“The Clueless Caucus”: The GOP Rebranding Is Doomed
When a company or an organization decides to do a rebranding, it does some research, maybe hires consultants, gets input from key employees, and then makes decisions about what the rebranding is going to consist of. This process can at times be excruciating, all the more so if the organization has some commitment to consensus; if you’ve ever suffered through a web redesign, you’ve probably had the experience of wondering, as the debate over the difference between particular shades of blue stretches into its third hour, just how much it would hurt if you plunged a pen through your ear into your brain. But at the end of the process, there’s someone in charge who will have the final say.
But when a political party decides to do a rebranding, things are a lot more difficult. In fact, it may not even be possible to get everyone to agree that the rebranding will actually take place. And once it begins, it can just go on forever, because the influence over the party’s brand is so widely distributed. Even after it’s over, you can’t just say to everyone, “Here’s the new stationary, and this is our new slogan; make sure you use it.” Because if they don’t like it, they won’t.
This is the problem the Republican party now faces. Many people within the party think a rebranding is in order, to cast off the party’s image as a bunch of nativist, misogynistic, rich old white guys and make itself more palatable to young people, women, and minorities. But the party is full of people who have troubling ideas about how a rebranding ought to take place, and people who don’t think there needs to be any rebranding at all. There are so many that Ed Kilgore was able to come up with ten different kinds of Republicans who can sabotage the rebranding effort.
So various members of the party keep causing problems by saying what they think, particularly when it comes to topics like rape, or reproduction, or really anything involving, you know, women. The latest, as you probably heard, was Congressman Michael Burgess, who, in support of a bill outlawing abortion after 20 weeks on the unsupported hypothesis that fetuses at that stage can feel pain, offered his hilarious belief that 15 week-old fetuses must be able to feel pain, since they’re already engaged in a pre-natal festival of onanism. “If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs,” he said, wistfully recalling sonograms he had seen. “If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?” The punch line is that before Burgess became a congressman, you know what he did for a living? He was an OB-GYN.
One way to look at this is, as Politico does, that the rebranding is being undercut by “the clueless caucus of the Republican Party.” But these kinds of things aren’t just coming from the same two or three people. Almost every time we hear some new outrageous statement from a GOP congressman, it’s someone entirely new. That’s because those beliefs are actually held quite widely within the party. There’s an almost endless supply of yahoo congressmen with retrograde beliefs, just waiting to make their dunderheaded debut on the national news.
John Boehner can’t stop these outbursts, because he’s not that kind of boss. This gets back to the difference between politics and other endeavors. Corporate CEOs and generals usually do poorly in politics because the hierarchical environments in which they flourished are so different from electoral campaigns and elected office. When you’re the boss, you can issue orders. That new electric nose-picker we’re releasing next month? The box is going to be blue, and if you’d prefer it to be red, you’re welcome to go find another job. You’ll be taking your unit up that hill, captain, whether you like it or not. But Boehner can’t fire the wingnuts in his caucus. What’s worse, they can fire him, by getting a different Speaker. Even when someone hasn’t been elected yet, it’s extremely hard to push them out of a race; don’t forget, they tried to do that with Todd Akin, and he just decided he didn’t want to leave.
And because the clueless caucus probably encompasses a majority of the party, the rebranding may well be doomed, unless somebody can rebrand the party by force. And the only one who can do that is a presidential candidate. So it may have to wait until 2016.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 20, 2013
“The Future Is Now”: It’s Time For Republicans To Choose Sides On Immigration Reform
The future of immigration reform is, for now at least, not up to House Speaker John Boehner. It is in the hands of a group of moderately conservative Republican senators who have to decide whether their desire to solve a decades-old problem outweighs their fears of retaliation from the party’s right wing.
These senators are clearly looking for a way to vote for a bill that is the product of excruciating but largely amicable negotiations across partisan and ideological barriers. But these Republicans — they include Bob Corker, John Hoeven, Susan Collins, Dean Heller and Rob Portman — want enough changes in the measure’s border security provisions so they can tell Tea Party constituents that they didn’t just go along with a middle-of-the-road consensus.
Here’s their problem: Changes that so complicate a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants as to render it meaningless are (and should be) unacceptable to supporters of reform, including most Democrats. But if the GOP senators accept something short of this, they will face furious attacks from the hardcore opponents of any move toward large-scale naturalization of those who came here illegally.
In the end, there is no way around their dilemma. If they want a bill, they will have to take political risks.
Boehner got a lot of attention the other day for what appeared to be a firm statement that he would not let an immigration bill through the House without majority support from Republicans. On its face, his statement would seem to doom reform, given where that majority now seems to stand.
But as he typically (and, in his partial defense, perhaps necessarily) does, Boehner left himself wiggle room. “I have no intention of putting a bill on the floor that will violate the principles of our majority and divide our conference,” he said.
Ah, yes, and let’s remember that this week’s “intention” does not necessarily determine tomorrow’s strategy. It’s in Boehner’s interest to keep the large right end of his caucus at bay and to stake out a hard line to extract as many concessions from the Senate as he can. In the House at the moment, tomorrow is always another day.
What may matter is not how many Republican votes he gets but whether a majority of his caucus quietly decides that passing immigration reform is better for the party than blocking it. Many in such a majority might actually vote against a bill they privately want to see enacted. By doing so, they could satisfy their base voters back home while getting the immigration issue off the political agenda and ending the GOP’s cold war with Latino voters.
This is not unduly cynical. Many essential laws have passed because legislators found a way to balance their political needs with their convictions. The movie Lincoln is instructive on the matter.
Such calculations explain the tensions among Senate Democrats over the best way forward. Politico recently reported on differences between Sen. Charles Schumer, the leading architect of the compromise bill, and Sens. Dick Durbin and Harry Reid, the majority leader.
Schumer is more willing to accept further compromises in order to get broad Republican support. He wants 70 votes for a bill, believing that a big margin would increase pressure on the House to act. He also wants to deprive Republicans of the chance to use procedural complaints as an excuse for voting no.
Durbin and Reid are wary of giving any more ground. They want to preserve negotiating space with the House and believe enough Republicans already know they have to support reform. They see the House as so unpredictable that watering down the bill may not, in any event, be very helpful.
Here’s the potential positive news for immigration reformers: This difference may produce, if unintentionally, a good cop/bad cop dynamic that could keep the key group of Senate Republicans from undercutting the bill. Schumer can be open to a variety of border security changes, as long as they don’t disrupt the path to citizenship. He can also be clear that there are limits on how far his party can go in providing the swing Republicans with political cover.
Which brings it all back to Corker and his allies. A Congressional Budget Office report on Tuesday showing that immigration reform could cut some $900 billion from the deficit over the next two decades should make it easier for them to make a deal. But in the end, they have to choose: Which side are they on?
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 20, 2013
“Norman Rockwell’s America Is Gone”: The Nation Should Welcome Darkening Demographic
Norman Rockwell is dead. So is his America.
If you find that declaration sad, or possibly slanderous, you probably have fond memories of “the way we were” during a supposedly kinder and gentler time before the civil rights movement, women’s lib and cellphones. If you don’t shed tears over that America, you may have grown up as I did — oppressed by the strictures of a social and political system that didn’t show much respect to those who were not white male Christians.
Either way, the overwhelmingly white nation that Rockwell depicted in his sentimental paintings is gone. (I intend no disrespect to Rockwell, whose portrait of 6-year-old Ruby Bridges integrating a New Orleans school stands out in civil rights iconography.) Just last week, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau confirmed a trend long in evidence: The nation continues, inexorably, to grow darker.
For the year ending July 1, 2012, deaths among non-Hispanic whites exceeded births, the Census Bureau reported. The majority of births in this country are now to blacks, Asians and Latinas.
That trend helps to explain the discomfort among older conservative voters with immigration, which has been the driver of the nation’s increasing diversity. They see the country in which they grew up, in which they held the political, social and economic power, slipping away, becoming a place with which they are unfamiliar. Their anxiety boils down to a misplaced fear that they will be strangers in their own land.
Their misapprehensions are stoked and amplified by the right-wing media axis, which has spent years defining undocumented workers as barbarians at the gate and all people of color as suspect. Even as support grows in mainstream America for legalizing undocumented immigrants, the pit bulls of the right continue to denounce any attempt at comprehensive immigration reform as an unjustified “amnesty” to lawbreakers.
Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, the magazine founded by William Buckley, says so. So does former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, now head of the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Rush Limbaugh, as usual, doesn’t attempt subtlety as he argues that conservative voters would lose all political clout if undocumented immigrants gain citizenship: “There are legitimate fears that … Republicans/conservatives are gonna end up … outnumbered.”
If Limbaugh conflates conservatives with his listeners, he’s right. But they are dwindling, anyway. The Limbaugh audience, like the GOP primary voter, skews older. Looking toward voting patterns 10 to 20 years from now, Republican strategists have fretted over the party’s failure to appeal to younger voters.
One of the ways in which the GOP alienates younger Americans is with its harsh rhetoric and unwelcoming policies toward those who crossed the border illegally. According to a 2009 Washington Post/ABC News poll, 73 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 support giving them a path toward legal status.
Younger Americans have grown up in a more diverse nation, so they are far less likely to see those with darker skin and different accents as a threat. But there are good reasons for older white Americans to welcome immigrants, too — whether or not they entered the country with legal documents.
Without them, the United States would be doomed to the kind of demographic “bust” that countries from Japan to Russia are experiencing, with birth rates so low that the population is not reproducing itself. That has all sorts of dire economic consequences.
For one thing, there aren’t enough younger workers to support all the retirees. Japan’s long-running economic malaise has several causes, but its aging population — exacerbated by its hostility to immigrants — is surely one of them.
Whatever the long-term problems with our Social Security and Medicare programs, they’d be far worse without the Latinos, Asians and Africans who have revitalized rundown neighborhoods, invigorated popular culture and shared in the American Dream. As Brookings Institution demographer William Frey told The New York Times, the new census figures make “more vivid than ever the fact that we will be reliant on younger minorities and immigrants for our future demographic and economic growth.”
Their vitality ought to be welcomed.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, June 15, 2013
“Little Evidence”: On Civil Liberties, Comparing Obama With Bush Is Easy, And Mostly Wrong
Nearly a dozen years after the passage of the PATRIOT Act — rushed through Congress in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation — informed debate over the balance between liberty and security is long overdue. That includes a public examination of how widely and deeply the National Security Agency (and other elements of the “intelligence community”) may monitor Americans’ telecommunications without violating the Bill of Rights.
But that needed discussion isn’t enhanced by hysteria or the partisan opportunism it encourages. As others have noted already, the supposed revelation that the NSA is collecting metadata on telephone use in this country isn’t exactly startling news. The fugitive ex-CIA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents concerning that program to the London Guardian and the Washington Post, may yet unveil more startling revelations from his peculiar refuge in China. But anyone paying attention has known about this program since 2006, when USA Today first disclosed its existence.
The most important difference today is that Americans are no longer too frightened by the constant “terror alerts” of the Bush administration to consider the boundaries of surveillance and security. Rather than hyping the terrorist threat, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, President Obama has repeatedly framed a calmer — if equally resolute — attitude toward Islamist extremism.
So while facile comparisons between the Obama and Bush administrations now appear every day in the media, they are quite misleading. Uttered by Republicans and their mouthpieces on Fox News, such arguments are hypocritical as well.
Consider the single most important surveillance controversy of the Bush era, namely the warrantless wiretapping undertaken on the president’s orders. In December 2005, the New York Times revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to monitor phone calls and emails originating in U.S. territory, without obtaining warrants as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. (That’s why it was called “warrantless.”) For the first time since Watergate – and the intelligence reforms resulting from that true scandal — the U.S. government had eavesdropped on Americans’ conversations without seeking the permission of a judge.
Only months before, Bush had claimed publicly that he was a steward of civil liberties and that his agents always got a court order before implementing a wiretap. But his administration had been using warrantless wiretaps ever since the 9/11 attacks.
Those trespasses against liberty went considerably further than the collection of metadata by the NSA. No reports indicate that the Obama administration violated existing law to eavesdrop on any American — or listened to any calls without the sanction of the special FISA court.
Yet reaction to the recent stories about the NSA’s policies has been far more intense than eight years ago. Pundits and politicians have compared Obama unfavorably with Richard Nixon, berating him as a tyrannical betrayer of civil liberties. A few prominent Republicans even seem determined to ruin the NSA, solely because they wish to embarrass the president – a motive that other Republicans attribute to Snowden, whom they vilify as a traitor.
Not a peep was heard from Republicans on Capitol Hill when Bush, his vice president Dick Cheney, and their lawyers were practicing and promoting the theory of the “unitary executive,” under which any act ordered by the president in wartime, including warrantless wiretapping, is deemed inherently legal and exempt from judicial review. What exercised the Republicans in those days was the temerity of the Times in revealing what Bush had done.
As for Obama, the complicated truth is a mixed record on civil liberties. He tried and failed to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and he supported the renewal of the PATRIOT Act without changes. But he also substantially reformed the use of military commissions and abolished the use of torture, renditions, and secret prisons. In ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has rejected the “permanent war” ideology, which the Bush regime deployed as a political weapon against dissent.
So far there is little evidence that Obama shares the dangerous theories of Bush and Cheney – but no president should enjoy the kind of exemption from congressional scrutiny that his predecessors exploited. Whatever Snowden’s intentions may be, he has inspired members of Congress to provide stricter oversight of the government’s gargantuan data-gathering efforts, which are inherently prone to overreach even under the most responsible supervision. At the very least, Congress and the public need to know how the government wields its powers under the PATRIOT Act – an interpretation that remains classified and thus precludes democratic oversight.
The president’s response to that question will test his commitment to the Constitution he swore to uphold.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, June 14, 2013
“Apocalypse Not Now”: Just About Everything Is Getting Better
As a culture, we seem to be in an apocalyptic moment. Judging from the movie trailers, it looks like the human race is basically screwed this summer in After Earth, World War Z, and This Is the End—a comedy!—while Washington (and its black president) will be besieged by cyber-terrorists in White House Down. In the real world, we’re bombarded with warnings about our debt crisis, our economic crisis, and of course our political crisis, which is to say, our government’s inability to deal with all its other crises. Republicans in particular have become perennial prophets of doom, warning that President Obama’s foreign policies will destroy our standing in the world, that Obamacare will destroy our health care system, that out-of-control spending, growth-killing taxes, and loose monetary policy will turn us into a dystopia of inflation, high interest rates and economic paralysis.
Relax!
Things are OK. And while you can’t tell from following the news—the press doesn’t like to report on planes that land safely, or seemingly obvious stuff that didn’t happen yesterday—things are getting better. The apocalypse is not nigh.
We are now in the fourth year of a slow but steady recovery. The economy is adding about 200,000 jobs a month, and has added 6.8 million private-sector jobs since the end of the Great Recession. The stock market is at an all-time high, and has almost doubled since Obama took office. The housing market is rebounding. It’s true that 7.5% unemployment is way too high, but it’s better than the double-digit unemployment we had in the wake of the financial meltdown, when the apocalypse really was nigh. The government has even turned a profit on the reviled Wall Street bailouts that ended the meltdown.
Yes, the economy would be doing even better if it weren’t being dragged down by the “sequester,” $85 billion worth of haphazard spending cuts resulting from Republican demands for government austerity. Those were misguided demands after a financial crisis, the kind of demands that have turned Europe into an economic basket case. But so far, at least, fears that the sequester could scuttle the U.S. recovery have proven to be overblown. Consumer confidence just hit a six-year high.
What about the fears that inspired the sequester and the rest of the austerity push, the fears that spiraling deficits would turn us into Greece? Well, the Congressional Budget Office now estimates the deficit at $642 billion, the lowest since the crisis; it’s been cut in half since Obama took office, the fastest reduction since World War 2. We’re not Greece. The bond markets certainly don’t think so; interest rates are at historic lows. And the runaway inflation that Paul Ryan and other loose-money critics keep predicting has yet to materialize; inflation is actually below the official Federal Reserve target of just 2 percent.
In fairness, while America’s short-term deficit is shrinking fast, our long-term deficit is still a concern, because soaring health care costs have threatened the future of Medicare and Medicaid. But there’s good news there, too. According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Foundation, health care spending is now growing at the slowest rate in five decades, which is why Medicare’s trustees just upgraded the program’s budget outlook. And there is strong evidence that Obamacare’s efforts to reorient the medical system to reward providers who keep their patients healthy instead of providers who perform more services are working. For example, Obamacare imposes financial penalties on hospitals with high rates of readmissions and central-line infections; predictably, hospitals have improved their performance in both areas. The health information technology revolution—launched by Obama’s 2009 stimulus—is also bending the cost curve, dragging a pen-and-paper system into digital age.
Meanwhile, U.S. combat forces are out of Iraq, and they’ll be out of Afghanistan next year. U.S. carbon emissions are at their lowest level in two decades, and so are U.S. oil imports. By historical standards, taxes are very low and spending is very modest. General Motors and Chrysler, wards of the state four years ago, are posting their best sales numbers in years. Gays are serving openly in the military, solar installations have increased over 1,000% in four years, a cool robot is taking cool pictures of Mars, and Tesla just paid back its government loan with interest. Things are getting better, and better is better than worse.
But the headlines are all about supposed scandals—stupid IRS agents in Cincinnati, overzealous leak investigations at the Justice Department, a dopey dispute over Benghazi talking points. These are the kind of things that politicians can obsess about when there’s no crisis on the horizon; the last time the national outlook was this bright, Republicans impeached the president for sexing up an intern. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not as if the latest wannabe-scandals are distracting official Washington from any important work it might be doing. Sure, Congress ought to do something about climate change, but as long as Republicans control the House, Congress isn’t going to do anything about climate change.
I guess that qualifies as a crisis. But one of the lessons of the Obama era, along with the general advisability of DOING STUFF regardless of the political implications, is that positive change can happen in spite of a dysfunctional system. You couldn’t build a summer movie around that—”In a world where complex legislation is implemented effectively…”—but it’s still a feel-good idea, even if it seems to have limited box-office appeal.
By: Michael Grunwald, Time Magazine, June 9, 2013
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