“Blame Jerry Falwell For Walker’s Slip”: A Trap Devised Long Ago By The Moral Majority
Well, we’re getting a pretty quick narrative rethink on Scott Walker, aren’t we? Two weeks ago he was a conquering hero. Now he’s a nincompoop. The truth is undoubtedly somewhere in between—although exactly which of the two poles he ends up nearer is one of the coming campaign’s mysteries.
But whether you’re liberal or conservative—that is, whether you think his cutesy refusal to confirm Barack Obama’s religiosity to The Washington Post was an outrage or act of truth-telling—the bottom line here is what my colleague Matt Lewis said it is: The way Walker and his people handled it was plain old not-ready-for-prime-time-ism. A first-time presidential candidate doesn’t get many mulligans on that front before the media decide he’s a second-rater and start covering him that way.
The most interesting thing about this hubbub, though, is the nature of the defense of Walker, which reveals a breathtaking lack of self-awareness on the right, or maybe dishonesty, or maybe both.
The main defense has been: Why was this question relevant? Why does Scott Walker even have to be asked about whether the president is a Christian? Well, maybe because for the last 30 or 35 years, the political right has dragged the question of a candidate’s piety from the fringes of the political debate, where it belonged and belongs, to the white-hot center, where it is a malignant tumor on our politics.
It wasn’t always this way. Of course we’ve had moralizers from the beginning. Thomas Jefferson’s political foes called him an “infidel” and a “howling atheist” and warned that if he won the presidency, churches would be converted into whorehouses. But then America matured, a little, and became a world power, and began taking in large numbers of immigrants, and started thinking about the world not only in terms of spirituality but in terms of psychology, social science, and so on. By the time all those forces had coalesced—the 1930s, let’s call it; the thermidorean backwash of the Scopes Trial—we by and large stopped having religious litmus tests for the presidency.
Ah but 1960, you’re thinking; well, yes, but that was totally different. No one questioned John Kennedy’s lack of religious faith. Indeed the issue was the opposite—that his Catholic faith was so all-defining that he’d govern as a Vatican fifth-columnist. For many years after that, a candidate’s religious beliefs were part of the story, certainly, but what reigned was a quality of tolerant and easy-going religious neutrality that was a reflection of the regnant, and largely bipartisan, Protestantism of the day. Candidates didn’t run around dog-whistling to the pious and implying that the impious were somehow lesser Americans whose votes ought to count for less.
Oddly it was a Democrat who first wore his religion on his sleeve in the presidential arena. Still, Jimmy Carter, though an evangelical, was still enough of a liberal to not tie his religious beliefs to a particular ideological agenda.
This all changed—and give the man his due—with Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, and the growing evangelization of the Republican primary electorate. Professions of faith from GOP candidates became more and more grandiose, like George W. Bush’s claim that Jesus Christ was his favorite philosopher. I’ve never known whether it was planned that he would say that or whether he just said it off the cuff, but whatever the case it was kind of brilliant of him, it must be admitted. When liberals made fun of him for not saying Locke or whatever, they managed to sound like snooty eggheads and Jesus-haters both at once.
At the same time that the religious right pushed Jesus into the presidential boxing ring, it did all it could to throw traditional religious neutrality out of it, such that positions that had been completely uncontroversial 20 years before grew to be toxic for Democrats. I think here of Al Gore being afraid to say in 2000 that he believed in evolution, one of the nadirs of recent presidential history.
In other words, it’s Republicans and conservatives who have made religious belief central to the conversation of presidential politics. And not just religious belief—a particular kind of (conservative) religious belief. Republicans made this a topic.
Now in fairness, Obama’s faith was a question in 2008, because of Jeremiah Wright, and that pot got a stirring not only from Republicans but from Hillary Clinton too. But the guy has now been the president for a long time, and voters twice elected him by reasonably comfortable margins. So these kinds of questions about Obama are still raised only in the fever swamps where Walker is trying to launch his dinghy. It’s only over there that these things matter.
So the question the Post put to Walker was completely logical and defensible within that tradition for which conservatism was responsible and to which Walker has recently been pandering, by weaseling around recently on the topic of evolution.
So it’s supposed to be unfair for Walker to have to answer a simple question like the one he was asked? Ridiculous. Liberals didn’t make faith a litmus test. If Walker and the others want to parade their own Christian credentials, any question along those lines is fair game. Besides, as Lewis said, there’s an easy answer: I don’t doubt that he is, it’s just his ideas and policies that are wrong. But of course that’s not enough for their base. If Walker got caught in any trap over the weekend, it’s one of conservatism’s devising, not the media’s.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 23, 2015
“Social Safety Net In Hands Of The States?”: The GOP’s State Budget Disaster Is The Best Case For Big Government
The Republican Party is cutting a swath of destruction through state budgets.
In Kansas, Gov. Sam Brownback’s experiment in income and business tax cuts has blown a $344 million hole in the budget for this fiscal year, and a projected $600 million hole for the next fiscal year. Part of his plan to close it is to cut $44.5 million from public schools and universities.
Illinois needs to cut over $6 billion to balance its books. So Gov. Bruce Rauner is calling for a $1.5 billion cut to the state’s Medicaid program, plus $600 million in cuts to local government finances and $387 million in cuts to higher education (though he may have trouble getting those ideas past the Democrats in the Illinois legislature).
Wisconsin’s state budget, meanwhile, faces a $238 million deficit, thanks in small part to tax cuts Gov. Scott Walker pushed through after taking office in 2011. That wiped out a $759 million budget surplus in 2013. Now Walker is looking to cut $300 million from higher education over the next two years, along with cuts to the state park system and its recycling programs, among other things, and to restructure about $100 million in debt payments the state already owes.
These three examples show the GOP’s “tax cuts now, tax cuts forever” ideology remains utterly unconcerned with economic reality. But more deeply, they’re a lesson in some bad choices America made in how to design its national social safety net, which set the stage for the current crises.
In not one of these three cases do the projected budget gaps rise above 1 percent of the income generated annually by the state’s economy. The idea that taxes couldn’t be raised, starting on high earners, to close these holes is risible.
On top of that, these tax cuts are often pitched as growth enhancers for state economies. That was the explicit case Brownback made for his tax cut package. But for such a policy gambit to have even a chance of working, spending must be held constant. If you start cutting spending on things like health care or education or transit or whatnot, you’re just pulling more dollars out of the state economy with one hand even as you leave more dollars in with the other.
In other words, you have to be able to deficit spend. But that can be hard for states. First off, most of them have balanced budget amendments in their constitutions, which means deficit spending is just a no-go. These restrictions generally don’t cover individual infrastructure projects and the like, which states can choose to borrow a set amount for from the bond markets. But covering shortfalls between general annual spending and revenue is much more difficult legislatively.
The other problem is that the bond markets might just not give you the money. Investors may consider a state a bad bet, which would drive its borrowing and interest payments up. That hasn’t been much of a problem in the aftermath of the recession, as investors have been desperate for safe places to park their money — which makes the refusal of state governments to borrow to cover their regular expenditures all the more absurd.
But the low rates won’t last forever, and the willingness of investors to take a bet on a state puts limits on state government borrowing.
What this all means is that state government spending is pretty pro-cyclical — i.e. it rises and falls with the economy. If the economy is doing well, state tax revenues go up. If the economy goes into recession, state tax revenues go down, forcing budget cuts in health, education, and elsewhere. And that’s before you factor in Republican governors and state legislators who are out to cut taxes willy-nilly.
But for spending on things like health care and education — two of the biggest drivers of any state’s budget — being pro-cyclical makes no sense. It’s not as if people just stop getting sick during recessions, or that children simply stop needing an education. These are public investments in the health and well-being of the American people themselves, and the need for them remains constant throughout all the ups and downs in the economy.
The only entity that can spend with impunity regardless of the state of the economy is the federal government. That’s because it can print money, which means it can always pay lenders back in a pinch. This does mean the federal government faces a different sort of threat — instead of being abandoned by investors, it could print so much money it drives up inflation. But that’s just really hard to do, historically speaking.
In short, these are programs that should be run through the federal government. But Medicaid is a joint state-and-federal program, meaning both the federal government and state government supply some of the money from their respective budgets. Meanwhile, education is funded by streams from the federal, state, and local levels at the same time.
That structure leaves these programs critically vulnerable to the whims of the economy — not to mention the whims of Walker, Brownback, Rauner, and their friends in the Republican Party.
By: Jeff Spross, The Week, February 24, 2015
“The Dangers Of Another Bush In The White House”: Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It
The more we learn about Jeb Bush, the more less he appears ready for primetime:
“Some states, like yours here in New York, are choosing not to grow. They won’t approve fracking,” Bush said, his veiled shot at Cuomo drawing roars of approval from Republicans gathered at a Sheraton in Manhattan. “Meanwhile, in parts of New York where huge opportunities exist for the restoration of economic activity, people languish.”
Bush left unmentioned that fracking in the Marcellus Shale beneath the New York-Pennsylvania border also presented a big opportunity for himself.
One of his private equity enterprises at that time was raising $40 million to back a Denver-based company acquiring fracking wells in hopes New York would lift its ban. The company, Inflection Energy, has active leases in Pennsylvania, and one of Bush’s equity partners sits on the board. He also has fracking ties through a separate business with both of his sons.
The intersection between Bush’s private and public life — calls for fracking have been a part of his speeches and came as recently as last month in San Francisco — triggers questions of disclosure.
It’s not just that fracking is a horrid, unpopular practice. It’s that the self-dealing in this case is so obvious it will confirm voters’ suspicions about the dangers of putting another Bush in the White House. One of the less highlighted but most damaging subtexts of the Bush Administration was the number of members of the Bush White House who were invested in moneymaking schemes directly profiting off the invasion of Iraq, not least of them being Dick Cheney and Halliburton.
With Jeb Bush hiring the same foreign policy advisors, ramping up rhetoric for war with Iran and evidently engaged in self-dealing over oil in his speeches, the same suspicions will arise with him. As well they should.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, February 23, 2015
“Scott Walker’s Koch Angle”: A Visceral Bond Forged By Americans For Prosperity
One reason Jeb Bush probably won’t raise all the money in 2016 is the existence of very large conservative donor networks that exist beyond the familiar clubby atmosphere of the former 2004 W. rain-makers who seem to dominate “Establishment” circles. The largest and most conspicuous, of course, is the Koch Donor Network, which reportedly aims at raising $900 million towards placing a special friend in the White House.
It’s not clear at this point if the Kochs and their allies intend to spend much of that money during the nomination contest. But if they do, reports Bloomberg Politics‘ Julie Bykowicz, Scott Walker’s probably first in line to become the beneficiary.
Charles Koch, she says, is personally very fond of Rand Paul, but he’s not, as events at the Koch Donor Network’s annual Palm Springs gathering this year indicated, very popular in KochWorld write large. But these folk have a visceral bond with Walker that was forged by Americans for Prosperity’s very direct involvement in his political career, even before his first election as governor:
On a sunny Saturday in September 2009, with Wisconsin in the throes of Tea Party fervor, conservative starlet Michelle Malkin fired up a crowd of thousands at a lakefront park in Milwaukee with rhetoric about White House czars and union thugs and the “culture of dependency that they have rammed down our throats.”
Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, a Republican candidate for governor, casually attired in a red University of Wisconsin Badgers sweatshirt, stepped to the podium to amplify the message. “We’re going to take back our government,” he shouted, jabbing the air with a finger. The attendees whooped and clapped. “We’ve done it here, we can do it in Wisconsin and, by God, we’re going to do it all across America.”
In a way, the event was Scott Walker’s graduation to the political major leagues. The audience had been delivered up by Americans for Prosperity, a Tea Party organizing group founded by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire energy executives whose fortune helps shape Republican politics.
The connection became even more intense during the initial wave of demonstrations against Walker’s proposals to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees:
Walker began battling with public employees soon after he was elected, submitting a budget in February 2011 that cut public pensions and sharply limited the collective bargaining rights of many state employees. Koch reinforcements quickly arrived.
A bus caravan of Walker’s friends at Americans for Prosperity disgorged thousands of supporters, carrying signs saying “Your Gravy Train Is Over … Welcome to the Recession” and “Sorry We’re Late Scott. We Work for a Living” into the mass of union activists gathered at the steps of the capitol. It all played out for a cable network audience, with pundits pointing to Walker as the new tip of the spear in a long Republican fight against the labor unions that have helped elect Democrats over the decades.
The AFP’s support wasn’t just a big pep rally. After the governor won the budget battle and his opponents began their effort to recall him, the group deployed hundreds of volunteers to knock on doors and call into voters’ homes to spread Walker’s message that his pension cuts and union reforms were helping solve the state’s budget crisis. The group bought television and digital ads echoing the “It’s Working!” theme—a phrase Walker also frequently used.
Nobody knows right now if these connections will pay off big for Walker in a highly contested nomination battle with so many different players. But he’s certainly got the emotional connection to the money people, and if he can continue to burnish his “electability” credentials, the money spigots will almost certainly be opened for him.
By Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, TheWashington Post, February 17, 2015
“A Very Low Bar”: The Smart Brother? Why Jeb Bush Can’t Escape Dubya’s Dubious Legacy
Being singled out as “the smart brother” in an American political and financial dynasty like the Bush family must be a heavy load. But Jeb Bush went far to dispel that burdensome description with his debut address on foreign policy. With its mélange of mispronunciations, mistakes, and casually ignorant utterances, Bush’s speech before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs instantly reminded listeners of the not-so-smart brother — the one who already became the second Bush president.
Such moments of recognition and remembrance are not auspicious for brother Jeb, whose burgeoning presidential ambition depends on persuading voters that he is emphatically not his brother George W. – or as he put it in an ad-libbed line: “I am my own man.” But his Chicago outing offered little to reassure Americans wary of the ruinous foreign policy record of the Bush-Cheney administration (an electoral subset that includes almost everyone).
Let’s start with the funny parts: Hoping presumably to move briskly past a certain disastrous trillion-dollar war, Jeb allowed that “mistakes were made in Iraq, for sure,” a remark so vague that even his brother, who once used a similar dodge in discussing torture at Abu Ghraib, would have to agree. Striving to demonstrate his familiarity with the new terror threats encircling the globe, he mentioned the Nigerian Islamist militants who call themselves “Boko Haram,” except he called them something that sounded a lot like “Beaucoup Haram.” Speaking of ISIS, the Syrian terrorist movement, he referred to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as “the guy that’s the supreme leader or whatever his new title is — head of the caliphate.” Overstating the military manpower of ISIS by a factor of 10, he said the group has 200,000 men under arms, when U.S. intelligence estimates no more than 20,000. (Before his spokesperson corrected that gaffe, it sounded as if he meant to instill fear with a mythical intelligence estimate – yet another déjà vu moment.)
At another point, he confused Iraq with Iran, a mistake anybody can make – and in this instance, a metaphor for his brother’s failed war, which vastly increased Iranian political, economic and military influence over Iraq.
What Bush failed to provide were specific policy ideas, sticking instead with platitudes about “strength” and “leadership.” Explaining how he would deal with ISIS, the former Florida governor kept it very simple: “We have to develop a strategy, that’s global, that takes them out. First, the strategy, you know, needs to be restrain them, tighten the noose, and then taking them out is the strategy.” Not much there for the Pentagon or the State Department, but at least he didn’t call it “strategery.”
The problem facing Jeb Bush is that to prove he is his own man in full, he must somehow erase many of his own previous positions and remarks.
Appearing on CNN in 2010, Jeb said of Dubya, “I have never disagreed with him…till death do us part.” Speaking about Iraq three years later, he claimed, “The war has wound down now and it’s still way too early to judge what successes it had in providing some degree of stability in the region” (a statement that can only provoke bitter laughter today). “During incredibly challenging times, he kept us safe,” he said in praise of Dubya at the 2012 Republican convention, as if 9/11 and that fateful Presidential Daily Briefing had never happened.
There are other clues to his policy predilections. For his entire career, Jeb has blindly advocated the Cuba sanctions policy that we have finally abandoned after 50 years of failure. That advocacy included a disgraceful episode in which he sought clemency from his presidential father for a bloody anti-Castro terrorist pursued by the U.S. Justice Department.
In keeping with that same foolishness was his early backing of the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, pulled together in 1997 by William Kristol, the Washington pundit best known for being wrong about everything – in particular the costs, difficulties, and results of invading Iraq. As the chief publicist for that war, Kristol told us it would be easy, cheap, and hugely successful. Dubya believed him and evidently so did Jeb.
That is an old story — but the putative Republican frontrunner recently released a list of his foreign policy advisors, which bizarrely features Paul Wolfowitz, Dubya’s deputy defense secretary and another PNAC enthusiast. Jeb’s campaign is proudly displaying the same old gang of advisors who turned the last Republican administration into wreckage.
Maybe Jeb really is the smart brother. So far, however, he shows no sign of being smart enough to avoid that other brother’s devastating mistakes.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, February 20, 2015
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