“It’s Good To Be A Bush”: How The GOP Presidential Candidates Will Talk About Obamacare
One of my favorite factoids from the 2012 presidential race emerged when Mitt Romney released his 2011 tax return. There may not have been much scandalous contained therein, but Romney’s sources of income were so varied and intricate that the return ran to a mind-boggling 379 pages. And it’s starting to appear that Jeb Bush may have a similarly complex financial life, which he’s starting to unravel as he prepares for a potential presidential run. There’s one particularly interesting source of income, as this article in the Los Angeles Times explains:
And on Wednesday, Bush resigned from the board of directors of Tenet Healthcare Corp., also effective Dec. 31, according to a corporate filing. The Dallas-based company actively supported the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and has seen its revenue rise from it, an issue that could draw fire in Republican primaries.
Bush earned cash and stock awards worth nearly $300,000 from Tenet in 2013, according to corporate filings. He also sold Tenet stock worth $1.1 million that year, the records show.
If it’s like other big corporations, the services for which he was paid $300,000 by Tenet probably involved little more than going to a couple of meetings every year. It’s good to be a Bush. But let’s try to imagine the fire he might draw in the primaries over his association with the company. Are politicians from the party of capitalism and business really going to criticize him for making a ton of money, even if it involved the hated Affordable Care Act?
Yeah, they probably will. Which raises the question of exactly how the 2016 GOP candidates are going to address the ACA, which even as it becomes further embedded in our health-care system is still on many Republicans’ minds. Chances are they’re going to talk about it in the most general terms they can, in a discussion that stays at a symbolic level and avoids any specifics.
That’s because there are many more Americans who have a negative view of the ACA as an abstraction than there are who dislike the things it actually does. Members of the public are about evenly split when you just ask them what they think of the law. (In the latest Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 45 percent say we should move forward with the law or expand it, while 43 percent say scale it back or repeal it.) But with the exception of the individual mandate to acquire coverage, the specific provisions of the law are all supported by strong majorities. Even majorities of Republicans support elements such as the creation of the exchanges, the expansion of Medicaid and the provision of subsidies to help people afford insurance.
So if you’re a Republican candidate, you have to seek safe harbor on the terrain of the general and symbolic. Otherwise, you’d end up like Mitch McConnell did during the last campaign, insisting that while he wanted to repeal the ACA “root and branch,” he also wanted to keep almost everything the law does.
At the moment, lots of Republicans remain psychologically trapped in the days right after the problematic rollout of Healthcare.gov convinced them all that the ACA would collapse in a matter of weeks or months. At the time, they could barely contain their glee. As Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin — widely considered two of the more sober conservatives on issues like these — wrote at the time, “As ObamaCare’s failures and victims mount by the day, Republicans have so far mostly been watching in amazement. They expected the law to fail, but even among its most ardent opponents few imagined the scale and speed of the fiasco.”
Even if that was your honest assessment back then, you’d have to be in the grips of a nearly psychotic level of denial to believe it today. Every result of the law may not be perfect, but it has been an overwhelming success. Just about every prediction Republicans made has turned out false. The economy hasn’t tanked, 10 million people were newly insured even before this year’s open enrollment, premium increases are slowing, overall health costs are slowing, and conservatives looking for specific evidence of the law’s failure don’t quite know what to say.
So criticizing something like the fact that one of your opponents sat on the board of a company that benefited from the ACA offers a way to tell voters that you still hate Obamacare with every fiber of your being — and that opponent obviously doesn’t — without having to talk about what the law has accomplished.
Now let’s imagine something fanciful. What if one of the GOP candidates said something like this:
I opposed Obamacare. I wish it had never passed. But now it has been implemented, and just repealing the whole thing isn’t an option anymore. Too many people are now on either Medicaid or plans they got through the exchanges, and it would be wrong to just toss them off their coverage. And there are some things in the law that both conservatives and liberals support. So here’s a plan to keep what’s right about it and fix what’s wrong about it.
We all assume that if a candidate said that, he’d be condemned by his opponents as a traitor and all Republican voters would turn against him. The former would certainly occur, but the latter might not. He might be able to pull the other candidates into a discussion about the specifics of the law, where — if he were the only one with a plan actually grounded in the real world — he could win the argument.
But the truth is, that’s not too likely. If Romney, whose Massachusetts health insurance reform provided the model for the ACA, could win the nomination just shaking his fist at President Obama and insisting that his reform was nothing like Obama’s — which not a single person, Republican or Democrat, actually believed — then why take that chance? If you’re Jeb Bush, you can leave the board of Tenet and repeat over and over that your loathing for the ACA is as strong as anybody’s. In the primaries at least, that will probably be enough to neutralize the issue.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, December 26, 2014
“Another ‘Price’ To Pay”: New Budget Committee Chief; Time For A New Debt-Ceiling Standoff
Almost immediately after the 2014 elections, the conventional wisdom among much of the Beltway media was that power would change Republicans for the better. By taking control of both chambers of Congress, the argument went, GOP lawmakers would have no choice but to become a responsible governing party. They would prove, at long last, that they’re capable of acting like grown-ups.
Just one month later, there’s already ample evidence that those assumptions about Republican maturity were completely wrong.
Republican Tom Price, the incoming House Budget Committee chairman, said his party could demand steep spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling next year, the most provocative comments by a senior GOP member to date on how negotiations could play out.
The Georgia congressman, during an hour-long briefing with reporters Friday, said the expected mid-2015 debate over whether to raise or suspend the debt ceiling offered Republicans an opportunity to make a sizable imprint on government policy.
The far-right Georgian added that he wants to see Republicans bring back the so-called “Boehner rule” – an arbitrary policy that demands a dollar in cuts for every dollar increase in the debt limit – that even Republicans recognized as ridiculous a couple of years ago.
“I prefer to think about it as opportunities and pinch points,” Price said, apparently using “pinch points” as a euphemism for “causing deliberate national harm.”
It’s worth emphasizing that Price isn’t some random, fringe figure, shouting from the sidelines – the Georgia Republican next month will fill Paul Ryan’s shoes as chairman of the House Budget Committee.
In other words, it matters that Price envisions a strategy in which Republicans threaten to hurt Americans on purpose unless Democrats meet the GOP’s demands.
That said, Price would be wise to start lowering expectations – his intention to create a deliberate crisis will almost certainly fail.
The gist of the plan is effectively identical to the scheme hated by House Republicans in 2011. Next year, the Treasury Department will alert Congress to the fact that it’s time to borrow the funds necessary to pay for the things Congress has already bought. As Price sees it, the GOP-led Congress will tell the Obama administration, “We’ll cooperate, but only if you slash public investments. If not, we’ll default on our debts, crash the economy, and destroy the full faith and credit of the United States.”
Why Price or anyone else would want to slash public investments right now – hurting the economy, just as the recovery gains steam – is a bit of a mystery.
Regardless, the problem with this ridiculously dangerous and politically violent scheme is that President Obama has already said he won’t play the GOP’s game. Indeed, earlier this year, Republican leaders suggested they would once again hold the debt ceiling hostage, but the White House called their bluff and refused to pay any ransom.
Soon after, Republicans backed down, and a new precedent was set.
Hostage crises only work when there’s a credible threat. In this case, Democrats have to actually believe that Republicans would do deliberate harm to the country unless Dems paid a ransom. But once Obama realized that GOP leaders had no intention of crashing the economy on purpose, the fear disappeared and the incentive to hold the nation hostage again vanished with it.
On Friday, Tom Price said in effect, “Maybe we can go back to the way things were in 2011?” And the polite response from the Oval Office and sensible adults everywhere will be, simply, “No.”
Let’s not forget that incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently explained, “There will be no government shutdown or default on the national debt.” And with those simple words, it became quite obvious that attempts to exploit the debt ceiling won’t work because Republicans won’t follow through on their threats to harm the hostage.
Someone probably ought to explain all of this to the incoming chairman of the House Budget Committee.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 15, 2014
“An Implausible Longshot”: Rand Paul Isn’t Leading The Republican Pack
The Fix’s new rankings for Republican presidential candidates are out. Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake pick Senator Rand Paul as the most likely nominee.
I’ve excluded Paul (and Ted Cruz, ranked No. 8 by Cillizza and Blake) from my list of plausible nominees. Do I need to revisit the question? Sorry, still not buying it.
Here’s the case The Fix makes:
No one rolls their eyes anymore. Paul has a unique activist and fundraising base thanks to his dad’s two runs for president, and has shown considerable savvy in his outreach efforts to the establishment end of the party over the past few years … Paul is the candidate furthest along in the planning process for president and the one with the most current strength in early states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
I don’t see much there. Of the four attributes listed, three — unique base, early planning, strength in early states — are exactly what was said about Ron Paul in 2012. Given that Ron Paul never had a realistic chance against a very weak field, I’m not convinced that we should think much of Rand Paul’s chances.
That leaves the question of whether the rest of the party is more interested in Rand Paul 2016 than it was in Ron Paul 2012. Not whether Paul has been “savvy” in selling himself, but whether anyone is buying.
I remain highly skeptical and will have to see some explicit support from important party actors outside of the Paul orbit (and outside of Kentucky, where he and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell have developed a working relationship). We know that Paul will have some important opponents within the party, especially on national security. He’s going to need some serious supporters to overcome that. And given the large, strong group of contenders, I just can’t imagine why any (non-libertarian) group of party actors would take on that battle.
I understand the math: It’s a large field and Paul is more or less guaranteed to get 20 percent of the vote in Iowa and New Hampshire. All he needs then is to exceed his father’s performance by a few thousand votes and he could easily capture those early states against a splintered group of Republicans. That’s an illusion. There probably won’t be a dozen candidates in Iowa; Republicans have efficiently winnowed their field pre-Iowa for several cycles. But it doesn’t matter; even if Paul wins with 25 percent of the vote in Iowa, he’s not going to win the nomination unless he can eventually reach more than 50 percent. And as long as a substantial clot of party actors opposes his candidacy and most of the rest are indifferent at best, he’s not going to get the favorable publicity he needs to do that.
Yes, lots of candidates at this stage of the process haven’t demonstrated their ability to win over half of the primary vote. Mitt Romney hadn’t last time. But the opposition to Paul, and the policy differences between Paul and most of the party, are far deeper than was the case with Romney in 2012.
Show me evidence Paul is attracting support from mainstream conservatives, and I’ll start believing he’s a viable nominee. Until then, he’s an implausible longshot.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The National Memo, December 5, 2014
“Gridlock Only Gets You So Far”: Voters Will Catch On To The Fact That The GOP Is Using Obstruction To Win Elections
There are three reasons that the Republicans pursue gridlock: ideological purity, hatred of President Barack Obama and because it helps them win elections. The first two they may be able to get over, but not the third.
Republicans discovered in 2010 that by opposing anything and everything of any consequence that Obama proposed, gridlock would ensue and the public’s anger and cynicism toward Washington would grow. Rallying around the tea party’s themes and the deep economic frustrations from the near depression, they swept out incumbent Democrats by the score.
Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell made it known that his number one goal was the defeat of Obama in 2012. That did not work out so well, but the Republicans quickly pivoted to 2014, where there was clearly fertile ground to elect more of their party. Part and parcel of this strategy was to not pass any meaningful legislation on immigration reform, job creation, education, tax reform or to improve America’s infrastructure and, finally, doing their very best to rally the base against anything having to do with government. The growing anger towards Washington and the party in control of the presidency – the Democrats – provided another windfall.
The difference now is that the anger which pollsters determined in 2010 created a majority for “standing up for principle” has now shifted to “it’s time to compromise, to get things done.” In short, voters want government to work and are sick and tired of the obstruction and gridlock.
Despite their efforts to shift blame, the Republicans now are boxed in, because it is pretty clear that they are the problem, not the party proposing solutions. Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, respected political analysts, have laid this out very clearly in their writings, including the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” So even if Republicans decide that the “shut the government” caucus led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz should be hidden away in the basement of the Capitol, they are still confronted with many political players who believe they were elected by being obstructionists.
The goal of the Democrats, then, should be to revise and reinvigorate the plans to legislate and solve America’s problems and convince the voters that the Congress, controlled by Republicans, is once again blocking progress. When the Republican leadership is convinced that gridlock is now a losing game politically, they may actually change their behavior. Their rigid ideology and their hatred for Obama will give way to a new political reality – the public is on to them and, much like President Harry Truman in 1948, the “do-nothing Congress” label will be laid at their feet.
The Republicans have to confront these past six years and change their behavior. They will only do so only if it becomes crystal clear that the public understands and is sick and tired of their embracing of Washington gridlock.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, November 26, 2014
“A Naïve View Of Politics”: The Poison-The-Well Myth, And How Politics Really Works
There are certainly some serious critiques of President Obama’s new immigration policy. It could encourage more illegal immigration in the long run. It may be another step toward an imperial presidency, detached from Congress. It definitely could have been executed less cynically, given that Mr. Obama all but admitted he delayed the announcement until after the midterms, in an (unsuccessful) effort to help Democrats on the ballot.
But there is also one critique that’s getting a lot of attention and isn’t so serious.
It’s the “poison the well” argument — the notion that Mr. Obama’s executive action to shield as many as five million people from deportation will prevent a bigger immigration bill from passing Congress and maybe prevent a whole bunch of other legislation, too.
John Boehner, the speaker of the House, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the next majority leader, have both used the phrase “poison the well.” A spokesman for Mr. Boehner said the move by Mr. Obama would “ruin the chances for congressional action on this issue and many others.” While maybe we should excuse politicians for trying to score political points, neutral commentators have picked up the argument, too. It’s one of those ideas that has the aura of sober-minded political analysis.
Obviously, we can’t run the final two years of the Obama presidency multiple times under different circumstances and see what happens in each. So it’s impossible to know for certain how any one action affects the course of events. But there are all kinds of reasons to believe that the poison-the-well theory is based on a naïve view of politics. And understanding why it’s wrong helps illuminate how politics really does work.
Whatever you may think of today’s politicians, they are highly successful people who have climbed to the top of a competitive profession. Most of the time, they make decisions that are in their interests — whether political interests or policy interests. A few notable exceptions aside (like Newt Gingrich’s infamous pique in 1995 over getting a bad seat on Air Force One), they do not make major decisions the way a small child would, based mostly on whether someone else is being nice or mean to them.
If you ask political scientists what they consider to be the biggest misconceptions about politics, you’ll often hear a version of the Nice-Mean Fallacy. The Obama presidency has offered a particularly rich set of examples. It’s true that Mr. Obama and his White House haven’t done a very good job of building relationships with Congress, and it’s true that the administration’s aloofness has probably hurt its effectiveness in some ways.
But consider the recent president whose relationship skills are often contrasted with Mr. Obama’s: Bill Clinton. Many members of Congress really did seem to prefer Mr. Clinton’s personality to Mr. Obama’s. And yet which of the two presidents failed to keep Democrats united on a major health care bill and thus failed to pass one? And which president held onto every single congressional Democrat he needed to pass such a bill?
Were the roles reversed, we no doubt would hear tales about how the gregarious president used his people skills to pass the biggest expansion of the safety net in a generation while the distant, professorial one failed. In truth, congressional Democrats weren’t making decisions based on either Mr. Clinton’s or Mr. Obama’s personality. They were making them based on bigger issues.
The Democratic Party of the early 1990s included more conservative Southerners than the 2009-10 version of the party, for example. The 2009-10 Democrats were also more desperate to succeed, remembering the disappointment of the Clinton bill and probably aware that economic inequality had worsened over the intervening decades. The Democrats stuck together because they believed doing so was in their interest.
Republicans have done the same in the Obama presidency. From the beginning, Mr. McConnell has understood that Republicans could veto Mr. Obama’s promise to be a bipartisan bridge-builder. “It’s either bipartisan or it isn’t,” Mr. McConnell said in 2010, explaining his caucus’s united opposition to the health care bill. No wonder that Republicans didn’t bite when the White House suggested adding medical-malpractice reform to the bill.
Many Republicans voters back this stance. Polls show that most want their leaders to stand on principle rather than to compromise. Democratic voters are fonder of compromise.
The story on an immigration overhaul has been similar. Some Republicans leaders see a bill as in their interests — helping them with Latino voters — and the Senate passed such a bill, 68-32, last year. Yet most House Republicans have philosophical objections and have few Latino voters in their district. House leaders have refused to bring the bill to the floor.
To accept the poison-the-well argument is to believe, first, that Republicans would have passed an immigration bill if Mr. Obama had not acted. This seems unlikely but not totally out of the question: Perhaps more Republicans want to show they can compromise now that they control both chambers, hoping their presidential nominee can win swing voters in 2016. In that case, an immigration bill might be more feasible in 2015 than it was in 2013.
But the poison-the-well theory then requires a second belief, too: That even if an immigration bill were in Republican interests, they would refuse to pass one, out of spite from Mr. Obama’s executive action. This belief seems strangely dismissive of Republicans’ instinct for self-preservation. It also conflicts with the history of both parties.
On the same day in August 1981 that President Ronald Reagan threatened to fire striking air traffic controllers, many Senate Democrats voted for his tax cut, and House Democrats did the same the next day. Mr. Clinton and congressional Republicans, less than a year after impeachment, collaborated on a sprawling bank deregulation bill in 1999. A few years later, many congressional Democrats voted for the Homeland Security Act even as President George W. Bush was calling them soft on terrorism.
In each of these cases, politicians voted with their interests, not their feelings. There is every reason to believe the same will happen over the next two years.
Some of the same Republicans worrying aloud about poisoned wells no doubt understand this reality. But they continue making the point partly because it helps unify the party on a divisive issue. “It’s a way the G.O.P. can achieve consensus,” as Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist and Upshot contributor, says. “They’re internally divided on policy on immigration but agree on a process critique of Obama’s actions.”
Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio may be on one side of some big immigration questions and conservative House Republicans may be on the other, but they can come together on metaphorical well water. Which is to say that politicians generally act in their interests, even when doing so involves pretending otherwise.
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