“Reaching Out, Finding Nothing”: Remind Me Again Of How All The President Has To Do Is “Lead” & Offer Good-Faith Compromises
It’s hard to blame President Obama for at least making an effort. For four years, he took a variety of steps — some social, some formal, some professional — to establish relationships with congressional Republicans. The outreach didn’t amount to much.
But it appears the president, either out of necessity or stubbornness, will continue his newly revamped charm offensive, including a trip to Capitol Hill for another round of budget talks. It’s clearly intended as a major gesture on Obama’s part — presidents usually summon lawmakers to the White House, not head to Capitol Hill for meetings on lawmakers’ turf.
Time will tell, obviously, whether the efforts pay dividends, but the New York Times has an interesting report today on the ineffectiveness of recent outreach, including a great anecdote I hadn’t heard before.
For all the attention to President Obama’s new campaign of outreach to Republicans, it was four months ago — on the eve of bipartisan budget talks — that he secretly invited five of them to the White House for a movie screening with the stars of “Lincoln,” the film about that president’s courtship of Congress to pass a significant measure.
None accepted.
For all the pundits who complain bitterly that Obama hasn’t done enough to schmooze with lawmakers, doesn’t an anecdote like this suggest the problem is not entirely the president’s fault? Are we to believe that all five — invited in secret so they wouldn’t have to take heat from Fox or the GOP base — were all washing their hair that night?
On a more substantive note, the piece also included this key piece of information:
What spurred Mr. Obama to reach out to rank-and-file Republicans with a flurry of phone calls, meals and now Capitol visits were the recent announcements by their leaders — Speaker John A. Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — that they will no longer negotiate with Mr. Obama on budget policy as long as he keeps demanding more tax revenues as the condition for Democrats’ support of reduced spending on Medicare and other entitlement programs.
This is important. Congressional Republican leaders are now saying they won’t even talk to the president unless Obama agrees — before any meetings even take place — to give them what they want. In other words, when the White House announces that all efforts at deficit reduction in the coming years will include literally nothing but 100% spending cuts, then GOP leaders will be prepared to negotiate with the president.
Please, Beltway pundits, remind me again how all the president has to do to resolve political paralysis is “lead” and offer good-faith compromises.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 12, 2013
“By Their Own Hands”: While Republicans Warn Against “Greece”, That Is Exactly Where Austerity Budgeting Will Lead The U.S.
Indebted America is in danger of turning into destitute Greece, or so congressional Republicans and conservative commentators have been warning us for years now. For many reasons, this is an absurd comparison – but it may not always be quite so ridiculous if Washington’s advocates of austerity get their way.
The Republicans actually want to impose Greek-style budget-slashing on the United States. And the federal budget sequestration scheduled to take effect next week could represent the first serious step here toward the kind of fiscal policies that have proved so ruinous not only in Greece — raising unemployment, destroying hope, and encouraging extremism — but across Europe.
Nearly every day, House Speaker John Boehner or Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell – or Senator Rand Paul or Rep. Paul Ryan, or almost any other prominent Republican – insists that the only way to improve the economic prospects of the American people is to impose drastic budget cuts on them. While these Republican leaders don’t love the sequester budget only because it cuts too deeply into defense programs, they are eager to impose similar cuts or worse on every domestic function, from health care and education to food safety and infrastructure.
Unwilling as they usually are to name specific cuts, the Republican plans that have emerged lately are indeed similar in scope and impact to those imposed by European central bankers on Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and other beleaguered states across the continent (and imposed by the British government on the United Kingdom itself).
Enacting the same fiscal policies in this country would, presumably, induce the same effects. Yet despite their enthusiasm for extreme austerity the Republican, Tea Party, and assorted media soothsayers almost never want to discuss what has happened in Europe as a result of those same policies. It is not always possible to ignore the unhappy reality of renewed recession, from England to Italy.
Just last weekend, the British were jolted by news that Moody’s had downgraded investments in their country’s sovereign debt from its traditional AAA status.
Why would the bond rating agency do something like that? Principally because the miserable budgeting of Tory Prime Minister David Cameron’s government has mired the United Kingdom in negative growth, with no prospect of reducing its debt, which keeps growing. So the scheme that was supposed to improve the fiscal outlook for the British has merely lowered their credit rating. That wasn’t supposed to happen — in fact, the austerity plan was designed to preserve Britain’s AAA rating — but it was inevitable as soon as Downing Street chose budget-balancing over growth.
The same downward trajectory can be marked wherever the leaders of dominant Germany have forced austerity plans onto indebted governments.
So damaging has this process become for all of Europe that the Germans finally began suffering the ironic consequences in the last quarter of 2012. Their export-led growth strategies cannot work when their neighbors, reduced to poverty, can no longer purchase German goods. If German exports pick up again this year, it will only happen because customers in the U.S. and China remain exempt from the effects of austerity.
Until now, the United States has escaped the fate of Europe, remaining the “sole bright spot” of steady growth in the global economy, because President Obama resisted the fiscal extremism of his Republican adversaries, and contrived to ward off recession with necessary spending. Now sequestration, with all of its dire social and economic effects, will provide a taste of what is to come under Republican austerity: a shrunken nation with a dim future.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, February 26, 2013
“Obstructionist-In-Chief”: It’s Past Time To Make Mitch McConnell Pay
There’s been no end to the grief Mitch McConnell’s taken for his declaration early in Barack Obama’s first term that his party’s top goal was to make Obama a one-term president. Ironically, though, the failure of McConnell and the GOP to realize their goal may be the best thing he has going for him as 2014 approaches.
McConnell has been the Senate minority leader since 2006, succeeding Bill Frist just as the party lost its majority in the chamber. Twice in his tenure – in 2010 and again in 2012 – Republicans have seemed poised to win back the majority only to fall short thanks to a combination of counterproductive primary results and a national image problem that turned off swing voters in key races. As ’14 approaches, Republicans are again looking at a favorable map, though it would take some big breaks for them to overcome the Democrats’ current 55-45 advantage. But McConnell himself has a much simpler concern: saving his own job.
The Kentuckian, who turns 71 on Wednesday, has never exactly been beloved in his home state, where voters have moved closer to the GOP in recent years but are still more than willing to vote Democratic. In his first campaign, back in 1984, McConnell scored an upset over incumbent Democrat Walter Huddleston by a fraction of a point, a victory owed entirely to Ronald Reagan’s formidable coattails. When McConnell last faced the voters, in 2008, he held on by 6 points against Democrat Bruce Lunsford – this on the same day that John McCain carried Kentucky by 16 points. And in early polling for ’14, he’s running under 50 percent and leading Ashley Judd, the Kentucky native and Hollywood actress who is edging closer to a candidacy, by a high single-digit margin.
Senate leaders have become irresistible targets for the rival party’s activists in recent years. The trend was kicked off in 2004, when Republicans made toppling Democratic leader Tom Daschle one of their top priorities. The GOP recruited a top-notch candidate, John Thune, poured millions into his coffers and even coaxed then-Majority Leader Bill Frist into coming to South Dakota on Thune’s behalf – a violation of a tradition of party leaders refraining from each other’s home state battles. The gambit worked and Daschle was defeated in a close race. Democrats then made a serious run at McConnell in ’08, although Majority Leader Harry Reid stayed away from Kentucky during the race, and Republicans made Reid their No. 1 Senate target in ’10; if GOP primary voters hadn’t insisted on nominating the erratic, self-destructive Sharron Angle, Reid would likely have been felled.
And now it’s McConnell’s turn to face a full-court press from the other party. Already, a liberal group has aired an anti-McConnell ad in Kentucky, criticizing the minority leader for his opposition to a new assault weapons ban. Under any circumstance, grass-roots Democrats would be excited over the prospect of giving McConnell a fight. But his emergence as the face of reflexive Republican opposition to Obama and his agenda has only ratcheted up the left’s resolve to make him pay.
The question is whether they can actually beat him. The good news for Democrats is that Kentucky isn’t quite the Republican bastion it’s often thought of as. Sure, it’s voted Republican by lopsided margins in the last four presidential elections, but Bill Clinton did manage to carry it twice in the 1990s. It also boasts an impressive run of Democratic governors. The state’s top job is now held by Steve Beshear, a second-term Democrat, and only three Republicans (Ernie Fletcher, Louie Nunn and Simeon Willis) have held it over the last 70 years. Democrats also control one of the state’s two legislative chambers, and while no Democrat has won a U.S. Senate race since Wendell Ford in 1992, the party has come close a few times: In addition to McConnell’s 6-point scare in ’08, Republican Jim Bunning only narrowly fended off Daniel Mongiardo in 2004 and Scotty Baesler in 1998.
So Kentucky is willing to vote Democratic, McConnell has never set the world on fire at the ballot box, and after 30 years of incumbency a change message could be a formidable weapon against him. Plus, as my colleague Alex Seitz-Wald wrote on Tuesday, Tea Party groups in Kentucky – which mobilized behind Rand Paul in 2010 to defeat McConnell’s protégé, Trey Grayson, in a Senate primary – are threatening to challenge McConnell in a primary, which could force him farther to the right and away from the general election mainstream.
And now the bad news for Democrats: There’s reason to believe that Kentucky has moved farther to the right – and grown more hostile to the national Democratic Party – since President Obama came to office. Nationally, Obama’s popular vote margin was down last November from its ’08 level, but Kentuckians turned against him particularly hard. In ’08, he lost the state by 16 points, but last November the margin was 22. To put that in some perspective, that’s even worse than Walter Mondale fared in Kentucky in 1984, when he lost the state by 21 points amid a 19-point national landslide defeat. Obama’s unpopularity in the state was driven home last spring, when a majority of the state’s counties voted for “uncommitted” over the president in the Democratic primary. Since Obama became president, Democrats have also lost one of their House seats in the state, leaving them with just one.
Race has clearly played a role in Kentucky’s Obama-phobia, as it has in other swaths of Appalachia. The Obama administration’s supposed “war on coal” is a big factor too. These attitudes aren’t likely to dull in the next 21 months, which will give McConnell a chance to survive simply by linking his opponent to the president. Already, an attack ad from a Karl Rove affiliated group is bashing Judd as “an Obama-following radical Hollywood liberal.” Judd was an active campaigner for Obama last year and was a delegate (from Tennessee) for him at the Democratic convention. She’s also spoken out against mountain top coal mining, which could play right into the GOP’s “war on coal” theme.
There’s also the matter of Judd herself. She has Kentucky roots, comes from a famous country music family, and is a visible and vocal presence at University of Kentucky basketball games. So she has some serious ammunition to fight charges of carpetbagging. And she’ll obviously be able to raise a ton of money. But Republicans have some ammunition of their own, to portray her as a cultural elite who’s too close to Obama. Judd’s candidacy would attract national attention and money, but it’s not clear she’s the best option for Democrats. If she runs, though, the nomination will probably be hers.
One look at his electoral history shows that McConnell has been ripe for a serious challenge for years. He’s going to get it next year. If he survives, ironically enough, he’ll have the president to thank for it. Without the Obama boogeyman to run against, he wouldn’t have much else going for him.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, February 20, 2013
“A Mitch That Needs Scratching”: Mitch McConnell, The Least Popular Senator In America
One of the most powerful men in Washington, it turns out, is also the most unpopular senator in the nation.
This is probably not a coincidence.
Facing reelection in 2014, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) finds himself in a tougher battle than many anticipated. According to a recent poll, just 17 percent of Kentucky voters are committed to voting for him. Given how out of touch he is with their needs, it’s no wonder.
As minority leader, McConnell has been the architect of an unprecedented level of legislative obstruction in the upper chamber. Indeed, he was the mastermind behind the strategy of intransigence that the GOP adopted immediately after President Obama took office in 2009. He and his merry band of GOP brothers have blocked every effort to reduce the economic pain felt by average Americans and the good people of his home state.
His exploitation of the filibuster to require a supermajority for almost every vote flies in the face of the Founders’ intention. In the Federalist No. 58, James Madison warned that granting such power to the minority would undo the fundamental principle of free government, allowing the minority “to extort unreasonable indulgences.”
Senate Republicans, on McConnell’s orders, have done just that, manufacturing crises like the debt ceiling, fiscal cliff and sequester in order to demand cuts to the social safety net.
Yet there’s an even more unseemly aspect to McConnell’s obstruction. He, quite simply, employs the filibuster to benefit his wealthy donors.
As the Public Campaign Action Fund has noted, he has delayed or killed bills that would repeal subsidies for Big Oil, incentivize job creation, strengthen worker rights and close tax loopholes for companies with overseas operations. Opponents of such bills have found a champion in McConnell, who is more than willing to cripple the legislative process in exchange for campaign donations.
Since arriving in Washington, he has raised more than a quarter-billion dollars for himself and his allies while fighting every attempt to rein in our out-of-control campaign finance system.
When Congress was grappling over the fiscal cliff, McConnell seized on the opportunity to broker a deal that would avert the crisis in the eleventh hour. The final bill included a provision that granted Amgen, a pharmaceutical company, a $500 million windfall. Just weeks ahead of the deal, an Amgen lobbyist gave McConnell $3,000 and the company’s PAC hosted a fundraiser for him. Though McConnell denied any quid pro quo, the implication of the timing is hard to ignore.
When Americans suffering the effects of Hurricane Sandy needed federal assistance, McConnell was content to sit on his hands, instead of helping to pass an aid package through the Senate — that is, until a New York City billionaire offered to raise money for him. Even then, he voted no on the bill.
President Obama urged Congress to bring his legislative proposals on gun violence to a vote during his State of the Union address. The victims of such senseless tragedies across the country deserve at least a vote, Obama asserted.
Yet given the McConnell-induced dysfunction in Congress, asking for a simple vote is asking for the moon — and McConnell has already vowed to deprive them of even that.
Eighty-two percent of Kentuckians support criminal background checks for gun purchases. The number of gun deaths in Kentucky is higher than the national average. But none of this matters when the gun lobby spent $198,615 to get McConnell elected. He will, apparently, vote based on what will keep him on office, rather than what is best for his constituents or the country.
McConnell, tacitly acknowledging his vulnerability, has already kicked off campaign efforts, raising money and opening a campaign headquarters before any challengers have even officially entered the race.
He’s smart to do so — opponents smell blood in the water. Groups like the Progressive Change Campaign, which released a scathing ad lambasting McConnell’s record on guns, are already generating momentum for a fight. There’s increasing talk of potential challengers such as Ashley Judd, and Kentucky’s liberal and tea party groups — unlikely bedfellows, to be sure — are mulling the possibility of teaming up in an effort to bring McConnell down.
While McConnell’s war chest is daunting, it is stuffed almost entirely by out-of-state and corporate PAC money. His grass-roots base is anemic, and individuals contributing $200 or less make up a sliver of the pie. A strong organizing effort could capitalize on that weakness, using his unpopularity and questionable votes to unseat him — something the Progressive Change Campaign Committee hopes to do.
Time and again, McConnell has ignored the needs of the people while staunchly defending the pay-to-play electoral system that shields him from legitimate challengers. And Kentuckians just might be fed up.
McConnell’s seat was once occupied by Henry Clay, who was dubbed “The Great Pacificator.” Admired by Abraham Lincoln, he is widely considered one of the greatest senators in American history. Clay once said, “Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.”
Kentucky voters deserve a senator who understands the wisdom of those words.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 19, 2013
“The Tea Party Is Beating Mitch McConnell”: Tea Party Wins, Regardless Of The Primary Outcome
If Mitch McConnell isn’t conservative enough for you, Matt Bevin may be your guy. The Kentucky businessman is reportedly considering mounting a primary challenge against the Senate minority leader from the right, and has been reaching out to local Tea Party groups to secure support, according to the Hill’s Alexandra Jaffe:
Sarah Duran, president of the Louisville Tea Party, told The Hill that Bevin had been in touch with her over the phone to discuss his run multiple times over the past few weeks, and that he met with the group two weeks ago to discuss his interest in the race. […]
She added that other Tea Party groups had reached out to Bevin to encourage him to run, and that even “some people that have supported McConnell in the past” had been in touch with him about a potential bid.
Does Bevin have any chance of beating McConnell? Well, he’s wealthy and could presumably fund his own campaign, which would be crucial in taking on McConnell, who is sitting on a prodigious $7 million war chest. And McConnell is fairly weak — the least popular senator in the country, according to a recent PPP poll.
But Bevin’s campaign is a long shot, at best. McConnell is a savvy operator who will have the state’s entire GOP establishment behind him, endless supplies of money, and universal name ID, while Bevin is almost entirely unknown. And McConnell is hardly a RINO despised by the far right like Rich Lugar or other GOP senators who have fallen to Tea Party challenges.
Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a more moderate, less powerful senator in a more conservative state, held on to his seat last year in the face of a Tea Party challenge. A primary challenge against House Speaker John Boehner fizzled harmlessly as well. Over 90 percent of senators who seek reelection win, after all.
Still, that doesn’t mean that a Tea Party challenge is unimportant. For the movement, a primary challenge can be successful even if it fails, as long as it succeeds in pushing the target further to the right and making him more responsive to the far right’s demands.
And by that measure, Bevin may have already won.
Rumors that the Tea Party might target McConnell started even before Election Day last year, and the Republican leader stepped up his outreach accordingly. In August, he held a large rally with fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who is positioning himself as a national leader of the libertarian and Tea Party wings of the GOP, even though McConnell campaigned against Paul and the two have clashed in the Senate.
McConnell even hired Paul’s former campaign manager, Jesse Benton, to lead his own 2014 reelection bid. Benton also ran Ron Paul’s presidential campaign and has deep ties in the conservative activist community. “The year-long search that ended with Benton’s hiring was a major signal to Republicans that McConnell views support from the younger libertarian and tea party movements as crucial not only to his political future, but also to his party’s prospects nationally,” Politico noted at the time.
The bar is especially high for a leader like McConnell, who would like to not only win, but win by a large margin to discourage future challengers and show strength within his caucus back in Washington. Which is why he seems to be taking the threat seriously.
As he leads his party’s negotiations on sequestration, gun control, immigration and everything else in the next two years, he will know that it’s not just his colleagues’ reelections at stake, but his own as well. And that makes him less likely to cooperate with the White House and more interested in adhering to the hard-line positions set by the growing number of conservatives in his own caucus, whose support he will need next year. In other words, the Tea Party wins, regardless of the primary outcome.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, February 19, 2013
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