“Sorry, GOP Reformers”: Your Own Party Isn’t Interested
Republican reformers are getting excited. For years, Ross Douthat and David Frum have been stubbornly making the case for a more moderate and economically populist GOP that would speak to and offer solutions for the problems facing struggling Americans. They are no longer voices crying out in the wilderness.
David Brooks has joined them in a column touting several reform-minded articles in the latest issue of National Affairs, a center-right policy journal. This comes in the wake of a recent speech by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and some not-so-recent speeches by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) on how the GOP might begin to combat poverty.
Taken together, these columns, articles, and speeches show that the movement for Republican reform has begun to persuade…at least a dozen people.
That’s no doubt an exaggeration on the low end, but it goes a long way toward explaining why I’m skeptical about reform efforts. By all means, such efforts are to be applauded and encouraged. But until Republican voters begin to express their support for them in opinion polls and at the ballot box, reform proposals will remain the impotent pet projects of pundits and politicians.
The fact is that there’s no sign so far that those voters want anything to do with new government initiatives to help the poor — or to do anything else for that matter. “Government is too big!” “Taxes are too high!” “Washington is the problem, not the solution!” Those are the only messages the Republican base wants to hear — and thus the only messages most Republicans dare deliver on the campaign trail or act on in the halls of Congress.
There’s a reason why the first tentative expressions of support for reform have come from senators, who are elected by entire states every six years. That distance from those partisan passions, which have produced a deep right-wing skew in gerrymandered House districts, gives senators more ideological freedom of movement.
Still, Republican senators must deal with irascible primary voters. And in the House there is no such freedom, which is why that chamber’s Republican majority refuses to budge on extending unemployment benefits or reversing cuts to food stamps. It is also why Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) efforts to revive immigration reform is likely to fail as well. Republican voters want none of it, and that’s exactly what they’ll get.
Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. He, too, has been trying to rebrand himself as a reformer — talking about the problem of poverty, and reaching a bipartisan deal to pass the bill that temporarily ended gridlock over the budget. All of it is an effort to make himself palatable as a general election presidential candidate. (Nothing inspires donors like “electability.”) But his position is only possible because he established himself as a leading conservative warrior on economic issues, which got the Romney ticket in so much trouble in 2012; indeed, it remains to be seen whether Ryan’s commitment to centrist reform is anything more than PR gloss.
That points to the depth of the GOP’s problem. Its base uncompromisingly demands that party members toe a line that places them far to the right of the median American voter. As long as that continues, Republicans will find themselves out of serious contention for the White House — and unable to follow through on any serious proposals for reform.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, January 10, 2014
“The GOP’s Poverty Problem”: Views Of Republicans Toward Poor People Run From Active Hostility At Worst, To Indifference At Best
Poverty is all the rage among conservatives this week, and will be for, oh, another few days at least. My guess is that this is happening largely because Democrats have made clear that income inequality is the issue they’ll be pressing from now until the November midterm elections, and Republicans are concerned that it might work. So they’re going to head it off by showing voters that they care about people who are struggling, too. The question is, how do you do that when you’re fighting against extending unemployment benefits, trying to cut food stamps, preventing poor people from getting health insurance through Medicaid, and arguing against increasing the minimum wage?
The answer, it seems, is to make public statements in which the word “poverty” appears. Marco Rubio and Eric Cantor gave speeches on it, Paul Ryan will be doing interviews on it, and you’ll probably be hearing more from Republicans on the topic. Mixed in will be some advocacy for policies they’ve pushed for a long time like school vouchers, and the occasional grand if counterproductive idea, like turning over all federal antipoverty programs to the states.
In seeing this, I couldn’t help but think about one of my favorite tidbits from the 2004 presidential campaign, the Bush website’s “Compassion Photo Album,” which consisted entirely of photos of George and/or Laura Bush hanging out with black and Hispanic people. Put aside how condescending it was to present the very fact of talking to a black person as an exercise in “compassion,” as though they were so pathetic that it took a mighty act of generosity for Bush to deign to place himself amongst them. The point is that things like that, and “compassionate conservatism” in general, were never about winning the votes of minorities. It was about showing moderate white voters that Bush was, in the phrase that was so often applied to him by the press when he first ran in 2000, “a different kind of Republican.” When he weighed in on a 1999 Republican budget proposal by saying, “I don’t think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor,” he wasn’t speaking to poor people, he was showing middle class people that he had a heart.
Republicans are doing the same thing now. The fact is that views in the GOP toward poor people run from active hostility at worst to indifference at best. I’m not saying your average Republican wouldn’t be pleased if cutting the capital gains tax did trickle down to the little guy, but even if it doesn’t, they’re still eager to do it because their hearts are with the wealthy. Conservatives see wealth as an expression of virtue; if you have it, it’s because you work hard and deserve it, and if you don’t, that reflects a defect in your character. That’s why so many of their proposals to address poverty are either of the “tough love” variety—have the government stop helping you as a means of encouraging you to get a firm grip on those bootstraps—or things like “enterprise zones” that involve giving tax breaks and exemptions from environmental regulations to wealthy investors and corporations, in the belief that the largesse will trickle down.
The political problem Republicans are trying to address is that, deny it though they might and protest it with cries of “Class warfare!”, economic populism has always been effective for Democrats. That’s partly because it speaks to people’s genuine sentiments about their own struggles and how society should work, and partly because Republicans are the party of the rich. They’d prefer not to be seen that way, of course. But they just are. So when Democrats say “They’re the party of the rich!”, they don’t have to do a lot of persuading, since it’s what voters already believe. A few speeches about poverty aren’t going to change that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 9, 2014
“Meet The Poverty Liars”: GOP Peddles More Garbage In War On The Poor
As we observe the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson declaring the “War on Poverty” this week, it’s worth remembering the way Ronald Reagan wrote its history, and its epitaph, with a soothing nine-word bromide: “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.”
It’s worth remembering, because as Republicans scramble to appear as though they care about the poor, circulating memos teaching how to seem “compassionate” and digging “anti-poverty plans” out of dusty file folders from the 1980s, all they’re doing is updating Reagan for the 21st century. And Reagan was dead wrong the first time around.
It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the effect of Reagan’s War on Poverty lies, especially as they’re warmed over by Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan as they dream about 2016. Even though Reagan began his Republican political career as a race-baiter and anti-welfare demagogue, by the 1980 campaign and his presidency, he’d softened some. He didn’t rail as much against “welfare queens” and “young bucks” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. Now he projected concern for the poor: He wanted to help them, and poverty programs hurt them.
Of course, we can’t forget the racial component of Reagan’s anti-welfare animus. Racial division is what doomed Johnson’s War on Poverty, almost as soon as it began. I was riveted by Slate’s feature on the actual woman behind Reagan’s race-baiting “welfare queen” stereotype. Reagan didn’t invent her, as many people thought over the years; his anecdote was based on Linda Taylor, a Chicago woman who did in fact use multiple identities to commit welfare fraud.
But my takeaway from Josh Levin’s mind-blowing piece had nothing to do with government poverty programs: Linda Taylor was a scary sociopath, a serial identity-switcher credibly accused of multiple cases of kidnapping and murder. Yet politicians and the media focused on the welfare fraud charges. It was the Chicago Tribune, not Reagan, that dubbed her the “welfare queen.” The Chicago police officer responsible for investigating her actual crimes was aghast at the focus on her welfare-grifting rather than her more far serious crimes. She went down in history as a symbol of a “welfare cheat,” not the kind of shrewd but deadly con artist and criminal that comes in every color and gender. And she got away with everything except the welfare fraud.
There weren’t neighborhoods full of Linda Taylors; there was one. But she’s the person Reagan chose to represent the millions of mothers – the vast majority of them white, by the way — struggling to feed their children on welfare aid that in many states might not bring them over the poverty line. And too many Americans chose to believe him.
Later, they believed his lyrical lie about welfare. Reagan revolutionized the poverty game for Republicans: You didn’t have to be angry and Nixonian, or an Archie Bunker type, to be against welfare anymore; instead you could project compassion. White middle-class folks didn’t have to worry that they were indulging resentment, or God forbid racism, by opposing poverty programs. Those programs hurt the poor; Reagan said so.
And here we are again. On the one hand, it’s a slight relief to see some in the GOP abandoning their ugly narrative about “makers” and “takers,” their demonization of the “47 percent” who “just won’t take care and responsibility for their lives,” in Mitt Romney’s campaign-killing words. House Republican leaders are now coaching members to show “compassion” for the unemployed, making sure they reflect that it’s a “personal crisis” and that they will give “proper consideration” to an extension of benefits — as long as Democrats cut other programs, of course — instead of rejecting it out of hand as they did last month.
Meanwhile Sen. Marco Rubio made a whole video to channel Reagan’s ideas about poverty programs. (Is it just me, or is anyone else waiting for him to lurch for a nearby bottle of water and take a slug?) Sleepy-eyed and absolutely unconvincing, Rubio asks: “After 50 years, isn’t it time to declare big government’s war on poverty a failure?” Not surprisingly, his cheesy video offers absolutely no policy agenda to fight poverty.
Rubio’s efforts are being met by well-deserved cynicism in the media and among Republicans. Not so for Paul Ryan’s claims that he’ll develop a bold new anti-poverty agenda. Yet so far, the notions Ryan has floated sound like warmed over Enterprise Zones, the failed 1980s GOP prescription for urban neighborhoods that cut taxes and created other incentives for employers to hire poor residents. Not to be outdone, Sen. Rand Paul is advocating “enterprise zones on steroids,” what he calls “economic freedom zones” in places like Detroit with high unemployment.
Of course, every reputable study of enterprise zones has found their impact on urban poverty “negligible” to nonexistent. “Enterprise zones are not especially effective at increasing overall economic activity or raising incomes for the poor,” Len Burman of the Urban/Brookings Tax Policy Center told Politico recently. “They just seem to move the locus of activity across the zone’s boundary — reducing activity outside the zone and increasing it inside.”
Criticizing GOP flim-flam on poverty shouldn’t obscure the fact that the War on Poverty didn’t do all that its sponsors hoped. That’s not because we did too much, but because we did too little. It’s true that in the immediate wake of the war’s launch, poverty fell from roughly 22 percent to 12 percent, before it began to climb again in the mid-1970s. Not surprisingly, given that establishing Medicare and expanding Social Security were its core components, Johnson’s anti-poverty push made the biggest strides in reducing poverty among the elderly.
For the rest of the poor, the program was never as ambitious – or successful. Johnson famously rejected a big public works jobs program as too expensive, especially as the Vietnam War escalated. He agreed to make “community action” a centerpiece of his anti-poverty work, but he had very different ideas about what that meant than some of the people who implemented the program. To kick it off, Johnson called Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and told him, “Get your planning and development people busy right now to see what you do for the crummiest place in town, the lowest, the bottom thing, and see what we can do about it. We’ll get our dough, and then you can have your plan ready, and we’ll move.”
But on the ground, community action organizers saw their role as organizing the poor to challenge mayors like Daley, which widened existing fissures around race and power in the Democratic Party. Federally funded anti-poverty warriors often took the side of urban insurgents – which was surely the correct side, in moral terms, but with hindsight, not the most effective way to mount a controversial and weakly bipartisan anti-poverty effort.
Finally, Democrats ran away from the War on Poverty, joining Reagan in declaring that government was too often a problem rather than a solution. Bill Clinton’s anti-poverty agenda was a stealthy one. With one hand, he ended welfare as we knew it with the 1996 reform act; with the other hand, he funneled billions to poor people by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit – a Republican idea – as well as eligibility for food stamps and Medicaid. That lifted millions of Americans above the poverty line — but most Americans didn’t know he did it. Democrats from Jimmy Carter to Clinton to Barack Obama – at least until recently — have contributed to the belief that “we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,” by refusing to either take credit for existing programs that fight poverty or advance a bold new agenda to update them.
That’s changing some. Obama is said to be readying a big income inequality push for his State of the Union, and he seems to have realized it must include taking aim at persistent poverty. With even Republicans conceding they can no longer demonize the poor, maybe Democrats can do something to actually help them.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 8, 2014
“A Gaping Wound In The Republican Psyche”: Obamacare Is No Longer Doomed, It Will Become A Scandal
Obamacare — actual, real, Obamacare, with doctors and cards and everything — has been operational for nearly a week now. It has been … extremely boring. It does not look like Stalinist collectivization. There aren’t even any beheadings. It looks like regular medical insurance, except several million more people now have it than before.
How conservatives will respond next to this mundane new world has become the subject of combative speculation. Greg Sargent predicts Republicans will soon come to terms with the law and begin negotiating for incremental improvements. On the right, Conn Carroll angrily replies that the law’s demise remains “inevitable” and liberals will turn against the law, citing Michael Moore as a harbinger of pro-single-payer liberals who will help Republicans dismantle Obamacare, somehow.
I predict a slightly different outcome than either. Obamacare will neither collapse, nor will Republicans accept its legitimacy, but the nature of their opposition will instead slowly morph. Gleeful predictions of imminent collapse will give way to bitter recriminations at the nefarious tactics used to make the law work. Obamacare will cease to be the something certain to destroy Obama and become something Obama has gotten away with.
In recent weeks, it has begun to dawn on some conservatives that the actuarial death spiral they confidently predicted for years — in which the young and healthy shun the exchanges, leading to sicker and costlier patients and rising prices, in turn driving out the remaining healthy customers — may not actually transpire. It won’t for several reasons, one of them being a set of protections embedded in the law itself called risk corridors and reinsurance, which compensate insurance companies that wind up with a sicker customer base in the first three years of the law’s operation, thus preventing a death spiral.
Republicans, having just learned of these provisions, demand that they be abolished, to hasten the death spirals. Repentant immigration reformer Marco Rubio is at the forefront with a bill to strike them from the law. Obviously Obama would never sign such a bill, but Charles Krauthammer offers a solution: demand he sign it or else refuse to lift the debt ceiling. The program is “a huge government bailout,” argues Krauthammer. This is true in the sense that any cost overrun by a defense contractor is also a huge government bailout — which is to say, it’s not true.
But it feels true, and that is the important thing. The premise that Republicans will seek to alter Obamacare in conservative-friendly ways assumes that the policy design of health-care law is their primary motivating force. Everything about the history of Republican health-care thought suggests the opposite. Just five years ago, Mitt Romney was running on a platform of taking his Massachusetts plan, with its individual mandate, national, provoking only the mildest grumbling on the right.
Obamacare is a gaping wound in the Republican psyche, representing not only the rise of a majority moocher class but a potential symbol of a successful Obama presidency. Health-care reform, George F. Will has ludicrously if representatively declared, amounts to Obama’s “single” achievement. If it lives, it will vindicate his presidency as a liberal Reagan, rather than the reprise of Jimmy Carter (or George W. Bush) Republicans wish him to be.
If and when the law melds into the national fabric, the proximate Republican response will not be to adapt their policy ideas to it, but to denounce it as a kind of stolen law. You can see this spirit creeping out not only in Rubio’s proposal but elsewhere. Eleven Republican attorneys general have denounced Obama’s various administrative maneuvers to make the law functional as illegal. “It was powerful corporate America, with its influential lobbyists, that got an additional year to meet the insurance mandate — when individuals did not,” complains The Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel, “It was the unions that got a reprieve from a health-insurance tax — when individuals and small businesses were left to pick up the tab.” The hapless Obamacare is slowly giving way to the devious Obamacare.
In the very long run, Obamacare may become a thing, like Social Security and Medicare, that Republicans initially predict will destroy the fabric of capitalism but eventually accept and then finally swear up and down they will not harm. In the shorter term, it will remain a bloody shirt. Obamacare will be Benghazi or the IRS scandal writ large.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencier, New York Magazine, January 5, 2014
“When The Worm Turns”: Republican Fallacies On Obamacare, The Greatest Hits
Before the holiday spirit makes Republican-bashing a little unseemly, it’s time to get in a last ornery blast at the party’s Obamacare stance. Republicans have enjoyed themselves immensely during the Affordable Care Act’s bungled rollout, but most of the claims they’re making are preposterous and phony. Since anyone able to take a longer view knows we’ll one day be well past Obamacare’s self-inflicted wounds, I’d like as a public service to catalog the GOP’s shabbiest arguments, so we’ll all have a handy reference once the worm fully turns.
The selective “humanitarian crisis.” Conservatives have warned of the “humanitarian disaster” that will ensue if several million people with cancelled policies are unable to secure new coverage before January 1. But this theoretical woe (which will almost certainly be avoided thanks to Web site fixes and policy extensions) pales next to the much larger humanitarian disaster of America’s nearly 50 million uninsured — a crisis that’s persisted for decades without conservatives caring a whit. I can’t be the only one who finds the right’s sudden concern for a small subset of the uninsured a bit rich.
The bogus oppression of the young and healthy. Another confused conservative trope bemoans the enslavement of younger or healthier Americans, who’ve supposedly been conscripted to subsidize their older, sicker countrymen. “Liberals justify these coercive cross-subsidies as necessary to finance coverage for the uninsured and those with pre-existing conditions,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized last Saturday. “But government usually helps the less fortunate honestly by raising taxes to fund programs.” Actually, the Journal has the American way of health subsidy exactly wrong. Most people aged 19 to 34 who have health coverage get it from their employer. And, as I’ve noted before, at nearly every firm, young people pay the same premiums as employees who are older and get more expensively sick. In other words, Obama’s scheme to rob Peter to fund health care for Paul already exists, at vastly larger scale, in corporate America. And while Obamacare is only hoping to sign up 2 million or so young people, 20 million Americans aged 19 to 34 get their coverage on the job. Where’s the Wall Street Journal’s rant against corporate America’s “coercive cross-subsidies”? And while we’re at it, when will we stop making all those people whose houses don’t burn down subsidize those whose do?
The “men and 55 year old women don’t need maternity care” fallacy. Well, yes, and people whose genes don’t predispose them to cancer (which tests will reveal soon enough) don’t need cancer coverage. As Bob Kocher, a doctor and former senior Obama health care advisor, explained, if one of our goals is to not charge women higher premiums than men, all plans have to cover maternity. Among younger women, moreover, maternity is the biggest driver of costs — so if you allow optional coverage, the plans young people buy would be super-expensive. “For insurance to work, you can’t allow people to opt into benefits like maternity right before they get pregnant,” Kocher adds. “When spread across the population, it’s not expensive.” Sounds like Insurance 101. Which in the social insurance context, conservatives can’t abide.
Insurance “bailout” baloney. Sen. Marco Rubio talks opportunistically (but I repeat myself) of Obama’s pledge to “bail out” health plans if the folks they sign up end up being unduly costly to treat. Once again, conservatives eat their own. Such “risk adjustment” — after-the-fact payments to reflect the actual vs. expected risk experience of health plans — has been a sensible staple of conservative insurance market reforms since George H.W. Bush proposed it in 1992. Little known but true: Before Romneycare begat Obamacare, Bushcare begat Romneycare. Rubio was only 21 then. He must not know. Or care.
The “Obama is taking over one-sixth of the economy” ruse. In the Fox News cocoon, this truth is self-evident. But it makes as much sense as crying that Ben Bernanke is “remaking 6/6ths of the economy” every time the Fed touches interest rates. The fact that health-care spending is 18 percent of GDP doesn’t mean Obama is “remaking” or “taking over” anything. He’s tweaking a dysfunctional corner of the market where 5 percent of us get our health coverage. He’s also testing ideas that health gurus in both parties have long suggested might help reign in future costs.
Worse than these GOP fallacies is the party’s smug sanctimony. It’s as if conservatives have decided to parody the moral preening they loathe in liberals, except that the right is serious. As one pundit lectured, “the administration didn’t care enough to make sure the people of their country were protected. In the middle of a second age of anxiety they decided to make America more anxious.”
Yes, the rollout was botched. But what is this person talking about? Finally assuring that illness in the United States can’t be the cause of financial ruin is the very essence of “protection.” How galling that conservatives can make such hollow charges while putting forward no plan of their own to “protect” anyone from anything!
Or take the pundit who wrote that “extending enrollment periods does nothing but provide Americans more time to contemplate their miserable choices.” Only someone with no empathy — someone who has never tried and failed to get coverage in the individual market — could possibly say such a thing.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years arguing that we can solve big problems such as providing insurance coverage in ways that honor both liberal and conservative values. It’s entirely doable — John Rawls and Milton Friedman can be reconciled, trust me. Apart from being sound policy, I’ve assumed such approaches would also be necessary, because with power closely divided in the United States, we’d need to strike big cross-party deals to make progress. The breathtaking intellectual and moral dishonesty of those driving the Obamacare debate in the GOP today makes me feel foolish for having tried.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 4, 2013
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