“Poetic Justice”: How A Bartender Helped Decide The 2012 Election
If Mitt Romney had taken a moment to thank the wait staff at a Boca Raton fundraiser last year, he may now be president, or at least could have removed one of his biggest obstacles to the White House: the so-called 47 percent tape that clouded the last two months of the race.
The anonymous person who filmed the tape turns out to be a bartender with a local catering company who is coming forward now that the election is over. He’ll reveal his identity tomorrow in an hour-long interview on “The Ed Show” on MSNBC, but in an interview with the Huffington Post Tuesday night, he suggested that he was disappointed that Romney never thanked the wait staff, as Bill Clinton had years before at a different event the same bartender happened to staff. Ryan Grim and Jason Cherkis report:
Romney, of course, did not speak to any of the staff, bussers or waiters. He was late to the event, and rushed out. He told his dinner guests that the event was off the record, but never bothered to repeat the admonition to the people working there.
One of them had brought along a Canon camera. He set it on the bar and hit the record button. The bartender said he never planned to distribute the video. But after Romney spoke, the man said he felt he had no choice.
The tape came to define Romney and was the fodder for several ads, giving the candidate a noticeable dip in the polls. Even when he recovered after Obama’s disastrous debate performance in Denver, the tape remained a weight around his neck.
Romney probably still would have lost without the tape, and maybe the bartender would still have revealed the video if Romney came back and shook his hand, but there’s some poetic justice in the idea of an hourly worker bringing down a presidential candidate for dismissing the importance of his vote.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, March 13, 2013
“Ryan’s Blurred Vision”: What The New Republican Budget Reveals And Conceals
Someone needs to tell Paul Ryan that his party – and the economic platform of austerity and plutocracy he crafted for it – lost a national election last year. Someone also needs to tell the Wisconsin Republican that he still chairs the House Budget Committee mainly thanks to gerrymandered redistricting.
Someone clearly needs to remind him of those realities because the “vision document” he proposed on Tuesday as the Republican federal budget is only a still more extreme version of the same notions (and the same evasions) that he and Mitt Romney tried to sell without success last fall.
Voters decisively rejected that version of Ryan’s “path to prosperity,” with its gutting of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, its additional tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and its destructive cutbacks in education, infrastructure, scientific research, national security, and a hundred other essential elements of modern American life – and a decent future – that require effective government.
Indeed, the astonishing initial assessment of the new Republican budget by experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is that Ryan wants even deeper cuts and even more lavish tax cuts than he and Romney touted in 2012. The CBPP estimates that the new Ryan plan would cut $800 billion over the coming decade from an assortment of vital programs, including Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP, or food stamps); Supplemental Security Income (SSI) that supports the elderly poor; Pell grants for higher education; and federal school lunches, among others, along with the Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC) and Child Tax Credits that have historically improved standards of living for millions of impoverished working families.
Ryan pretends to admire Ronald Reagan, but the late president — who proudly extended and expanded the EITC — was far too liberal for the likes of him and Romney. Unlike the sunny Gipper, these sulking millionaires resent the working poor – the “47 percent” – who aren’t paying high enough taxes.
But everyone ought to know Ryan well enough by now to anticipate these cruel proposals. They ought to know, too, that Ryan would allow the entire edifice handed down to us by previous generations – highways, bridges, airports, canals, reservoirs, schools, parks, and much more – to crumble into oblivion, rather than increase taxes on the Republican donors whose wealth has multiplied so astronomically in recent years. His voice is the high-pitched drone of a generation of termites, voraciously consuming the nation’s foundations.
What everyone may not know is that Ryan’s vision of the future is quite blurry, since he again refuses to specify exactly how his budget allegedly achieves balance. It says (again) that the severest cuts will be made in domestic non-discretionary spending, but never details how much will be cut from which programs or even categories. It says (again) that tax expenditures will be reduced to balance those tax cuts for the rich, but never details those either. It says (again) that the Affordable Care Act will be repealed, although there is no chance of that happening now. And it says that defense spending – including untold billions in well-known waste – will simply be restored to pre-sequestration levels, while everything else will be cut again, starting at the post-sequestration baseline, much as Romney promised last year.
It says the federal budget will achieve balance within 10 years, but (again) there is no reason to believe its unfounded promises.
This old “new” budget demonstrates that no change is taking hold among the Republicans, except that they seem even more rigid in their ideological obsessions. No basis exists for bipartisan negotiation toward a budget compromise.
Without a massive public reaction to the Ryan proposals, the likelihood is that sequestration will continue and the Republicans will again seek to hold government hostage, as they have done repeatedly since 2009. And the nation will continue to suffer until voters finally decide, in their wisdom, to curtail the power of this truculent and implacable faction.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, March 13, 2013
“Reaching Out, Finding Nothing”: Remind Me Again Of How All The President Has To Do Is “Lead” & Offer Good-Faith Compromises
It’s hard to blame President Obama for at least making an effort. For four years, he took a variety of steps — some social, some formal, some professional — to establish relationships with congressional Republicans. The outreach didn’t amount to much.
But it appears the president, either out of necessity or stubbornness, will continue his newly revamped charm offensive, including a trip to Capitol Hill for another round of budget talks. It’s clearly intended as a major gesture on Obama’s part — presidents usually summon lawmakers to the White House, not head to Capitol Hill for meetings on lawmakers’ turf.
Time will tell, obviously, whether the efforts pay dividends, but the New York Times has an interesting report today on the ineffectiveness of recent outreach, including a great anecdote I hadn’t heard before.
For all the attention to President Obama’s new campaign of outreach to Republicans, it was four months ago — on the eve of bipartisan budget talks — that he secretly invited five of them to the White House for a movie screening with the stars of “Lincoln,” the film about that president’s courtship of Congress to pass a significant measure.
None accepted.
For all the pundits who complain bitterly that Obama hasn’t done enough to schmooze with lawmakers, doesn’t an anecdote like this suggest the problem is not entirely the president’s fault? Are we to believe that all five — invited in secret so they wouldn’t have to take heat from Fox or the GOP base — were all washing their hair that night?
On a more substantive note, the piece also included this key piece of information:
What spurred Mr. Obama to reach out to rank-and-file Republicans with a flurry of phone calls, meals and now Capitol visits were the recent announcements by their leaders — Speaker John A. Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — that they will no longer negotiate with Mr. Obama on budget policy as long as he keeps demanding more tax revenues as the condition for Democrats’ support of reduced spending on Medicare and other entitlement programs.
This is important. Congressional Republican leaders are now saying they won’t even talk to the president unless Obama agrees — before any meetings even take place — to give them what they want. In other words, when the White House announces that all efforts at deficit reduction in the coming years will include literally nothing but 100% spending cuts, then GOP leaders will be prepared to negotiate with the president.
Please, Beltway pundits, remind me again how all the president has to do to resolve political paralysis is “lead” and offer good-faith compromises.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 12, 2013
“Love You To Death”: Republicans Saving Souls Through The Destruction Of The Body
You, liberal reader, probably think of Ted Cruz as this vicious neo-McCarthyite crank who is raging around Washington threatening not so much Democrats as the imaginary RINOs who control his political party.
But the image he’s projecting to his fellow-conservatives, and that he’d like the GOP to project nationally, is very different: he’s a sweet huggy-bear who thinks Republicans lose elections because–I know this is hard to believe, but it’s true–people perceive that they don’t care about less-fortunate people. That’s gotta change, Cruz recently explained in Miami at the Cuban-Democracy PAC luncheon, via the Florida conservative blog The Shark Tank:
I think why Republicans did so poorly in the Hispanic community this last election was not primarily immigration, I think it was two words- 47 percent. And by that I don’t mean that unfortunate comment… What I mean is the narrative of the last election. The 47% percent who are dependent on government- we don’t have to worry about them. I can’t think of an idea that is more antithetical to what we believe as conservatives and Americans than that idea.
“Republicans did a poor job last time around…is making the case to the single mom, making the case to the young African American, the young Hispanic coming out of school looking for his first job that the party of opportunity is a party that allows and encourages small businesses to thrive and encourages economic growth.”
You hear this a lot from conservatives. The I’m-with-the-rich-because-I-love-the-poor rap is a hardy perennial that was bequeathed to the Right by the late Jack Kemp, who probably actually believed it. One of Kemp’s proteges, a guy named Paul Ryan, spoke at the Jack Kemp Foundation dinner in December, and justified his screw-the-poor budget policies as a deeper form of agape love for those who had been failed by the welfare state. Here’s a taste from the deep well of his compassion:
Not every problem disappears through the workings of the free market alone. Americans are a compassionate people. And there’s a consensus in this country about our obligations to the most vulnerable. Those obligations are beyond dispute. The real debate is how best we can meet them. It’s whether they are better met by private groups or by government – by voluntary action or by government action.
I like that. Not every economic or social problem can be ignored because the Market Knows Best. Some people may need help in the form of “voluntary action!” Let’s hear it for charity!
What’s never been clear to me is whether this Empowerment Conservative rhetoric is ultimately designed to appeal to poor and minority folk (if so, it’s failed dismally over the decades), to the news media, or to the tender consciences of conservatives themselves. Some media folk seem to find it a revelation whenever Republicans don’t look and sound like Daddy Warbucks, which is why Kemp always got such good press, and probably why the people surrounding George W. Bush thought “compassionate conservatism” was such a great marketing slogan.
What’s interesting about the version of this pseudo-ideology being embraced by Ryan and Cruz is that there is not one ounce of the old moderate-Republican noblesse oblige in it, with its compromises with the welfare state on behalf of the little people. No, for these new Empowerers love for the poor isn’t genuine unless it involves the full, ruthless destruction of the public support that has enslaved everyone dependent on it. They kind of remind me of the medieval priests who viewed the killing of heretics as the supreme act of charity, saving souls through the destruction of the body.
So it’s probably more a salve to their own (and their supporters’) consciences than a marketing tactic for people like Ryan and Cruz to promote their policy views as pretty much what Jesus would support if he were a Member of Congress. If it becomes necessary to love the poor to death, they’re up to the task.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 12, 2013
“The Dubya Albatross”: Why Republicans Can Never Distance Themselves From George W. Bush
When he was performing his Full Jeb of Sunday show interviews over the weekend, Jeb Bush got asked everywhere whether he’s running for president, and each time he gave the same practiced answer (not thinking about it yet). He also got asked whether his brother’s disastrous presidency, and the fact that Dubya left office with abysmal approval ratings (Gallup had him in the 20s for much of 2008) would be a drag on him. Jeb gave the answer you’d expect: history will be kind to my brother, I’m very proud of him, and so on. Of course it’s true that Jeb, what with his last name and all, would have to “grapple” with his brother’s legacy more than other candidates. But when we think about it in those terms, I think we overlook something important about how the Bush legacy will continue to operate on Republicans, not just Jeb but all of them.
I thought of this when reading Peter Beinart’s take on Jeb, wherein he says something I think misses the mark:
That’s why Jeb Bush will never seriously challenge for the presidency—because to seriously challenge for the presidency, a Republican will have to pointedly distance himself from Jeb’s older brother. No Republican will enjoy credibility as a deficit hawk unless he or she acknowledges that George W. Bush squandered the budget surplus he inherited. No Republican will be able to promise foreign-policy competence unless he or she acknowledges the Bush administration’s disastrous mismanagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. It won’t be enough for a candidate merely to keep his or her distance from W. John McCain and Mitt Romney tried that, and they failed because the Obama campaign hung Bush around their neck every chance it got. To seriously compete, the next Republican candidate for president will have to preempt that Democratic line of attack by repudiating key aspects of Bush’s legacy. Jeb Bush would find that excruciatingly hard even if he wanted to. And as his interviews Sunday make clear, he doesn’t even want to try.
The focus on ideas like credibility and pre-empting attacks makes it seem as though this is really an issue of rhetoric and positioning, but it’s more than that. Let’s go through point by point. Does a Republican need to establish credibility as a deficit hawk? No, because the definition of deficit hawkery is endlessly malleable; Republicans who want to give huge tax cuts to the rich and increase military spending pretend to be deficit hawks just by saying “We need to rein in entitlements,” and people in the press believe them. Nobody voted for Barack Obama because they didn’t think Mitt Romney was enough of a legitimate deficit hawk. Does the next Republican candidate need to promise foreign-policy competence? Ask Michael Dukakis how important establishing your competence is to winning the White House. And did McCain and Romney lose because they didn’t create enough distance between themselves and Bush by not repudiating parts of his legacy?
Ah, here’s where it gets tricky. What, exactly, should they have repudiated, or should future Republican presidential contenders repudiate? Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy that helped explode the deficit? His military adventurism? Appointing right-wing judges? Undermining environmental and workplace protections? The trouble is that those things are central to conservative ideology as it exists today. During much of the Bush years, Republicans controlled all three branches of government, and got pretty much everything they had ever wanted. You can tweak Bush’s legacy around the edges, but if you don’t believe in nearly everything he did, you aren’t really a Republican.
This reminds me of a terrific piece this magazine ran about the Iraq War in the fall of 2005 by Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias called “The Competence Dodge.” Their argument was that while the Bush administration was most certainly screwing up the war, even if they had been more competent, it would only have made a small difference. The problem wasn’t the details of the execution; the problem was that invading Iraq was a terrible idea. The same is true of the Bush administration more broadly. Yes, they screwed some things up. But on the whole, the problems sprang from their goals. The people who run for the Republican nomination in 2016 are going to share those goals, and the Democrats will once again say “You just want to take us back to the Bush years.” That will be true whether any of them are named Bush or not.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 12, 2013
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