“Nutballs And Buffoons”: The GOP’s Next Internal Debate
This morning, Jeb Bush said some somewhat surprising things in a meeting with reporters, at least for a Republican. He noted that neither Ronald Reagan nor his father could be elected in today’s GOP, and said in essence that Mitt Romney had moved too far to the right on immigration. He also said some of the things you’d expect a Republican to say, like that the blame for the current partisan atmosphere lies with President Obama, because he didn’t seek common ground with Republicans enough. Anyone who has been watching politics for the last three and a half years knows how utterly insane this is, but in case you missed this tidbit, a bunch of influential congressional Republicans got together on the night of Obama’s inauguration to lay out a plan for how they would obstruct everything they could and sabotage his presidency.
The question of what Jeb is up to sheds some light on where his party is going to find itself this coming fall, should it lose the presidential election. The simplest explanation for his willingness to tenderly criticize other Republicans is that he is realistic about the country’s yearning for more Bushes in the White House, so he feels free to state the blindingly obvious about his party’s gallop to the right. The alternative answer, which Jonathan Chait suggests, is that Jeb “is clearly engaged in an effort to position himself as the next leader of the Republican Party.” Chait explains:
To understand what Bush is saying, you need to anticipate how the party might diagnose the causes of a loss in 2012, and then you can see how he is setting himself as the cure. Bush has been publicly urging Republicans to moderate their tone toward Latinos and to embrace immigration reform. Here is the one issue where Republicans, should they lose, will almost surely conclude that they need to moderate their party stance. The Latino vote is both growing in size and seems to be tilting ever more strongly toward the Democrats, a combination that will rapidly make the electoral map virtually unwinnable. Indeed, the body language of the Romney campaign suggests it already regrets the hard-line stances on immigration it adopted during the primary…
If you try to imagine the Republican consensus after a potential losing election, it will look like this [a moderation in tone, without a moderation in substance]. It will recognize that its harsh partisan rhetoric turned off voters, and will urgently want to woo Latinos, while holding on to as much as possible of the party’s domestic policy agenda. And oh, by the way, the party will be casting about for somebody to lead it.
Chait may indeed be right about what Jeb is thinking. But it’s important to remember that if Romney loses, there will be a vigorous debate within the GOP about why he lost, and the outcome of that debate is not completely certain. Many Republican leaders will certainly argue that the rhetoric got out of hand, and they’ll be right. But lots of other Republicans, including the remnants of the Tea Party and the people who represent them, will argue that there was only one reason Romney lost: he was too liberal. They will push for more hardline positions, more uncompromising obstruction, and more conservative candidates, at all levels but especially when it comes to the 2016 presidential race.
You might say, well, that happened in 2012, didn’t it? And the establishment’s candidate eventually prevailed. That’s true enough, but Mitt Romney had the good fortune to run against a remarkable collection of nutballs and buffoons. It isn’t as though defeating Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum makes you some kind of giant-killer. After a few months of those primaries, he came out looking like the closest thing the party had to a candidate who was in possession of all his faculties.
In every presidential election in the last half-century with the exception of 2000, Republicans have nominated the person who was “next in line,” almost always someone who had run for president before and come in second. But the closest thing to a next in line for 2016 will be Santorum, and the party couldn’t possibly be dumb enough to nominate him. There will likely be some candidates more acceptable to the establishment, and some who appeal more to the base. But the former group will still feel enormous pressure to move as far right as possible to placate those base voters. In other words, it’s possible Jeb Bush will wind up as the leader of the GOP. But if he does, it won’t be because he’s a moderate. It’ll be because, like Romney, he can give the base the wingnuttery it demands, while winking to the establishment that he’s not as crazy as he sounds.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 11, 2012
“Threatening To Further A Very Bad Trend”: Romney’s All Wrong On Public Sector Employment
Is the 2012 election going to hinge on voters’ beliefs about the government workforce? It seems that at least this week’s news cycle will. It’s an important conversation to have. Public sector job loss is at the heart of our stagnant economy and is a big reason why the recovery can’t get real lift-off. Yet this isn’t a coincidental phenomenon or a bipartisan issue. Republican lawmakers are to blame for the bulk of these job losses, and their solutions to the problem will only add fuel to the fire.
To recap for those who don’t watch the Sunday talk shows: in a press conference on Friday, President Obama said, “The private sector is doing fine.” The full quote shows that he was talking about private sector job creation versus public sector job loss, but the pundits began a-punditing and soon his quote had become synonymous with “the economy is doing fine,” as if the private sector is all that matters.
Never one to sit on an opportunity to muddy his own message, Mitt Romney jumped in later in the day to take it further. Instead of confining his attack to Obama’s (purported) suggestion that things are hunky-dory in the private sector while the economy is still clearly suffering, Romney maligned some of the most beloved public sector workers. He said of Obama: “He wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more fireman, more policeman, more teachers.… It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”
Both soundbites are likely to get so bent out of shape by the media game of telephone that they’ll eventually end up unrecognizable. But at the heart of each statement lies a fundamental difference in how the two candidates—and the two parties—view the nature of the jobs crisis. From Obama’s point of view, we’re not being dragged down by job loss in the private sector but by losses in the public sector. Romney sees exactly the opposite: we should cut even more jobs in the government and invest more heavily in private sector job creators. (He even explicitly called for government job cuts just a week ago.) So which view is right?
Evidence backs Obama’s perspective. Since the recovery officially began, the number of local government jobs has fallen by 3 percent, while the private sector has actually been able to add jobs—4.3 million, to be exact. And it’s worth comparing those numbers to recent recessions to get the full effect of just how bad, and abnormal, this trend is. Romney is at least partly right in that the private sector isn’t doing as well as it could be. At this point in the recessions experienced in 1992 and 2003, it had added 5 million and 4.5 million jobs, respectively.
But the public sector looks far, far worse now than it did then. As Ben Polak and Peter K. Schott write in the New York Times today, “In the past, local government employment has been almost recession-proof. This time it’s not.” Local government employment actually grew in the past two recessions by 7.7 percent and 5.2 percent for each respective period. This time around, it’s hemorrhaging jobs.
So it seems that while both candidates’ exaggerations were a bit off—Obama misspoke in suggesting that the private sector is completely shielded from pain—he gets closer to the heart of the problem than Romney. The huge fall in public sector employment really is dragging down the economy. As we wonder how to get out of this economic mess, it’s good to keep in mind another point Polak and Schott make: “If state and local governments had followed the pattern of the previous two recessions, they would have added 1.4 million to 1.9 million jobs and overall unemployment would be 7.0 to 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent.” That’s a huge difference.
But it’s also extremely important to remember why we’re in this situation. Polak and Schott hypothesize that it could be an electorate that is no longer willing to stomach paying for a growing government workforce. Or perhaps, they say, it’s that state and local governments have run out of ways to handle their extremely crunched budgets. But as Mike Konczal and I showed not too long ago, the massive job loss we’ve been experiencing in the public sector is no random coincidence or unfortunate side effect. It is part of an ideological battle waged by ultra conservatives who were swept into power in the 2010 elections. Republicans seized control of eleven states, and of those, five were at the top of the list for public sector job loss. Only seven states lost more than 2.5 percent of their government workforce from December 2010 to December 2011, and those five newly Republican states were among them. All others fared far better: they lost an average of .5 percent of their government employees.
This means that the eleven states that went red two years ago were responsible for 40 percent of these public sector job losses in 2011. If we add in Texas, a massive red state, we can pinpoint the source of 70 percent of those losses. And these losses were the result of deliberate decisions: even in the face of tight budget constraints, many of these states cut taxes for corporations and top earners while slimming down the public payrolls. It was part and parcel of a new agenda that came in with Tea Party–esque Republican legislators.
All of this is even more important when we switch from discussing the causes of the jobs crisis to the solutions. Romney’s plan looks very similar to those being played out in these ultraconservative states: he wants to further eviscerate the public workforce—including, apparently, policemen and teachers, who are desperately needed right now—while continuing tax breaks and creating even more for top earners and corporations.
On the other side of the aisle, Obama is still demanding—even if the demand is falling on deaf ears—that Congress pass his American Jobs Act, which would spend $35 billion in federal funds to keep those very government workers in their jobs. Guess who opposes that plan? Congressional Republicans and Mitt Romney.
There are still some remaining questions when it comes to Obama’s plan. Where’s the money to put public employees back to work after so many lost their jobs? Even more troublesome, if these job losses are due to ideologically driven decisions, will more federal spending really make a dent? Will these ultraconservative Republicans even accept the money? But it is clear that under a President Romney that money won’t even be offered and even less may be extended. Whether employed by the government or a private business, any voter should be nervous about a candidate that is threatening to further a trend that’s already holding our economy back.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, June 11. 2012
“Mouth Open, Brain Dead”: Mitt Romney Looks A ‘Gaffehorse’ In The Mouth
When Republicans propose cuts to essential public services, Democrats generally respond by accusing their GOP opponents of wanting to fire teachers, police officers, and fire fighters.
These public servants are cherished members of their communities. Anyone who would denigrate them must want a dumber, scarier, and more dangerous society. In other words, as the great Admiral Ackbar once said: “It’s a trap!”
Usually Republicans tend to skip over that particular trap, retreating into blather about debt for the grandkids or overbearing union bosses. What they never do is confess to wanting fewer firemen, policemen and teachers, at least not in public—until Mitt Romney came along.
It all began last Friday, when Romney advisers decided that President Obama had blunderingly delivered a gift to them during a White House press conference. “The private sector is doing fine,” the president had said. Of course he meant that the private sector is doing much better than the public sector – not going as far as many, including Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal, who argue that the private sector actually is doing fine.
Still, Romney’s team practically ignited with glee. They pounced on May’s 69,000 jobs report, although that’s 58,000 more than Bush created on average. (And never mind that economists think Mitt’s plan won’t help and could make things worse.)
So Romney blurted an attack, shouting angrily: ”He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”
Now we all know that Mitt wants fewer firemen, fewer policemen, fewer teacher. This will help the American people? And this was the lesson of Wisconsin? That’s like being born on third base and thinking the lesson is you hit a triple.
Here are the real lessons of Wisconsin:
- Don’t get outspent 10-to-1
- Start attacking early
- Don’t initiate a recall without a charismatic alternative
- Move to the center
Scott Walker wasn’t only helped by the Citizens United ruling. A loophole in Wisconsin law allowed the challenged governor to raise unlimited donations from individuals. Meanwhile, his Democratic opponent only had two months to raise funds and — despite winning most late-deciding voters — he got creamed. Nearly 20 per cent of Obama supporters voted for Walker simply because they disliked the idea of a recall. And Democrats won at least a symbolic victory by taking back the State Senate.
According to Mitt, however, Wisconsin means people don’t want more firefighters, cops, or teachers — an argument too ridiculous even for Walker to endorse. No, Mitt thinks they want more tax breaks for investment bankers and oil barons.
The Republican candidate answered a “gaffe” with a big, loud GAFFE. The President’s campaign should be very grateful.
By: The National Memo, June 11, 2012, @LOLGOP
“Illogical Reasoning”: Mitt’s Utterly Empty Massachusetts Boasts
The Obama campaign has been criticizing Mitt Romney’s record as Massachusetts governor, and the presumptive Republican nominee is now responding with an ad of his own. Romney certainly has a right (and, from a strategic standpoint, an obligation) to rebut his opponent’s attacks, but the defense he offers is a textbook demonstration of how to make something out of nothing.
The spot makes three specific boasts about Romney’s term as governor, which ran from 2003 to 2007. The first involves job creation:
“As Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney had the best jobs record in a decade.”
That sounds impressive, but look a little closer. In the decade before Romney’s tenure, Massachusetts had three other governors, all Republicans. One of them, Bill Weld, clearly had a better jobs record than him. When Weld came to office in January 1991, the state’s economy really was in a freefall. A major Boston-based bank, the Bank of New England, had just failed and the jobless rate was 7.4 percent and climbing fast. Within a few months it reached 9.7 percent, then began falling as the economy – in the state and nationally – revived. Weld left office at the end of July ’97 (to pursue an ill-fated bid to become ambassador to Mexico) with the jobless rate at just 4.1 percent.
His successor, Paul Cellucci, oversaw a further decline, with the rate plummeting to just above 2 percent in 2000. But the economy began sagging, and the number started to rise again. On April 10, 2001, he resigned to become George W. Bush’s ambassador to Canada. If you use the data from March ’01, Cellucci’s last full month on the job, he left the state with a jobless rate of 3.1 percent. If you use the April ’01 data, the figure was 3.3 percent. Either way, it’s comparable to the 0.9 percent drop that Romney presided over from ’03 to ’07.
The only governor in the decade before Romney’s arrival with a clearly worse jobs record was his immediate successor, Jane Swift, who served as acting governor from April ’01 to January ’03. During that time, unemployment climbed to 5.6 percent, which is where it stood when Romney was sworn-in.
So what Romney’s “best governor in a decade” boast actually means is that he had a better jobs record than Cellucci and Swift. And the reality is that there wasn’t a dramatic difference between his jobs record and Cellucci’s. So really, Romney is just bragging that he was better than Swift, who served less than half a term.
Then there’s this:
“He balanced every budget without raising taxes.”
This is only true in a very literal sense. Romney didn’t raise the income or sales taxes, but his first budget did impose more than $500 million in new fees that directly hit middle class residents. At the time they were enacted, the National Conference of State Legislatures noted that no other state had relied so heavily on fees to balance its books. Not that this is news: Obama’s campaign has been playing up Romney’s fee spree, and his Republican opponents threw it in his face during both of his presidential runs.
The ad’s final claim is that Romney achieved balanced budgets “by bringing parties together to cut through gridlock.” Again, this means a lot less than it sounds like. A balanced budget is required in Massachusetts and the state’s legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic. The only way for Romney to meet his constitutional duties was to sign a balanced budget approved by Democrats.
What Romney is banking on, of course, is that swing voters aren’t aware of this context, or don’t care about it even if they are. His entire strategy depends on economic anxiety leading voters to look for reasons to throw out Obama and to give Romney the benefit of the doubt, even if those reasons aren’t logical. From that standpoint, this ad might work just fine.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, June 8, 2012
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