“An Intra-Republican Bloodbath”: The 2016 Presidential Race And The Coming Death Struggle Within The GOP
There’s an interesting article in The Hill today about some early 2016 jockeying, and it shines a light on just how important this presidential campaign will be to the ongoing struggle within the GOP. Once next month’s elections are over, things are going to get very intense. Here’s an excerpt:
For the past year, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has been wooing his longtime friend Jeb Bush to jump into the 2016 presidential race, even as he has shunned potential Tea Party rivals like Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Boehner stepped up his lobbying efforts this week, singing the former Florida governor’s praises in a pair of media interviews.
The Speaker’s preference for yet another Bush White House run is partly political, partly personal. He sees Bush as undeniably the strongest, most viable candidate who could pull the party together after a bruising primary and take on a formidable Hillary Clinton, sources said. And the two men are aligned politically, hailing from the same centrist strand of the GOP.
The next presidential campaign will shape how we all understand the eight-year intra-Republican bloodbath that will have lasted through the Obama presidency, in a way that the 2012 election didn’t. While most of the candidates in 2012 spent plenty of time pandering to the Tea Party, none of them were birthed by the movement. All of the real contenders had been around for a long time, some for decades.
In contrast, 2016 will be the first presidential election in which some of the GOP candidates rose to prominence after Barack Obama’s election. Three potential candidates (Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker) first got elected to their current positions during the revolution of 2010, and one other (Ted Cruz) two years later. Even if only Cruz among them is still considered a 100 percent pure Tea Partier, this is going to be a primary race defined by a generational split between those who rode the Tea Party to prominence and those who came to public attention before.
If you’re John Boehner, somebody like Ted Cruz getting the Republican nomination would be a terrible rebuke, not just because Cruz has personally been such a pain in Boehner’s behind (constantly encouraging conservative House members to turn against the Speaker), but also because of what it would say about this period in Republican history. If a real Tea Partier were elected, Boehner’s entire Speakership would look like nothing more than roadkill along the way — the “GOP establishment” had done nothing but resist the inevitable, by trying to keep the Tea Party in check, for too long. On the other hand, someone like Jeb Bush becoming president would mean that all the aggravation Boehner endured wasn’t futile; he held the barbarians back, prevented them from ruining the GOP, and the party came through on the other side by taking back the White House.
On the other hand, nothing would be worse for Boehner and other establishment figures than somebody like Bush getting the GOP nomination but then losing to Hillary Clinton — and short of a Tea Partier winning the presidency, nothing would be better for the base conservatives. Those conservatives could say: Look, we’ve tried nominating old, familiar, establishment Republicans three times in a row now, and all it got us was President Obama and now President Clinton. We can’t repeat the same mistake in 2020. It’ll be an awfully compelling argument to those in the party, even if the counter-argument — that nominating someone like Cruz would be a complete disaster — might be true.
It’s possible that a candidate who successfully bridges the two sides could emerge (for instance, Indiana governor Mike Pence could be that candidate). And the establishment folks are going to try to play down the idea that there’s any “battle for the soul of the Republican party” going on at all, since that’s a battle they aren’t sure they can win. But the battle is real, and its outcome, at least for the next decade or two, could be determined by what kind of Republican gets the 2016 nomination, whether he wins or loses, and more broadly, what kind of GOP we have in coming years.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 2, 2014
“Nazis, Lynching And Obamacare”: In An Era Of Metaphors Gone Mad
You might think that the methodical extermination of millions of Jews by a brutal regime intent on world domination would resist appropriation as an all-purpose metaphor. You might think that genocide, of all things, would be safe from conversion into sloppy simile.
After Paul Ryan’s fact-challenged address at the Republican National Convention last year, the chairman of the Democratic Party in California actually compared him and his compatriots to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. A short time later, the chairman of the Democratic Party in South Carolina likened that state’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, to Adolf Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun.
At that point Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, did what he shouldn’t need to do even once, let alone the multiple times that he’s been forced to. He implored politicians and pundits to stop it already.
No matter. Allusions to Nazi Germany were back for debates over gun control and, of course, Obamacare. Ted Cruz, the Senate’s prince of tirades, compared people who claim that the new insurance program can’t be stopped to those who rolled over for Hitler and the Third Reich. This prompted a public reprimand from John McCain, who has developed something of a sideline career of swatting Cruz on the nose. They’re like a hapless master and his hopeless dachshund. The former keeps trying to housebreak the latter, while the latter just beams at every mess he makes.
It’s not only Nazis who are flourishing in this era of metaphors gone mad, of analogy bloat. Lynch mobs are also having a good go of it. A senator who was quoted anonymously in The Times last week used that term to describe the Republican lawmakers who had lit into Cruz during a private luncheon, and lynching was invoked more disturbingly by the chief executive officer of A.I.G., who recently said that public complaints about Wall Street bankers’ bonuses were intended “to get everybody out there with their pitchforks and their hangman nooses.” This, he added, was “sort of like what we did in the Deep South.”
How absolutely bonkers. And yet how unsurprising. We’re awash these days in metaphors as overworked as our political debate is overwrought, and it’s impossible not to wonder how much one contributes to the other. When nuance and perspective exit the language, do they exit the conversation as well? When you speak in ludicrous extremes, do you think that way, too?
Obamacare has proved to be not just ideologically divisive but linguistically fertile. There’s seemingly no event or passage in American history to which it can’t be compared.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11? Check. Back when Mike Pence, Indiana’s Republican governor, was still in Congress, he summoned that day’s horror to characterize the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the Affordable Care Act.
Slavery? Check. Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, has described opposition to Obamacare in terms of stands against fugitive slave laws.
The hyperbole and hysteria make any constructive debate impossible, and they insult the past, robbing important events of the specific meaning and individual detail they deserve. Consider our recurring “-gate” mania. We equate each new scandal, whether extra-large or fun-size, with Watergate, and by willfully misremembering President Richard Nixon’s crimes, we dilute them. It’s just a suffix for the taking, a point of comparison for such wildly unrelated matters as the spilled secrets of Arkansas law enforcement officers who were supposedly privy to Bill Clinton’s private life. Troopergate, that was called.
For President Obama, Benghazi was supposed to be his Watergate, and so was the I.R.S.’s scrutiny of conservative groups, and so were a bunch of other things I can’t even remember anymore. They blur and fade, which is not to say they didn’t matter. It’s to say that when everything is supposedly like everything else, nothing’s distinctive. It’s all one big mush.
For that reason, among others, we should watch our words. They have consequences. As irresponsible and detestable as the recent actions of the most conservative wing of House Republicans have been, we’d be better off without figurative talk of hostage taking and guns to heads, without headlines like one in The Huffington Post that said: “Boehner Threatens to Shoot the Hostage.” That sort of language only turns up the heat.
And I cringe at how pointlessly hurtful it must have been for a 9/11 widow or widower to listen to the right-wing moralist Gary Bauer exhort voters to fight back against President Obama’s agenda the way passengers on United Flight 93 fought back against hijackers. Or for Holocaust survivors to hear all this gratuitous Nazi talk.
You know what’s just like Germany in the 1930s? Germany in the 1930s. We’re in an unfortunate place, but we needn’t travel back there to describe it.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 7, 2013
“Political Skullduggery”: Indiana Fudges Truth On Health Exchange Rates To Make Obamacare Look Bad
Sometimes, the political urge simply overwhelms anything resembling common sense and appropriate behavior.
Witness the latest example of political skullduggery playing out in the great State of Indiana where GOP Governor Mike Pence has found it necessary to take extreme liberties with the reporting of the state’s healthcare exchange data—all to justify his anti-Obamacare political positioning.
Anyone paying attention to data projecting what a health insurance policy will likely cost on the newly formed individual policy insurance exchanges could hardly miss the headlines late last week announcing that premiums for health insurance policies stood to rise to an average monthly price of $570—a 72 percent increase over current rates in Indiana.
Of course, if this data is correct, it would be quite a blow to Indiana residents at the hand of the dreaded Obamacare.
At first glance—the only glance the Indiana officials intend for you to see—this is certainly disturbing news. Even those willing to accept the projections and claims made by the President during last week’s health care address—where he referred to the ‘good news’ in California, Oregon, Washington and, particularly, New York—would have to come to the understanding that there may, indeed, be states where the law is going to badly hurt consumers.
Fortunately, there are those whose job it is to dig below the surface of that ‘first glance’ to discover the truth of any situation—and, in this situation, we learn that Indiana has sought to play cute in its efforts to present a grim picture of the healthcare reform law, even when the data reveals otherwise.
You see, while the states that have already released their projections have based their price expectations on what insurance company filings suggest will be the cost of a ‘Silver’ plan (the second least expensive option to be offered on the exchanges), Indiana decided to publish their projections based on a calculation that took all the levels of plans to be offered—ranging from the less expensive Bronze and Silver plan to the most expensive Gold and Platinum plans—and averaged them all together to come up with their projected rates.
As Sy Mukherjee points out, “That’s like saying the average cost of a car in an Indiana dealership is $100,000 because it sells $20,000 Fords, $60,000 BMWs, and $220,000 Lamborghinis — technically true, but highly misleading.”
Exactly.
What possible benefit can there be to taking an average of costs ranging from most expensive to least expensive when we know full well that the overwhelming majority of those living in Indiana—and, for that matter, everywhere else—will purchase the policies in the lower cost ranges?
How do we know this?
We know this because we have the evidence of buying patterns provided by the State of Massachusetts, a state that has been utilizing this system for quite some time now.
As Sarah Kliff at the Washington Post reports—
“In Massachusetts, 8 percent of enrollees bought a gold plan. Eighty-four percent chose bronze or silver. At least one carrier in Indiana seems to agree with this distribution. In state rate filings, Physicians Health Plan of Indiana estimates that 45 percent of its enrollees will pick bronze and 38 percent take up silver. It is expected that the average mix of Individual Market will be more toward less rich benefit plans and credit should be given for the associated reduction in induced utilization,” the company wrote in its filing. In other words, the average plan cost isn’t a great estimation of what the average person will pay.”
Ms. Kliff also did a little digging to discover that the actual prices for Bronze and Silver plans in Indiana are going to be far below the $512 a month estimate provided by the state’s government.
“Anthem’s rate filing includes projections for health insurance costs in their bronze plans. A 47-year-old male who does not smoke would be charged, on average, $307 per month. Sample plans from another plan, MDWise, predict a 47-year-old man will be charged $294 and $391 for a bronze and silver plan, respectively.”
While you may find the actual rates of the policies to be made available on the Indiana individual exchange to be good news or bad— depending on what you currently pay for health coverage—one would at least hope that the state would want to put out an honest analysis.
The Tea Party’s Religious Inspiration
If American politics were a TV show, it would by now have jumped the shark. Then again, American politics is a sort of TV show, considering its surreal plot lines, its cast of kooky narcissists, and an epistemology that blithely combines absolutist religious convictions with post-modern relativism: belief that the Bible is literally true comfortably co-exists with disbelief in simple, verifiable matters of fact, like the President’s place of birth or the absence of an HCR death panel mandate. It’s not surprising that, under the influence of the Tea Party, freedom is just another word for no abortion rights (and no contraception or cancer screenings for poor women).
Not long ago, the Tea (taxed enough already) Party was often presumed to stand for what its name implies — low taxes and limited government services (or at least limits on programs and services not enjoyed by its members.) But a new Pew Forum survey offers some quantitative evidence that Tea Party members tend to be religiously inspired, social conservatives; the movement “draws disproportionate support from the ranks of white evangelical Protestants … most people who agree with the religious right also support the Tea Party.”
Pew’s findings are unsurprising. You might have inferred the Tea Party’s religious motivations from the statements and policies of its established or aspiring political leaders, at state and federal levels. I’ll refrain from offering an extended litany of their wacky assertions and legislative ideas. Just keep in mind a few examples.
One of the subtler but also most hysterical expressions of legislative sectarianism is the wave of state proposals aimed at banning the non-existent threat of Sharia law. At first glance, you might mistake this trend for an effort to keep religion out of government, but a law intended to impose special disadvantages on one religion is no less sectarian (and violative of the First Amendment) than a law intended to extend special advantages to another.
So it’s not surprising to find proposed bans on Sharia law in conservative states, like South Dakota and Texas, alongside extreme anti-abortion proposals. (You can find atheists and agnostics who oppose abortion rights, but generally the anti-abortion movement is overwhelmingly religious and tends to divide along sectarian lines: according to Pew, “most religious traditions in the U.S. come down firmly on one side or the other.”) The notorious South Dakota bill that would arguably legalize the killing of abortion providers has been tabled; but a bill pending in Texas requires doctors to conduct pre-abortion sonograms for women and to impose on them a description of the fetus’s arms, legs and internal organs. Supporters of this bill insist that it is “pro-woman;” its purpose is empower them and “ensure there are no barriers preventing women from receiving the information to which they are entitled for such a life-changing decision” — barriers like a woman’s right to decline a sonogram or description of the fetus.
But the right wing’s aggressive sectarianism extends far beyond the usual battles over abortion and other culture-war casualties. Just listen to Mike Huckabee gush over Israel (biblical Zionists have been carrying on about Israel for years, but these days they have Tea Party stars on their side.) Michelle Bachmann claims that “if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play.” Note former Senator Rick Santorum’s defense of the Crusades, which, he laments, have been maligned by “the American left who hates Christendom.” Remember the Bible-based environmental policy of Illinois Congressman John Shimkus, now chair of the House Environment and Economy Sub-Committee. “The Earth will end when God declares it’s time to be over,” Shimkus famously declared in a 2009 hearing. Reading from the Bible and citing God’s promise to Noah not to destroy the earth (again), Shimkus said, “I believe that’s the infallible word of God and that’s the way it’s gonna be for his creation.”
Pay particular attention to Indiana congressman Mike Pence’s revealing declaration that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a federal bill prohibiting workplace discrimination against gay people “wages war on freedom of religion in the workplace.” If religious beliefs legitimized workplace discrimination, as Pence advises, then Title Vll of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would be unconstitutional at least as applied to people with religious compunctions against hiring women or members of particular racial or religious groups: If you believe that God did not intend women to hold traditionally male jobs, for example, or if you simply don’t like Mormons, then, in Pence’s view of religious freedom, you have a constitutional defense to employment discrimination claims by female or Mormon job applicants. But I bet that Pence would hesitate to defend a constitutional right to discriminate categorically against women or Mormons in the workplace; and if I’m right, it means he recognizes religious biases as defenses to discrimination claims as long as they’re biases he shares. Pence’s position on ENDA demonstrates the confident, theocratic approach to governing enabled by the Tea Party’s electoral successes.
Of course, Pence and Shimkus, among others, are hardly the first theocrats to land in office. There’s nothing new about the religious right’s drive for political power, which helped sweep Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980, when liberal stalwarts were swept out of the Senate. What does seem new is the increased dominance of the Republican Party by sectarian religious extremists and their acquisition of power during a prolonged economic crisis and even longer war — a period marked by national pessimism, fear of terror, and a bipartisan assault on civil liberty unprecedented in its scope (thanks to technology) if not its intentions. In other words, what’s worrisome is our vulnerability, susceptibility to demagoguery, and diminishing margin of error. We don’t have time for the unexamined certitudes of religious zealotry.
If only Tea Partiers and their legislative surrogates would take seriously the Constitution and the founding fathers they so frequently invoke. Then they’d respect the First Amendment’s prohibition on government-established religion, which codified the Founder’s belief in a secular, civil government that accommodates diverse religious practices and beliefs. They’d understand that the Establishment clause doesn’t merely bar the federal government from requiring us to attend a federal church; it bars Congress from turning sectarian religious beliefs into law (unless they coincide with practically universal moral codes, like prohibitions on murder.) “People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution, they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible,” Maryland State Senator Jamie Raskin once said (to appropriate acclaim.) It’s an accurate statement of law and constitutional ideals, but, sad to say, an increasingly aspirational description of political practice.
By: Wendy Kaminer, The Atlantic, February 25, 2011
For the GOP, Fear is Always the Answer in Thwarting Health Care Reform
With the Congressional Budget Office’s report out, detailing that health care reform will trim the deficit over the next 10 years by $138 billion, Republican resistance to this bill has gone from annoying to downright illogical, and I mean birther-style illogical. It is no longer about cost or policy issues, it is simply an obvious attempt to kill this presidency and damn the citizens in the process.
The Congressional Budget Office’s methods or neutrality on issues have never been questioned until now. It seems that now because reality doesn’t coincide with the Republicans desire to block health care reform, the CBO is playing a shell game.
“Only in Washington, D.C. can people announce they are spending a trillion dollars and reducing the national deficit,” said Mike Pence., R-Indiana, on The Dylan Ratigan show. “The American people know this is growing the government. It’s only going to increase the deficit, increase the debt…This massive government plan, with the CBO report withstanding, is not fooling anyone.”
Then, on the conservative Web site, Redstate.com: “The natural reaction by most Americans to the unofficial and preliminary claim that the $2.5 trillion ObamaCare bill is revenue-neutral is, well, B.S. (There is a card game with the same name.) The second natural reaction is the realization that ObamaCare must cut the guts out of Medicare and raise taxes through the roof.”
What is even more strange and really disappointing is that this “non-logic” appears to be working. Even with the CBO report, Americans are evenly divided on health care reform. Even with the proof that it will reduce, not add to the deficit, recent polling indicates only a slight improvement for passage of the bill. Why? Fear.
These are uncertain times. Jobs are disappearing. The banks are doubling down on fees while demanding more in terms of credit, down payments and collateral. The American Automotive industry is effectively existing only through taxpayer subsidies. Even Toyota—who not so long ago was considered “the standard” in the industry—appears to maybe knowingly have put its customers at risk to save a few bucks.
FOX News has been on a mission for the last year to discredit and derail this administration by misinforming and enraging its viewers. America is at a tipping point. Within the next decade, Caucasians will no longer be the majority. In the next decade, Blacks will no longer be the largest minority in this country. Within the next decade, America loses its prominence as the wealthiest nation to China. In the last 10 years, we have endured terrorism. We are currently engaged in two wars and still in the middle of the most debilitating recession in more than 20 years. These are uncertain times and Americans are fearful.
Past efforts to overhaul the nation’s health care system looked different. The process to reaching the legislation was different. The folks supporting it were different. The folks opposing reform were different. The one common denominator in this effort and every past effort: Fear.
“It’s really a case of deja vu,” Jonathan Oberlander, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said. “You hear in today’s debate echoes of the past that extend all the way to the early part of the 20th century. And I think the reason that people use fear again and again is that it’s effective. It’s worked to stop health reform in the past. And so they’re going to try and use it in the present.”
The very first time in 1915 when America attempted to change its health care system, it was defeated by tying those attempts to our greatest international treat of the time: The German Empire.
Fear was used again in the next effort of the late 1940s. This time the American Medical Association told citizens if the nation adopted national health insurance, the Red army would be marching up and down the streets. Then even later when former President Bill Clinton tried passing health care reform, the health care industry was firmly in place. Their lobbying influence in Congress was apparent and their might in terms of influencing public opinion by flooding the television with misleading advertisements was informidable. Remember Harry and Louise?
This time around it’s the same. They’ve gone back to the well of fear with the death panels claim, fear of big government, fear of socialism, fear of rationing. Then they targeted the politicians themselves, with the fear of losing their next election. Today, the GOP upped the ante of this fear campaign, by telling Democrats that if they vote for reform, and lose their next election, he will personally block them from future governmental appointments. Once again, the obstacle to change is fear.
Fear is something you cannot reason with. You cannot refute. You cannot combat. It’s this primal instinct that, once aroused, simply takes over your brain, rendering you incapable of either reason or logic. A lot of people are pointing to the points where health care reform falls short. Others are pointing to how the president has come up short in terms of selling reform to America and Congress.
Me? I’m just wondering if this will finally be the year that fear no longer works.
By: Devona Walker- TheLoop21.com’s senior financial/political reporter and blogger-March 19, 2010
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