“Contemptible Creatures”: The GOP’s Self-Delusion Syndrome
What a fantastic last two weeks these have been. I don’t even mean Barack Obama solidifying his lead over Mitt Romney, although that’s perfectly fine. No, I mean the near-mathematically perfect joy of watching these smug and contemptible creatures of the right dodge and swerve and make excuses and, most of all, whine. There is no joy in the kingdom of man so great as the joy of seeing bullies and hucksters laid low, and watching people who have arrogantly spent years assuming they were right about the world living to see all those haughty assumptions die before their eyes. Watching them squirm is more fun than watching Romney and Paul Ryan flail away.
I loved the initial reaction to the famous videotape. Problem? Are you kidding? This is just what we’ve been waiting for! This will help Romney, it was said; finally, we have Mitt unchained, Mitt raw, Mitt the truth-teller. Now he can just charge out there and do more of this, and in no time the nation will be putty in our hands! And just you wait for the next polls.
Well, the polls have started to come, and they portend total disaster. Americans don’t turn out to like a heartlessly cruel Social Darwinian articulation of the national condition that by the way calls half the population worthless. Huh. Go figure.
But is this a problem? Of course not! There is an explanation for this too: The polls are wrong! All of them. Except of course Rasmussen, that rock of right-minded methodological certitude jutting out from the ocean of relativist corruption. I’d like a nickel but would settle happily for a penny for every tweet I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks from a conservative braying about a given poll’s sample.
There are loads of them but the gold medalist of this event by far is Dick Morris, who sits there on the Fox set like a betumored walrus on an ice floe assuring his viewers not to worry. His riff to Sean Hannity Monday night, a night when everyone else saw that Obama’s lead was getting comfortable-to-the-point-of-insurmountable, is worth quoting at some length: “[Romney] is at the moment in a very strong position. I believe if the election were held today Romney would win by four or five points. I believe he would carry Florida, Ohio, Virginia. I believe he would carry Nevada. I believe he would carry Pennsylvania.” Even Hannity at this point interjected, “Oh, come on.” But on Morris went. He knew of a private poll in Pennsylvania, “by a group that I’ve hired in the past,” that had Romney two points behind.
“People need to understand,” he continued, “that the polling this year is the worst it’s ever been. Because this is the first election where if I tell you who’s gonna vote, I can tell you how you’re gonna vote.” He went on to say that polls are assuming a six- or seven-point Democratic edge, and he assumes a three-point edge.
First of all, what was the Democratic edge in 2008? Uh, seven points. Second, while he is correct that the polls are showing strong Democratic advantages, they’re doing so because that’s how people are identifying themselves to pollsters. In fact, Stan Greenberg noted last Friday, Republicans lost five points in voter identification in a month. This is not bad poll sampling. It’s reality. And while it’s true that today’s numbers might overstate what will be the case on Nov. 6, the way things are going, they just might be understating them.
But no—now, the mere fact of poll-taking is “a subtle means of Republican voter suppression,” as Simon Maloy put it over at Media Matters. And the latest whine—this cupboard somehow never runs bare—is that conservatives don’t like taking polls. So said Scott Walker to Fox on Wednesday. Yes, of course! Because conservatives are people of action, busy people, who have neither the time (like the indolent 47 percenters) nor the inclination to accept phone calls from lamestream media pollsters. Honestly. Scott Walker can’t really believe this.
And finally, the last refuge of these scoundrels, bashing the librul media. Did you catch Rush Limbaugh’s pathetic rant on Tuesday after the famous blown interception call? Packer fans should just shake it off, he said, because the true aggrieved party is conservatives: “We’re lied about every day. The media gets it wrong on purpose against us every day. Now, I think it’s a good analogy.”
It’s a ridiculous analogy, and it’s not lies with which Limbaugh and Morris and their ilk are now coming face-to-face. It’s the truth. Americans like Barack Obama. They don’t like Mitt Romney. They really don’t like Paul Ryan. And they don’t want any part of the ideology of callousness and make-believe facts and pigheaded warmongering—and economic crisis and big deficits and all of that—that the Republicans are peddling. Of course these people will never come to terms with all that. But right now, boys, you’re running out of targets, and excuses.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 27, 2012
“We Never Liked You Anyway”: The Knives Are Out As Conservatives Turn On Romney
As often as not, parties nominate candidates for president that pretty much all their own partisans acknowledge are less than inspiring. Democrats were so excited about Barack Obama in 2008 partly because their previous two nominees, John Kerry and Al Gore, rode to the nomination on a stirring sentiment of “Well, OK, I guess.” The same happened to Republicans, who adored the easygoing George W. Bush after the grim candidacies of Bob Dole and Bush’s father. And now that Mitt Romney has suffered through an awful few weeks—a mediocre convention, an embarrassing response to the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi, then the release of the “47 percent” video in which Romney accused almost half of America of refusing to “take responsibility for their own lives”—the knives have come out.
First it was a widely shared Politico story full of intramural Romney campaign sniping, most directed at chief strategist Stuart Stevens (the article full of anonymous backstabbing is the hallmark of a struggling campaign, as midlevel staffers explain to reporters how everything would be going better if they were in charge). Then came a parade of criticism from prominent conservative commentators. Peggy Noonan called the Romney campaign a “rolling calamity.” David Brooks responded to the 47 percent comment by sounding like Romney talking about Obama: “It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America.” Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said Romney and others in his party “mouth libertarian nonsense, unable to even describe some of the largest challenges of our time.”
William Kristol called Romney’s remarks “arrogant and stupid” and asked, “Has there been a presidential race in modern times featuring two candidates who have done so little over their lifetimes for our country, and who have so little substance to say about the future of our country?” Sarah Palin even got into the act, encouraging Romney and Paul Ryan to “go rogue” to revive their campaign, though whom she thought they should rebel against (themselves?) was unclear. Romney’s problems even trickled down to other races, as one Republican Senate candidate after another rushed to distance themselves from Romney’s dismissal of the 47 percent. No wonder the strain of removing sharp implements from her husband’s back led Ann Romney to tell conservatives, “Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring.” It’s a little late for that though; Republicans are stuck with Romney whether they like it or not. And they’re making sure everyone knows they don’t.
Romney is not yet doomed, of course. Something might happen to upend the campaign and convince large numbers of people to change their votes. But an Obama victory remains more likely than not, which means that a few months from now Republicans will be telling each other that they saw it coming all along.
It isn’t hard to figure out what they’ll be saying. The first explanation for their loss will be a strategic one. “I worked for the Romney campaign,” Republicans will say, “but they never took my advice.” He should have spent more time talking about the economy, or more time talking about social issues. He should have worked harder to win Hispanic votes, or spent more resources on the ground game and less on television ads. He was too vague in his policy prescriptions, not giving America enough of a sense of what he wanted to do.
Of course, they’ll say the news media were hopelessly biased against Romney, elevating every one of his mistakes and ignoring the self-evidently horrifying things Obama said. (Did you know that once, 14 years ago, Obama used the word “redistribution” favorably? I mean, come on!) Forever seeing ideological bias when the truth is that those trailing in the polls get negative coverage and those leading get positive coverage (a kind of bias in itself, but not the kind conservatives mean), they are practiced at blaming their own failures on the media.
On the fringes, they’ll say Democrats cheated, something they’ve believed in the past and will no doubt believe in the future (in late 2009, one poll found that a majority of Republicans believed ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama). The idea that a majority of voters willingly chose this president conservatives despise so fervently strikes them as simply impossible, so there must have been a secret conspiracy assuring his election. This year the only voting conspiracy is no secret; it’s the coordinated Republican effort to put as many roadblocks as possible between Democratic voters and the polls, from photo-ID requirements to purging rolls of voters whose names suggest they might just be noncitizens. Yet should Obama win, conservative websites will trumpet every available story of someone suspicious who cast a ballot, as though it were possible to mobilize millions of voter impersonators to flood the booths.
Then there will be the explanations about Mitt Romney himself, and this is where conservatives will begin to move toward agreement. Some may gently suggest that perhaps a party dogged by a reputation for caring only about the rich could have done better than to nominate a guy with a quarter of a billion dollars whose 2011 tax return was so complex it ran to 379 pages, and who exudes a strange combination of overeagerness and sheer terror whenever he comes in contact with people whose incomes fall below six figures. But in the end, Republicans will agree that for all Mitt Romney’s weaknesses as a candidate, his real problem was that he just wasn’t conservative enough.
As Digby has observed many times, as far as Republicans are concerned, conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. If Republicans lose at the polls or preside over disastrous policies, the only possible explanation is that they weren’t true enough to their ideology. It may be true that Romney became, in his own words, “severely conservative.” He gave the party’s base everything they wanted (and kept giving it to them long after it became a liability). He adopted their agenda, aligned his policy positions with theirs, and told them whatever he thought they wanted to hear, with sometimes disastrous results (see “47 percent”). But they’ll say the problem was that he didn’t really believe it deep down in his heart, and the voters could tell. If only they had nominated a true conservative, everything would have been different.
There may be a Republican here or there telling the party that they’ve gone astray. Perhaps Christie Whitman will write an op-ed lamenting her party’s turn to the right. But as they have in the past, these voices will be ignored. Republicans will promise never to make the same mistake again. Next time, they’ll pledge, we’ll nominate a real conservative, and our ideological purity will be rewarded at the polls.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 25, 2012
“The Red Flags Are Flying”: Senate Candidate Tommie Thompson Wants To “Do Away With Medicare And Medicaid”
Paul Ryan admits that he’s an “end Medicare as we know it” candidate.
But, somehow, we are not supposed to think that he would actually end the popular and successful healthcare program for the elderly, as well as related Medicaid programs for the poor and people with disabilities.
The “as we know it” part provides a sort of cover, at least in the eyes of a media that is more inclined toward stenography than journalism.
Never mind that Ryan, a rabid reader of government-can-do-no-good fanatic Ayn Rand, goes positively wide-eyed when he starts talking about how desperately he wants to downsize government—and shift control of healthcare and retirement programs to the insurance and Wall Street interests that so generously fund his campaigns. We’re not supposed to talk about the long-term crony-capitalist scheme of certain Republicans to do away with government programs that work so that private sector profiteers can come in and create programs that don’t work—except for private sector profiteers.
Never mind that the Republican nominee for vice president has a long history of decrying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in Randian terms such as “collectivist” and “socialistic.”
Never mind that Ryan has griped that “Social Security right now is a collectivist system. It’s a welfare transfer system.”
Never mind that, as recently as 2010, Ryan dismissed Medicare and Medicaid as part of a “socialist based system” that needs to be replaced.
The red flags are not supposed to go up until someone actually says they want to, you know, “do away with Medicaid and Medicare.”
Never mind that, even now, Ryan complains about how America is being overwhelmed by “takers” (citizens who claim benefits to which they are entitled) and the “welfare state” (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid).
Only when a candidate starts talking about ending entitlement programs—as in “doing away” with them—can we be serious about the immediate threat those programs actually face.
Meet Tommy Thompson, former Republican governor of Wisconsin, former Bush-Cheney administration secretary of health and human services, former candidate for the Republican nomination for president and mentor to Paul Ryan.
Speaking to a Tea Party group while campaigning for Wisconsin’s open US Senate seat, Thompson recounted how he “reformed” welfare in Wisconsin.
Back in the 1990s, Thompson said he wanted to “end welfare as we know it.” In fact, he replaced the program with a classic combination of high-government spending, lots of patronage appointments and rising poverty.
Now, Thompson has dropped the “end welfare as we know it” pretense. He brags that he finished off “one of the entitlement program.”
And he’s gunning for a couple of other entitlement programs.
Which ones?
You guessed it: Medicaid and Medicare.
Declaring that he wants to “change Medicare and Medicaid like I did welfare,” Thompson asked a May gathering of the Lake Country Area Defenders Of Liberty in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin: “Who better to and who better than me, who’s already finished one of the entitlement programs, to come up with programs to do away with Medicaid and Medicare?”
The video has only now surfaced and its a blockbuster—especially in the aftermath of the release last week of a similar video that saw Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney dismissing 47 percent of Americans as a “dependent” class unworthy of Republican consideration.
Just to repeat: a top Republican Senate candidate has been caught on video talking about how he would “DO AWAY WITH MEDICAID, AND MEDICARE.”
Just to repeat: “DO AWAY WITH MEDICAID, AND MEDICARE.”
It should be understood that Thompson is no fringe-dwelling Todd Akin. As the longtime Republican governor of a swing state, he’s worked with every GOP president since Ronald Reagan, and he oversaw social programs for the Bush-Cheney administration. This year, he’s one of his party’s premier recruits in the fight to retake the Senate. Indeed, the race between Thompson and Democratic Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin could decide which party controls the chamber.
Thompson is, as well, closely aligned with Paul Ryan. The Senate candidate’s ties to Ryan’s politically connected family go back to when the Republican vice presidential nominee was a child. Thompson has been a Ryan booster from the very beginning of the younger Wisconsinite’s career in electoral politics—when Thompson was the powerful governor of the state and Ryan was organizing his first Congressional bid.
When Thompson joined the Bush-Cheney Cabinet, he and Ryan kept regular company in Washington. They look forward to working together when Thompson becomes the point man on entitlement debates in a Republican-controlled Senate and Ryan is the Romney White House’s chief liaison to Capitol Hill.
The voters will have something to say about that, however.
If they want to preserve Medicaid and Medicare, they will remember that, while Ryan may add the “as we know it” spin, Thompson gets to the heart of the matter when he says it is the intention of these “reformers” to “do away with Medicaid and Medicare.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, September 24, 2012
“Eddie Haskell Maintains His Mask”: Paul Ryan’s Presence On The Romney Ticket Has Become An Actual Irritant
The day Mitt Romney put Paul Ryan on the ticket, my immediate reaction was to speculate that this was a definite effort to get conservative activists off Mitt’s back and liberate him to run whatever kind of campaign he wanted: “Here you go! Now STFU!”
If that was the idea, the memo didn’t seem to get around, because Ryan’s presence on the ticket has become an actual irritant to many of the Wisconsin’s fans who are increasingly agitated that this isn’t the Randian anti-entitlement firebrand they know and love. WaPo’s Felicia Sonmez and David A. Fahrenthold have the low-down:
Conservatives had hoped that Mitt Romney’s choice of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (Wis.) as his running mate would make Romney act more like Ryan — bold, specific, confident.
Instead, in the six weeks since Ryan became the GOP vice presidential nominee — and particularly in the three weeks since the Republican National Convention in Tampa — there has been mounting concern among Republicans that the pick has made Ryan look more like Romney — vague, cautious and limited to pre-set talking points….
“I was wrong. When Paul Ryan was picked, I really thought this meant that the Romney campaign was shifting gears and was going to have a debate about big issues,” said Michael Tanner, an expert on health care and the budget at the libertarian Cato Institute.
He said that Romney’s campaign had previously cast the race as a referendum on Obama instead of as a choice between two clear visions. That hasn’t changed, Tanner said.
“Why do you pick somebody like Paul Ryan if you’re going to run a referendum, Obama’s-done-a-bad-job campaign?” Tanner asked.
That’s the question being raised by all sorts of people on the Right who weren’t informed or didn’t accept that the gift of the vice-presidential nomination was the last gift the Romney campaign intended to give them before November 6.
So the Eddie Haskell persona Ryan’s put on from the moment he was chosen–reassuring old folks he’s not the Social-Security-and-Medicare hater his record would suggest, and is instead actually their very best friend, determined to protect their benefits from mean old Barack Obama–is upsetting those who are fond of the smart-and-snarky Eddie who emerges when Mrs. Cleaver isn’t around. Indeed, Team Mitt is in serious danger of falling between two stools here, picking a vulnerable running mate whose downside can’t be made to go away even as his upside is obscured.
Before it’s over, Tim Pawlenty may look better than ever in the rear-view mirror.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 24, 2012
“Promoting Untrue Choice”: Paul Ryan’s Health Care Proposal Would Shrink The Medicare Doctor Pool
The federal budget proposed by Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, extols the benefits of “promoting true choice” for Medicare beneficiaries.
In truth, though, the Ryan plan would substantially reduce choice for many people on Medicare — by cutting them off from their current doctors.
Doctors see Medicare patients, despite the relatively low payments they receive for doing so, partly because Medicare represents such a large share of the health-care market.
If a substantial number of beneficiaries moved out of Medicare and into private plans, as Ryan proposes, doctors would have much less incentive to see Medicare patients. And the elderly who want to remain in traditional Medicare would risk being stranded.
The evidence suggests that, in time, this problem could well affect a large share of Medicare beneficiaries. To put that evidence in context, though, it helps to first review the history of the Ryan plan.
The proposal has changed since it was presented in 2011. In the original version, traditional Medicare was eventually to be replaced in its entirety by private plans. The Congressional Budget Office found that this shift would raise health-care costs drastically because the private plans wouldn’t be large enough to enjoy Medicare’s leverage in negotiating prices with hospitals and other large providers. The savings that private plans could achieve because beneficiaries would share more of the costs, and therefore economize more, would be more than offset by that loss of leverage — and by the private plans’ higher overhead and need to turn a profit.
Ryan Revision
In response to the devastating CBO report, Ryan revised his proposal. Under Ryan 2.0, private plans would co-exist with traditional Medicare. (The CBO hasn’t fully evaluated the revised plan yet.)
Many supporters argue that the new plan can’t be as big a problem as the old one, since beneficiaries could always choose to remain in traditional Medicare. In health care, however, choice isn’t always innocuous — and can sometimes be harmful.
I have previously described two downsides to expanding private plans in Medicare. First, it would undercut Medicare’s ability to help move the payment system away from fee-for- service reimbursement and toward payments based on value, because no private plan is large enough to accomplish that shift by itself. Second, the mechanism for adjusting premiums to even out the health risks of individual beneficiaries is far from perfect, so plans can easily game the system, raising total costs. In effect, the plans would end up being overpaid.
The reduced choice of doctors for those who remain in traditional Medicare is a third adverse consequence of moving beneficiaries out of the program.
Currently, Medicare beneficiaries almost universally enjoy excellent access to doctors. And the great majority of beneficiaries never have to wait long for a routine appointment, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has found. Roughly 90 percent of doctors accept new Medicare patients.
Doctors provide this access even though they are reimbursed by Medicare at rates that are only about 80 percent of commercial rates — partly because Medicare is such a large share of the market. Which brings us to the concern about the Ryan plan.
Medicare Doctors
How important is Medicare’s market share in influencing physician participation? The evidence is limited, but the best study to date suggests it is significant. In the 1990s, Peter Damiano, Elizabeth Momany, Jean Willard and Gerald Jogerst, all associated with the University of Iowa, surveyed Iowa physicians and examined variation among counties. They found that for each percentage-point increase in the share of Medicare beneficiaries in a county’s population, doctors were 16 percent more likely to accept patients on Medicare. The only other study I know of on this topic, an unpublished analysis by Matthew Eisenberg of Carnegie Mellon University, also found an effect from Medicare’s market share, albeit one that was substantially smaller than the one Damiano and his colleagues found.
About 10 percent of the U.S. population is now enrolled in traditional Medicare, and an additional 5 percent has private Medicare plans. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the Ryan plan would cause another 5 percent of the population to shift, and to be conservative let’s cut in half the Damiano estimate of the impact from that reduction in Medicare’s market share. Then the chance that a doctor is willing to see traditional Medicare patients would be expected to decline by a whopping 40 percent. The share of doctors accepting Medicare would fall from about 90 percent to 54 percent.
To be even more conservative, let’s average the reduced Damiano estimate (already been cut in half and applied only to today’s market share rather than the higher one that will exist in the future when more people are on Medicare) with the Eisenberg estimate. Still, about 20 percent of doctors would be expected to stop accepting Medicare patients.
Supporters of the Ryan approach might argue that fewer people would shift into the private plans, so the impact would not be that great. After all, the existing Medicare program already offers Medicare Advantage plans, so perhaps anyone who wants private insurance already has it. But then, what is the point of Ryan’s Medicare reform?
Another defense might be that the government could simply raise doctor-reimbursement rates to encourage providers to continue treating a shrinking population of traditional Medicare patients. And that’s true. However, Ryan has not included the extra cost in his budget.
So, which is it, Mr. Ryan? Will your plan cause Medicare beneficiaries to lose access to their doctors, or are your budget numbers too rosy because you haven’t counted the extra payments needed to keep doctors in the program?
By: Peter Orszag, Council on Foreign Policy, Business Insider, September 24, 2012
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