“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
“Big Money’s Futile Search For A GOP Frontrunner”: There Is No Overriding Argument To Rally Republican Insiders
The New York Times has a well-reported article today outlining the desires of various Republican Party donors and bundlers to get behind a single establishment candidate in the 2016 presidential primary. There’s only one problem: That doesn’t seem remotely possible.
Yes, it makes sense to try to limit the intraparty war. The three potential establishment candidates — former Florida governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey governor Chris Christie and 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney — would presumably compete for the same donors and voters if they all enter the race. But each of the three has his own personal ambitions, core set of loyalists, individual and institutional strengths, and potentially fatal flaws. Why should any two such candidates cede to a third? And what of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker? Ohio governor John Kasich? Florida senator Marco Rubio? If they run, each will depend in some degree on establishment support as well.
Bush has all but dared the party to nominate someone else, saying that, if he runs, he won’t court Republican base voters so eagerly that he alienates the general electorate. He refuses to abandon his commitment to Common Core educational standards, which the base has come to perceive as ideologically sketchy and governmentally oppressive. Worse, he is unabashedly pro-immigrant in a party that has concluded that, at the end of the day, it really prefers a good deportation. Bush’s description of illegal border crossing as an “act of love” will prove a constant temptation to the devil perched on the party’s shoulder. Which of the candidates competing for the base’s roar of approval will resist the temptation to label Bush a quisling in the existential war against the Other?
Christie may be even less of a sure bet. A Department of Justice investigation into his subordinates’ creepy “Bridgegate” activities is yet to be concluded. Christie’s presidential calling card — his “character” — rides on his aggressive demeanor and the results of that investigation. But a long presidential campaign seems unlikely to serve his ambition. I have never been able to get over this Christie television ad from 1994 in which he sits with his wife and baby, and proceeds to lie to the camera about two Republican primary opponents. Yes, the ad is old. Yes, the office he sought was relatively small potatoes (a county board seat). But find me another top-tier presidential candidate who has used a family tableau with his wife — let alone his infant child — to falsely attack opponents. (Christie was subsequently sued by his opponents and, remarkably, settled out of court.) Bridgegate. Babygate. All that shouting at regular people. Something is not right about this guy. A presidential campaign will almost certainly expose it — if the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey doesn’t first.
That leaves Romney. He’s competent, tried, true, tested. And the base — convinced that Romney’s 2012 outing proves that establishment candidates lack the real faith to win — will have conniptions if party elites try again to force him to the top of the Republican heap.
So if you’re a big Republican donor, or an ambitious bundler, who do you get behind? And how do you convince rival donors to join you? There is no favorite among the three, no overriding case to be made for any particular candidate. Which means that there is no overriding argument to rally Republican insiders representing various industries, regions and personal loyalties to abandon their personal stakes in one candidate and support a different candidate.
The only people who can clear the field are the candidates themselves. That’s usually the purpose of a primary. And it’s always the outcome.
By: Francis Wilkinson, The National Memo, December 8, 2014
“The Cycle Of Republican Radicalization”: The Particularly Intense Loathing Republicans At All Levels Have For Obama Feeds The Cycle
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported on a Quinnipiac poll from a week ago showing a striking change in public opinion on immigration. The question was whether undocumented immigrants should be deported or should be able to get on a path to citizenship. Clear majorities of the public have long favored a path to citizenship (especially if you provide details of what that path would entail, which this poll didn’t). But that has changed, because Republicans have changed. As the Post described the Quinnipiac results, “Although [Republicans] supported citizenship over deportation 43 to 38 percent in November 2013, today they support deportation/involuntary departure over citizenship, 54 to 27 percent.”
That’s an enormous shift, and it provides an object lesson in a dynamic that has repeated itself many times during the Obama presidency. We’ve talked a lot about how the GOP in Congress has moved steadily to the right in recent years, but we haven’t paid as much attention to the movement of Republican voters. But the two feed off each other in a cycle.
Immigration is a perfect example. Before this latest immigration controversy, Republican voters were at least favorably inclined toward a path to citizenship. But then Barack Obama moves to grant temporary legal status to some undocumented people (and by the way, nothing he’s doing creates a path to citizenship for anyone, but that’s another story). It becomes a huge, headline-dominating story, in which every single prominent Republican denounces the move as one of the most vile offenses to which the Constitution has ever been subjected. Conservative media light up with condemnations. And because voters take cues from the elites on their own side, Republicans are naturally going to think the order was wrong while Democrats are going to think it was right.
But what the Quinnipiac poll suggests — and granted, this is only one poll and we won’t know for sure until we get more evidence — this process also ends up shifting people’s underlying beliefs about the issue. In this case, the controversy makes Republicans more conservative.
Let’s take another example. People like me have mocked Republican officeholders for the way they shifted on the wisdom of health insurance reform that involves establishing a marketplace where people can buy private insurance, providing subsidies so those with modest incomes can afford it, and imposing an individual mandate to ensure a wide risk pool. When Mitt Romney passed a plan on that model in 2006, Republicans thought it was an innovative, market-based solution to the problem of health insecurity and the uninsured, but when Barack Obama passed a similar plan in 2010, they decided it was a freedom-murdering socialist nightmare.
But it’s safe to say that the average Republican voter didn’t have much of an opinion on that particular kind of health care reform prior to Barack Obama becoming president. They did, however, have opinions on the underlying question of whether it’s the responsibility of the government to make sure that everyone has health coverage. You’d expect most Republicans to say no, since they believe in the free market and aren’t favorably inclined toward the safety net. And most did — in Gallup polls, the number of Republicans answering no to this question has consistently been over 50 percent. In 2006, for instance, it was 57 percent. But since then the rejection of government having this responsibility has gone from a majority position among Republicans to near-unanimity. In 2013, it reached 86 percent.
So it isn’t just that Republican voters were convinced that the Affordable Care Act is a bad thing. As a group they moved to the right, with the minority of them who believed in a government responsibility for health care either changing their minds or changing their party affiliation.
This movement hasn’t happened on every issue; for instance, you might be surprised to learn that substantial numbers of Republican voters appreciate the reality of global warming and favor taking steps to address it; in some cases, even a majority of them do, depending on what specific question is being asked (see here for some examples). My guess is that there are two reasons we haven’t seen a similar movement to the right on climate. First, there is some diversity of opinion within the GOP elite, from outright climate denialism on one end to acknowledgement of reality on the other (without, it should be said, accepting that anything ought to be done about it). Second, and perhaps more important, the issue has never been at the top of the news agenda for an extended period in recent years, particularly in a conflict that pits all Republicans against Barack Obama.
But when an issue like immigration or health care does meet those criteria, you get a particular cycle. Elite Republicans take their place in the fight against Obama; then rank-and-file Republicans follow along; then pushed by their constituencies, the officeholders harden their positions, which in turn pulls their voters farther to the right, and on it goes. The particularly intense loathing Republicans at all levels have for Obama feeds the cycle, pushing them toward not just disagreeing with him on particular courses of policy but rejecting the underlying principles he holds.
Is this cycle going to continue after Obama leaves office? If Hillary Clinton wins in 2016, it probably will.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 2, 2014
“How Obama Boxed In Republicans With His Immigration Order”: Revoking It In 2017 Will Be A Lot More Complicated
If there’s an elected Republican who thinks it wasn’t a bad idea for President Obama to take executive action on immigration, he or she has yet to make that opinion known. Not surprisingly, the 20 or 30 men (and one woman) hoping to get the GOP nomination for president in 2016 have been particularly vocal on the topic. But while thunderous denunciations of the Constitution-shredding socialist dictator in the White House may seem to them today like exactly what the situation demands, before long they’re going to be asked a simple yet dangerous question: If you become president, what are you going to do about it?
Although they haven’t actually answered that question yet, their feelings have been unambiguous. Ted Cruz said Obama has “gotten in the job of counterfeiting immigration papers, because there’s no legal authority to do what he’s doing.” Rand Paul compared the order to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Rick Perry threatened to sue over it. So did Scott Walker. So did Mike Pence.
Because these guys would all like to be president, we have to place their opposition in a different context from their current jobs as senators and governors. So let’s imagine it’s January 2017. You, Republican candidate, have just been sworn in as president. Two years ago, Barack Obama made this policy change, and as a result, millions of undocumented immigrants registered with the government, submitted to background checks, paid back taxes, and obtained work permits. They’re now working legally and not living in fear of immigration authorities. You have to decide what’s going to happen to them. This is a very different situation than it was back in 2014 when the move was announced. Instead of wondering whether we should give legal status to a group of undocumented immigrants, we’re now wondering whether to take away legal status from a group of people who are documented, even if they’re not actually on a path to citizenship.
And don’t forget, these are pretty sympathetic folks — they’ve been in the United States for at least seven years now (under the order, only those who came before 2010 are eligible), and they were either brought here as children and grew up in America, or are the parents of children who were born in the U.S., or are legal residents. Deporting them would mean breaking up families. Just think how that’s going to play on the evening news—the image of children crying desperately as their parents are carted off by law enforcement on your orders isn’t exactly going to go over well.
That’s what the next president will confront. So what are the possible answers a Republican candidate could give to the question of what they will do about Obama’s order? They might say what a lot of Republicans fear, which is that however much they opposed the move in the first place, by 2017, undoing it will be impractical and cruel. But saying that would pretty much doom them with the extremely conservative white Republican primary electorate, because it both capitulates on the substance and reflects a stance of less than maximal opposition toward something Barack Obama did.
Alternatively, they could say they’ll immediately reverse the order and start deporting these immigrants. In fact, if they believe as they say that the order is illegal, wouldn’t they have no choice but to revoke it? And immediately? The trouble is that saying so would risk both alienating and mobilizing Latino voters, for whom undocumented people aren’t an abstraction or an invading horde but individual human beings.
If the eventual nominee said explicitly that he’ll revoke Obama’s order, it could remind a lot of people of 2012, when Mitt Romney suggested that given the impracticality of rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants, the way to deal with the problem was “self-deportation” — in other words, making life so miserable for them that they decided to return to the countries from which they fled. Even RNC chairman Reince Priebus later called that comment “horrific” because of the message it sent to Latinos. Pledging to start breaking up families would be even worse.
Since both those answers are extremely unappealing, the GOP candidates might try to retreat to a dodge — something like, “I’ll sit down with congressional leaders to determine a way forward.” Any reporter or debate monitor with a pulse is likely to follow up with, “O.K., but legislation can take time, and there’s little appetite among Republicans in Congress for immigration reform that goes much beyond building fences. So in the meantime, would you leave Obama’s order in place or issue your own order revoking it?” And they’d be right back where they started.
There are times when it’s perfectly reasonable for a candidate to answer a tough question with “It depends,” and this could be one of those times; for instance, how a Republican president would address the issue could depend on how many people actually sign up for this new legal status. But let’s be realistic: Republican primary voters are unlikely to accept that as an answer. They’re going to want a declaration of resolve and commitment, a signal that the candidates feel the same way about undocumented immigrants that they do. And there is bound to be at least one candidate (Ted Cruz, I’m guessing) who will open the bidding with an emphatic pledge to reverse Obama’s order on his first day in office. That will raise the pressure on all the other candidates to follow suit.
If they do, it will send a message of hostility that Latino voters will hear loud and clear, a message the GOP has been trying (unsuccessfully) to avoid for the last couple of years. Barack Obama sure boxed them in on this one, didn’t he?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 1, 2014
“The Undeniable Truth”: Why I’m (Still) Thankful For President Obama
On a day when we pause to consider those things for which Americans ought to be thankful, I feel obliged to mention my appreciation for many of the things that Barack Obama has accomplished as President of the United States, and my profound relief that he is in the Oval Office rather than any of the Republicans who sought to displace him.
On this day, it seems appropriate to reflect not only on Obama’s considerable achievements, but on how much worse our situation might be if his opponents had been in control of events from January 2009 until now.
With our continuous immersion in harsh commentary from factions and ideologues across the spectrum, a mindless negativity tends to dominate assessments of his presidency. He is certainly more flawed than his most zealous supporters would ever have admitted six or seven years ago, which is why some of them are disproportionately disappointed today; he has made regrettable mistakes in both policy and politics; and, as we saw in this month’s midterm election, he has suffered declines in public confidence that injured his image and the fortunes of his party. His approval ratings remain low.
And yet, whatever his fellow citizens may feel, the undeniable truth is that Obama righted the nation in a moment of deep crisis and set us on a navigable course toward the future, despite bitter, extreme, and partisan opposition that was eager to sink us rather than see him succeed.
So I’m thankful that Obama was president at the nadir of the Great Recession, rather than John McCain, Mitt Romney, or any other Republican who might have insisted on austerity and prevented the stimulus spending that saved us from economic catastrophe. It wasn’t large enough or long enough to prevent the human suffering of unemployment, but it was sufficient to bring recovery, more rapidly than most countries have recovered after a major panic.
The simple proof may be found in the record of growth that outpaced every other industrialized country in the world – a record that seems even more impressive because the crash began here, as a consequence of irresponsibility and criminality in American financial markets. Undergirding the stimulus was his courageous decision to bail out the automotive industry, denounced as “socialism,” saved at least a million jobs and prevented the further deindustrialization of America.
I’m also thankful that Obama – a politician who respects science and listens to scientists — was president as we began to encounter the difficult realities of climate change. Having declared his determination to double the production of renewable energy in this country, he has far exceeded that objective already. Under his guidance, the federal government has acted against excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, required automakers to double their fuel economy by 2025, ordered agencies to achieve sustainability in operations and purchases, and invested tens of billons in smart electric grids, conservation, and clean fuels.
I’m thankful that he oversaw passage of financial reform, despite his overly cautious failure to prosecute the financial felons who caused the crisis and his refusal to take down any of the big banks. Like the stimulus and the auto bailout, the Dodd-Frank Act is imperfect but useful and necessary – and wouldn’t have occurred if the bankers and their most abject Republican servants had been fully in charge.
I’m even more thankful that he pushed through the most extensive and generous reform in American health care since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act – which, despite its troubled debut, has proved to be a remarkable success. It isn’t Medicare for all, but Obamacare is insuring and protecting millions of Americans who would otherwise be subject to the Tea Party Republican policy, pithily summarized by that mob screaming “let ‘em die” at the GOP debate in 2012. Health care costs are falling, Medicare’s solvency has improved, and millions more of the country’s poor and working families are covered by Medicaid, in spite of Republican legislators and governors who would, quite literally, let them die.
Finally, I’m appreciative of many other policy decisions Obama has made – promoting human rights by ending anti-gay discrimination in the military, banning the Bush era tolerance of torture, outlawing unequal pay for women, and most recently his executive order on immigration. I’m grateful that he is seeking peace through negotiation with Iran, instead of going directly (and insanely) to war as McCain or Romney would almost surely have done. I’m glad he had the guts to order the operation that finished Osama bin Laden.
None of this diminishes the president’s political errors, his sometimes naïve attitude about “bipartisanship,” his excessive deference to the national security and defense establishments, or his persistent susceptibility to wrongheaded cant about entitlements and deficits.
But he remains admirably cool under attacks that would madden most people. He refuses to mimic the cynical, mindless, and ugly conduct of his adversaries. He still proclaims American values of shared responsibility and prosperity, of cooperation and community, of malice toward none and charity for all.
In different ways, those ideals were epitomized by the presidential founders of this national holiday – George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt – and their persistence is reason for thanksgiving, too.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, November 27, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 