“Try Not-Extremism’: Extremist Republicans Don’t Want To Be Attacked For Extremism
The National Review‘s Andrew Stiles is still upset with Democratic messaging on reproductive rights:
Welcome to the scorched-earth phase of the Democrats’ “war on women” campaign, and the beginning of a ruthless offensive to hold their Senate majority, and possibly to retake the House, in 2014.
Democrats have nearly perfected the following exercise in cynical electioneering: 1) introduce legislation; 2) title it something that appeals to the vast majority of Americans who have no interest in learning what is actually in the bill, e.g., the “Violence Against Women Act”; 3) make sure it is sufficiently noxious to the GOP that few Republicans will support it; 4) vote, and await headlines such as “[GOP Lawmaker] Votes No On Violence Against Women Act”; 5) clip and use headline in 30-second campaign ad; and 6) repeat.
I’m not sure if Stiles knows this, but the Violence Against Women Act predates the Democratic “war on women.” It was first passed in 1994 by a vote of 61-38 in the Senate and 235-195 in the House. It was reauthorized in 2000, and again in 2005—with little opposition from Republicans. And indeed, Senate Republicans joined Democrats last year to reauthorize the new VAWA, with the included protections for Native American women and other groups.
The problem, as it has been for the last two years, is a conservative minority of the House Republican conference. Indeed, it’s the same minority that has rejected equal pay laws, and pushed anti-abortion bills that sharply reduce the reproductive autonomy of women. If the “war on women” has had any traction as a rhetoric framework, it’s because those things are unpopular with voters.
Stiles is free to complain that a political party is being unfair by playing politics, but if he wants to solve the problem, he should push his allies to abandon their current drive to make life more difficult for women.
The more interesting tidbit in Stiles’ piece is this:
Republican aides are increasingly convinced that taking the House back in 2014 is going to be Obama’s sole focus over the next two years. “Democrats are not presenting a good-faith effort to get legislation passed,” a Senate GOP aide says. “They simply want to have Republicans on record voting for or against, and to use those votes in political campaigns next year. They’re going to label us as obstructionists and extremists, and try to win back the House and a 60-vote majority in the Senate so they can push their real agenda.”
I doubt that Democrats can take back the House in 2014. It wouldn’t just run against the general pattern—where the president’s party loses seats in the midterm—but Democrats would have to fight an uphill battle against a large number of incumbent legislators, with all the benefits that come from incumbency. Then again, the public is unhappy with the Republican Party, and if the GOP’s position continues to deteriorate, a 2014 sweep is definitely on the table for Democrats.
Again, however, it’s worth noting the odd complaint behind Stiles’ observation. If Democrats are planning to label Republicans “obstructionists and extremists,” it’s because Republicans have been acting as obstructionists and extremists. In just the three months since the election, Republicans have:
- Held the economy hostage to massive spending cuts (the fiscal cliff).
- Launched a crusade against the administration on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, with the clear goal of generating a scandal.
- Filibustered a Cabinet nominee over aforementioned pseudo-scandal.
- Threatened to allow a huge round of austerity (the sequester), if the president doesn’t agree to another round of spending cuts (which would also harm the economy).
In between, Republicans have continued to endorse the right-wing policies of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, and the newest star in the GOP—Ted Cruz—is a far-right ideologue.
Are Democrats exaggerating the extremism of congressional Republicans? Probably. But it’s easy to do when the GOP is so eager to help.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, February 21, 2013
“Reagan Has Left The Premises”: The Republican Party Needs A Reality Check
In the summer of 1999, George W. Bush chose the first major policy speech of his presidential campaign to pick a fight with Grover Norquist. Bush flatly rejected the “destructive” view “that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved” — a vision the Texas governor dismissed as having “no higher goal, no nobler purpose, than leave us alone.”
Norquist had proposed to define conservatism as the “leave us alone” coalition — a movement united by a desire to get government off our backs. Bush countered that “the American government is not the enemy of the American people.”
Ed Crane, then the president of the libertarian Cato Institute, said the speech sounded as if it had been written by someone “moonlighting for Hillary Rodham Clinton.” I can formally deny that charge. But the Bush campaign was purposely attempting to alter the image of the Republican Party. And the party — rendered more open to change by eight years in the presidential wilderness — gave Bush the leeway to make necessary ideological adjustments.
It is the nature of resilient institutions to take stock of new realities and adjust accordingly. In a new cover essay for Commentary magazine, Peter Wehner and I detail the examples of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Clinton broke a long Democratic presidential losing streak by emphasizing middle-class values, advocating the end of “welfare as we know it” and standing up to extreme elements within his coalition (thereby creating the “Sister Souljah moment”). In Britain, Blair went after the “moral chaos” that led to youth crime, abandoned his party’s official commitment to public ownership of the means of production and launched New Labor.
The Republican Party now needs similar transformation. Out of the past six presidential elections, four have gone to the Democratic nominee, at an average yield of 327 electoral votes to 211 for the Republican. During the preceding two decades, from 1968 to 1988, Republicans won five out of six elections, averaging 417 electoral votes to Democrats’ 113.
This stunning reversal of electoral fortunes has taken place for a variety of reasons: changing demographics; the end of a GOP foreign policy advantage during the Cold War; a serious gap in candidate quality; the declining relevance of economic policies that seem better suited to the 1980s; and an occasionally deserved reputation for being judgmental and censorious.
A full Republican appreciation of these disturbing fundamentals was delayed by the 2010 midterms, in which an unreconstructed anti-government message seemed to be riding a wave. Just two years later came that wave’s withdrawing roar. The Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, lost by 5 million votes to a beatable incumbent presiding over an anemic economy. The explanation is not purely technical or personality oriented. At the national level, Republicans have a winning message for a nation that no longer exists.
In retrospect, last year’s Republican primary process was entirely disconnected from the actual needs of the party. One candidate pledged to build a 20-foot-high electrical fence at the border crowned with the sign, in English and Spanish, “It will kill you — Warning.” Another promised, as president, to speak out against the damage done to American society by contraception. Another warned that vaccinations may cause “mental retardation.” In the course of 20 debates and in tens of millions of dollars of ads, issues such as upward mobility, education, poverty, safer communities and the environment were rarely mentioned.
A Republican recovery in presidential politics will depend on two factors. First, candidates will need to do more than rebrand existing policy approaches or translate them into Spanish. Some serious rethinking is necessary, particularly on economic matters. In our Commentary essay, we raise ideas such as ending corporate welfare, breaking up the mega-banks, improving the treatment of families in the tax code, and encouraging economic mobility through education reform and improved job training. Whatever form Republican proposals eventually take, they must move beyond Reagan-era nostalgia.
Second, Republican primary voters, party activists and party leaders have a choice to make, ruthlessly clarified by recent events. They can take the path of Democrats in 1988, doubling down on a faltering ideology. Or they can follow the model of Democrats in 1992 and their own party in 2000, giving their nominee the leeway needed to oppose outworn or extreme ideas and to produce an agenda relevant to our time.
By: Michael Gerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 22, 2013
“The Unsubstantiated Smear”: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, And The Smear-Tacular Tea Party GOP
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has gotten a lot of grief lately, and for good reason. His speculation about whether Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel received secret payments from North Korea was the kind of unsubstantiated smear that takes your breath away. But in all the ballyhoo over Cruz something else seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle: the extent to which the unsubstantiated smear has become stock in trade for Tea Party senators.
Take, for example, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson. Earlier this month he gave a speech in which he set out to “describe” what “patriots,” “people who like freedom,” and “people who like this country” are “up against” these days. The answer: “liberals, progressives, Democrats, whatever they call themselves nowadays, Socialists, Marxists.”
That’s right, Senator Johnson. Having determined that the term “liberal” is too freighted with negative connotations, there are a lot of us Democrats calling ourselves Marxists these days. It’s a bit of rebranding and we have high hopes.
But regardless of what we call ourselves, the implication of Johnson’s observation is pretty clear: on the one side you have patriots (people like Johnson), and on the other you have people who neither love freedom nor America—those are the Democrats.
In the same speech, Johnson said “Liberals have had control of our culture now for about 20 years.” It’s part of their “diabolically simple” strategy to undo America. Wow, liberals must be a pretty nefarious bunch. Need proof? Johnson doesn’t offer much, but maybe he doesn’t need to. Twenty years ago was 1993. That year cross-dressing home wrecker Mrs. Doubtfire took the country by storm. It was pretty much everything liberals stand for in 125 minutes of heart-tugging hilarity.
And if Cruz and Johnson aren’t enough for you, take a listen to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. In a recent interview with NPR Paul was asked to explain how Mitt Romney could have lost in 2012. Paul’s explanation: “it is much easier to offer people something for nothing, than it is to tell people that in reality hard work and sweat equity is how a country gets rich.” That evidently appealed to Obama voters because the president said “he was going to take from the rich and give to the poor. And there’s always more poor than there are rich. So, you can see in a democracy it’s easier to sell that message.”
Oh, OK. The way to success in America is hard work. But “poor” people would rather have the spoils of success handed to them than have to work hard. So a president who promises to do that has found himself a winning message. What a terrific view of people who labor at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder, the aspirations they have for themselves and their families, and the kinds of things they think about when they go to the voting booth (to say nothing of how it characterizes Obama supporters: we’re lazy, and just looking for a handout.)
To be sure, this isn’t the first time we’ve ever heard people say things like that. Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Dinesh D’Souza have been peddling this pabulum for years. And anyone who’s been in the middle of a congressional election with a Tea Party candidate has heard all of this and more.
But the frequency with which this kind of rhetoric emanates from conservative quarters ought not to inure us to its impact. It encourages the transformation of ideological differences into bright lines that allegedly divide good people from bad, and it gives sanction to the notion that difference is itself sufficient evidence that the other person could be engaged in any manner of nefarious conduct.
It’s the kind of thing that you’d like to think wouldn’t work in the American political system. But for the last couple of election cycles its worked like gangbusters, tapping a deep vein of grievance that animates the Tea Party, a myopic sense of victimhood and entitlement.
So holding Senator Cruz to account for his slander was a good thing. But if the recent past is any indication, the smear isn’t going anywhere. It wins votes. And that should be troubling to all of us, Democrats and Republicans, who share the pluralistic notions of democracy to which our country has long aspired.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World report, February 21, 2013
“Still More BS”: The Bowles-Simpson Commission Is The Fiscal Zombie That Just Won’t Die
We all do things that we regret. President Obama must surely regret that he ever listened to the extreme deficit hawks back in early 2010, when he appointed the Bowles-Simpson Commission, the fiscal zombie that just won’t die.
The commission is long defunct. The recommendations of its majority report never became law (because that required a super-majority). But the dreams and schemes of B-S have become the gold standard of deflationists everywhere. The test of budgetary soundness is: does it meet the recommendations of Bowles and Simpson?
On Tuesday, the depressive duo were at it again, calling for additional deficit reductions of $2.4 trillion over a decade. This is almost a trillion dollars beyond what President Obama and Congress are considering.
This clarion call was issued under the aegis of the corporate group, “Fix the Debt,” a bunch of millionaires and billionaires urging regular people to tighten their belts for the greater good.
Quite apart from the impact of particular cuts (Social Security, Medicare, domestic discretionary spending), this is economic lunacy—because it sandbags an already depressed economy. The Congressional Budget Office has calculated that growth would be 3 percent this year, but will only be half that rate because of the effects of the sequester (or cuts of a similar magnitude)—and Bowles and Simpson are calling for annual cuts of twice the scale of the sequester, and over a whole decade.
President Obama has focused on heading off the sequester—$85 billion of mandatory cuts in the next ten months. But he has bought into the deeper mischief wrought by Bowles and Simpson, by embracing further cuts of $1.5 trillion over a decade.
As the latest pronouncement by the B-S boys shows, the cuts are never enough. If Obama accepts $1.5 trillion, they counter with $2.4 trillion.
They are more gentlemanly than Grover Norquist, but the ideological goal is the same—a government small enough to drown in a bathtub. Even worse, deflationary cuts slow growth, making the debt load larger in real terms, no matter how much we cut.
We’ve now had a real-time experiment, in countries as diverse as Greece, Spain, and Britain. Austerity only breeds more austerity.
By: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, February 21, 2013
“A Game Of Chicken”: Republicans Want To Burn The Coop
Well, here we go again. Another season, another manufactured, self-inflicted, completely preventable crisis of government. This time it’s the sequester.
We may as well put these things in the Farmers’ Almanac.
Now we’re engaged in a finger-wagging blame game of who proposed it, who supported it and who is opposed to preventing it.
Let’s lay out some of the facts of this disaster.
The sequester’s origin is quite muddy.
President Obama, responding to Mitt Romney in an October presidential debate, said: “First of all, the sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen.”
John Boehner, on the other hand, now says that the sequester is Obama’s baby. In a speech on the House floor this month, Boehner said:
“The president first proposed this ‘sequester’ in 2011 and insisted it be part of the debt-limit agreement.”
In an opinion piece published Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, Boehner wrote, “Having first proposed and demanded the sequester, it would make sense that the president lead the effort to replace it.”
PolitiFact rated Obama’s claim that the sequester was proposed by Congress as “mostly false” saying:
“It was Obama’s negotiating team that came up with the idea for defense cuts in 2011, though they were intended to prod Congress to come up with a better deal for reining in the deficit, not as an effort to make those cuts reality. Meanwhile, members of both parties in Congress voted for the legislation that set up the possibility of sequestration. Obama’s position is that Congress should now act to avoid those across-the-board cuts. Obama can’t rightly say the sequester isn’t his, but he did need cooperation from Congress to get to this point.”
PolitiFact bases its assessment largely on assertions in the new book “The Price of Politics,” by the renowned Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
The Web site does, however, point out that there are dissenting views, including that of Christopher Preble at the libertarian Cato Institute. PolitiFact quotes Preble as saying, “I do not believe it accurate to refer to the cuts that will occur in both defense and nondefense discretionary spending under sequestration as ‘Obama’s cuts.’ ”
And John Avlon, a senior columnist for The Daily Beast, wrote Wednesday that he “happened to come across an old e-mail that throws cold water on House Republicans’ attempts to call this ‘Obama’s Sequester.”
According to Avlon:
“It’s a PowerPoint presentation that Boehner’s office developed with the Republican Policy Committee and sent out to the Capitol Hill GOP on July 31, 2011. Intended to explain the outline of the proposed debt deal, the presentation is titled, ‘Two Step Approach to Hold President Obama Accountable.’ It’s essentially an internal sales document from the old dealmaker Boehner to his unruly and often unreasonable Tea Party cohort. But it’s clear as day in the presentation that ‘sequestration’ was considered a cudgel to guarantee a reduction in federal spending — the conservatives’ necessary condition for not having America default on its obligations.
The presentation lays out the deal in clear terms, describing the spending backstop as “automatic across-the-board cuts (‘sequestration’). Same mechanism used in 1997 Balanced Budget Agreement.”
So, there’s that.
But I’m not sure where all this you- are-the-father origination blame game gets us.
The bill got bipartisan support in the House and at the time Boehner bragged:
“When you look at this final agreement that we came to with the White House, I got 98 percent of what I wanted. I’m pretty happy.”
And President Obama signed it.
None of this changes the fact that the sequester is still bearing down on us, and it still holds horrible consequences that we didn’t think we’d be facing.
Now we are stuck in a vicious fight about what, if anything, can be done to prevent it and protect an economy that is just beginning to emerge from the muck.
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, “Our estimate of approximately one million lost jobs due to sequester remains our base case if a full sequester occurs as scheduled on March 1.”
So once again the American people are caught in the middle of a game of chicken between Democrats, who rightly warn that the sky could fall, and Republicans, who want to burn the coop.
Thus far, the president and the Democrats are outmaneuvering the Republicans in the messaging war, but that will be of cold comfort if the Republican hotheads prevail.
Erskine Bowles, the former White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton, and the Bowles half of the Simpson-Bowles Commission, said of impending cuts: “They are dumb and they are stupid, stupid, stupid. They are inane.”
And yet dumb, stupid and inane have become the three pillars of government now that strong-willed, dimwitted hard-liners who see compromise as a dirty word have infiltrated the halls of Congress.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 20, 2013
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