
All told, in seven races for which both Democrats and Republicans provided complete fund-raising totals by Wednesday evening — Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan and North Carolina — Republicans held more cash in six of them, with a net advantage of about $7 million. At the same time, Democrats had booked more advertising from Sept. 29 through Election Day in at least five of those races, with the biggest advantages in North Carolina and Iowa, according to a Republican tracking media purchases.
In Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia and Iowa, Republican contenders posted their best fund-raising quarter of the year. In Iowa, the Republican candidate, Joni Ernst, who narrowly leads in polling, raised $6 million, more than double the amount taken in by her Democratic opponent, Representative Bruce Braley, and reported three times as much in cash on hand than Mr. Braley. Representative Tom Cotton of Arkansas reported raising $3.8 million, far more than the Democratic incumbent, Senator Mark Pryor, who took in $2.2 million. In Colorado, Representative Cory Gardner raised $4.5 million and reported $1.4 million more in cash on hand than Senator Mark Udall, the Democratic incumbent.
If you don’t live in one of these states it may be hard to appreciate the incredible volume of political ads television viewers have already endured in recent months. A count from the Wesleyan Media Project of television ads shows that in just one week, some 14,000 ads were aired in North Carolina, 13,000 in Iowa, 11,000 in Kentucky, and so on. Buying a few hundred more ads in one of these states is like walking up to people who have been standing in the middle of a monsoon and firing a squirt gun at them.
Meanwhile, the total spending so far in these races is enormous, as these data from the Center for Responsive Politics show:
By the time the race is over, the spending in, for example, North Carolina will probably total at least $75 million. Is another million or two going to be transformative? Probably not.
The important thing here is that all of this spending makes real accountability a lot harder. The candidates know that any forum where they might actually be held accountable will inevitably be drowned out by all the ads. For instance, in a debate yesterday Cory Gardner had to endure a grilling by a couple of obviously exasperated reporters over the fact that Gardner keeps denying that the “Personhood” bill he sponsored in Congress actually does what it says it does. He bobbed and weaved, and the footage looks really bad. But is Gardner particularly worried? I doubt it. He’s up by a couple of points in the polls, and how many people actually watched that debate? He has thousands of opportunities to get his message out his way.
Nor, I suspect, is Mitch McConnell worried that he’ll pay a price for trying to fool people in Kentucky into thinking that you can repeal the Affordable Care Act “root and branch,” but they’ll still get to keep Kynect, the hugely successful ACA exchange. Voters don’t understand the distinction, and the media aren’t helping them get it. In the post-Citizens United world, there’s little to fear, so long as you and your allies have the money.
That isn’t to say that the media couldn’t impose some accountability if they truly wanted to. But it would take an agreement that a particular issue is important enough to warrant intense, repeated attention. And that, apparently, is something they only do for things that have little or no substantive importance, like whether a candidate will say who she voted for.
Thirty years ago, George H.W. Bush’s press secretary Peter Teeley was asked by a reporter about a lie Bush had told during his debate with Geraldine Ferraro. “You can say anything you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it,” he said. And if reporters then correct the falsehood? “So what?” Teeley responded. “‘Maybe 200 people read it or 2,000 or 20,000.”
The principle today is the same, but the information environment has changed. Candidates are no more afraid of accountability than they were, but now it’s because they’re drowning voters in advertising. And they can still say anything they want.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 16, 2014
“For GOP, Crickets From The Pundits”: The Kentucky Senate Race And The Media’s Double Standard For Disqualifying Candidates
Last week, in the tightly contested Senate race in Kentucky, both Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell and his Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes gave newsworthy interviews in which they seemed to stumble over basic questions. But only one of the awkward missteps was treated as big news–treated even as a campaign-ending debacle–by some in the Beltway press: the Grimes interview.
Pundits pounced after Grimes refused, during an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal editorial board, to say whether she voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. (McConnell has spent most of his campaign trying to tie Grimes to Obama, who is unpopular in Kentucky.)
After a Republican opposition group posted the clip of Grimes’ answer, the Washington Post immediately linked to it and mocked the candidate’s performance as “painful.” On MSNBC, morning host Joe Scarborough bellowed, “What a rookie mistake!” CNN commentators criticized Grimes for being “too scripted” and “evasive.”
Keep in mind; the issue itself is of no practical consequence to Kentucky voters — it doesn’t affect their day-to-day lives. But the story revolved around campaign “optics,” which Beltway commentators now thrive on, especially when it’s bad Democratic optics.
“Is she ever going to answer a tough question on anything? You want to be a U.S. senator?” demanded Meet The Press moderator, Chuck Todd. “I think she disqualified herself. I really do. I think she disqualified herself.”
Recall that query (“Is she ever going to answer a tough question on anything?”), and the way Todd described it as a disqualifying trait for a Senate candidate. Because the day before the Grimes interview, McConnell called into Kentucky Sports Radio to talk with host Matt Jones. Days earlier, the popular host had interviewed Grimes with the understanding the McConnell campaign had also agreed to an interview. But after Jones grilled Grimes on the air, McConnell’s campaign refused to answer Jones’ emails and phone calls with regards to finalizing an appearance.
After days of on-air pleas, McConnell, without advance notice, finally called into the show last Wednesday and spoke with Jones for 14 minutes. Among the actual topics covered (in the place of optics analysis) were climate change and gay marriage. McConnell basically refused to answer questions about either:
JONES: That’s a yes or no question. Do you believe in global warming?
McCONNELL: No it isn’t. It is not a yes or no question. I am not a scientist.
And here’s how McConnell danced around the issue of gay marriage:
When asked if he supports gay marriage, McConnell answered, “I believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman.” Asked why he believes that, McConnell again repeated he thinks marriage is “between one man and one woman.” Again asked “why?” McConnell repeated the same line. Jones tried one more time. Again, “It is my belief that marriage is between one man and one woman.”
To recap: If you’re a Kentucky Democrat and you don’t answer a straight-forward question, you may as well take your name off the ballot, according to Beltway journalists. But if you’re a Kentucky Republican and you do the same thing, it’s mostly crickets from the same pundits.
And again, Grimes’ election crime was to stumble over a tactical campaign question, while McConnell refused to answer questions about public policy that inform the decisions he makes as a lawmaker. So why does the Democrat get hit harder?
There’s something of a conventional wisdom among commentators that Republicans nominated much stronger candidates this election cycle. And specifically, GOP candidates aren’t out on the campaign trail making up strange and unsupported claims that could jeopardize Republican chances of reclaiming the Senate. This observation is usually made in contrast to 2010 and 2012, when untested Republican candidates such as Todd Akin, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle uncorked a series of verbal shockers and badly lost their campaigns.
Republican candidates this time around are so much more professional and focused and on-message. They’re so mainstream. Or so goes the narrative.
Keep in mind that the Republican candidate in North Carolina, Thom Tillis, says the government needs to “seal” the U.S.-Mexican border in order to protect America from the Ebola virus (via West Africa). The Republican candidate in Arkansas, Tom Cotton, thinks Mexican drug cartels are teaming up with Islamic State terrorists. And the Republican candidate in Iowa, Joni Ernst, suggested Obama be impeached because he’s “become a dictator.
All of that is complete nonsense. But Republicans don’t have to worry about candidates making crazy allegations this cycle, and Grimes is the one who flunked the competency test?
Meanwhile, Colorado Republican Senate candidate Cory Gardner repeatedly refuses to directly answer whether “humans are contributing significantly to climate change.”
That type of evasion has become a hallmark of the midterm election cycle: Faced with the very simple, yes-or-no question about whether candidates believe climate change is happening, lots of Republican in tight races now throw up their hands and suggest the topic’s just too complicated and confusing, and that once scientists stop arguing about it, they’ll be happy to address the issue.
Of course, 97 percent of scientists are in heated agreement about the topic, which makes the dodge so comical. But have we heard D.C. pundits condemning the conveyor belt of clunky dodges? Have who heard Sunday morning talk show hosts announce that any candidate who refuses to address a “tough question” about climate change (or gay marriage) has instantly disqualified him or herself?
We have not.
Question: Are there different media standards for Republicans and Democrats this election cycle?
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters For America, October 13, 2014
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