“Party Wrecker”: How Ron Paul Will Change the GOP in 2012
We haven’t even said goodbye to 2011, but I want to be first in line with my person of the year prediction for 2012: Ron Paul. I don’t think Paul is going to win the presidency, or even win the Republican nomination. But he’s going to come close enough to change the GOP forever.
Washington Republicans and political pundits keep depicting Paul as some kind of ideological mutation, the conservative equivalent of a black swan. They’re wrong.
Ask any historically-minded conservative who the most conservative president of the 20th Century was, and they’ll likely say Calvin Coolidge. No president tried as hard to make the federal government irrelevant. It’s said that Coolidge was so terrified of actually doing something as president that he tried his best not even to speak. But in 1925, Silent Cal did open his mouth long enough to spell out his foreign policy vision, and what he said could be emblazoned on a Ron Paul for President poster: “The people have had all the war, all the taxation, and all the military service they want.”
Small government conservatism, the kind to which today’s Republicans swear fealty, was born in the 1920s not only in reaction to the progressive movement’s efforts to use government to regulate business, but in reaction to World War I, which conservatives rightly saw as a crucial element of the government expansion they feared. To be a small government conservative in the 1920s and 1930s was, for the most part, to vehemently oppose military spending while insisting that the US never, ever get mired in another European war.
Even after World War II, Mr. Republican—Robert Taft—opposed the creation of NATO and called the Korean War unconstitutional. Dwight Eisenhower worked feverishly to scale back the Truman-era defense spending that he feared would bankrupt America and rob it of its civil liberties. Even conservative luminaries like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater who embraced the global anti-communist struggle made it clear that they were doing so with a heavy heart. Global military commitments, they explained, represented a tragic departure from small government conservatism, a departure justified only by the uniquely satanic nature of the Soviet threat.
The cold war lasted half a century, but isolationism never left the conservative DNA. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, some of America’s most prominent conservative intellectuals—people like Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Pat Buchanan—argued that the GOP should become the party of Coolidge and Taft once again. The Republican Congress of the 1990s bitterly opposed Bill Clinton’s wars in the Balkans, and Buchanan, running on an isolationist platform, briefly led the GOP presidential field in 1996. Even the pre-9/11 Bush administration was so hostile to increased military spending that the Weekly Standard called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign.
Given this history, it’s entirely predictable that in the wake of two disillusioning wars, a diminishing al Qaeda threat and mounting debt, someone like Ron Paul would come along. In Washington, Republican elites are enmeshed in a defense-industrial complex with a commercial interest in America’s global military footprint. But listen to Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh and see how often you hear them demanding that America keep fighting in Afghanistan, or even attack Iran. According to a November CBS News poll, as many Republicans said the U.S. should decrease its troop presence in Afghanistan as said America should increase it or keep it the same. In the same survey, only 22 percent of Republicans called Iran’s nuclear program “a threat that requires military action now” compared to more than fifty percent who said it “can be contained with diplomacy.” Almost three-quarters of Republicans said the U.S. should not try to change dictatorships to democracies.
There are certainly Republicans out there who support the Bush-Cheney neo-imperialist foreign policy vision. But they’re split among the top tier presidential candidates. Paul has the isolationists all to himself. Moreover, his two top opponents—Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich—not only back a big-government foreign policy agenda, but have periodically backed a big-government domestic agenda as well. In other words, they personify the argument at the heart of Paul’s campaign: that if you love a powerful Pentagon, you’ll end up loving other parts of the government bureaucracy as well.
Since the Iowa caucuses generally reward organization and passion, I suspect Paul will win them easily. That would likely propel him to a strong showing in libertarian New Hampshire. Somehow, I think Romney and the Republican establishment will find a way to defeat him in the vicious and expensive struggle that follows. But the dominant storyline at the Republican convention will be figuring out how to appease Paul sufficiently to ensure that he doesn’t launch a third party bid. And in so doing, the GOP will legitimize its isolationist wing in a way it hasn’t since 9/11.
In truth, the modern Republican Party has always been a house divided, pulled between its desire to crusade against evil abroad and its fear that that crusade will empower the evil of big government at home. In 2012, I suspect, Ron Paul will expose that division in a way it has not been exposed in a long time. And Republicans will not soon paper it over again.
By: Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast, December 27, 2011
Newt Praised Romneycare Before He Was Against It
From the WSJ’s use of the Internet comes a 2006 letter on the website of a former Newt Gingrich consulting company praising a then-new development in healthcare, the Massachusetts health care law – or, as it’s known today, Romneycare:
“The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system,” said an April 2006 newsletter published by Mr. Gingrich’s former consulting company, the Center for Health Transformation.
The two-page “Newt Notes” analysis, found online by The Wall Street Journal even though it no longer appears on the center’s website, continued: “We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100% insurance coverage for all Americans.”
Mr. Gingrich’s rise to the top of the field has come in part from his bashing Mr. Romney for engineering a state health-care expansion that became a model for President Barack Obama’s 2010 health law. “Your plan essentially is one more big-government, bureaucratic, high-cost system,” Mr. Gingrich told Mr. Romney during an October debate in Las Vegas. He said Mr. Romney was trying to solve Massachusetts’ health-care problems “from the top down.”
R.C. Hammond, a spokesman for Mr. Gingrich, said the April 2006 essay shouldn’t be read as an endorsement of Mr. Romney’s health plan. He noted that it raised several questions about the Massachusetts effort, including whether the plan would work in the state. “Being critical…isn’t endorsing it,” he said.
Mr. Hammond said the Newt Notes essay wasn’t written by Mr. Gingrich himself.
It is true that the “Newt notes” wasn’t totally sanguine about the Romney health care plan, and Gingrich – or whoever the author was – warned its success depended on how it played out. However, there were other interesting bits in the “Newt notes,” such as this, per the original letter, flagged by Andrew Kaczynski:
The Romney plan attempts to bring everyone into the system. The individual mandate requires those who earn enough to afford insurance to purchase coverage, and subsidies will be made available to those individuals who cannot afford insurance on their own. We agree strongly with this principle, but the details are crucial when it comes to the structure of this plan…While the Commonwealth’s plan will naturally endure tremendous scrutiny from those who assert that the law will not work as intended, Massachusetts leaders are to be commended for this bipartisan proposal to tackle the enormous challenge of finding real solutions for creating a sustainable health system.
By: Maggie Haberman, Politico, December 26, 2011
Obama: The Conservative In 2012
At a moment when the nation wonders whether politicians can agree on anything, here is something that unites the Republican presidential candidates — and all of them with President Obama: Everyone agrees that the 2012 election will be a turning point involving one of the most momentous choices in U.S. history.
True, candidates (and columnists) regularly cast an impending election as the most important ever. Campaigning last week in Pella, Iowa, Republican Rick Santorum acknowledged as much. But he insisted that this time, the choice really was that fundamental. “The debate,” he said, “is about who we are.”
Speaking not far away, in Mount Pleasant, Newt Gingrich went even further, and was more specific. “This is the most important election since 1860,” he said, “because there’s such a dramatic difference between the best food-stamp president in history and the best paycheck candidate.” Thus did Gingrich combine historic sweep with a cheap and inaccurate attack. Nonetheless, it says a great deal that Gingrich chose to reach all the way back to the election that helped spark the Civil War.
Mitt Romney was on the same page in a speech in Bedford, N.H. “This is an election not to replace a president but to save a vision of America,” he declared. “It’s a choice between two destinies.” Sounding just like Santorum, he urged voters to ask: “Who are we as Americans, and what kind of America do we want for our children?”
Obama could not agree more. “This is not just another political debate,” the president said in his theme-setting speech in Osawatomie, Kan., earlier this month. “This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.”
On this one, Santorum, Gingrich, Romney and Obama all have it right. For the first time since Barry Goldwater made the effort in 1964, the Republican Party is taking a run at overturning the consensus that has governed U.S. political life since the Progressive era.
Obama is defending a tradition that sees government as an essential actor in the nation’s economy, a guarantor of fair rules of competition, a countervailing force against excessive private power, a check on the inequalities that capitalism can produce, and an instrument that can open opportunity for those born without great advantages.
Today’s Republicans cast the federal government as an oppressive force, a drag on the economy and an enemy of private initiative. Texas Gov. Rick Perry continues to promise, as he did last week during a campaign stop in Davenport, Iowa, to be a president who would make “Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as he can make it.” That far-reaching word “inconsequential” implies a lot more than trims in budgets or taxes.
The GOP is engaged in a wholesale effort to redefine the government help that Americans take for granted as an effort to create a radically new, statist society. Consider Romney’s claim in his Bedford speech: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing — the government.”
Obama believes no such thing. If he did, why are so many continuing to make bundles on Wall Street? As my colleagues Greg Sargent and Paul Krugman have been insisting, Romney is saying things about the president that are flatly, grossly and shamefully untrue. But Romney’s sleight of hand is revealing: Republicans are increasingly inclined to argue that any redistribution (and Social Security, Medicare, student loans, veterans benefits and food stamps are all redistributive) is but a step down the road to some radically egalitarian dystopia.
Obama will thus be the conservative in 2012, in the truest sense of that word. He is the candidate defending the modestly redistributive and regulatory government the country has relied on since the New Deal, and that neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush dismantled. The rhetoric of the 2012 Republicans suggests they want to go far beyond where Reagan or Bush ever went. And here’s the irony: By raising the stakes of 2012 so high, Republicans will be playing into Obama’s hands. The GOP might well win a referendum on the state of the economy. But if this is instead a larger-scale referendum on whether government should be “inconsequential,” Republicans will find the consequences to be very disappointing.
By: E. J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 25, 2011
Mitt Romney’s Limited Understanding Of “Jobs”
Mitt Romney seems to think his strongest issue in a general-election race against President Obama is jobs. I’d argue he has that backwards.
In an interview with TIME Magazine’s Mark Halperin, Romney said, “I know that the Democrats will try and make this a campaign about Bain Capital…. 25 million people are out of work because of Barack Obama. And so I’ll compare my experience in the private sector where, net-net, we created over 100,000 jobs.”
“I’ll compare that record with his record, where he has not created any new jobs.”
This detachment from reality fascinates me, so let’s unwrap the argument.
First, the confused former governor believes 25 million people are out of work “because of Barack Obama.” If Romney can explain why Obama is to blame for a recession that began in 2007, I’d love to hear it. For that matter, the economy lost 3.6 million jobs in 2008 — the year before the president took office. How exactly is Obama responsible for that, too?
Second, Romney now claims to have created “over 100,000 jobs” at his vulture-capitalist firm. Romney also appears to have made this number up out of whole cloth. Indeed, two weeks ago, when Romney’s Super PAC ran an ad claiming he “helped create thousands of jobs” as CEO at Bain, Super PAC officials were asked to back that up with evidence. They refused.
Third, it’s remarkable that Romney is only willing to compare his “experience in the private sector.” What about when Romney was willing to put his experience to work in the public sector, during his one term as governor of Massachusetts? Romney doesn’t want to talk about it for a reason — his state’s record on job creation was “one of the worst in the country,” ranking 47th out of 50 states in job growth. It’s one of the reasons Romney left office after one term deeply unpopular, and why his former constituents don’t want him near the White House.
And fourth, Obama “has not created any new jobs”? The ease with which Romney lies continues to be disconcerting.
With one month remaining this year, the U.S. private sector has now added 1.67 million jobs in 2011, well ahead of last year’s private-sector total of 1.2 million, and the best year for businesses since 2006. Since March 2010, American businesses have created 2.9 million jobs.
I’d encourage Romney to consider this chart showing private-sector job growth by month since the Great Recession began…
…and this chart showing private-sector job growth by year over the last two decades (and 2011 isn’t over yet).
Reporters really need to brush up on this stuff. When Romney lies to their face — which seems to happen just about every day — they should be able to push back with reality.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 23, 2011
Oh, Please: The Hypocrisy Of Gingrich And Romney
To use the adverbs of which he is so fond, it is magnificently, fundamentally, literally ironic that Newt Gingrich, the master of slasher political rhetoric, is busy mewling over those meanie attack ads being run against him.
And to employ Mitt Romney’s favorite piece of management-consultant speak, with regards to those terrible, horrible nasty outside groups, it’s a bit rich for the former Massachusetts governor to bemoan their existence and assert that there’s absolutely, positively nothing he could do to get them to stop.
How dumb do they think we are?
Gingrich has long been a leading advocate and practitioner of the full-throated political attack. His current ads may be all warm and Christmas cozy, with syrupy music in the background, but his lifelong modus operandi has been to demonize opponents, not simply differ with them.
In “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” a guide produced by Gingrich’s GOPAC political action committee, fellow Republicans are advised, “Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. . . . Remember that creating a difference helps you.” Among the Gingrich-suggested words: “radical,” “pathetic,” “sick,” “traitors,” “steal,” “corrupt” and “disgrace.”
Gingrich didn’t stop at hurling words — he launched a first salvo in the ethics wars that ended up consuming him when he filed a complaint against then-House Speaker Jim Wright, D-Tex.
He was also a pioneer in the use of outside groups to buttress his political prospects. See GOPAC, above, and the investigation that ended up with Gingrich agreeing to a reprimand and a $300,000 fine.
So forgive me if I have a hard time generating any sympathy for the now put-upon candidate when he whines about the onslaught of negative attack ads being run by outside groups supporting Romney and others.
“I object to negative smear campaigns,” asserted Gingrich, master of the negative smear campaign. Boo-hoo-hoo.
Not that Romney deserves any sympathy, either. The explosion of super PACs, Romney said on MSNBC the other day, has been “a disaster” that “has made a mockery of our political campaign season.”
Really? I don’t recall Romney having anything critical to say about the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which ushered in the era of super PACs permitted to make unlimited expenditures on behalf of favored candidates. In fact, Romney told the Portsmouth (N.H.) Herald’s editorial board last month of the justices’ ruling: “I think their decision was a correct decision. I support their decision. I wish we could find a way to get money out of politics. I haven’t found a way to do that.”
More to the point, if Romney believes that super PACs are such a problematic development, could he explain what, precisely, he was doing speaking at events sponsored by Restore Our Future, the super PAC run by former Romney aides and now responsible for the barrage of negative advertising against Gingrich.
“We really ought to let campaigns raise the money they need and just get rid of these super PACs,” Romney said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Well, showing up at their events is a rather odd way to achieve this.
Then there is Romney’s phony claim that he can’t say anything to disavow the super PAC advertising for fear of being sent to “the big house” — as in, “My goodness, if we coordinate in any way whatsoever, we go to the big house.”
Oh, please. It’s illegal for the Romney campaign to coordinate with the Romney-backing super PAC, but those rules are porous enough to have allowed, for example, Romney to speak at a Restore Our Future event.
But the question posed to Romney was merely whether he would call on the super PAC, as Gingrich had demanded, to stop the negative advertising. “I’m not allowed to communicate with a super PAC in any way, shape or form,” he claimed. But nothing — nada, zilch — would prevent Romney from disavowing the advertising or calling on the super PAC to cut it out. Which, of course, he won’t.
This may sound a bit harsh, but, really, these two candidates deserve each other.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 22, 2011
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