“Cheney’s Descent Into Incoherence”: The “Guy At The End Of The Bar” Agument
It stands to reason former Vice President Dick Cheney would be unimpressed with the international agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. Heck, Cheney didn’t even get along with George W. Bush late in their second term because Bush was reluctant to launch military strikes on Iran, so the notion that Cheney would balk at President Obama’s policy is hardly a surprise.
But as Ben Armbruster noted, Cheney appeared on Fox News this morning to complain about U.S. policy towards Iran, and the former VP doesn’t even seem to be trying anymore.
The former vice president moved to Iran and without mentioning any specific criticisms of the agreement, claimed it’s bad because of unrelated health care issues. “We don’t follow through and Iran we’ve got a very serious problem going forward and a deal now been cut,” he said. “The same people that brought us ‘you can keep your insurance if you want’ are telling us they’ve got a great deal in Iran with respect to their nuclear program. I don’t believe it.”
This is what I like to call a “guy at the end of the bar” argument. You may know the type: there’s some angry guy watching the TV above the bar, and to no one in particular, the loudmouth wants to share his poorly informed wisdom about a variety of subjects. He’s the guy who’s convinced government is inherently bad because of lines at the DMV.
Cheney has become that guy. About 1 percent of the population will be adversely affected by changes to the messy individual, non-group insurance market, and as such, the P5+1 nuclear agreement with Iran is suspect. What do these two things have to do with one another? For sensible people, nothing.
But in Cheney’s mind, if Obama used oversimplified rhetoric about a sliver of the population individual health plans, then literally everything the administration says on every subject should be rejected. One wonders if Cheney would hold himself to the same standard, given his lengthy record of breathtaking dishonesty.
Indeed, in the same Fox appearance, Cheney added, “I don’t think that Barack Obama believes that the U.S. is an exceptional nation,” which is demonstrably silly.
And why should anyone care what the failed former vice president thinks? It’s a fair question, though I’d note that Cheney’s perspective remains relevant, not just because of his frequent media appearances, but because congressional Republicans continue to seek his counsel on matters related to foreign policy and national security.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 9, 2013
“Obama Gets Real”: A Growing Deficit Of Opportunity Is A Bigger Threat To Our Future Than Our Rapidly Shrinking Fiscal Deficit
Much of the media commentary on President Obama’s big inequality speech was cynical. You know the drill: it’s yet another “reboot” that will go nowhere; none of it will have any effect on policy, and so on. But before we talk about the speech’s possible political impact or lack thereof, shouldn’t we look at the substance? Was what the president said true? Was it new? If the answer to these questions is yes — and it is — then what he said deserves a serious hearing.
And once you realize that, you also realize that the speech may matter a lot more than the cynics imagine.
First, about those truths: Mr. Obama laid out a disturbing — and, unfortunately, all too accurate — vision of an America losing touch with its own ideals, an erstwhile land of opportunity becoming a class-ridden society. Not only do we have an ever-growing gap between a wealthy minority and the rest of the nation; we also, he declared, have declining mobility, as it becomes harder and harder for the poor and even the middle class to move up the economic ladder. And he linked rising inequality with falling mobility, asserting that Horatio Alger stories are becoming rare precisely because the rich and the rest are now so far apart.
This isn’t entirely new terrain for Mr. Obama. What struck me about this speech, however, was what he had to say about the sources of rising inequality. Much of our political and pundit class remains devoted to the notion that rising inequality, to the extent that it’s an issue at all, is all about workers lacking the right skills and education. But the president now seems to accept progressive arguments that education is at best one of a number of concerns, that America’s growing class inequality largely reflects political choices, like the failure to raise the minimum wage along with inflation and productivity.
And because the president was willing to assign much of the blame for rising inequality to bad policy, he was also more forthcoming than in the past about ways to change the nation’s trajectory, including a rise in the minimum wage, restoring labor’s bargaining power, and strengthening, not weakening, the safety net.
And there was this: “When it comes to our budget, we should not be stuck in a stale debate from two years ago or three years ago. A relentlessly growing deficit of opportunity is a bigger threat to our future than our rapidly shrinking fiscal deficit.” Finally! Our political class has spent years obsessed with a fake problem — worrying about debt and deficits that never posed any threat to the nation’s future — while showing no interest in unemployment and stagnating wages. Mr. Obama, I’m sorry to say, bought into that diversion. Now, however, he’s moving on.
Still, does any of this matter? The conventional pundit wisdom of the moment is that Mr. Obama’s presidency has run aground, even that he has become irrelevant. But this is silly. In fact, it’s silly in at least three ways.
First, much of the current conventional wisdom involves extrapolating from Obamacare’s shambolic start, and assuming that things will be like that for the next three years. They won’t. HealthCare.gov is working much better, people are signing up in growing numbers, and the whole mess is already receding in the rear-view mirror.
Second, Mr. Obama isn’t running for re-election. At this point, he needs to be measured not by his poll numbers but by his achievements, and his health reform, which represents a major strengthening of America’s social safety net, is a huge achievement. He’ll be considered one of our most important presidents as long as he can defend that achievement and fend off attempts to tear down other parts of the safety net, like food stamps. And by making a powerful, cogent case that we need a stronger safety net to preserve opportunity in an age of soaring inequality, he’s setting himself up for exactly such a defense.
Finally, ideas matter, even if they can’t be turned into legislation overnight. The wrong turn we’ve taken in economic policy — our obsession with debt and “entitlements,” when we should have been focused on jobs and opportunity — was, of course, driven in part by the power of wealthy vested interests. But it wasn’t just raw power. The fiscal scolds also benefited from a sort of ideological monopoly: for several years you just weren’t considered serious in Washington unless you worshipped at the altar of Simpson and Bowles.
Now, however, we have the president of the United States breaking ranks, finally sounding like the progressive many of his supporters thought they were backing in 2008. This is going to change the discourse — and, eventually, I believe, actual policy.
So don’t believe the cynics. This was an important speech by a president who can still make a very big difference.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 5, 2013
“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
“No Sense Of Irony”: Don’t Be Fooled, Scott Walker Is No Reformer
Could there be irony greater than that of a career politician appearing before a gathering of political donors in a city far from his home state to declare that he is an outsider and a “reformer”?
Not likely.
Indeed, it would take a mighty tone-deaf politician to miss the surreal moment in which he found himself.
Meet Scott Walker.
The Wisconsin governor has spent much of the month of November scrambling around the television studios, luxury hotel suites and corporate-funded “think tanks” of Washington and New York, desperately attempting to position himself as a Republican presidential prospect. And he has done so without any sense of irony.
And an expectation that the national media will be gullible enough to believe that the most divisive governor in the modern history of Wisconsin—polls show that his classic swing state is almost evenly divided between those who approve and disapprove of the governor—can somehow run for the presidency as a consensus builder. Walker is now being pitched by the co-writer of the governor’s 2016 campaign book—Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge—as the ideal GOP candidate for the presidency.
Of all the “compelling potential standard-bearers” for the party, argues Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, “none is better positioned to energize the conservative grassroots while winning the center than Scott Walker.”
Thiessen imagines Walker “as an across-the-board, unflinching, full-spectrum conservative” with an ability to appeal “to persuadable, reform-minded, results-oriented independents.”
That may be what Walker says. But that’s not the assessment of state Senator Dale Schultz, a Republican who has worked with Walker for two decades and who enthusiastically backed Walker in 2010.
This year, Schultz opposed Walker’s approach to a state budget process that the senator said veered—on everything from school funding to academic freedom to tax policy to local control—into territory that was “way too extreme.”
Schultz, a veteran legislator from rural western Wisconsin, criticized Walker for “passing up an opportunity to show independent leadership.”
“No amount of rhetoric or sloganeering will cover up the influence of an out of state billionaire funded and driven agenda,” declared Schultz. “This is not the Wisconsin agenda I’ve fought for over 30 years, and it’s not the Wisconsin agenda I hear from people as I travel around my district and across the state.”
Walker and his allies are doing everything they can to foster the fantasy that the governor as an outsider, a reformer, the antithesis of poilitics as usual. That was certainly the agenda last week, when Walker appeared in New York City before a November 18 gathering of top check writers for Republican candidates, Walker ripped the Democrat he hopes to run against in 2016—Hillary Clinton—for her long record of public service. Hillary Clinton “wasn’t just secretary of state, wasn’t just a U.S. senator, wasn’t just the first lady. She’s been a product of Washington for decades.”
Always at the ready for some self-promotion, Walker told the Republican crowd in New York that “if we’re going to beat somebody like Hillary Clinton, we’ve got to have somebody from outside of Washington, who’s got a proven record of reform.”
So, let’s review: Clinton’s the insider and Walker’s the outsider, right?
Not so fast.
Though she spent many years in Arkansas, Clinton has certainly done her time in Washington. And she is certainly no innocent when it comes to the maneuverings and manipulations that take place in the capitals of states and nations. So even if she is not a “product” of Washington, she is certainly no newcomer to the political game.
And what of Walker?
The governor conveniently forgot to mention that he began his own political career at age 22 and has, since then, run twenty-three years primary and general election campaigns in twenty-three years—making him one of the most determined careerists in American politics. And even before he finishes his first term as one of the nation’s most embattled governors, Walker is bidding for the presidency—so much so that he did not bother to correct a questioner in New York who began: “Since you’re clearly running for president…”
The problem with careerists is that they are often more interested in their careers than in challenging power.
In a word, they are: intimidated.
But Walker says that’s not him.
The governor’s new book seeks to portray this would-be presidential contender as an fearless political warrior, ever at the ready to advance his ideals.
That, like Walker’s suggestion that his austerity agenda has been successful, is a fantasy grounded in his ambition rather than reality.
In fact, Walker is one of the most intimidated politicians in America.
When Walker ran for governor in 2006, he framed a reform message that talked about ending crony capitalism and addressing the influence of special-interest campaign money and lobbying on the state budget process. In meetings with the state’s newspaper editorial boards, he pitched himself as a different kind of Republican who would not play insider political games. Walker earned some high marks when he “vowed to run as an underdog battling party insiders”—except from party insiders, who were unimpressed with his campaign.
In March 2006, just days after Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman visited Wisconsin, and barely a week after a visit to the state by Vice President Dick Cheney, Walker folded his gubernatorial campaign.
No “unintimidated” stand against the Washington power brokers. No fight to the end on behalf of his ideals. No faith that a grass-roots campaign could beat the money power.
Four years later Walker was back, with a better fundraising operation. This time, he had all the right connections. National donors, like Charles and David Koch, made maximum contributions to his campaign, and then gave even more money to groups making “independent” expenditures on Walker’s behalf.
He won, and in February 2011, when he got a call from someone he thought was David Koch, Walker played along with the caller’s talk about “planting some troublemakers” to disrupt peaceful protests against the governor’s anti-labor policies. Walker writes in his book that “we never—never—considered putting ‘troublemakers’ in the crowd to discredit the protesters.” Yet, when he was talking to someone he thought was a billionaire campaign donor, the governor said: “We thought about that.” If we take Walker at his word—that he never considered using agents provocateurs—then why didn’t he say so at the time? Was he intimidated by someone he thought was a major campaign donor?
The same question arises regarding Walker’s conversation with Beloit billionaire Diane Hendricks, who gave $500,000 to his 2012 campaign. Walker has said he has “no interest in pursuing right-to-work legislation” to weaken private-sector unions. Yet, when Hendricks asked him about right-to-work legislation, Walker did not say, “We’re not going to do that.” Rather, he told Hendricks his “first step” would be to attack public-sector unions as part of a “divide-and-conquer” strategy.
Walker wants a frequently obtuse national media and grassroots Republicans to imagine that he is “unintimidated.” And perhaps that is the case when he is picking on teachers and nurses and anyone who might dare to join a public-employee union. But when the party bosses and billionaire donors come calling, he’s just another politician telling the money power what it wants to hear.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, November 26, 2013
“Rooting For Failure”: Hard To Remember A Time When A Major Political Party And Its Media Arm Rooted For Fellow Americans To Lose
I just spent 15 minutes on my local health care exchange and realized that I could save a couple hundred dollars a month on my family’s insurance. Of course, I live in Washington State, which has a very competitive market, a superbly functioning website and no Koch-brothers-sponsored saboteurs trying to discourage people from getting health care.
California is just as good. It’s enrolling more than 2,000 people a day. New York is humming as well. And Kentucky, it’s the gold standard now: More than 56,000 people have signed up for new health care coverage — enough to fill a stadium in Louisville.
This is terrible news, and cannot be allowed to continue. If there’s even a small chance that, say, half of the 50 million or so Americans currently without heath care might get the same thing that every other advanced country offers its citizens, that would be a disaster.
But not to worry. The failure movement is active and very well funded. You probably know about the creepy Uncle Sam character in ads financed by the Koch brothers. Sicko Sam is seen leering over a woman on her back in a hospital exam room, her legs in stirrups. This same guy is now showing up on college campuses, trying to get young people to opt out of health care. On some campuses, he plies students with free booze and pizza — swee-eeet!
The Republican Party started a failure campaign earlier this year, but then the strategy got sidetracked in a coercive government shutdown that cost us all $24 billion or so. With the disastrous rollout of the federal exchange, Republicans now smell blood. A recent memo outlined a far-reaching, multilevel assault on the Affordable Care Act. Horror stories — people losing their lousy health insurance — will be highlighted, and computer snafus celebrated.
Ron Paul, the nuttier of the two political Pauls, recently suggested to a crowd in Virginia that “nullification” of the health care law might be the best way to kill it. I’m not sure what he meant by that, but it sounds illegal.
It’s hard to remember a time when a major political party and its media arm were so actively rooting for fellow Americans to lose. When the first attempt by the United States to launch a satellite into orbit, in 1957, ended in disaster, did Democrats start to cheer, and unify to stop a space program in its infancy? Or, when Medicare got off to a confusing start, did Republicans of the mid-1960s wrap their entire political future around a campaign to deny government-run health care to the elderly?
Of course not. But for the entity of the Obama era, Republicans have consistently been cheerleaders for failure. They rooted for the economic recovery to sputter, for gas prices to spike, the job market to crater, the rescue of the American automobile industry to fall apart.
I get it. This organized schadenfreude goes back to the dawn of Obama’s presidency, when Rush Limbaugh, later joined by Senator Mitch McConnell, said their No. 1 goal was for the president to fail. A CNN poll in 2010 found 61 percent of Republicans hoping Obama would fail (versus only 27 percent among all Americans).
Wish granted, mission accomplished. Obama has failed — that is, if you judge by his tanking poll numbers. But does this collapse in approval have to mean that the last best chance for expanding health care for millions of Americans must fail as well?
Does this mean we throw in the towel, and return to a status quo in which insurance companies routinely cancel policies, deny health care to people with pre-existing conditions and have their own death panel treatment for patients who reach a cap in medical benefits?
The Republican plan would do just that, because they have no plan but to crush the nation’s fledgling experiment. Sometimes they bring up vouchers, or tort reform, or some combination of catchphrases. Here was Sarah Palin, who is to articulate reason what Mr. Magoo is to vision, on the Republican alternative, as she told Matt Lauer:
“The plan is to allow those things that have been proposed over many years to reform a health care system in America that certainly does need more help so that there’s more competition, there’s less tort-reform threat, there’s less trajectory of the cost increases. And those plans have been proposed over and over. And what thwarts those plans? It’s the far left.”
Yes, it is a big and legitimate news story, for a presidency built on technical expertise, that the federal exchange is not working as promised. Ditto Obama’s vow that people could keep their bottom-feeder health care policies.
But where were the news conferences, the Fox News alerts, the parading of people who couldn’t get their lifesaving cancer treatments under the old system? Where was the media attention when thousands of people were routinely dumped once they got sick? When did Republicans in Congress hold an oversight hearing on the leading cause of personal bankruptcy — medical debt?
All of that is what we had before. And all of that is what we will return to if some version of the Affordable Care Act is not made workable. Republicans have a decent chance, in next year’s elections, of killing the dream of progressive presidents going back to Teddy Roosevelt. But they shouldn’t count on it. What’s going against them, or any party invested in failure, is that Americans are inherently optimistic. That alone may be enough to save Obamacare.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, November 28, 2013
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