“Satisfying The Base”: Why Republicans Can’t Stop Pissing Off Hispanics, Women, And Young People
What are the three demographic groups whose electoral impact is growing fastest? Hispanics, women, and young people. Who are Republicans pissing off the most? Latinos, women, and young people.
It’s almost as if the GOP can’t help itself.
Start with Hispanic voters, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they comprise an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney by more than two to one, according to a recent Pew poll.
The movement of Hispanics into the Democratic camp has been going on for decades. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Replicating California Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s disastrous support almost twenty years ago for Proposition 187 – which would have screened out undocumented immigrants from public schools, health care, and other social services, and required law-enforcement officials to report any “suspected” illegals. (Wilson, you may remember, lost that year’s election, and California’s Republican Party has never recovered.)
The Arizona law now before the Supreme Court – sponsored by Republicans in the state and copied by Republican legislators and governors in several others – would authorize police to stop anyone looking Hispanic and demand proof of citizenship. It’s nativism disguised as law enforcement.
Romney is trying to distance himself from that law, but it’s not working. That may be because he dubbed it a “model law” during February’s Republican primary debate in Arizona, and because its author (former state senator Russell Pearce, who was ousted in a special election last November largely by angry Hispanic voters) says he’s working closely with Romney advisers.
Hispanics are also reacting to Romney’s attack just a few months ago on GOP rival Texas Governor Rick Perry for supporting in-state tuition at the University of Texas for children of undocumented immigrants. And to Romney’s advocacy of what he calls “self-deportation” – making life so difficult for undocumented immigrants and their families that they choose to leave.
As if all this weren’t enough, the GOP has been pushing voter ID laws all over America, whose obvious aim is to intimidate Hispanic voters so they won’t come to the polls. But they may have the opposite effect – emboldening the vast majority of ethnic Hispanics, who are American citizens, to vote in even greater numbers and lend even more support to Obama and other Democrats.
Or consider women – whose political and economic impact in America continues to grow (women are fast becoming better educated than men and the major breadwinners in American homes). The political gender gap is huge. According to recent polls, women prefer Obama to Romney by over 20 percent.
So what is the GOP doing to woo women back? Attacking them. Last February, House Republicans voted to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. Last May, they unanimously passed the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” banning the District of Columbia from funding abortions for low-income women. (The original version removed all exceptions – rape, incest, and endangerment to a mother’s life – except “forcible” rape.)
Earlier this year Republican legislators in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Alabama pushed bills requiring women seeking abortions to undergo invasive vaginal ultrasound tests (Pennsylvania Republicans even wanted proof such had viewed the images).
Republican legislators in Georgia and Arizona passed bills banning most abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy. The Georgia bill would also require that any abortion after 20 weeks be done in a way to bring the fetus out alive. Republican legislators in Texas have voted to eliminate funding for any women’s healthcare clinic with an affiliation to an abortion provider – even if the affiliation is merely a shared name, employee, or board member.
All told, over 400 Republican bills are pending in state legislatures, attacking womens’ reproductive rights.
But even this doesn’t seem enough for the GOP. Republicans in Wisconsin just repealed a law designed to prevent employers from discriminating against women.
Or, finally, consider students – a significant and growing electoral force, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Attack them, of course.
Republican Budget Chair Paul Ryan’s budget plan – approved by almost every House Republican and enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney – allows rates on student loans to double on July 1 – from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. That will add an average of $1,000 a year to student debt loads, which already exceed credit-card debt.
House Republicans say America can’t afford the $6 billion a year it would require to keep student loan rates down to where they are now. But that same Republican plan gives wealthy Americans trillions of dollars in tax cuts over the next decade. (Under mounting political pressure, House Republicans have come up with just enough money to keep the loan program going for another year – safely past Election Day – by raiding a fund established for preventive care in the new health-care act.)
Here again, Romney is trying to tiptoe away from the GOP position. He now says he supports keeping student loans where they were. Yet only a few months ago he argued that subsidized student loans were bad because they encouraged colleges to raise their tuition.
How can a political party be so dumb as to piss off Hispanics, women, and young people? Because the core of its base is middle-aged white men – and it doesn’t seem to know how to satisfy its base without at the same time turning off everyone who’s not white, male, and middle-aged.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, April 26, 2012
“Perfectly Equal Already”: GOP Tries To Protect The “Sanctity Of Traditional Domestic Violence”
Republicans still can’t decide whether there is a War on Caterpillars Women, or whether President Obama started it, or whether it’s a fictional invention of the media or the Democrats, or whether it’s a Democratic War on Women Ann Romney.
This week, Michele Bachmann said, “There is no war on women. There’s never been a war on women.” Which is either on or off message, depending on the day. For example, Sen. John McCain on Meet the Press, March 20, 2012:
GREGORY: Do you think that there is something of a war on women among Republicans?McCAIN: I think we have to fix that. I think that there is a perception out there because of how this whole contraception issue played out — ah, we need to get off of that issue, in my view.
But this week, during a Senate debate on reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, McCain flip-flopped on the problem he’d previously acknowledged. He took to the floor to make his case while his party launched an unprecedented opposition because they don’t like the part where it includes protection for immigrants, lesbians and Native American women. Or, as Melissa McEwan (aka Shakespeare’s Sister) brilliantly described it, “Protect the sanctity of traditional domestic violence!”
While McCain ultimately voted to reauthorize the act, he first had to spend more than 10 minutes explaining why women are perfectly equal already and, just as his fellow Republican Bachmann claimed, the War on Women is mere fiction:
My friends, this supposed “War on Women” or the use of similarly outlandish rhetoric by partisan operatives has two purposes, and both are political in their purpose and effect. The first, purely political; the first is to distract citizens from real issues that really matter, and the second is to give talking heads something to sputter about when they appear on cable television. Neither purpose does anything to advance the well being of any American. […]To suggest that one group of us or one party speaks for all women or that one group has an agenda to harm women and another to help them is ridiculous if for no other reason than it assumes a unity of interests, beliefs, concerns, experiences and ambition among all women that doesn’t exist among men or among any race or class. […]
Thankfully, I believe men and women of our country are smart enough to recognize that when a politician or political party resorts to dividing us in the name of bringing us together, it usually means that they’re either out of ideas or short on resolve to address the challenges of our time. At this time in our nation’s history, we face an abundance of hard choices. The vicious slogans and the declaring of phony wars are intended to avoid those hard choices and to escape paying a political price for doing so. […]
Leaving these problems unaddressed indefinitely and resorting to provoking greater divisions among us at a time when we most need unity might not be a war against this or that group of Americans, but it is surely a surrender: a surrender of our responsibilities to the country and a surrender of decency.
Apparently, Mitt Romney’s flip-flopping is contagious, and John McCain has a bad case of it.
As I previously wrote, and as readers of this series well know, Republicans can deny it all they want, but there is a War on Women. It’s real, and it’s dangerous, and it’s not about zingers and slogans:
It’s about a constant legislative assault by the Republican Party, at the state and federal level, on women’s equality and basic rights, from health care to equal pay to funding programs to combat violence against women. Women aren’t stupid, even if Republicans, like Herman Cain, insist that “men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people.”
Despite the best efforts of the 31 Republicans (yes, all men) who voted against it, the Senate passed the not-watered-down Violence Against Women Act. Next stop is the House, so tell your representatives to pass the Violence Against Women Act.
By: Kaili Joy Gray, Daily Kos, April 28, 2012
“Ignoring The Facts”: Romney’s Fiscal Fantasy Plan
Political arithmetic is always suspect, and one should always examine carefully the claims of those seeking votes. Smart observers have learned to distinguish between the claims of political candidates and their advisers and proposals that have been evaluated by independent scorekeepers such as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
This principle was aptly illustrated by the “budget analysis” Mitt Romney’s chief economic adviser, Glenn Hubbard, recently put forward. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, Hubbard constructs a budget plan that he imagines President Obama might propose someday, engages in a set of his own extrapolations and then makes assertions about it. He does not discuss the actual Obama plan or how it has been evaluated by the CBO. Nor does Hubbard invest his credibility in defending the claims that Romney has made about his own fiscal plans. He simply states that “Yes, President Obama and Mitt Romney have budgets with competing visions. But Gov. Romney’s budget makes tough choices” — without delving into the specifics or trade-offs that Romney’s “tough choices” entail.
The president put forward a plan this year that would reduce deficits by more than $4 trillion over the next decade. It would bring federal discretionary spending to its lowest levels since the 1960s. It includes $2.50 in spending cuts for every $1 in additional revenue. It also asks everyone to pay his or her fair share of taxes, repealing the Bush tax cuts for families making more than $250,000 a year and closing loopholes and shelters such as preferences for private jets, hedge fund managers and offshore investments.
The independent CBO confirms that the Obama budget would stabilize the debt as a share of the economy — returning us to a tenable fiscal path. It would do that while allowing increased investments in education, research and infrastructure that are critical to stronger, shared economic growth in the years to come. By focusing on building a strong economy, the budget expands the tax base and reduces pressures for future tax increases.
Rather than criticize this approach, Hubbard ignores it — and instead chooses to invent assumptions that bear no relationship to the president’s actual policies. His figures are not explained, but they apparently arbitrarily assume that the president must raise taxes to pay for spending above a level of Hubbard’s choosing.
Rather than filling imaginary gaps in the president’s budget, which has been spelled out in sufficient detail to permit evaluation by independent experts, Hubbard should perhaps address some of the many gaps in Romney’s plans.
Start with the taxes. The Romney campaign has been very clear about what the former governor is promising: $5 trillion in tax cuts on top of extending the Bush tax cuts, with those benefits heavily weighted toward the country’s wealthiest taxpayers. Romney himself has acknowledged the lack of details, stating in reference to his tax plan that “frankly, it can’t be scored.” I have been party for many years to searches for “high-income tax shelters” that can feasibly be closed. I know of no reputable expert in either political party who would find that there is anything even approaching $5 trillion in potential revenue to be generated from this source.
Romney has also proposed a massive defense buildup, even while he says he will cut spending deeply enough to balance the budget. I think it’s clear why he won’t tell voters which cuts he would make: In the past, disclosing his planned budget cuts was politically damaging.
We have seen this movie before. When President Bill Clinton left office, our country was paying down its debt on a substantial scale. I was privileged as secretary of the Treasury to be buying back federal debt. George W. Bush campaigned on a program of tax cuts supported by economic advisers who were not subject to the rigors of official budget scorekeeping. The results — trillions of dollars of budget deficits — speak for themselves.
This is a consequential presidential election. As the country continues to recover from the largest economic crisis in generations, we need to strengthen the job market, address big fiscal challenges and build an economy that is based on sustainable, shared economic growth. Voters should have a chance to choose between clear alternatives. Obama — consistent with his obligations as president — has laid out a multiyear budget embodying his vision for the future, and it has been evaluated by independent experts. It is time for Romney to do the same.
By: Lawrence Summers, Opinion, The Washington Post, April 26, 2012
“Ryan Shrugged”: Paul Ryan Suddenly Does Not Embrace Ayn Rand’s Teachings
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) tried to send the message this week that, contrary to “urban legend,”he is not obsessed with philosopher and author Ayn Rand.
“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan told National Review on Thursday. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.”
Best known for her novels “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand advocated a philosophy that emphasizes the individual over the collective, and viewed capitalism as the only system truly based on the protection of the individual. She has been a significant influence on libertarians and conservatives.
Ryan, whose name has been floated as a possible running mate for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, appeared to be distancing himself from Rand in response to a public letter he received this week from nearly 90 faculty and administrators at Georgetown University. In their letter, they criticize him for misusing Catholic social teaching in defending his budget, which hurts the poor by proposing significant cuts to anti-hunger programs, slashing Pell Grants for low-income students and calling for a replacement of Medicare with a voucher-like system. They also invoke Rand’s name.
“As scholars, we want to join the Catholic bishops in pointing out that his budget has a devastating impact on programs for the poor,” said Jesuit Father Thomas J. Reese, one of the organizers of the letter. “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.”
But any urban legend about Ryan’s affinity for Rand surely started with Ryan himself, who, prior to this week, had no qualms about gushing about Rand’s influence on his guiding principles.
“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said during a 2005 event honoring Rand in Washington, D.C., the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in April 2009.
During the 2005 gathering, Ryan told the audience, “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill … is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict — individualism versus collectivism.” The event was hosted by The Atlas Society, which prominently features a photo of Rand on its website and describes itself as a group that “promotes open Objectivism: the philosophy of reason, achievement, individualism, and freedom.”
Ryan also said during a 2003 interview with the Weekly Standard, “I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well … I try to make my interns read it.” He noted that he “looked into” Rand’s work when he was younger, but reiterated that he is a Christian and reads the Bible often.
In 2009, Ryan posted two videos on his Facebook page raving about the importance of Rand’s views.
“If ‘Atlas Shrugged’ author Ayn Rand were alive today, here’s the urgent message I think she’d be conveying,” Ryan wrote alongside the first video, titled “Ayn Rand’s relevance in 2009.”
He says in the video:
What’s unique about what’s happening today in government, in the world, in America, is it’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build the moral case for capitalism. And that morality of capitalism is under assault. And we are going to replace it with a crony capitalism, collectivist, government-run system which is creeping its way into government. And so if Ayn Rand were here today, I think she would do a great job in showing us just how wrong what government is doing is. Not the quantitative analysis, not the numbers, but the morality of what is wrong with what government is doing today.
In the second video, titled “Ayn Rand & 2009 America, Part 2,” Ryan says it doesn’t surprise him that sales of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” have “surged” since President Barack Obama took office.
“It’s that kind of thinking, that kind of writing, that is sorely needed right now. And I think a lot of people would observe that we are living in an Ayn Rand novel right now, metaphorically speaking,” Ryan says. “The attack on Democratic capitalism, on individualism and freedom in America is an attack on the moral foundation of America. And Ayn Rand more than anyone else did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism. This, to me, is what matters most.”
Some of Ryan’s critics took a shot at him for suddenly distancing himself from Rand.
“Not pure enough on entitlement cuts @philipaklein @robertcostaNRO Paul Ryan on Ayn Rand: ‘I reject her philosophy,'” Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, tweeted Thursday.
UPDATE: 5:14 p.m. — Ryan spokesman Kevin Seifert downplayed the lawmaker’s apparent change of tune on Rand.
“I wouldn’t make too much of this one way or another. Congressman Ryan was not ‘distancing himself’ from Rand, merely correcting several false storylines that are out there, such as the myth that he requires all of his staffers to read Atlas Shrugged. Saying he ‘rejects Ayn Rand’s philosophy’ was simply meant to correct a popular falsehood that Congressman Ryan is an Objectivist — he isn’t now and never claimed to be,” Seifert said in a statement to The Huffington Post.
By: Jennifer Bendery, The Huffington Post, April 27, 2012
“In The Rearview Mirror”: GOP Already Backseat Driving Romney Campaign
It seems awfully early in the campaign for campaign-strategy kibitzing, but Republicans are already leaning into the front seat to tell Mitt Romney what he should be doing differently. The New York Times reports on a host of Republicans fretting over the “angry tenor” of Romney’s campaign. Likewise, the Wall Street Journal editorial page urges Romney to be more positive. (And also, um, more mean: “One of Mr. Romney’s trickiest challenges will be how to handle Mr. Obama’s, er, veracity. … Mr. Romney can’t let the President get away with this.”)
Campaign backseat driving, as a rule, tends to be crap. There is a grain of truth here. In any incumbent election, voters tend to have pretty firm opinions about the incumbent. The campaign dynamic therefore hinges largely on the acceptability of the challenger. (Obviously, if the incumbent is popular or unpopular enough, the challenger’s standing doesn’t matter much.) The 2004 election, an election that seemed to revolve almost entirely around defining John Kerry, offers a good illustration. An incumbent hanging around the 50 percent approval mark will tend to devote his energy to disqualify the challenger, and the challenger will tend to focus on building himself up.
The problem for Romney’s campaign is that his staff is built to run a negative campaign.
Jason Zengerle’s fantastic profile of Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s all-purpose guru, underscores how and why his campaign has behaved as it has. Fehrnstrom is tabloid hit man by trade, a cynical man who is filled with resentment at the liberal swells. He excelled at crafting a series of attacks against Romney’s parade of Republican challengers, knocking each of them off one by one. But a big-picture visionary he clearly is not. The undercurrent of early criticism probably reflects the fact that Romney’s main advisers are not deeply rooted in conservative-movement ideology.
An additional problem is that Romney doesn’t have a politically attractive vision to offer. The Journal counsels him to move beyond his gauzy paeans to capitalism and American greatness and instead embrace the Paul Ryan agenda more specifically. Of course, Romney had to embrace the Ryan plan to make it through the primary, but his campaign pretty clearly grasps that this is a liability, and the more closely he’s tied to its specific policies, the worse he’ll fare. A bold and centrist agenda might work — say, an embrace of a Bowles-Simpson type of plan, perhaps coupled with some alternate proposal to ensure universal coverage. But the Ryan plan precludes that.
The Journal also argues that Romney should inoculate himself from the inevitable charge that he represents a return to the Bush era by attacking Bush’s record from the right:
Before Mr. Obama’s stimulus, Mr. Bush joined with Nancy Pelosi and Larry Summers on the blunder of “targeted, temporary” tax cuts. Mr. Bush began playing business favorites for ethanol and green energy fads. Republicans in Congress spent like Democrats and protected Fannie Mae and the housing lobby. And Mr. Bush and most Republicans embraced an easy-money Federal Reserve that favored Wall Street and asset bubbles at the expense of real middle-class incomes.
The interesting thing about this isn’t the political-advice aspect. It’s that the Journal is really giving away the game on the right-wing hysteria against Obama. After all, the point here is that many of Obama’s policies truly are a continuation of traditional bipartisan approaches. Republicans (including the Journal) have spent more than three years decrying Obama’s plans to destroy American freedom with a nefarious new agenda of profligacy and crony capitalism. Here, they’re basically admitting that Obama is just doing stuff they all considered, at worst, a minor annoyance until he proposed it. For better or worse, the party that’s departing from long-standing tradition here is the GOP. I don’t know if it matters much one way or another politically, but it’s quite an admission.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, April 26, 2012
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