“Plan Versus No Plan”: Virginia’s Gubernatorial Race Is A Referendum On ObamaCare, And The GOP Is Going To Lose
Republican Ken Cuccinelli became a national conservative star as Virginia’s attorney general by leading the legal fight to declare the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional all the way to the Supreme Court. Now he’s running for governor, and he’s making health care the defining issue of his campaign.
As the federal rollout continues to be plagued by website problems and renewed criticism over discontinued low-coverage individual plans, Cuccinelli told his supporters Monday, “We need people to know Nov 5th in Virginia is a referendum on ObamaCare.” His latest ad slams Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe for wanting to “EXPAND OBAMACARE,” and closes by saying “to stop ObamaCare and higher taxes, there’s only one choice.” Outside conservative groups are also running ads excoriating McAuliffe as a supporter of ObamaCare.
Virginia voters appear to agree with Cuccinelli that health care is one of the most important issues of the campaign. The Washington Post poll conducted October 24-27 asked likely voters how important eight different issues were to determining their vote. Along with job creation and education, health care tied for first, with 72 percent saying those issues were “very important.”
And yet, in that same poll, Cuccinelli is losing by 12 points.
In fact, Cuccinelli is losing in every single poll that’s been taken in this race save for one in early July, suggesting that his defeat is a near-certainty.
Republicans are clinging to a bit of hope after a Quinnipiac poll released this week showed him only down by 4 points. But that poll only shows a minor tightening — within the margin-of-error — relative to the previous Quinnipiac poll from earlier in the month. Further, both Quinnipiac and the Washington Post polls peg Cuccinelli’s level of support around a meager 40 percent. And both polls show a third-party candidate in the race drawing support away from both major party candidates, which suggests if the also-ran fades in the stretch it won’t upend the stable trajectory of the race to date. (The Huffington Post synthesis of all the polls to date estimates McAuliffe’s lead to be a healthy eight points.)
Why isn’t health care helping Cuccinelli in the swing state of Virginia, despite all the very real problems ObamaCare has been facing this month? After all, the candidates’ positions on health care couldn’t make the choice any clearer. Cuccinelli wants the law repealed. McAuliffe says “it’s time to implement the law” by accepting federal money so the state can expand Medicaid coverage for the working poor, and having Virginia establish its own health insurance exchange.
The simplest answer is: McAuliffe’s position is shared by a whole lot of Virginians.
A plurality of 49 percent supported ObamaCare in a different Quinnipiac poll taken October 2-8. Voters said McAuliffe would do a “better job” on health care by a nine-point margin over Cuccinelli.
Of course, now that the shutdown is over and the program’s rollout is suffering significant flak, you might expect those numbers to worsen for McAuliffe. But this week’s Washington Post poll finds voters now trust McAuliffe to do a “better job” on health care by a whopping 21-point margin.
There is another plausible reason: Republicans still refuse to bolster their criticism of ObamaCare with serious policy alternatives.
Despite Cuccinelli’s insistence that the election is a referendum on ObamaCare, his website fails to include a page dedicated to what he would do about health care. Instead, he buries a few paragraphs on health care on his overall “Issues” page, which offers several conservative buzzwords but no actual policy specifics. Meanwhile, McAuliffe spells out his health care agenda in a seven-page white paper.
Plan beats no plan.
Despite all the troubles the Obama administration has had in getting ObamaCare off the ground, what’s been clear all month is this: Whatever misgivings and uncertainties persist, millions of people are going to Healthcare.gov and want the new system to work. But only Democrats, and a very small number of Republican governors, are showing a commitment to making the system work.
This should be a wake-up call to Republicans who thought the shaky Affordable Care Act rollout would shred belief in governmental competence, undermine liberalism, justify conservative obsession with repeal, and infuse Republicans with fresh momentum.
Because as this Virginia race shows, without plausible Republican policy alternatives, Democrats will able to ride out the inevitable hiccups that come with implementing new government programs and avoid any mass anti-government backlash. Simply hating on ObamaCare has not, is not, and will not be a potent political weapon.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, October 31, 2013
“A War On The Poor”: This Is Now The Central And Defining Issue Of American Politics
John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, has done some surprising things lately. First, he did an end run around his state’s Legislature — controlled by his own party — to proceed with the federally funded expansion of Medicaid that is an important piece of Obamacare. Then, defending his action, he let loose on his political allies, declaring, “I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor. That, if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.”
Obviously Mr. Kasich isn’t the first to make this observation. But the fact that it’s coming from a Republican in good standing (although maybe not anymore), indeed someone who used to be known as a conservative firebrand, is telling. Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn’t really stand for anything else — and only willfully blind observers can fail to see that reality.
The big question is why. But, first, let’s talk a bit more about what’s eating the right.
I still sometimes see pundits claiming that the Tea Party movement is basically driven by concerns about budget deficits. That’s delusional. Read the founding rant by Rick Santelli of CNBC: There’s nary a mention of deficits. Instead, it’s a tirade against the possibility that the government might help “losers” avoid foreclosure. Or read transcripts from Rush Limbaugh or other right-wing talk radio hosts. There’s not much about fiscal responsibility, but there’s a lot about how the government is rewarding the lazy and undeserving.
Republicans in leadership positions try to modulate their language a bit, but it’s a matter more of tone than substance. They’re still clearly passionate about making sure that the poor and unlucky get as little help as possible, that — as Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, put it — the safety net is becoming “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” And Mr. Ryan’s budget proposals involve savage cuts in safety-net programs such as food stamps and Medicaid.
All of this hostility to the poor has culminated in the truly astonishing refusal of many states to participate in the Medicaid expansion. Bear in mind that the federal government would pay for this expansion, and that the money thus spent would benefit hospitals and the local economy as well as the direct recipients. But a majority of Republican-controlled state governments are, it turns out, willing to pay a large economic and fiscal price in order to ensure that aid doesn’t reach the poor.
The thing is, it wasn’t always this way. Go back for a moment to 1936, when Alf Landon received the Republican nomination for president. In many ways, Landon’s acceptance speech previewed themes taken up by modern conservatives. He lamented the incompleteness of economic recovery and the persistence of high unemployment, and he attributed the economy’s lingering weakness to excessive government intervention and the uncertainty he claimed it created.
But he also said this: “Out of this Depression has come, not only the problem of recovery but also the equally grave problem of caring for the unemployed until recovery is attained. Their relief at all times is a matter of plain duty. We of our Party pledge that this obligation will never be neglected.”
Can you imagine a modern Republican nominee saying such a thing? Not in a party committed to the view that unemployed workers have it too easy, that they’re so coddled by unemployment insurance and food stamps that they have no incentive to go out there and get a job.
So what’s this all about? One reason, the sociologist Daniel Little suggested in a recent essay, is market ideology: If the market is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor. I’d add that some leading Republicans are, in their minds, acting out adolescent libertarian fantasies. “It’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now,” declared Paul Ryan in 2009.
But there’s also, as Mr. Little says, the stain that won’t go away: race.
In a much-cited recent memo, Democracy Corps, a Democratic-leaning public opinion research organization, reported on the results of focus groups held with members of various Republican factions. They found the Republican base “very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority” — and seeing the social safety net both as something that helps Those People, not people like themselves, and binds the rising nonwhite population to the Democratic Party. And, yes, the Medicaid expansion many states are rejecting would disproportionately have helped poor blacks.
So there is indeed a war on the poor, coinciding with and deepening the pain from a troubled economy. And that war is now the central, defining issue of American politics.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 31, 2013
“Health Care Sabotage 101”: The GOP, Not A Botched Website, Is The Real Obstacle To Implementing Obamacare
It’s the latest chapter of Barack vs. the Health Care Killers, The Continuing Saga of Posturing, Bad Faith, Spite and Ineptitude.
Republicans, who have used every trick in their playbook to gum up the works of the Affordable Care Act, are now holding hearings to investigate how the works got so gummed up.
They could save themselves the trouble by looking in the mirror, just as O.J. Simpson could have done to find his wife’s killer. But that would rob them of the chance to grandstand.
In fairness, they do have one point. The Obama administration botched the debut of its insurance marketplace website so badly that it fairly begged for an investigation. And since Republicans had little or nothing to do with the website, the blame for its failures falls squarely on the president and his deputies.
The screw-up was a gift. GOP lawmakers were calling the law a failure before most of it went into effect, but lacking any evidence they had to rely on mere accusation. Now, finally, they can say that their worst predictions had some validity.
Nevertheless, Republican “outrage” over the glitches is hard to take seriously. If they’re really looking to find what went wrong — and there was plenty — one suspects it’s only so they can clone the virus. Then anyplace where the law is working, such as Kentucky, Washington and Oregon, they can infect the system, watch it crash, shake their heads and snicker.
Come on, folks. Republicans want to “fix” what’s broken here as much as they want to “protect” women by targeting their reproductive rights and “defend” the vote by obstructing it. But because Healthcare.gov went live on the same day that the party crazies shut down the government over the law’s funding, they were too deep in their own morass to capitalize on it. Worse, they had to fold on the shutdown without getting anything in exchange. No wonder they’re pouncing on the chance to grill the people whose job it was to enable what they’ve called the worst law in the history of man.
Yes, the administration deserves to be on the hot seat. There was more than enough time to make sure the website worked properly and there is no excuse for its failure to do so.
Mr. Obama had to know that the first weeks would set the tone for public perception. If he had wanted to raise doubts about the program or shoo people away, he couldn’t have done a better job of it.
Once again, we have to wonder what goes on in his mind. This legislation is only the most important accomplishment of his presidency. He put everything on the line for it. Millions of people are counting on it for coverage they cannot otherwise afford. If he can’t get the introduction right, well, let’s just say it’s a good thing he won’t be running again.
But then there’s that pesky caveat called perspective. A botched website, which can and will be repaired, is nowhere near the biggest obstacle to the success of health care reform. That distinction goes to the program’s sworn enemies, who have been conducting a misinformation campaign of false claims and scare tactics since the law was passed. To hear them tell it, “Obamacare” will turn people into devil worshipping socialist homosexual vegetarians who want the terrorists to win. So of course they will do everything they can to stop it.
Exhibit One: The quickest and easiest way for states to enact the law’s reforms is to expand Medicaid, which would trigger a huge infux of federal dollars for the first several years. Yet Republican governors in 26 states have refused to do so. The primary excuse is that they won’t be able to afford it once the federal money stops. The subtext is that they’d rather sabotage the president than help their own citizens get the treatment they need. Thanks to them, according to a New York Times analysis, the new law will leave out two-thirds of the nation’s black citizens and single mothers, and half of the low-wage workers who currently lack insurance.
In addition, GOP governors (including our own Tom Corbett and, regrettably, a few Democrats) have refused to create insurance exchanges that would facilitate reaching the uninsured. Instead, those people will have to go to the federal exchange.
They’re also refusing to assist applicants and blocking the use of so-called “navigators,” whose job is to help people understand the law and sign up for its benefits. When a constituent calls with questions, they are making sure they’ll get no answers.
Then there was the government shutdown, during which Republicans offered more than 40 measures to cripple the law. They failed in every sense, but it still cost the country $24 billion.
It doesn’t take a genius to see where the real obstruction lies. For all its screw-ups, the Obama administration is trying to make health care reform work. And for all their public posturing, Republicans are trying to ruin it. But the law was duly passed, it’s here, and it’s not going away. They should save the fake righteousness for a cause that isn’t already lost.
By: Sally Kalson, Pittsburg- Post Gazette, October 26, 2013
“Lousy Medicaid Arguments”: Deeply Revealing, More Evidence Of The Right’s Intellectual Decline
For now, the big news about Obamacare is the debacle of HealthCare.gov, the Web portal through which Americans are supposed to buy insurance on the new health care exchanges. For now, at least, HealthCare.gov isn’t working for many users.
It’s important to realize, however, that this botch has nothing to do with the law’s substance, and will get fixed. After all, a number of states have successfully opened their own exchanges, doing for their residents exactly what the federal system is supposed to do everywhere else. Connecticut’s exchange is working fine, as is Kentucky’s. New York, after some early problems, seems to be getting there. So, a bit more slowly, does California.
In other words, the technical problems, while infuriating — heads should roll — will not, in the end, be the big story. The real threat remains the effort of conservative groups to sabotage reform, especially by blocking the expansion of Medicaid. This effort relies heavily on lobbying, lavishly bankrolled by the usual suspects, including the omnipresent Koch brothers. But it’s not just money: the right has also rolled out some really lousy arguments.
And I don’t just mean lousy as in “bad”; I also mean it in the original sense, “infested with lice.”
Before I get there, a word about something that, as far as we can tell, isn’t happening. Remember “rate shock”? A few months ago it was all the rage in right-wing circles, with supposed experts claiming that Americans were about to face huge premium increases.
It quickly became clear, however, that what these alleged experts were doing was comparing apples and oranges — and as Ezra Klein of The Washington Post pointed out, oranges that, in many cases, you can’t even buy. Specifically, they were comparing the premiums young, healthy men were paying before reform with the premiums everyone — including those who previously couldn’t get insurance because of pre-existing conditions — will pay under the new system. Oh, and they also weren’t taking into account the subsidies many Americans will receive, reducing their costs.
Now people are signing up for policies on state exchanges and, to a limited extent, on the federal exchange. Where are the cries of rate shock? Anecdotal evidence, which is all we have so far, says that people are by and large happily surprised by the low cost of their insurance. It was telling that when Fox News eagerly interviewed some middle-class Americans who said they had been hurt by the Affordable Care Act, it turned out that none of their guests had actually checked out their new options — they just knew health reform was terrible because Fox News told them so.
Now, about those lousy Medicaid arguments: Last year’s Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act did strike down one provision, the one that would have forced all states to accept an expansion of Medicaid, the already-existing program of health insurance for the poor. States are now free to reject that expansion. Yet how can states justify turning down a federal offer to insure thousands of their citizens, one that would cost them nothing in the first year and only trivial amounts later? Sheer spite — the desire to sabotage anything with President Obama’s name on it — is the real reason, but doesn’t sound too good. So they need intellectual cover.
Enter the same experts, more or less, who warned about rate shock, to declare that Medicaid actually hurts its recipients. Their evidence? Medicaid patients tend to be sicker than the uninsured, and slower to recover from surgery.
O.K., you know what to do: Google “spurious correlation health.” You are immediately led to the tale of certain Pacific Islanders who long believed that having lice made you healthy, because they observed that people with lice were, typically, healthier than those without. They were, of course, mixing up cause and effect: lice tend to infest the healthy, so they were a consequence, not a cause, of good health.
The application to Medicaid should be obvious. Sick people are likely to have low incomes; more generally, low-income Americans who qualify for Medicaid just tend in general to have poor health. So pointing to a correlation between Medicaid and poor health as evidence that Medicaid actually hurts its recipients is as foolish as claiming that lice make you healthy. It is, as I said, a lousy argument.
And the reliance on such arguments is itself deeply revealing, because it illustrates the right’s intellectual decline. I mean, this is the best argument their so-called experts can come up with for their policy priorities?
Meanwhile, many states are still planning to reject the Medicaid expansion, denying essential health care to millions of needy Americans. And they have no good excuse for this act of cruelty.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 20, 2013
“The GOP’s White Southern Republican Problem”: Following Similar Path Of “Massive Resistance” Taken After Brown V. Board Decision
In 1956, segregationist Southern Democrats outlined a policy of “massive resistance” in response to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling desegregating public schools.
Today, the Republican Party, particularly in the South, is following a similar path of massive resistance when it comes to Obamacare and any other major policy initiative proposed by President Obama. According to The New York Times, twenty-six states—all-but-three controlled by the GOP—have declined the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, thereby denying health insurance coverage to 8 million Americans. “Every state in the Deep South, with the exception of Arkansas, has rejected the expansion,” writes the Times.
The GOP’s obsession with defunding Obamacare has caused them to shut down the government despite the public outcry. Many factors play into the shutdown, but a leading cause is the fact the Republican Party is whiter, more Southern and more conservative than ever before.
Writes Charlie Cook:
Between 2000 and 2010, the non-Hispanic white share of the population fell from 69 percent to 64 percent, closely tracking the 5-point drop in the white share of the electorate measured by exit polls between 2004 and 2012. But after the post-census redistricting and the 2012 elections, the non-Hispanic white share of the average Republican House district jumped from 73 percent to 75 percent, and the average Democratic House district declined from 52 percent white to 51 percent white. In other words, while the country continues to grow more racially diverse, the average Republican district continues to get even whiter.
As Congress has become more polarized along party lines, it’s become more racially polarized, too. In 2000, House Republicans represented 59 percent of all white U.S. residents and 40 percent of all nonwhite residents. But today, they represent 63 percent of all whites and just 38 percent of all nonwhites.
Even though House Republicans do not represent the changing face of the country, they have a huge structural advantage when it comes to the makeup of Congress, especially following the 2010 redistricting cycle, when the GOP controlled the process in twenty states compared to seven for Democrats. Writes Cook:
The number of strongly Democratic districts—those with a score of D+5 or greater at the presidential level—decreased from 144 before redistricting to 136 afterward. The number of strongly Republican districts—those with a score of R+5 or greater—increased from 175 to 183. When one party starts out with 47 more very strong districts than the other, the numbers suggest that the fix is in for any election featuring a fairly neutral environment. Republicans would need to mess up pretty badly to lose their House majority in the near future.
This phenomenon is most acute in the South, where the GOP systematically packed as many Democratic voters, particularly African-Americans, into as few districts as possible in order to ensure huge Republicans majorities across the region (see my story “How the GOP Is Resegregating the South”). Here’s the gist:
In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats. “What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.” The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.
After the 1994 elections, white Southern Republicans accounted for sixty-two members of the 230-member House GOP majority. Today, white Southern Republicans account for ninety-seven members out of the 233-member House GOP majority. That’s a pretty remarkable shift and one that is not likely to end any time soon. “In all but one election since 1976, the proportion of Southerners in the House Republican caucus has gone up,” says Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.
Of the fifty-four members of the congressional Tea Party Caucus—which is most vociferously telling John Boehner not to compromise—33 are from Southern states. Of the eighty members of the so-called House GOP “suicide caucus” who urged Boehner to defund Obamacare, “half of these districts are concentrated in the South,” writes Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker. As long as ultraconservative Southerners from lily-white districts hold the balance of power in the Congress, we shouldn’t be surprised that obstruction and dysfunction is the result.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, October 4, 2013
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