The GOP Policy Problem
Ezra Klein has an excellent point to make about Republicans and policy this morning. He’s writing about how many policies Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich once supported that turned out to be Kenyan socialism once Barack Obama adopted them. Jonathan Cohn has yet another excellent example: Newt was an enthusiastic backer (with John Kerry!) of comparative effectiveness research — that is, having the government collect data about which medical treatments actually work. That was way back in 2008, but as Cohn points out, after it became part of ACA a few months later it immediately became evil socialist rationing, something that Gingrich can now get in trouble for with conservatives on the campaign trail.
Klein concludes that the reason that Romney and Gingrich are stuck with having supported so many now-forbidden policy is because they are “wonks.” I think that’s too strong, however, or perhaps not strong enough, depending on your perspective. Klein provides a long list of Republicans who once supported an individual mandate on health insurance, but surely they weren’t all wonks? Nope. Most of them were just Republicans following the standard Republican line of the time, a line that was good enough until Barack Obama and the Democrats adopted a kitchen sink to health care reform and tossed in any decent idea that they could find (remember all that rhetoric back then about all the Republican-sponsored ideas included in ACA? It was true!).
No wonder that House Republicans are spending much of their energy repealing non-existent regulations about farm dust or affirming the US motto. Or why Romney’s entire foreign policy program appears to be a pledge not to go on an “apology tour” that never happened. It’s a lot easier to be certain that you always completely oppose the president’s program when you write your own fictional version of the president.
But Klein’s conclusion is right on the mark:
At the end of the day, the GOP will nominate somebody for president…The bigger problem will be if that individual wins. At that point, they’ll need actual solutions for the problems facing the nation. But the Republican Party has ruled out an individual mandate to help with health-care reform, a cap-and-trade program to mitigate global warming and speed the development of renewable energy options, tax increases to help reduce the deficit, and stimulus to help boost the economy. That leaves a potential GOP president with a lot of problems to solve, but few workable policies with which to solve them.
Well, they still have tax cuts for rich people.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, Washington Monthly, December 14, 2011
“Going, Going, Gone”: The Presidential Auction Of 2012
The conservative radio host Michael Savage this week presented an unusual offer to Newt Gingrich.
“Newt Gingrich is unelectable,” Savage said of the improbable new front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. “Therefore, I am offering Newt Gingrich 1 million dollars to drop out of the presidential race for the sake of the nation.”
A million bucks? Come on, man.
Gingrich got $1.6 million being a lobbyi—, er, historian for Freddie Mac. He gets $60,000 a pop for speeches, by his own boastful account. He reportedly has generated $100 million in revenues by trading on his Washington connections.
Offering him $1 million to drop out of the presidential race is the political equivalent of Dr. Evil’s plan to hold the world hostage for — ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
But if Savage was a few zeros short on Gingrich’s price tag, his instincts were correct: Gingrich and his rivals are most definitely for sale. The Republican nominating contest resembles nothing so much as a Christie’s wine auction, as candidates accept, and toss about, dollar figures beyond the comprehension of the people they would serve.
“Tell ya what. Ten thousand bucks? Ten-thousand-dollar bet?” Mitt Romney proposed to Rick Perry in his now-infamous attempt at Saturday’s debate to resolve a dispute over health care.
Criticized for that high wager, Romney went on Fox News to say that Gingrich should return the $1.6 million from Freddie Mac. That led Gingrich, just days into his vow to stay “relentlessly positive,” to suggest that Romney should “give back all the money he’s earned on bankrupting companies and laying off employees.”
The positive front-runner also took a gratuitous pop at Perry, saying of the longtime public servant: “I couldn’t imagine he could cover a bet like that.”
To most Americans, lacking a spare $10,000 wouldn’t be considered a character flaw. But Gingrich is different: a member of Donald Trump’s Trump National Golf Club, he boasted on the campaign trail recently that he didn’t have to be a lobbyist because he was getting rich on the celebrity speaking circuit.
Romney can’t exploit Gingrich’s $100 million in revenues, nor his $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany’s, because his own net worth is $264 million and his own speeches bring in up to $68,000. If corporations are people, as Romney says, he is a man among boys — and his vast campaign stash is the main reason he still has a good chance to beat Gingrich.
President Obama (worth: as much as $11 million) would no doubt enjoy taking on either man, although the fun will be tempered by his own struggle to bring in $1 billion for his campaign, up from $750 million last time. For now, the task of taking on the plutocrats falls to GOP candidate Jon Huntsman, whose new Web site, www.10kbet.com, features a photo of Romney and his Bain Capital colleagues playing with cash.
For Huntsman to pursue this attack is a bit rich (his net worth: between $16 million and $71 million). But the problem is not the candidates’ net worth or their campaign cash. It’s the impression they are giving that corporate interests are receiving something in exchange for the worth they’re helping to build and the cash they’re providing.
Even the relative pauper Perry got in trouble earlier in the campaign for supporting mandatory HPV vaccination after the vaccine’s maker, Merck, gave money to his campaign. “If you’re saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended,” he said.
But could he be bought for the $28,000 he actually got from Merck? And could the billions now regularly generated in campaign contributions — nearly $4 billion in the 2010 elections alone — have something to do with all the goodies for pet corporations?
Though it’s difficult to trace specific government actions to contributions, there is no doubt in the aggregate that corporate interests can buy candidates for a modest investment.
Compared to $4 billion, Michael Savage’s $1 million won’t buy much: maybe a new, better-fitting suit for Ron Paul, a nice Christmas present for Herman Cain’s wife or enough cushion so that Sarah Palin doesn’t need to pitch another reality show.
In recent days, the gadfly Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, proposed a way out of this mess: a constitutional amendment that would outlaw corporate campaign contributions, overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
Ten thousand bucks says the idea goes nowhere.
By: Dana Milbamk, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 13, 2011
Newt Gingrich’s Revisionist History
For a man who likes to tout his expertise as a historian, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has a decidedly revisionist approach when it comes to his own history.
In 1997, Gingrich became the only speaker in history to be reprimanded by the House of Representatives. He agreed to pay $300,000 to settle the matter, which involved using charitable groups to promote his political views and submitting misleading documents to the House ethics committee.
The ethics charges sound like ancient history. They involve dreary matters of tax law. But the episode is worth revisiting because it offers insights into Gingrich’s bombastic, push-the-boundaries style. More troubling, in recent days, Gingrich has been blatantly dishonest in his self-interested rewriting of this history, dismissing the ethics sanction as the action of “a very partisan political committee.”
As Gingrich relates the story, “The Democrats filed 84 charges against me; 83 were dismissed. The only one which survived was the fact that my lawyers had written a letter inaccurately and I signed it.”
Referring to California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who served on the panel, Gingrich said last week, “If she was in the middle of it, how nonpartisan and just do you think the process was?”
How partisan? The ethics panel, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, voted 7 to 1 in favor of the reprimand. The dissenting Republican, Lamar Smith of Texas, said Gingrich had made “real mistakes” but called the penalty “way too severe.”
The House agreed to the reprimand by a similarly overwhelming margin, 395 to 28. “The penalty is tough and unprecedented,” the committee chairman, Connecticut Republican Nancy Johnson, said on the House floor. “It is also appropriate.”
Another Republican on the ethics panel, Porter Goss of Florida, said he found “the fact that the committee was given inaccurate, unreliable and incomplete information to be a very serious failure on [Gingrich’s] part.” Indeed, Gingrich’s own lawyer told the ethics committee that the speaker “recognizes the serious nature of the charges and the seriousness of his admission.”
The ethics investigation stemmed from a Gingrich-inspired enterprise during the early 1990s to spread his conservative message — and engineer a Republican takeover of Congress — through a satellite broadcast and a college course that would also be televised.
Both efforts were connected with GOPAC, a political action committee that Gingrich then headed, and were funded by tax-deductible contributions to various nonprofit groups.
For example, the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation, originally designed to help inner-city youth, served as the vehicle to fund the satellite broadcast. GOPAC lent money to the Lincoln foundation to take over the program, then steered its donors to the foundation and was ultimately repaid by the charitable group.
In Gingrich’s defense, the Internal Revenue Service concluded that the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which underwrote the college course, should not lose its charitable status. After initially revoking the tax-exempt status of the Lincoln foundation, the IRS agreed to reinstate it.
Yet the tax questions show Gingrich’s characteristic willingness to skirt close to the edge, if not beyond. Having been involved in a previous case about the permissible use of charitable groups, Gingrich “had ample warning that his intended course of action was fraught with legal peril,” the committee’s report found. The speaker’s own tax lawyer said he would have advised against the “explosive mix.”
The ethics committee ultimately concluded that Gingrich was, at the very least, reckless in not seeking tax advice.
Then there was the matter of repeated incorrect statements made to the committee as part of the effort to persuade it to dismiss the case. Gingrich twice assured the committee — incorrectly — that GOPAC played no role in developing or financing the college course.
Gingrich blamed the inaccurate statements on his lawyer and said he did not review the letters carefully enough. The four members of the investigative subcommittee found that there was “reason to believe” that Gingrich knew the information was wrong. But they settled for Gingrich’s admission that he “should have known” it was false.
“The violation does not represent only a single instance of reckless conduct,” the report found. “Rather, over a number of years and in a number of situations, Mr. Gingrich showed a disregard and lack of respect for the standards of conduct that applied to his activities.”
This is the bipartisan judgment of his peers. Is Gingrich really the man Republicans want to be their nominee?
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 13, 2011
The South Is Allergic To Mitt Romney
For most of the year, Mitt Romney has had a serious problem that’s mostly been obscured by the absurd volatility of the GOP race: He’s a very tough sell in the South.
Politico touches on this today in a story that acknowledges the unique obstacles Romney seems to face in the region while ultimately concluding that “the contest for the allegiance of Southern conservatives in the 2012 race is as wide open as ever.” That’s one way of looking at it, but there’s a more disheartening possibility for Romney as well: that with the rise of Newt Gingrich, Mitt-phobic Southerners finally have a consensus alternative with some staying power.
First, consider Romney’s plight in Dixie.
South Carolina, which holds the historically pivotal first-in-the-South primary, has long been a problem for him. In 2008, when he pitched himself as the kind of true believer conservative that Southerners tend to find attractive, Romney finished fourth in the state, with just 15 percent of the vote — half of what Mike Huckabee, who nearly knocked off John McCain in the state, received. And in polling throughout 2011, South Carolina Republicans have made their yearning for a non-Romney candidate clear. Both Rick Perry and Herman Cain opened up double-digit leads over Romney when they were seen as his main foe earlier in the fall.
Polling has been less intense elsewhere in Dixie, since the other states don’t vote as early as South Carolina, but the signs are just as ominous. A Gallup poll released last week showed Romney getting just 15 percent of the vote across the region. That’s about where he’s been stuck all year; Gallup’s survey over the summer had him at 12 percent. This broad resistance in what for the GOP is a voter-rich region is dragging down Romney’s overall support, a major reason he’s failed to push past 30 percent in national polling.
Now factor in Gingrich’s potential impact. He’s not a native-born Southerner and doesn’t speak with a Southern accent, but the region is responding to his presidential candidacy with more enthusiasm than any other. South Carolina is a perfect example of this. The two most recent polls there show Gingrich mauling Romney by 23 and 19 points. So is North Carolina, where a new PPP poll puts Gingrich 37 points ahead of Romney, 51 to 14 percent. Or take Mississippi. The last poll conducted there was in early November, when Cain was still the hot commodity on the right and Gingrich was still barely cracking double-digits nationally. And yet a PPP survey of Mississippi Republicans still showed Gingrich in first place with 28 percent, followed by Cain and Perry. Romney was all the way back in fourth place with 12 percent.
For Romney, the implications of this are worrisome. If Gingrich manages to “win” Iowa (that is, he’s declared the big winner by the press), it will probably be the death knell for Perry, who is trying to make a campaign-saving stand in the state. And without Perry, a Texan with natural Dixie appeal, Gingrich will be well-positioned to capitalize on the potential that clearly exists for him in the South — starting with South Carolina and potentially carrying over to Super Tuesday on March 6, when five states from the old Confederacy will vote.
In his ’08 campaign, Romney fared respectably in the South, finishing near the top in a handful of states. But that might have been deceptive, with Huckabee and John McCain generally gobbling up about two-thirds of the vote, making Romney seem more competitive than he actually was. This time there’s a chance Romney will only have one main opponent in the South.
The region’s apparent hostility toward him could come from several places. Maybe it’s a reflection of his supposed “Mormon problem” that’s been so widely discussed. Or it could just be his Northern roots. Or maybe it’s ideological. In the Obama-era, the South has been particularly kind to Tea Party Republicanism, which has meant new scrutiny of Romney’s moderate-to-liberal Massachusetts past. It’s also unclear what’s driving Gingrich’s Dixie appeal. His ties to Georgia, which he represented in the House for 20 years, surely help. But it may just be that the region is looking for someone, anyone who’s (a) viable; and (b) not named Mitt.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon War Room, December 13, 2011
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