“The Insufficient Craziness Theory”: When Plain Old Everyday Crazy Is Just Not Enough
Every time Republicans suffer a rejection of the most right-wing items on their agenda, a significant number decide they haven’t been sufficiently crazy. That was the conclusion that many Republicans drew from the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012. And now that Republicans in Congress have been forced to surrender in their fight with President Obama over the budget, health care and the nation’s credit, some are drawing the same conclusion.
In this view, as Dylan Scott pointed out on Talking Points Memo today, it was not the far-right that caused Speaker John Boehner problems, it was those pesky moderates (whoever they may be). ”I’m more upset with my Republican conference, to be honest with you,” said Rep. Raul Labrador, Republican of Idaho. “It’s been Republicans here who apparently always want to fight, but they want to fight the next fight, that have given Speaker Boehner the inability to be successful in this fight. So if anybody should be kicked out, it’s probably those Republicans.”
He said they “are unwilling to keep the promises they made to the American people. Those are the people who should be looking behind their back.”
I don’t really have any idea what Mr. Labrador thinks those promises were. Presumably they did not include withholding paychecks from federal workers and threatening to create a worldwide recession.
But in the view of this crowd, having the same fight again in an election year (which could happen since the debt ceiling was raised only until Feb. 15) could actually be a good thing. That’s not so shocking, I guess, coming from the bomb-throwing Tea Party wing, but the political blindness goes farther than that.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for example, said the fight over the debt ceiling was good for Democrats, but for a peculiar reason. “It has been the best two weeks for the Democratic Party in recent times because they were out of the spotlight and didn’t have to showcase their ideas,” Mr. Graham said.
What Mr. Graham perceived as hiding was actually an exercise in not interrupting your enemy while he’s making a mistake. It was a good period for Democrats because Republicans were in the spotlight and showcasing their ideas. Or their lack of ideas, in the words of Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor who always seems on the verge of making a presidential run that never quite seems to materialize.
“We have to have an agenda, we just can’t be against what’s in front of Washington, D.C.,” Bush said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today. “Much of what goes on in Washington is completely irrelevant to the lives of everyday people. I mean it’s just amazing.”
By: Andrew Rosenthal, Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, October 17, 2013
“The Power Of Personality”: “ObamaCares” And The Tea Party Doesn’t
Does anybody care that millions of Americans can’t afford health care? Does anyone care that before health care reform, insurance companies had the power to screw their customers royally? Does anyone care that Americans spend more per person on health care than people anywhere else in the world but are not nearly as healthy as the citizens of nations which provide comprehensive health care coverage to their residents?
Barack Obama does and the tea party doesn’t.
The most important stat that I saw in the 2012 National Election Day Exit Poll was the power of personality in the presidential race. A majority of the voters who looked for leadership, vision and shared values in 2012 supported Mitt Romney. The only other personal dimension measured by the exit poll was caring. The voters who sought compassion in their president supported Barack Obama by an overwhelming margin. The president’s advantage on empathy was so big that it overwhelmed the support that Mitt Romney had on the other three personality dimensions.
Compassion brings us to the Affordable Care Act or, as I like to call it, ObamaCares.
Many Americans who oppose ObamaCares also dislike the mean spirited nature of the tea party. You can talk about issues until the cows come home, but Americans vote for people, not issues. Voters use the candidates’ positions on issues to make personal judgments about their character. Many Americans may have philosophical reservations about the Affordable Care Act, but more than anything else they resent the tea party’s blind opposition to any proposal that improves the quality of health care available to the public. The tea party has demonstrated its indifference to the suffering of millions of Americans by its failure to offer its own plan to improve the floundering system of health care that undermines the health, wealth and well being of the United States
Politics is full of irony, which is what makes Washington so interesting. Republicans pushed hard on the budget because they wanted to use the threat of a shutdown as leverage against ACA. But on the same day that the wacko birds forced the federal government to close with dismal reviews, enrollment in Obamacare began with such a big demand that it overwhelmed computer systems. My guess is the wingnuts don’t see the irony, but do see a lot of red.
The early returns on the shutdown should worry Republicans. A CBS News survey conducted since the federal government closed for business early Tuesday morning indicates that a large majority (72 percent) of Americans oppose the shutdown over Obamacare. The tea party doesn’t seem to care about its electoral fortunes any more than it does about the well being of the working families who make this country great. The party’s indifference to people and politics will cost it dearly next year in the midterm elections.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, October 3, 2013
“Elections Don’t Have Consequences”: In His Warped Mind, Jim DeMint Is Essentially Declaring A Mistrial
Remember the 2012 elections? The one in which Republicans ran on a platform of repealing the Affordable Care Act, and then lost?
If you’re Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, helping lead the anti-healthcare crusade, the apparent answer is no.
DeMint thinks the election results don’t accurately reflect national sentiment and therefore can’t be used to argue against his desire to move the party to the right. True conservatism never got a hearing — particularly not in regard to Obamacare, which was, after all, modeled after a Massachusetts law signed by Romney. “Because of Romney and Romneycare, we did not litigate the Obamacare issue,” he says. Essentially, DeMint is declaring a mistrial.
So while John McCain and I — there’s a pairing I didn’t expect to write about — agree that elections have consequences, we nevertheless have Jim DeMint sticking up for the “these elections don’t really count” contingent.
And they don’t count, he argues, because that darned Republican presidential candidate just didn’t push the health care issue. Sure, if you have the memory of a fruit fly, you might not recall Romney promising in every speech for a year and a half to repeal the health care law, the ads promising to destroy the law on Romney’s first day in office, or the central role the anti-Obamacare message played in the Republican pitch in 2012.
But for the rest of us, it’s getting increasingly difficult not to just laugh out loud when Jim DeMint starts talking.
In fact, the closer one looks at this, the more hilarious DeMint appears.
I suspect he’d prefer that we forget, but in 2007, DeMint, then a U.S. senator, endorsed Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy, citing — you guessed it — Romney’s successful health care reform law in Massachusetts.
And yet, at this point, DeMint no longer remembers his affinity for Romney, his support for Romney’s health care plan, or Romney’s platform from last year’s campaign.
This guy’s the head of a once-relevant think tank?
On a related note, Molly Ball has a great new piece in The Atlantic on Heritage’s dwindling credibility under DeMint’s leadership.
[T]here is more at stake in Heritage’s transformation from august policy shop to political hit squad than the reputation of a D.C. think tank or even the careers of a few squishy GOP politicians. It is the intellectual project of the conservative movement itself. Without Heritage, the GOP’s intellectual backbone is severely weakened, and the party’s chance to retake its place as a substantive voice in American policy is in jeopardy.
As the right embraces a post-policy role in American politics, Republicans can thank DeMint for helping lead the way.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 26, 2013
“Mitt The Prophet”: Still Pandering, The Romney Camp Shows Its Continued Detachment From Reality
In preparation for a review on 2012 campaign books for the Monthly, I’ve been reading Jonathan Alter’s fine book The Center Holds this week, and have been marveling anew at the detachment from reality exhibited by Mitt Romney and his advisers, culminating in their inability to understand how and why they lost (or even that they had lost, until well after the race had been decided).
So it’s amusing to read McKay Coppins’ BuzzFeed article today indicating that the people who thought they’d be running the country right now are declaring Romney a prophet whose views are being vindicated every day:
From his widely mocked warnings about a hostile Russia to his adamant opposition to the increasingly unpopular implementation of Obamacare, the ex-candidate’s canon of campaign rhetoric now offers cause for vindication — and remorse — to Romney’s friends, supporters, and former advisers.
“I think about the campaign every single day, and what a shame it is who we have in the White House,” said Spencer Zwick, who worked as Romney’s finance director and is a close friend to his family. “I look at things happening and I say, you know what? Mitt was actually right when he talked about Russia, and he was actually right when he talked about how hard it was going to be to implement Obamacare, and he was actually right when he talked about the economy. I think there are a lot of everyday Americans who are now feeling the effects of what [Romney] said was going to happen, unfortunately.”
Give me a break. Nobody in Obama’s camp denied there were issues on which the U.S. and Russia would disagreed, and nobody predicted implementation of Obamacare would be a walk in the park, particularly given the viciously irresponsible determination of Republicans to screw it up while blocking with their House veto the simple legislative “fixes” major legislation always requires. Besides, Romney’s “prophecies” were virtually all throwaway lines aimed at pandering to conservatives to get them off his case so that he could run his campaign on the only issue he cared about: making himself the CEO of the U.S. economy.
Another quote from Spencer Zwick in Coppins’ piece gets at the truth of his and other Romneyites’ complaint:
“It’s frustrating because there’s no way to correct it,” Zwick said. “We don’t do what they do in the U.K. and lead the opposition party when you lose. When you lose there is no way to sort of be vindicated. There’s no way to say, ‘OK, well, I didn’t win the presidency but I’m going to continue to fight.’ There’s no fighting. There’s no platform to do that. Fifty million Americans voted for the guy and yet it’s all for nothing.”
Yeah, it’s tough to go from measuring the drapes in your White House office to being a political outcast with no appreciation from much of anyone in either party and no prospects for another campaign. But please, don’t pretend that the heavily financed mendacious shuffle which the Romney campaign represented from beginning to end was in fact some sort of prophetic stance.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 5, 2013
“You Can’t Fix Stupid”: Reince Priebus Tries To Stop Republicans From Saying More Dumb Things About Immigration
In an effort to reshape the debate over immigration reform, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus harshly criticized Mitt Romney’s self-deportation comments from the 2012 GOP primary while speaking to reporters on Thursday.
Republican leaders have long feared the current dialogue could doom the party with Latino voters in a repeat of the 2007 reform effort, which was shut down by a revolt by the GOP base.
“Using the word ‘self-deportation’ — it’s a horrific comment to make,” Priebus said. “I don’t think it has anything to do with our party. When someone makes those comments, obviously, it hurts us.”
“The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here,” Romney said during the Florida debate held shortly after he lost the South Carolina primary to Newt Gingrich. “And so we’re not going to round people up.”
Priebus defended the progress his party has made with Latino voters since the release of the so-called GOP autopsy. He also ripped comments by Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who has continually offered comments offensive to Latino voters followed by stern defenses of those comments.
“Well, of course, it’s hurtful,” Priebus said, in reference to King’s comment that for every undocumented valedictorian there were hundreds of drug smugglers with calves the size of cantaloupes. “Of course, it hurts. … Just, not good.”
King is the public face of the war against reform, and he insists he’s speaking for many members who don’t want to come forward, a claim that makes sense as House Republicans overwhelmingly supported his recent bill to deport undocumented young people.
The congressman recently said that a “spell” has been cast over his party on the issue of immigration, which The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent sees as a positive sign for the immigration reform debate.
The Senate passed immigration reform in the spring with more than two-thirds supporting the bill. The House GOP has refused to consider the Senate’s plan and is weighing how to proceed with reform in a way that can get the support of a majority of the Republican caucus, which is Speaker John Boehner’s stated standard for bringing any legislation to the floor.
There has been relatively little backlash from the Republican base about reform over the August recess, meanwhile, several House Republicans — including Reps. Jeff Denham (R-CA), Aaron Schock (R-IL) and Dan Webster (R-FL) – have made positive statements for reform that include a “path to citizenship,” which is a key demand of many reform advocates.
Passing immigration reform was the one specific policy recommendation in Priebus’ autopsy. Many of the GOP’s most prominent donors, including Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers, want reform. However, most House Republicans — who primarily come from safe, white districts — don’t seem to be feeling the pressure.
By calling out comments of his fellow Republicans, Priebus may not be able to make reform happen. But he’s hoping to keep it from getting ugly — or, at least, uglier.
By: jason Sattler, The National Memo, August 16, 2013
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