If Newt Doesn’t Implode, Could the GOP Stop Him?
One question posed by the bizarre rise of Newt Gingrich is whether or not he will implode in the Spinal Tap drummer pattern experienced by every other candidate who has challenged Mitt Romney. A second question is whether, failing that, the Republican Party can actually stop him. A third question is whether the Party actually wants to stop him. Let’s consider them in order.
Gingrich is notoriously erratic. But we are only six weeks away from the Iowa caucuses. It is possible that Gingrich manages to hold it together between now and then. And should he win Iowa, he may challenge Romney in New Hampshire (possibly with some help from Jon Huntsman), or at the very least gain enough momentum to overcome him in South Carolina and beyond.
Even assuming away any future meltdown, Gingrich is laden with personal and ideological baggage. Yet he seems to have perfected a smart strategy for deflecting any hostile attention: Attack the media. Gingrich’s incessant and often unprovoked media-bashing is one of the keys to his success. It converts every question about him into a tribal contest between conservatives and the hated Other.
The possible flaw in this strategy would be if right-wing media decide to go after Gingrich. Newt would be in trouble if Fox News started to harp on his marital history or past support for cap and trade. That could happen if Roger Ailes and various party poobahs emerge from their mountaintop castle and decide to anoint Mitt Romney as the nominee.
That would be the obviously sane course of action. Both observable evidence and common sense suggest that Romney would make a far stronger candidate. But Republicans have been disregarding political common sense with increasing frequency. Having the whole House vote for a budget that cuts taxes for the rich and privatizes Medicare yet stands no immediate chance of passage is not a smart idea. Nominating Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell is not a smart idea. There is less and less of a sense that those mountaintop castle meetings are actually working the way they’re supposed to.
At one level, it seems completely insane to not nominate Romney. Yet there is a logic to it. The worst thing that can happen to you as a party is for your president to compromise away your agenda, and party unity is far easier to organize in the opposition. The Republicans can block any plan to put a price on carbon emissions by President Obama. All the purists and all the party loyalists will vote as a block to stop it.
But suppose President Romney decides he wants to tackle cap and trade? He’ll split the party between purists, who will vote against Romney’s climate plan, and loyalists, who would be happy to vote for a Romney-endorsed plan, which they would oppose if put forward by Obama. And then support for cap and trade will be marginalized as a position, just as opposing any Medicare drug benefit was marginalized after George W. Bush supported it. In the long run, keeping your party together is more important than winning. You can always come back from a loss, but you can’t come back from apostasy. Another way to put that is, as a liberal, I’d much rather have a Republican president dedicated to a flat tax than a Democratic president dedicated to a flat tax.
Now, the tricky thing with Gingrich is that he is not exactly a perfect vehicle for right-wing purity. But if you view Gingrich’s positions as a graph, with erratic spikes to the left (support cap and trade!) and to the right (fight the secular socialist machine!), the general thrust is still one of maximal partisan conflict. If I’m a Republican, I worry a lot less about Gingrich selling me out than Romney selling me out.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, November 18, 2011
Newt’s Freddie Mac Lobbying Whopper
At Wednesday night’s GOP presidential debate in Michigan, Newt Gingrich was asked by the mostly on-the-ball CNBC panel about his work on behalf of housing giant Freddie Mac. For the former Speaker of the House, it was a bit of a welcome-back moment; for the last few months, he’s been so much of an afterthought that moderators haven’t even bothered with his own personal history and resume.
But Gingrich had an answer ready. He denied the lobbying charge, and then, via Benjy Sarlin, offered this spirited defense:
I offered advice. My advice as an historian when they walked in and said we are now making loans to people that have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything but that’s what the government wants us to do. I said at the time, this is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible. It turned out unfortunately I was right and the people who were doing exactly what Congresswoman Bachmann talked about were wrong.
It’s pretty self-evident, though, that Gingrich wasn’t hired as a consultant because he was an untenured history professor at North Georgia College in the late 1970s. He was hired because, as a former Speaker of the House, he had a lot of influence with a lot of imporant people. An AP investigative report from 2008 framed Gingrich’s role as that of a political operator, greasing the wheels on Capitol Hill. Key section
Efforts to tighten government regulation were gaining support on Capitol Hill, and Freddie Mac was fighting back.
According to internal Freddie Mac documents obtained by the AP, Reps. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), and Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) spent the evening in hard-to-obtain seats near the Nationals dugout with Freddie Mac executive Hollis McLoughlin and four of Freddie Mac’s in-house lobbyists. Both were members of the House Financial Services Committee. The Nationals tickets were bargains for Freddie Mac, part of a well-orchestrated, multimillion-dollar campaign to preserve its largely regulatory-free environment, with particular pressure exerted on Republicans who controlled Congress at the time.
Internal Freddie Mac budget records show $11.7 million was paid to 52 outside lobbyists and consultants in 2006. Power brokers such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich were recruited with six-figure contracts. Freddie Mac paid the following amounts to the firms of former Republican lawmakers or ex-GOP staffers in 2006…
Pushing back, Freddie Mac enlisted prominent conservatives, including Gingrich and former Justice Department official Viet Dinh, paying each $300,000 in 2006, according to internal records.
Gingrich talked and wrote about what he saw as the benefits of the Freddie Mac business model.
Gingrich made a pretty penny as a consultant in the 2000s. As CPI reported, the former Speaker’s consulting firm took in $312,000 from the ethanol lobby in 2009. Presumably, they weren’t paying him for his historical insights.
By: Tim Murphy, Mother Jones, November 11, 2011
Don’t Blame The GOP For Mitt Romney’s Flip-Flops
As former Gov. Mitt Romney gets battered by the likes of George Will, expect to hear a lot more arguments along the following lines.
It’s not Romney who is the flip-flopper. It’s the conservative movement. It was only three years ago that Jim DeMint was praising the Massachusetts healthcare plan. Post-2009, conservatives have flip-flopped on individual mandates, they have flip-flopped on monetary policy, in these cases they have adopted ever more extreme positions.
Yes Romney has had to shape-shift to keep pace, and that’s unfortunate. But don’t blame him—blame them.
God bless David, but this is too cute. It’s impossible to deny, at this point, that the idea of an individual mandate emerged from the right. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was forced to admit this onstage in the primary debate in Las Vegas.
But that hardly means the conservative movement has flip-flopped on the issue.
Sure, it was a feature of the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare, but that was spearheaded by Sens. Lincoln Chafee and Bob Dole. If Frum would like to make the case that those guys were emblematic movement conservatives, he can go right ahead.
I was around Capitol Hill in the late-’90s and, truth be told, I don’t remember hearing much about the mandate at all.
After Hillarycare unraveled, the healthcare debate came to focus on the late Rep. Charlie Norwood‘s “patients’ bill of rights.”
It was a genteel, middle-of-the-road proposal, sure to appeal to women voters (guaranteed access to OB-GYNs was a frequent talking point). It rattled around for a few years, garnered bipartisan support, but most Republicans were happy to see it wither.
On substance, conservatives pointed out, rightly, that the bill wouldn’t do anything to increase access to insurance. And so they proposed market-friendly solutions (“association health plans,” for example) that would have reduced the number of uninsured citizens by a few million.
That the patients bill of rights did nothing for the uninsured was always slightly embarrassing for Democrats to admit—but this was the safe, piecemeal strategy they had embraced until 2009, when they got regulations of that sort on insurance companies and coverage for most of the uninsured, the costs for which would have to be borne by healthy people not paying into insurance pools (hence the need for an individual mandate).
Look: I’m not denying that some Republicans have been more than a little squirrelly on the mandate. I’m just saying it was never an issue that movement conservatives seriously fought for, to the extent that they thought about it all.
Now, onto Michael Gerson, who praises Romney’s pragmatism and downplays the risk that he’ll flip-flop away from the movement after Inauguration Day. Moreover, Gerson argues that Romney’s “multiple choice” reputation will actually strengthen the movement’s grip on his presidency:
Precisely because he has a history of ideological heresy, it would be difficult for him to abandon his current, more conservative iteration. He has committed himself on key conservative issues. Having flipped, he could not flop without risking a conservative revolt. As a result, conservatives would have considerable leverage over a Romney administration.
This is interesting, I’ll admit.
I would agree with Gerson that the chances of Romney switching back to pro-choice on abortion is vanishingly small. Ditto for embryonic stem-cell research. There really is no plausible way for Romney to climb back from these positions.
And when Romney said recently that “the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us,” I was inclined to believe him. I can’t see his administration spending a penny on climate change.
The problem with Romney isn’t that he’s changed his mind on this or that issue. Every politician not named Rep. Ron Paul has done this.
The question Gerson and movement conservatives should be asking themselves about Romney isn’t whether, having checked the right box now, he’ll uncheck it later. It should be: Do you think he’d spend political capital or risk his presidency on any issue that you care about?
Put another way: Do you believe that Mitt Romney is more than nominally pro-life? Will he fight to change the status quo on abortion?
I suppose Gerson’s assurance depends, too, on what constitutes a “key issue.” Does the building of a border fence count? If so, does Gerson really believe that President Romney is going to build a “high-tech fence” to “secure the border”?
How about gays in the military? Romney’s most recent position on the issue is that he didn’t think “Don’t ask, don’t tell” should have been interfered with. Does Gerson think Romney, a la former Sen. Rick Santorum, will fight to reinstate the policy?
Does Gerson think that Romney will try to dismantle Obamacare in its entirety—or just the “worst aspects” of it?
Romney isn’t just a flip-flopper. He’s just downright weaselly.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, November 2, 2011
Losing The Future: GOP Hostility Towards Student Aid Intensifies
Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul wants to eliminate the federal student loan program. Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich believes student loans are a “Ponzi scheme,” which really doesn’t make any sense at all.
And Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain added his name to the list of GOP leaders who no longer want the federal government to help young people pay for higher education.
Speaking by satellite to a New York education forum sponsored by The College Board, a membership association of colleges that administers standardized tests like the SAT, Cain proposed local avenues to replace existing federal tuition aid structure.
“I believe that if a state wants to help with college education, that they should do that,” he said from Arkansas, where he is on a campaign swing. “Secondly, you have people living within communities within states that are willing to help fund those kinds of programs. So I do not believe that it is the responsibility of the federal government to help fund a college education because herein, our resources are limited and I believe that the best solution is the one closest to the problem. The people within the state, the people within the communities, ultimately, I believe, are the ones who have that responsibility.”
It’s not just presidential candidates. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) last week told voters the Pell Grant program is “unsustainable” (it’s actually sustainable with some sensible reforms, making Paul’s drive to gut the program unnecessary*) and that he was outraged that the Obama administration “confiscated the private student loan industry” (that never happened).
As a factual matter, Ryan has no idea what he’s talking about, and Cain’s idea about shifting all college aid responsibilities to states won’t work. But even putting these pesky details aside, why is it Republicans are so eager to make it harder for young people to further their education?
College tuition costs are soaring to the point of being “out of control.” Young people are entering the workforce shouldering $1 trillion in student-loan debt. Given global competition and the need for the most educated workforce the nation can muster, policymakers should be making every effort to make higher ed more accessible, not less, at costs that are more affordable, not less.
And yet, here we are, with national Republican figures cutting funding for student loans, pushing for the elimination of student grants, and in the case of some GOP presidential candidates, calling for the end of federal student assistance altogether.
Talk about losing the future….
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 28, 2011
The Republican’s Imaginary Class War
Suppose they threw a class war and nobody came?
The Republican Party is up in arms this week in response to President Obama’s proposal to help close the deficit by requiring the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share of taxes. Specifically, the president has proposed the “Buffett Rule,” named for billionaire Warren Buffett, which would ensure that millionaires pay as fair a share in income tax as do all working Americans. In response, GOP budget guru Rep. Paul Ryan resurrected one of his party’s favorite talking points, calling the proposal “class warfare.” Others have been following his rhetorical lead. In last night’s GOP debate in Florida, Mitt Romney asserted that “the president’s party wants to take from some people and give to others” and Newt Gingrich insisted that people on unemployment insurance are getting paid “for doing nothing.” Republican leaders seem to be preparing for an all-out assault from low-and-middle income Americans whom they bizarrely believe are intent on stealing their cash.
The Republicans’ “class warfare” accusation is both ironic and cynical.
It’s ironic because, in the midst of the current economic and jobs crisis, where a huge number of Americans are desperately hurting — with homes underwater, with unemployment insurance running out and health insurance gone, with kids in over-crowded classrooms in buildings that are decaying — the rich are getting richer and large corporations are sitting on record profits. Income inequality in the U.S. is at its highest since the precarious days of the late 1920s. One third of Americans who were raised in middle class households can fall out of the middle class as adults. A political elite beholden to the wealthiest CEOs has pursued policies that take money out of the pockets of the neediest to create ever-larger tax breaks for the wealthy. The richest one percent of Americans now earn almost a quarter of the country’s income and control 40 percent of its wealth — a level of inequality not seen since the days before Social Security and Medicare and the social safety net as we know it. If there is “warfare” going on between the “haves” and the “have nots” it’s pretty clear who is waging war on whom.
Even more, this claim of “class warfare” that Republicans are touting is something quite dangerous. It’s an expression of a deeply cynical vision of our country, in which everyone is out for themselves, the suffering of the least fortunate is of no consequence to the most fortunate, and the American dream is off-limits to those who have lost their footing in a devastating economy. Fortunately, this is a vision that most people wholeheartedly reject. The task of our elected officials is to stop assuming the worst about their constituents’ insensitivity to the plight of their fellow Americans, to stop trying to pit us against each other and to start working toward an economic policy that works for everyone. Struggling Americans don’t want to take the American dream away from those who have achieved it and successful Americans don’t want to see their fellow citizens slip into permanent poverty.
The “class warfare” Republicans decry is all in the heads — and the destructive policies — of a small number of political leaders. While all but a few Republicans in Congress have signed a pledge to never raise taxes on corporations or the wealthy, the majority of Americans are much more pragmatic. According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, a whopping 71 percent of Americans — including 86 percent of moderates and 74 percent of independents — think that any plan to reduce the deficit should include both spending cuts and tax increases. 56 percent, including large majorities of moderates and independents said that wealthier Americans should pitch in and pay higher taxes to help reduce the deficit. A Gallup poll this week found that 53 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners support the president’s plan to eliminate corporate tax loopholes (a major element of the alleged “class warfare”), and majorities of GOP respondents supported spending that extra revenue on hiring public employees, funding public works projects and cutting payroll taxes on small businesses.
The Republicans’ invocation of “class warfare” is a political ploy that the vast majority of Americans want no part of. Warren Buffett is not alone.
By: Michael B. Keegan, Huffington Post, September 23, 2011
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