“Struggling To Justify A Heresy”: Are Republicans Falling Out Of Love With Ronald Reagan?
The first big Republican presidential primary debate defied expectations in any number of ways. But one of the most surprising things may have been that only five of the 10 candidates invoked the memory of that most sainted Republican, that giant among dwarves, that demigod among mortals, America’s greatest president and a man who walked the Earth without sin. I speak, of course, of Ronald Reagan.
How on Earth did the other five candidates forget to speak his name and clothe themselves in his holy memory?
In the “undercard” debate that took place hours before the main event, the ratio was a bit better — four of the seven candidates invoked Reagan. But the trend still held. Could it be that the power of invoking Reagan is beginning to fade — even if only a bit?
Consider that, with the exception of Donald Trump, the Republican candidates who mentioned Reagan in the prime-time debate — Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, and John Kasich — are all stuck in single digits, as are all the candidates from the undercard. Furthermore, many of the mentions came when a candidate was struggling to justify a heresy, as if to say, “Please don’t be too angry with me about this, because Reagan did it too.”
Defending his switch from pro-choice to pro-life, Trump said, “Ronald Reagan evolved on many issues.” Paul, explaining why he’s not the hawk other Republicans are, said, “I’m a Reagan conservative. Reagan did negotiate with the Soviets.” And Kasich explained his support of the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid by saying, “President Reagan expanded Medicaid three or four times.” Only Cruz offered a good old-fashioned song of praise, when he said with a stirring voice and passion in his eyes, “It is worth emphasizing that Iran released our hostages in 1981 the day Ronald Reagan was sworn into office.” (I won’t bother going over the history of that event, except to say that it didn’t happen because the Iranians were so terrified of Reagan’s steely resolve.)
In a group of people who worship Reagan, maybe there’s little to be gained by reiterating your love for him; it would be like a cardinal saying he ought to be pope because he is in fact a Catholic. Or maybe it’s that a full quarter-century after Reagan left office, even Republicans have a somewhat more realistic view of his presidency than they used to.
I’d like to think that if the importance of Reagan as a totem is fading, it has at least something to do with liberals like me, even if that seems a little far-fetched. We have spent a lot of time not only mocking Republicans for their worship of Reagan, but also pointing out that he was a far more complicated president than they claim. His record even includes a number of decisions that today look downright liberal. He did indeed negotiate with the Soviets (to the dismay of many Republican hard-liners at the time), he raised taxes repeatedly, the deficit ballooned on his watch, and instead of setting out to destroy government entitlements, he partnered with liberals to save Social Security in 1983 (more details can be found here).
That isn’t to say that Reagan wasn’t a strong conservative, because he was. But he was president in another era, when being a Republican meant something rather different than it does today.
Up until the last few years, you could be a Republican in good standing while still being pragmatic. But today’s Republican Party isn’t just more conservative on policy, it has become doctrinaire in a way it didn’t used to be. Compromise itself — regardless of the context or the content — is now held by all right-thinking Republicans to be inherently evil. Far too much is made of Reagan’s alleged friendship with Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, but it’s true that Reagan could be friendly with his political opponents. Today, every Republican has to express a deep and intense loathing for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton if they hope to win their party’s favor. The Tea Party essentially took over the GOP after Obama’s election, forcing everyone in the party to prove again and again that their hearts are pure and they’d rather lose everything than willingly give an inch on anything. Entire organizations now exist to police elected Republicans for signs of heresy, and punish those who fail to measure up.
So maybe that’s why you now hear Reagan invoked mostly defensively. The one who does it knows that he has transgressed, and hopes that the aura of Saint Ronnie will cleanse him of his sins and bring him before the primary electorate clean and unsullied. But it doesn’t seem to work — Republicans are vigilant for even the faintest whiff of impurity, and no amount of Reagan-invocation will distract them once they’ve caught the scent. If that’s true, we might hear his name spoken less and less often as time goes on.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 10, 2015
“A Hater’s Guide To The GOP Debate”: Rubio Will Rise And Trump Will Inevitably Fall
Well, that was kind of like watching a basketball game that had 10 teams. But hey—the questions were good. They were surprisingly tough. But were they evenly tough? That’s an interesting question. Let’s take a quick look at who was asked what, among the four top candidates. I kept track.
Donald Trump was asked eight questions, about: why he wouldn’t back the GOP nominee (which he of course brought on himself by volunteering that he might not); all the names he’s called women; what his evidence was for saying that Mexico is “sending” us its rapists; why he used to support single-payer; his four bankruptcies; why he was once pro-choice; whether his tone is appropriate in a president; the Iran deal.
Jeb Bush was asked six questions, about: dynastic politics; his previous Iraq faux pas; Common Core; his 4 percent growth pledge; being on that Bloomberg board (an abortion question); did he call Trump a “clown,” “buffoon,” or “asshole.”
Scott Walker (seven questions): the Wisconsin abortion bill that makes no exception for the life of the mother; his path-to-citizenship flip-flop; what more we could be doing with our Mideast allies; Wisconsin’s poor job growth; the Iran deal; police shootings; cyber war.
Marco Rubio (six questions): lack of experience; immigration; Common Core; how he’d help small businesses; what Megyn Kelly thought was his support for rape and incest exceptions for abortion; about God and veterans.
Lots of people seem to think that Rubio had a strong night. I would submit to you that the question list helps explain why. They lobbed a few massive softballs in his direction. For example, both he and Bush were asked about Common Core. But whereas to Bush this was a challenging question, because he’s swimming against the GOP tide on the question, to Rubio it was just, as a Senator, what do you think of what Governor Bush just said? The immigration and small-business questions were totally teed up. And God and veterans? They might as well have asked him if he loved his mother (which he answered anyway; he does).
The other top-tier candidates all got tougher questions. Seven of Trump’s eight questions could fairly be called confrontational or at least challenging. Five of Bush’s six were the same; maybe all six. Three of Walker’s seven. And just one or at most two of Rubio’s. And even those were only mildly so. The lack-of-experience question, for example, was an obvious set-up for him to launch into his future shtick, which he plans on making his main line of attack against Hillary Clinton should he be the nominee.
Now I’m not suggesting that there’s some Murdoch-orchestrated conspiracy here to elevate Rubio. Moderating a 10-candidate debate is probably a really hard thing to do. They surely drew up at least 20 questions for each candidate, knowing that they could only get to some of them, and of course they had to make sure that the questioning was evenly distributed. It’s a high-pressure gig, and the three of them—Kelly, Baier, and Wallace—did pretty well overall.
But it is a fact that they didn’t hit Rubio with any gotcha questions. Two possibilities spring to mind. They could have asked him about his hard-line Cuba position, which isn’t supported even by Cubans in Florida themselves, except those aged 65 and older. And if they’d really wanted to zing him, they could have brought up that hearing where he seemed to think that Iran and ISIS were allies and John Kerry had to explain politely that they weren’t.
In contrast, it seemed clear that they wanted to rake Trump over the coals. The opening question, about whether they’d all support the GOP nominee, was obviously aimed squarely at him, and he obliged them by affirming that no, he would not. Well, Trump’s the front-runner, and the front-runner should get tough questions. And Trump was pretty bad. He clearly didn’t prepare much, he wasn’t funny (and he can be), and he didn’t manage at all to do the one thing he really should have done, which was to say something, just one thing, that was substantive, that showed he had a surprising command of policy, so that the talking heads afterward would have been forced to say, “Hey, that Donald, give him credit, he showed us something new tonight.” He showed nothing new.
Bush was…okay. His task was to be the one who seized on any Trump stumble to communicate to people: See, I’m the real front-runner. But he never really did that. Walker was kind of a blank until almost the very end of the debate, when he pulled out that line about how Russia knows more about Hillary Clinton’s emails than the United States Congress.
As for the second tier: John Kasich probably had the best night. At least he managed to get an audience of conservatives to applaud the fact that he attended a gay wedding. That’s what a home-court advantage will do for you. But his saying that God’s unconditional love for him meant he should love a potentially gay daughter was the right way to do it.
And yes, I’m kind of surprised that I’m 860 words into this column and haven’t mentioned Ted Cruz. Now there’s a guy who needs a lot more than 60 seconds to find his rhythm.
Bottom line: Trump drops, Rubio gains. But the most interesting figure, even though he is personally quite boring, is Bush. When will he demonstrate that he actually deserves to be the one getting all these millions of dollars raised for him? He’s just a bet by moneyed class, not because of what he is, but because of what he isn’t (not Trump, not extremist). He wasn’t bad enough that any of the money people are going to panic. But if it were my money, I’d be shopping around.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, August 7, 2015
“Scott Walker And The Masters Of Deceit”: Tailoring His Views To The Particular Audience He Is Addressing
As Scott Walker finally makes his presidential bid official today, National Journal‘s Tim Alberta wonders if the candidate can perpetually get away with tailoring his views to the particular audience he is addressing. That certainly seems to be the calculation in Walker-land:
[A]ccording to Walker allies, he’s going to pursue exactly the opposite strategy Romney used in 2012. Whereas Romney started in the middle and moved rightward throughout primary season, Walker is starting on the right and will shift toward the middle.
“You start in Iowa and lock up conservatives, because if you don’t do that, none of the rest matters,” said one longtime Walker adviser, who requested anonymity to discuss campaign strategy. “It’s much easier to move from being a conservative to being a middle-of-the-road moderate later on.”
The adviser added: “In Iowa, you see the beginnings of that. He’s capturing that conservative wing first and foremost, and then moving from Iowa to the other states and bringing other voters into the fold.”
Pretty candid, I’d say, particularly when you remember the brouhaha that erupted in 2012 when Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom talked about the “pivot” his candidate was about to execute after locking up the GOP nomination:
“Everything changes,” Mr. Fehrnstrom, 50, said on CNN, with a slight smirk that suggested he believed he was about to use a clever line. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”
So here’s a Walker “adviser” (who did have the good sense to stay unnamed) saying the same sort of thing. Won’t there be some angry recriminations from conservatives who are being told Walker’s going to start sounding like a different person once Iowa is in the bag?
Maybe, but it’s worth thinking about the subject Alberta uses at the top of his story to demonstrate Walker’s slippery nature:
“I’m pro-life,” Scott Walker said, looking directly into the camera. “But there’s no doubt in my mind the decision of whether or not to end a pregnancy is an agonizing one. That’s why I support legislation to increase safety and to provide more information for a woman considering her options. The bill leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor.”
That was last October, less than a month before Election Day, when the Wisconsin governor was locked in a tight reelection battle with Democrat Mary Burke. Her allies were attacking Walker for signing a bill that required women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion. He responded with this memorable 30-second ad, part of an ongoing effort to soften Walker’s image in the eyes of on-the-fence voters. In deeply polarized Wisconsin, they would decide the race. Exit polling shows they broke to him: Walker beat Burke among independents by 11 points en route to winning a second term.
Walker will announce Monday that he’s running for president. And dovetailing with the campaign launch will be a ceremony in which the governor signs into law a 20-week abortion ban that makes no exception for rape or incest. This hard-line stance on abortion, juxtaposed against the tone he struck on the issue last fall, provides a window into Walker’s political style and helps explain how he got to this point.
That “hard-line stance” has been packaged across the country with the very rhetoric about “safety” and “information” that Walker used in his gubernatorial campaign. The latter is a deliberate deception to make medically unnecessary and onerous requirements imposed on abortion providers and the women seeking their services sound innocuous. And it’s part of a long, long pattern of deceit by antichoicers who act as though they’re only concerned with women’s health and rare late-term abortions even as they fight with each other as to whether an outright ban on all abortions should include a rape-incest exception or perhaps even extend to “abortifacient” birth control methods like IUDs. So they’re not exactly going to be upset at Scott Walker for playing the same game:
“Even as he cut that abortion ad, there isn’t a single pro-life voter in the state who suddenly thinks he’s pro-choice,” said Matt Batzel, executive director of American Majority, a conservative activist group. “They know he shares their views.”
You could undoubtedly say the same about Walker’s business backers, who may well have laughed up their sleeves during this last campaign when the good and gentle governor disclaimed any interest in passing a right-to-work law–which is practically the first thing that happened after he was safely returned to office.
So perhaps there is something about Scott Walker that inspires the kind of trust in ideologues which makes a little deception now and then acceptable so long as it produces electoral victories and he delivers the goods in the end.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, July 13, 2015
“Medically Unnecessary”: Scott Walker Doesn’t Get Why His ‘Cool’ Ultrasound Remark Was So Offensive — And That’s The Problem
Gov. Scott Walker was chatting recently with right-wing radio host Dana Loesch about his efforts to set up regulatory hurdles to abortion access in Wisconsin, when he offered this defense of a law he signed that would require a woman to undergo a medically unnecessary ultrasound before exercising her constitutionally protected right to an abortion:
I’m pro-life. I’ve passed pro-life legislation. We defunded Planned Parenthood, we signed a law that requires an ultrasound. Which, the thing about that, the media tried to make that sound like that was a crazy idea. You know, most people I talked to, whether they’re pro-life or not, I find people all the time that pull out their iPhone and show me a picture of their grandkids’ ultrasound and how excited they are, so that’s a lovely thing. I think about my sons are 19 and 20, we still have their first ultrasounds. It’s just a cool thing out there.
Right Wing Watch, a project of People For the American Way, was listening to the show and brought attention to Walker’s comments, and they understandably hit a nerve.
Sure, an ultrasound could be “cool” if you are a woman carrying a healthy child, surrounded by family, love and support and making your own medical choices along with your doctor. Or you are excited grandparents looking forward to years of joy with a child. What’s not “cool” is if the state mandates that you undergo a medically unnecessary procedure in an effort to prevent you from making a choice that you, an adult woman whose circumstances your politicians have no right to know or judge, have already made and are unlikely to change.
Even less “cool” is the fact that the ultrasound bill was passed as part of an explicit effort to undermine women’s access to health care. Its companion bill was an “admitting privileges” requirement, a common anti-choice tactic, that threatened to close two abortion clinics in the state. Since then, Walker has boasted to anti-choice leaders of using deceptive rhetoric about the ultrasound bill in order to downplay its true intentions.
Unlike the ultrasounds of the Walkers’ children, forced ultrasounds like these aren’t the kind that anyone wants to show off. What’s astonishing is that Walker doesn’t seem to get this. Instead, he’s accusing the “gotcha” media of being “biased” and “lazy” and twisting the meaning of his comments. Unfortunately, some of the media are taking him at his word.
Walker’s remarks weren’t twisted. You can listen to his whole answer to the question here. The problem is that Walker just doesn’t seem to get why what he said was so offensive. For someone who wants to be president, that’s deeply troubling.
By: Michael B, Keegan, President, People For the American Way; The Blog, The Huffington Post, June 1, 2015
“GOP Wants To Define Rape… Again”: How Lindsey Graham Reawakened The Ghost Of Todd Akin
Ah, Lindsey Graham. The South Carolina senator who says he’s thinking about running for president no doubt thought he was helping the GOP get beyond its meltdown over its 20-week abortion ban bill, which leadership dropped unexpectedly when some GOP congresswomen balked, by asking antiabortion zealots attending the “March for Life” to help him “find a way out of this definitional problem with rape.”
One major issue with the bill was the way it defined rape: a women would have to have made a police report in order to get an abortion under the bill’s rape exception. (Katie McDonough has the details here.) Most rape victims don’t report the crime.
So Graham went to the “March for Life” today and came clean with the group, which is seething over its betrayal by GOP leadership. There’s going to be some kind of rape exception in the bill, and he needs their input to shape it.
“I’m going to need your help to find a way out of this definitional problem with rape,” Graham told the marchers, according to Dave Weigel. ”We need to find a consensus position on the rape exception. The rape exception will be part of the bill. We just need to find a way definitionally to not get us into a spot where we’re debating what legitimate is. That’s not the cause. We’re not here debating legitimate rape. We’re talking about saving babies at 20 weeks.”
So there it is again, the GOP’s lust for getting into the gritty details of defining rape, to make sure slutty women aren’t using rape exceptions to get around various types of abortion bans. That’s what former Rep. Todd Akin was getting at in 2012, when he talked about women rarely becoming pregnant as a result of “legitimate rape,” because “a woman’s body has a way of shutting that whole thing down.” As you’ll recall, instead, women shut the GOP down that November. Republicans don’t want that to happen again in 2016.
The funny thing is, clearly Graham thinks he’s smarter than Akin: he insists he doesn’t “want to get us into a spot where we’re debating what legitimate is.” But he doesn’t seem to understand that the whole effort to “define” rape, which he’s apparently now spearheading, is precisely about deciding whether a woman’s claim of rape is “legitimate” or not.
At its heart, this Republican project is predicated on the belief that women lie about rape, but Republicans can outsmart them. If some Republican women believe that requiring women to make a police report is draconian, then Graham is searching for another way to define a woman’s rape as legitimately deserving of an exception to their 20-week abortion ban.
Rep. Renee Ellmers, who supported the very same bill in 2013, had second thoughts this time around. “We got into trouble last year, and I think we need to be careful again; we need to be smart about how we’re moving forward,” Ellmers told National Journal. ”The first vote we take, or the second vote, or the fifth vote, shouldn’t be on an issue where we know that millennials — social issues just aren’t as important [to them].”
So Ellmers is not exactly the picture of integrity here. She’s not worried about passing a terrible bill that could hurt women; she’s worried about how it looks to millennial voters.
Still, there looks to be a real split between GOP congressional men and women over the issue. Only women came forward to take their names off the bill; then male leadership acquiesced to withdraw it from consideration. Reportedly the party had the votes to pass the bill in the House at least, but Speaker John Boehner and others were concerned about the “optics” of ignoring women in the caucus.
I guess that’s a kind of progress for women’s rights, albeit tiny. But in walks Lindsey Graham to try to mansplain the right way to handle this whole rape “definition,” and even as he thinks he’s helping, he’s making his party’s problems much worse.
I never thought Graham had a prayer of winning the presidency, or even the GOP nomination, but his chances just got a lot worse. Republicans did well in 2014 by avoiding Akin-like controversies over defining rape and holding forth on the intimate workings of women’s bodies generally. It seems they just can’t help themselves, and that’s good for Democrats generally in 2016.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 22, 2015
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