“Same Conservative Talking Points”: Jeb Bush Won’t Win the GOP Primary If He Keeps Giving Bland Speeches Like This One
On Wednesday, Jeb Bush delivered the biggest speech of his young campaign in Detroit, Michigan, where he promised to lay out a positive agenda in the months ahead. “I will offer a new vision,” the former Florida governor said. “A plan of action that is different than what we have been hearing in Washington D.C.” Political analysts quickly tried to parse Bush’s words to discern any hints about that plan of action.
Those hints are hard to find. Read the transcript; it’s an utterly ordinary speech, filled with bromides against liberalism and big government. Bush cited rising income inequality, stagnant wages, and slow growth as problems that demand big solutions. He talked about the opportunity gap and mentioned Uber and deregulation. And he used the downfall of Detroit as a warning sign for the rest of country. Nothing new, in other words.
Bush did try to spin conservative talking points in a more positive, wonky manner. His most notable comments came about halfway through, when he criticized Washington, D.C.—as in, the Obama administration—for “recklessly degrading the value of work, the incentive to work, and the rewards of work.”
We have seen them cut the definition of a full-time job from 40 to 30 hours, slashing the ability of paycheck earners to make ends meet. We have seen them create welfare programs and tax rules that punish people with lost benefits and higher taxes for moving up those first few rungs of the economic ladder.
In the first sentence, Bush is referring to the provision under the Affordable Care Act that requires employers with more than 50 workers to offer health insurance to any employee that works more than 30 hours. Republicans have criticized the rule as incentivizing employers to reduce their workers’ hours below that threshold. They have suggested changing the definition of a full-time employee to 40 hours per week—a change that the Congressional Budget Office says would increase the deficit and lower the number of Americans with health insurance. Even some conservatives like Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, have come out against it. But it’s a good sound bite—one that shows Bush is aware of ongoing policy arguments in Washington—so he jumped on it.
“Instead of a safety net to cushion our occasional falls,” he added, “they have built a spider web that traps people in perpetual dependence. We have seen them waive the rules that helped so many people escape welfare.”
I had not heard any politician compare the safety net to a “spider web” before, and based on a quick Google search, Bush has not made the comparison before either. It’s reminiscent of Representative Paul Ryan’s analogy of the safety net as a “hammock” that traps the poor in poverty, an analogy that has been harshly criticized. But while a hammock evokes images of laziness and gives agency to the poor, a spider web suggests that the poor are trapped. With many Americans believing that Republicans don’t care enough for the poor, you can understand why Bush settled on the “spider web” analogy.
But does Bush actually reject the “maker and taker” rhetoric? At the Washington Post, Greg Sargent argues yes—or at least that Bush will do so rhetorically. “Message: Jeb Bush will not be 47-percent-ed. He will not be Mitt-ed,” Sargent writes. “He will present a conservative pro-economic-freedom case without committing the fatal political misstep of showing contempt for those who currently depend on government in any form.” That seems broadly right, at least insofar as we can determine Bush’s rhetorical strategy from one speech. Yet, it’s always a tight line to blame government for making the poor dependent without actually blaming the poor themselves.
And when Bush argues that Obama tried to “waive the rules that helped so many people escape welfare,” he’s harkening back to an old, disproven conservative meme against the administration. During the 2012 election, Mitt Romney argued that Obama was undoing welfare reform by offering states waivers allowing them to forego the welfare work requirements, as long as they accomplished the goal of the law— moving welfare recipients to work. In fact, Republican governors had requested the waivers. The Washington Post fact checker gave Romney four Pinnochios for the baseless assertion. But Bush has brought the attack line back.
Overall, Bush seemed to be trying to use the same conservative talking points and attacks, with a more positive spin. Yet, it’s still hard to look at this speech and see what part of the Republican Party it appeals to, at least compared to his competitors. Florida Senator Marco Rubio has a far more comprehensive agenda at this point. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker offers a very conservative governing record and has won three statewide races in four years. Many Republican candidates have switched their economic message to focus on wages and inequality, if only to find a new attack against the president as the recovery strengthens.
Granted, this is just one speech. Bush has plenty of time to deliver concrete policy proposals. But there’s something telling about the ordinariness of his speech, of its generic GOP talking points. There’s no natural constituency for his candidacy, at least in the primary. Bush has said that the GOP nominee must be willing to “lose the primary to win the general.” In other words, to avoid taking far-right positions that doom the candidate in the general election.
Thought about in that light, Bush’s speech makes more sense. Spinning conservative talking points in a positive light, while promising a new agenda, is a campaign platform that could appeal to the full electorate. If he somehow emerged as the Republican nominee, he could be a very credible challenger to Hillary Clinton. Yet, the underlying problem remains: He has to win the nomination. His willingness to lose the primary will, in all likelihood, prove self-fulfilling.
This isn’t just his problem, though; it’s the Republican Party’s. The primary electorate makes it hard for a candidate like Bush, who despite being extremely conservative is nonetheless moderate compared to the other candidates, to win. It forces the eventual nominee to move to the right, eventually putting himself in an almost impossible position to win the general election. The complete blandness of Bush’s speech Wednesday only underlines this dynamic.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, February 5, 2015
“Bait And Switch”: Introducing Obamcare Lite; What The New GOP Health Reform ‘Alternative’ Really Tells Us
Plainly wounded by the Plum Line’s mockery, some congressional Republicans have finally unveiled a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act with their own health care reform. Is it serious? It’s certainly serious enough to examine and judge on its merits. Will it become the plan around which Republicans will unite? I doubt it, just because it’s hard to imagine Republicans ever uniting around a plan to do anything proactive on health care, though that’s always possible.
What’s really remarkable about this plan is that for all the claims we’ll hear about how it undoes the tyrannical horror of Obamacare, the Republicans’ version of health care reform has accepted most of the fundamental goals and regulatory paths of the law they so deeply despise. This plan — authored by Senators Richard Burr and Orrin Hatch and Rep. Fred Upton — is little more than Obamacare Lite. Though the devil is in the details — and there are some devilish ones — this tells us that Barack Obama has for all intents and purposes won the health care argument, at least as far as it concerns government’s role in health care.
Here are some of the provisions, which I’ve copied from their synopsis:
- Ensure NO ONE can be denied coverage based on their pre-existing condition;
- Prohibit insurance companies from imposing lifetime limits on a consumer;
- Adopt an age rating ratio that limits the amount an older individual will pay to no more than five times what a younger individual pays (5 to 1) as a baseline, unless a state affirmatively elects to have a different ratio;
- Require health plans to offer dependent coverage up to age 26, unless a state opts out of this provision;
- Ensure guaranteed renewability for patients to be able to renew their coverage;
- Create a new “continuous coverage protection” that rewards individuals moving from one health market to another — regardless of whether in the individual, small group, or large employer markets — by allowing them to get a similar plan at a similar cost and not be rated on health status.
In addition, they would reduce the availability of subsidies from their current 400 percent of the poverty level to 300 percent of the poverty level, and repeal the Medicaid expansion but allow poor people not on Medicaid to get subsidies. The subsidies also would no longer be tied to the actual cost of insurance, and they’d be a tax credit instead of a direct subsidy at the point of sale. There’s also a provision replacing the “Cadillac Tax” on high-value plans with a provision removing the deductibility of employer health care plans that cost over a certain level.
If all that’s making your eyes glaze over, consider it this way: Again and again in the Republican plan, what they do is take a provision or principle in the Affordable Care Act and essentially say, “We want to do that too, we’ll just do it a little less generously.” No denials for pre-existing conditions? It’s in there, but there are some important caveats (which I’ll get to in a moment). No lifetime limits on coverage? In there. Young people up to age 26 can stay on their parents’ plan? Yes, but a state could opt out. Subsidies for middle-class people? In there, just up to 300 percent of the poverty level. Coverage for the poor? Yes, just up to 100 percent of poverty instead of 138 percent. Tax on high-value plans? Yep, just in a different way. Government-set limit on how much insurers could vary premiums by age? Yes, but the ratio would be expanded from 3-1 up to 5-1. A mandated list of “essential health benefits” for all plans? Yes, but the states would determine the list instead of the federal government, with more flexibility.
In all these cases, they aren’t looking for some free-market alternative that will supposedly deliver even better results. They’re accepting government’s role in both regulating insurance and in helping people pay for it; they just want to make the benefits not so attractive.
There are a few exceptions. They would repeal both the individual and employer mandates, which by now even Democrats are not particularly enthusiastic about (at this point I think most Democrats would be happy to junk the employer mandate if they got something in return, though the individual mandate could be a different story). And most significantly, the plan abandons the fundamental coverage guarantee the Affordable Care Act provides, while essentially trying to convince you that’s not what it does.
This is a critical point. Under the ACA, no one will ever be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition. Ever. Medical underwriting, in which insurers comb through your history to see if they don’t want to cover you or if they should charge you huge premiums, is over. The Hatch-Burr-Upton plan is presented as though it does the same thing. Note that bullet point above: “Ensure NO ONE can be denied coverage based on their pre-existing condition.” In their executive summary, this point is the one sentence in the document that is highlighted in bold.
But actually, it’s not quite true. Their plan has a one-time open enrollment period for the uninsured; if you don’t get coverage during that time, you’re out of luck, and insurers will be free to deny you coverage. If you have coverage now but lose it, say because you lost your job, you’d have a limited amount of time (they don’t specify how long) to enroll in a new plan; if that time expired, you’d also be out of luck.
They would probably argue that they’re putting the responsibility on individuals, and all they have to do is take advantage of it. But that’s a very different thing from a guarantee. And that may be the biggest difference between the Affordable Care Act and this plan. The ACA tries to achieve universal coverage, and this plan doesn’t.
Frankly, that isn’t all that surprising, because universal coverage was never a goal conservatives had for health care. In recent days some of them have been arguing for something similar to this plan — see Michael Strain or Ramesh Ponnuru — and what they say about the subject is that they want universal catastrophic coverage, meaning everyone should have access to a bare-bones plan that will cover them not for ordinary medical expenses but only when a major illness or accident brings those expenses to a level that almost no one could afford. Those catastrophic plans are usually paired with Medical Savings Accounts for people to pay for everything else — a more market-based approach.
But the Hatch-Burr-Upton plan says nothing explicitly about catastrophic plans, and it doesn’t claim universal coverage as a goal. Its approach is that coverage will be there if you’re on the ball enough to get it at the right time. And if you aren’t, tough luck.
So there is something of a bait-and-switch going on. On provision after provision, this Republican plan promises to give all the benefits of the ACA, at least the ones that score highly in polls. It accepts that government will regulate health insurance and help people pay for it, even if that help is substantially less helpful. Looking at that, we might say that Republicans have accepted the ACA’s foundation, and that part of the health care argument is over. But they still aren’t willing to move substantially toward universal coverage. The ACA doesn’t achieve universal coverage either (the reasons why are a topic for another day), but it tries much harder to move down that road. So the new GOP “alternative” to Obamacare tells us that some Republicans, at least, have ceded a whole lot of ground in the broader debate over government involvement in health care, but it appears that’s one bridge they aren’t yet willing to cross.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, February 5, 2015
“The Product Of A Fringe Movement”: The Crazy Is A Resume Item For Rand Paul
At the Prospect today, Paul Waldman manages to remind us of two important things to keep in mind in contemplating the Rand Paul presidential campaign: first, some of the crazy things he’s said in the not-too-distant past (example: ruminations on the North American Superhighway Conspiracy in 2008), and second, why that matters more in his case than in others. The crazy stuff will drib and drab into public view for the next few months, and some people will notice and others won’t. So it’s the second issue most interests me, because it explains why we should notice:
[M]ost politicians who get to where Paul is work their way up by climbing the political ladder: they run for city council in their town, then maybe mayor, then they become a state rep, then a state senator or congressman, and finally run for the Senate. That experience makes you a creature of the place where you come from and party that nurtured you. Along the way your views will come to reflect their concerns and their consensus about policy.
But that’s not the path Rand Paul followed. Whatever his talents, he’s a United States senator because he’s Ron Paul’s son. Over his time in Congress, Ron Paul developed a small but fervent national constituency, made up of some ordinary libertarians and a whole lot of outright wackos. That constituency was greatly expanded by his 2008 presidential campaign. Despite the fact that Paul had plenty of interesting and reasonable things to say, it’s also the case that if you were building a bunker to prepare for the coming world financial crash and ensuring societal breakdown (and possible zombie apocalypse), there was only one presidential candidate for you. When Rand Paul decided to run for Senate in 2010, having never run for anything before, the Ron Paul Army mobilized for him, showering him with money and volunteers. He also had the good fortune to be running in a year when Republicans everywhere were looking for outsider, tea party candidates, so he easily beat the choice of the Kentucky GOP establishment in the primary.
In other words, Senator Rand Paul is the product of a fringe movement that has embraced all sorts of nuttiness from the theocratic urges of the Constitution Party to Agenda 21 to the North American Superhighway, in addition to its better-known eccentric obsessions with crank monetary policy. That’s his resume. You have to examine it the same way you examine what other candidates did just before becoming national political celebrities. Otherwise you buy into the idea that he sprang fully developed from the brow of his father before running for president himself.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, February 6, 2015
“Mollifying The Extremists”: GOP Back To ‘Impeachment,’ ‘Jail Time’ For Obama
As the 2014 cycle progressed, the number of congressional Republicans talking about impeaching President Obama faded, and there’s no real mystery as to what happened. GOP leaders, fearing a public backlash, told Republican incumbents and candidates to dial it down a notch. Why rile up Democrats, who too often stay home in midterm cycles, when they’re tuning out?
And as a consequence, for months, the “i” word more or less faded. That is, until very recently.
Last week, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), less than a month into his first term in Congress, announced his belief that President Obama, without a doubt, “deserves impeachment.” He’s not the only one talking like this.
Republican Rep. Tom Marino of Pennsylvania says President Obama is “getting close” to impeachment. “People say, ‘should the president be impeached?’ I say, we’re getting close to that,” Marino said in a video posted on YouTube Wednesday by the local newspaper, the Wellsboro Gazette.
Marino said he was talking about impeachment because “it comes up consistently at town hall meetings.”
Well, that’s a good reason. Marino was a little fuzzy on what, exactly, would be the grounds for presidential impeachment, but for many GOP lawmakers, that’s a minor and inconvenient detail that shouldn’t interfere with reckless rhetoric.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), meanwhile, has no use for subtlety and is already talking publicly about “jail time” for the president:
In an appearance on “The Steve Malzberg Show” [Tuesday], Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., continued his crusade against President Obama’s executive actions on immigration reform, calling on the federal courts to find that the president’s actions violated the law.
If Obama defies such a ruling, Brooks said, then Congress should pass a contempt citation against the president for his “reckless conduct” and demand that he comply with the court’s decision.
He said that Obama would then drop his executive actions since he, like Richard Nixon, doesn’t want to “incur the wrath that comes with a contempt citation with potential fines and jail time.”
At this point, I still consider it unlikely that GOP leaders will go along with the far-right’s impeachment crusade, but conservative media appears to be on board, and the number of congressional Republican talking up the idea since the elections keeps growing.
Even if party leaders balk, this only means they’ll have to think of something else to mollify the extremists in their midst, and pointless anti-Obama lawsuits probably won’t cut it.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 4, 2015
“Jeb’s Past vs Jeb’s Future”: A Forgiving Standard For Himself And A Punitive Standard For Everyone Else
There’s nothing in American public life quite like the scrutiny of a presidential campaign. Credible candidates can expect to see their entire lives dissected in granular ways that are often unflattering, and it’s up to voters to decide whether, and to what extent, a presidential hopeful’s life experiences matter.
With this in mind, the Boston Globe ran a lengthy feature over the weekend on former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a leading Republican presidential candidate, who apparently had a troubled youth.
He bore little resemblance to his father, a star on many fronts at Andover, and might have been an even worse student than brother George. Classmates said he smoked a notable amount of pot – as many did – and sometimes bullied smaller students. […]
Meanwhile, his grades were so poor that he was in danger of being expelled, which would have been a huge embarrassment to his father, a member of Congress and of the school’s board of trustees.
At this point, I suspect many Republicans are thinking, “He was a dumb teenager and none of this tells us anything important about his character now.” It’s a perfectly legitimate defense – as brutal as a presidential vetting process is, there has to be a limit on how closely we look at candidates’ backgrounds, especially before they were even adults.
I imagine we can all look back at our high-school years and think of things we should have handled differently. Presidential politics can tolerate some statutes of limitations on teen-aged stupidity.
But in this particular case, the Globe’s look at Jeb Bush’s past may have some relevance to contemporary policy disputes.
Sen. Rand Paul says it’s hypocritical for Jeb Bush to oppose legalizing marijuana given that Bush smoked a fair amount at prep school. “You would think he’d have a little more understanding then,” Paul told The Hill while en route to a political event in Texas.
“He was even opposed to medical marijuana,” Paul said of Bush. “This is a guy who now admits he smoked marijuana but he wants to put people in jail who do.”
The Kentucky Republican, a likely Bush rival for the 2016 nomination, went on to say, “I think that’s the real hypocrisy, is that people on our side, which include a lot of people who made mistakes growing up, admit their mistakes but now still want to put people in jail for that…. Had he been caught at Andover, he’d have never been governor, he’d probably never have a chance to run for the presidency.”
I don’t say this often, but Rand Paul raises a good point.
If Jeb Bush said his drug use in high school was a long time ago, it was a teen-aged mistake, and he’d like voters to overlook his youthful indiscretions, the issue would be a non-factor in the campaign.
But that’s not quite the situation we’re confronted with here. Rather, Bush seems to support one forgiving standard for himself and a punitive standard for everyone else.
As a politician, Bush has not embraced marijuana. He spent much of his time as Florida governor championing jail instead of treatment for nonviolent drug offenders, and pushed for mandatory prison sentences for drug offenders – with the exception of his daughter, Noelle, who has struggled with crack cocaine use.
More recently, while acknowledging that states should “have a right” to decide on the legalization of marijuana, Bush publicly opposed an amendment to legalize medical marijuana in Florida.
Overlooking a presidential candidate’s high-school-era mistakes is easy. Overlooking a presidential candidate who punishes those for making the same mistakes he made is far more difficult.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 2, 2015
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