“Stupid Is As Stupid Does”: Bobby Jindal’s Guidance To Republicans Comes With A Catch
In the wake of his party’s defeats in the 2012 elections, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) has positioned himself as a leader in setting the GOP on a smarter path. He was the first Republican to publicly condemn Mitt Romney’s “gifts” comments, and soon after, Jindal declared he wants Republicans to “stop being the stupid party.”
And while these efforts are drawing praise from some on the right, let’s pause to note the superficiality of Jindal’s vision. Take his comments yesterday on Fox News, for example.
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) accused failed Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock of saying “stupid” and “offensive” things that damaged the Republican Party.
“We also don’t need to be saying stupid things,” he said. “Look, we had candidates in Indiana and Missouri that said offensive things that not only hurt themselves and lost us two Senate seats but also hurt the Republican Party across the board.”
On abortion, while Jindal said he’s pro-life, “we don’t need to demonize those that disagree with us. We need to respect the fact that others have come to different conclusions based on their own sincerely held beliefs.”
Here’s the detail Jindal neglected to mention: he opposes any and all abortion rights, without exception. If the Louisiana governor had his way, women impregnated by a rapist would be forced by the American government to take that pregnancy to term. The same would be true in cases of incest or pregnancies in which the health of the mother is at risk.
In other words, as far as public policy is concerned, the only difference between Jindal, Akin, and Mourdock is word choice. Jindal doesn’t want candidates in his party “saying stupid things,” but he’s entirely comfortable with those candidates adopting the same extremist positions he espouses.
Indeed, the larger irony of Jindal presenting himself as a forward-thinking, far-right leader is realizing just how odd a choice he is.
On the one hand, the Louisiana governor says he’s “had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism”; on the other, Jindal is a fierce, anti-gay culture warrior who wants children to be taught creationism and believes he participated in an exorcism.
As this relates to abortion, Jindal is effectively urging his party to adopt the same vision as Mourdock and Akin, but present their agenda with less-offensive talking points. It’s reminiscent of Charles Krauthammer’s advice to the GOP: “The problem … for Republicans is not policy but delicacy.”
They’re both misguided if they think softer, more polite language can make the right-wing social agenda seem more palatable to the American mainstream.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 19, 2012
“Dishonest Introspection”: Mitt Romney’s Sneering Farewell To The “47 Percent”
Trying to explain away his decisive, sweeping, and very expensive rout to his disappointed supporters—those one-percent Republicans—Mitt Romney offered a new version of the discredited “47 percent” argument that was so ruinous in its original form. In a Wednesday afternoon conference call, the defeated Republican nominee told donors and fundraisers that President Obama had won by lavishing generous “gifts” upon certain groups, including young voters, African-Americans, and Latinos.
“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift,” said Romney, after apologizing for losing what he called a “very close” election that he lost by more than 100 electoral votes and no less than three percent of the popular vote (as indicated in “The Ass-Whuppin’ Cometh” by James Carville and Stan Greenberg).
“Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008… Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group.”
It’s amusing that at this late date, the Republican who distanced himself from health care reform — and constantly vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act even though he knew that would be bad policy — claims that Obamacare helped Obama to win.
Now, before dispensing with Romney for good — as most Americans (including many Republicans) are understandably eager to do — it is worth noting that these churlish excuses to his donors represent the ultimate falsification, not only of his campaign, but of his own character.
Recall how he disowned the “47 percent” remarks when he realized how damaging they were to his chances for victory, telling Sean Hannity on Fox News that what he had been caught saying at a $50,000-a-plate Boca Raton fundraising event was “just completely wrong.” That mea culpa was factually accurate, of course – as we have discovered again lately with the news that so many food stamp recipients reliably vote Republican.
But as a matter of feelings rather than facts, Romney evidently cannot stop himself from sneering at society’s struggling people and the politicians who seek to improve their lives. It is not as if the donors he was addressing don’t want “gifts” from government – such as the big new tax breaks that Romney had promised them, the huge increases in defense spending that would swell their profits, or the various individual corporate favors that they regard as their very own “entitlements.” Just don’t expect that kind of honest introspection from Romney or his crowd.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, November 15, 2012
“Big, Unpopular, Losing Ideas”: Paul Ryan’s Rapid Rewrite Of Election History
Paul Ryan, who famously suggested that the General Motors plant in his hometown closed because of Obama administration policies when it actually closed under President Bush, is now going for an even bigger rewrite of history.
He is claiming that his austerity agenda—at least the part that makes tax cuts for the rich the supreme imperative—remains popular. Indeed, to hear Ryan tell it, those ideas almost prevailed.
In an ABC News interview a week after the election, Ryan was asked whether President Obama has a mandate to call for raising taxes on the rich. “I don’t think so,” said Ryan, who argued that, “This is a very close election.”
Ryan rejects the notion that his ideas lost. Indeed, he still claims he’s promoting “popular ideas.” And he says of the Republican ticket: “It was a well-run campaign. We made this campaign about big ideas and big issues, which is the kind of campaign we wanted to run, so we ran the kind of campaign we wanted to run.”
But Barack Obama also ran on big ideas. On the morning before the election, Obama appeared just a few miles up the road from Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin.
“If we’re serious about the deficit, we can’t just cut our way to prosperity. We’ve also got to ask the wealthiest Americans to go back to the tax rates they paid when Bill Clinton was in office,” the Democratic president told a crowd that had just heard Bruce Springsteen sing and speak about the need to create a more equitable America. “And by the way, we can afford it. I haven’t talked to Bruce, but I know he can afford it. I can afford it. Mr. Romney can afford it.”
But Obama went further, in that speech in Madison, and in speeches in Columbus and Des Moines and communities across the country. He called, again and again, for raising taxes on the rich. “Because our budget reflects our values, it’s a reflection of our priorities, you know. And as long as I’m president, I’m not going to kick some poor kids off of Head Start to give me a tax cut,” said the president.
Ryan is claiming in his post-election interviews that: “I don’t think we lost it on those budget issues, especially on Medicare — we clearly didn’t lose it on those issues.”
Yes they did.
In his closing argument, Obama focused—as did other winning Democrats—on “those budget issues.” One of the president’s biggest applause lines was: “I’m not gonna turn Medicare into a voucher just to pay for another millionaire’s tax cut.”
Obama and Vice President Biden ran on big ideas, just as Romney and Ryan did.
Ryan and Romney lost Wisconsin and every swing state except North Carolina.
Ryan and Romney lost the Electoral College by an overwhelming 232-206 margin.
Ryan and Romney lost the popular vote by more than 3.4 million votes.
Obama and Biden won a mandate in a battle of ideas where the lines were clearly drawn.
Despite what Paul Ryan says, Obama won a mandate—a bigger mandate, in fact, than Presidents Kennedy in 1960, Nixon in 1968, Carter in 1976 or Bush in 2000 and 2004.
To say otherwise is to deny what just happened.
Paul Ryan can try if he wants.
But he should remember what happened when he tried to peddle a fantasy about the closing of that Janesville General Motors plant.
Well, Ryan lost his home precinct in Janesville—not just as a vice presidential candidate but as a candidate for reelection to his House seat.
Ryan lost Janesville, as a vice presidential candidate and a congressional candidate.
Ryan lost surrounding Rock County, as a vice presidential and a congressional candidate.
Ryan and Romney lost Wisconsin—by such a resounding margin that Saturday Night Live was mocking the result on the weekend after the election.
When the rejection is so glaring that it becomes a punchline, it’s a stretch to talk about a “close election.”
And it’s absurd to suggest that your ideas are popular.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, November 14, 2012
“The Fizzling Of A Divine Plan”: Is The Religious Right In Trouble?
If we’re going to count the losers of the 2012 election, the religious right has to be high on the list. Its members said they would turn out in extraordinary numbers to fight that infidel in the White House, but Ralph Reed’s turnout push fizzled. Gay marriage is now legal in three more states than it was on November 5, with more sure to come. In response, some on the religious right are wondering whether this politics thing just isn’t working out for them. It isn’t that they failed to get their message out, said influential religious-right quote machine Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “it’s that the entire moral landscape has changed. … An increasingly secularized America understands our positions and has rejected them.”
We’ve heard this kind of thing before, and Ed Kilgore warns that the religious right’s stranglehold on the Republican Party hasn’t lessened at all:
Lest we forget, every single Republican candidate for president in 2012 toed the Christian Right line in every major detail. The second-place finisher in the nomination fight, Rick Santorum, was himself a Christian Right Culture Warrior of the most impeccable purity, willing to openly smite not just Secularists but Liberal Protestants and Catholics as infidels and instruments of Satan. The old chestnut of a “struggle for the soul” of the GOP between economic and cultural conservatives turned out to be as empty as ever, as the former embraced an aggressive campaign against legalized abortion and for “religious liberty” even as the latter continued to baptize laissez-faire capitalism as part of the Divine Plan.
Ed also notes that the potential 2016 GOP contenders all have impeccable religious-right credentials as well. All of that’s true, but as a faction they still have an uncertain future. Ed’s last point about the deal between economic and cultural conservatives—the former pretend they care deeply about abortion and oppose gay rights, while the latter proclaim that if Jesus came back tomorrow his highest priority would be cutting the capital gains tax—is right, in that it isn’t so much a “struggle” as a negotiated arrangement. But in the last few years, culture has been pushed further and further into the background. If you added up all the time Mitt Romney spent talking about the business and the wonder of markets and compared it to the time he spent talking about abortion and same-sex marriage, the ratio would probably be ten to one or more. The Tea Party may have been made up in large part of cultural conservatives, but they swore up and down that all they cared about was their economic agenda. Republicans are as engaged as ever in a culture war, but the primary enemy in that war isn’t godless secularists, it’s government-loving socialists.
There’s no question that the GOP can’t abandon the religious right. But what it may do is confine its pandering to as brief a period during the primaries as possible. Let’s remember that though Rick Santorum may have finished second to Romney, he scared the living daylights out of the Republican establishment, precisely because his message was so retrograde and filled with hostility.
The problem will only get worse for the religious right. There’s an inexorable demographic evolution going on, one in which older, more culturally conservative people are dying off as younger, more culturally liberal people become adults and play a larger political role. How will they handle the shrinking of their appeal? One answer is for the religious right to undergo its own evolution. They’ve done it in the past, and there’s no reason they can’t do it in the future. The Southern Baptist Convention, which in the past had supported slavery and then segregation, recently elected its first black president. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if 20 or 30 years from now, nearly all the institutions we now consider part of the religious right will have changed their position on gay people. They won’t have to change on abortion—the country looks like it will remain split on that issue for the foreseeable future—but they may change on any number of other issues.
On the other hand, they may just hunker down; as Ed says, these folks love being able to consider themselves martyrs, surrounded by hostile forces and bravely standing up for God. But what happens when, a few elections from now, some incredibly charismatic Republican comes along and says he supports gay marriage and somehow manages to win, proving that maybe Republicans don’t need them? Then they’ll be in real trouble.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 14, 2012
“That’s Just How Those People Are”: Land Of The “Free Stuff,” Home Of The Brave
If you want to explain why your party lost a presidential election, there are a number of places to look. You can blame your candidate and his campaign (which usually means, “If only they had listened to me!”). You can blame your party and ask if it should examine its ideology or its rhetoric. You can blame the media. Or you can blame the voters. As the old political saw says, “The people have spoken—the bastards.” And that is what one conservative after another has been saying over the last week.
They aren’t saying that the voters are uninformed, or that they allowed themselves to be duped. Instead, Barack Obama’s re-election is said to be a moral failing on the part of the American public. They got what they wanted, conservatives are saying. And what was it they wanted? Universal health coverage, higher taxes on the wealthy, strong environmental regulations, legal abortion? Nope. They wanted free stuff. Because that’s just how those people are.
This was perhaps articulated most vividly by Bill O’Reilly, who on election night lamented the fact that “the white establishment is no longer the majority” and said, “It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.”
It didn’t start on election day; this is a tune that Republicans have been playing for a couple of years now, and nearly everyone, from media figures to members of Congress to their presidential nominee himself, joined in with increasing frequency over the last few months. “You either get free stuff or you get freedom. You cannot have both,” said Sarah Palin back in September. “Offering Americans a check is a more fruitful political strategy than offering them the opportunity to take control of and responsibility for their own lives,” wrote National Review‘s Kevin Williamson after the election. “You have two generations now who believe that the government owes them something,” said conservative columnist Cal Thomas. “If you’re looking for free stuff you don’t have to pay for, vote for the other guy,” said Mitt Romney during the campaign. And of course, his infamous 47 percent video was all about those people who think they are “entitled” to government benefits.
The truth, of course, is that every single person in America gets benefits from the U.S. government. We get defended from invasion, we get roads to drive on, we get reasonably clean air to breathe, we get parks and schools and so much else. But that’s not the “free stuff” conservatives are talking about. They’re talking about the government giving you something directly as an individual, like money. But there’s a problem here too: Lots and lots of Americans, including most of those whom Republicans deem morally worthy, get plenty of stuff from the government. I’m not even talking about bank bailouts, or corporations like General Electric rewriting the tax code so they pay nothing. I’m talking about individual people, the kind of people Republicans like, getting direct government aid.
There is nothing–nothing–that makes, say, Medicare superior to unemployment benefits, even though as far as conservatives are concerned, only receiving the latter makes you a “taker.” If you’re unemployed, you paid taxes, and now the government is helping you in your time of need. There is nothing that makes the mortgage interest deduction morally superior to food stamps, even though conservatives like one but not the other. The government has decided, wisely or not, that it wants to promote home ownership, so it pays for part of millions of homeowners’ mortgage interest. The government has also decided that it’s bad for our society if people starve, so if your income falls below the level where it will be difficult to afford food and also pay for the other necessities of life, it give you some help in buying food.
So what is it that, in conservatives’ minds, distinguishes the “makers” from the “takers,” particularly when, as political scientists Suzanne Mettler and John Sides report, “97 percent of Republicans and 98 percent of Democrats report that they have used at least one government social policy”? Think hard, and it’ll come to you.
Even if Mitt Romney had not chosen Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan to be his running mate, this election would still have seen the triumph of a Randian attitude on the right, in which every policy and everyone they don’t like is attacked as a despicable parasite sucking off the labors of their economic betters. We had Romney’s absurdly mendacious welfare ad (“You wouldn’t have to work … they just send you your welfare check”). We had Newt Gingrich proclaiming that he’d love to explain to the NAACP “why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” We had the attack on Sandra Fluke for allegedly wanting “free contraception,” or even asking for taxpayers to pay for it (“Ms. Fluke wants us to pick up her lifestyle expenses!” said Bill O’Reilly), when what she advocated was that the insurance coverage that women themselves pay for should cover contraception. We had conservatives fascinated by the idea that poor voters were being given free “Obama phones” (don’t ask). To the right, if you were voting for Obama it could only be because you wanted to get something from the government you didn’t deserve.
But if you want to find a real sense of entitlement, the place to look is among the country’s wealthy, the people who turned over hundreds of millions of dollars to Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie in their failed attempt to drive Barack Obama from office. They may not have been able to propel one of their own to the White House, but despite all their resentment and complaining things have never been better for the country’s economic Übermenschen. Not only do they hold more of the nation’s wealth than at any time since the Gilded Age, the privileges of that wealth have never been greater. Their taxes have never been lower. The entire world offers special concierge services to shield them from the indignities and inconveniences of everyday life. And now, they have new freedoms in the political realm as well; where they might have had to hold their tongues in the past, thanks to Citizens United they are now free to strong-arm their employees to vote in the right way, complete with threats of layoffs should the voters be so vulgar as to elect a Democratic president.
Perhaps by the time 2016 arrives, the Republican party will find a message that resonates with voters more effectively than “You people make me sick.” For now, though, that’s what they’re sticking with.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 12, 2012
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