“Its Time To Reboot”: Ronald Reagan Is The GOP’s Problem, Not Its Solution
So the Republican Party’s going through some soul searching. And after the results of the 2012 elections that seems like a sensible thing to do.
But so far most of the changes contemplated tend toward the cosmetic—we have to change our “tone,” they say, or the “face” of the party. And that’s all well and good. But one is left to wonder: Is there something going on here that requires plumbing a little deeper into the Republican depths?
I think the answer is yes.
Come back with me to 1981. It’s Ronald Reagan’s inaugural, a shining moment for conservatives and the GOP, punctuated by his famous quotation: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Those words were the apotheosis of a conservative line of argument championed by the likes of William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk for over 30 years. And here was a president not attacking this government program or that one, but instead indicting government as a whole. How satisfying that must have been for those who had long railed against programs like the New Deal and the Great Society.
Not surprisingly, Reagan’s creed became a rallying cry for conservatives and over the past three decades it has remained ever thus. It’s a great slogan that immediately communicates a distinctive set of values, and in that respect, in many cases, it has served the GOP well. But as an organizing principle for electoral success? Well, that’s a little more complicated.
For the GOP’s traditional base—the wealthy—it’s a terrific message. If you have sufficient wealth, you don’t have much need for the domestic programs you see your taxes going to fund, and maybe it offends you to see your money being redistributed by the government to folks less well off than you. If that’s the case, you might prefer a federal government that does less and, as a result, costs less, leaving more of the money you earn in your pocket. In other words, for you, government really is the problem: it diminishes the amount of money you can spend on the things you want, and it does so without offering you something that you regard as an offsetting benefit.
If the number of people who don’t need domestic programs were large enough the GOP would need go no further than Reagan’s creed to win elections. But it isn’t.
Recognizing this, clever Republicans take a step back from the broad sweep of Reaganism and instead try taking it to a more tactical scale, identifying a particular demographic group whose taxes can be said to be paying for a program that benefits someone else. By saying to Group A you are paying for the benefits of Group B some try to mine a latent vein of resentment without threatening government programs that benefit a broader swath of the electorate. See: Reagan appealing to blue color whites by talking about welfare.
Finding the sweet spot between Reagan maximized and Reagan targeted is often the key to Republican electoral prospects, as no less than Reagan himself found out. Early in his first term he managed to push through broad spending cuts. But as people learned the impact those cuts were actually having (remember ketchup as vegetable?) momentum waned. And that’s the thing: take Reagan too far, and your spending cuts start hacking away at programs that people have come to rely on. Think school lunches. Student loans. Social Security. You see, sometimes government is the solution, no matter how much conservatives don’t want to believe it.
Today, the Republican caucus seems fractured between true believers looking to cut anything that moves, and more traditional Republicans who speak Reagan boldly, but apply him more cautiously. And while the radicals have had some well-publicized victories, the long-term health of the party seems dependent upon the veterans’ ability to retake the agenda. One suspects that that is how this play will eventually unfold.
But I’d like to suggest something a little different. There’s an honorable role to be played by a party that holds government expenditure to a rigorous standard. To be sure, for every government program that works there are any number that don’t. Fashioning a government that is narrowly tailored to the problems its constituents face, and that moves efficiently to address them (whether through a program or the absence of one) ought to be everyone’s goal.
Just imagine how constructive a Republican party able to have a rational discussion about the role of government in our lives could be, a party able to contemplate not only the costs but also the benefits of government, and one that offered a principled view about how to distinguish between the two. That would be quite something. And it would offer an extraordinary service to this country.
But for that to happen, something pretty fundamental has to change. There must be a recognition that for all he did for the Republican cause, in this present crisis Ronald Reagan isn’t the solution to your problem; Ronald Reagan is the problem. And its time to reboot.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, February 1, 2013
“NRA”: The National Regulation-Resisters Association
Sometimes common sense isn’t a common trait.
Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice president, is a shining example of this. He continues to voice resistance to even the most basic kinds of changes in existing gun policy, changes that almost all Americans support, changes that would have little impact on the rights and ability of sane, law-abiding citizens to purchase legal weapons.
First, some background.
The White House released its plan to reduce gun violence two weeks ago, a month after the horrific school shooting in Newtown, Conn.
The plan covered closing loopholes in the background check system, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, as well as improving school safety and mental health services.
Public opinion polls suggested that people generally supported the president’s plan.
A Gallup poll conducted the day after the president presented his plan found that 53 percent of Americans would want their representatives in Congress to vote for it.
An ABC/Washington Post poll last week found that 53 percent of Americans favored it.
And a Pew Research Center poll last week found that a majority of Americans thought the plan was about right or didn’t go far enough. Only 31 percent thought that it went too far.
In fact, one of the greatest points of agreement among Americans is the need for universal background checks, as the president proposed.
A Gallup poll released last week found that 91 percent of Americans would vote to “require criminal background checks for all gun sales” if they could.
From a public relations perspective, trying to find some common ground on this issue with the public would seem a no-brainer. Not so for the No Brain-ers.
On Wednesday, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence, LaPierre, as is his wont, gave a rambling, twisted argument against, that’s right, universal background checks.
LaPierre said during the hearings:
“My problem with background checks is you are never going to get criminals to go through universal background checks. All the law-abiding people, you’ll create an enormous federal bureaucracy, unfunded, hitting all the little people in the country, will have to go through it, pay the fees, pay the taxes.”
He continued:
“We don’t even prosecute anybody right now that goes through the system we have. So, we’re going to make all those law-abiding people go through the system and then we aren’t going to prosecute any of the bad guys if they do catch one. ”
So LaPierre’s argument, if I can follow this spiral of spuriousness, is that if we don’t prosecute “bad guys,” then there is no use in checking buyers in the first place so that “bad guys” could be identified and prevented from making the purchases. As best I can tell that seems to be it, and if that is it then I say: you can’t be serious.
Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, shot back:
“Mr. LaPierre, that’s the point. The criminals won’t go to purchase the guns because there’ll be a background check. We’ll stop them from original purchase. You missed that point completely. It’s basic.”
The room erupted in applause.
Universal background checks would seem a basic and exceedingly reasonable proposal. I would add that there should also be universal prosecutions for being intentionally misleading during those checks. But LaPierre is a different kind of person. His interests are not the same as most Americans’. His organization and the majority of so-called “pro gun rights” groups are in the business of unfettered gun proliferation as a means of increasing gun industry profit.
This is about money, pure and simple.
Wednesday morning, before LaPierre’s testimony, the Republican Joe Scarborough of MSNBC said on his show:
“You know what the greatest danger to that Second Amendment right and that guarantee is right now? Extremism from the survivalist wing of the N.R.A. that impacts Republicans’ policies nationwide and moves the Republican Party so far away from mainstream America that they lose the House, they lose the Senate again in ’14, and they lose the presidency again. And the next president will be Democratic.”
I would have to agree with that.
LaPierre is fanning paranoia because it helps grow the N.R.A.’s membership rolls and helps the N.R.A.’s friends and benefactors in the gun industry. And the N.R.A. uses its war chest to scare cowering politicians into taking unreasonable positions.
But extreme resistance to change is no longer acceptable with most of the public. People want action. They’re demanding it. Extreme resistance in this climate could prove more politically poisonous, particularly to some Republicans, than upsetting the N.R.A.
At this moment you have an outraged public against the gun profiteers and the gutless politicians. I believe in the end the people will win.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 30, 2013
“The Enemy Within”: Who’s Trying To ‘Annihilate’ The GOP?
When John Boehner whined last week that Obama’s goal for his second term is to “annihilate the Republican Party” and “shove us into the dustbin of history,” he was working the party into a psychological state much like James Franco had to in 127 Hours: They’re getting ready to accept that they will have to sequester their arm with a dull knife.
Of course, Obama’s War on the GOP is about as real as the liberals’ War on Christmas—both are paranoid, apocalyptic fantasies marketed to drum up fear and self-pity on the right. Obama telling Republicans to “Please proceed” is no more tantamount to annihilating the GOP than chirping “Happy Holidays” is to eliminating Christmas.
Instead, this is a classic case of psychological projection. Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich, Frank Luntz, and senators Bob Corker, Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint, among other right thinkers, actually held a meeting the night of the 2009 Inaugural to plot to undermine Obama’s newborn presidency with nonstop obstructionism. The next year, Mitch McConnell said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” And yet, after these plans failed to block Obama’s re-election and instead cost the GOP a number of House and Senate seats to boot, here is Boehner saying his party is the victim of existential aggression.
Paranoid projection—whether subconscious or deliberate—is part and parcel of the GOP’s broader denial of so much of contemporary reality, whether it’s climate change, demographic change, macroeconomics or polls that don’t go their way.
But mostly, they deny who that black man claiming to be president really is. And so they’ve created an Imaginary Obama, who is just as crazily radical as the Ryan budget would be, if it were passed, or as Bush’s war in Iraq actually was. In one of the funnier attempts to portray Obama’s insidiously well-cloaked but devastatingly destructive nature, Breitbart.com wrote that by supporting gay rights in his Inaugural speech, the president had “bullied” the Supreme Court justices on the dais into going gay-friendly in their upcoming decisions.
It’s a short step from believing that Obama wants to decimate your party to believing he’s making your party choose hard-right fringe policies that will alienate voters. And as Jonathan Chait writes, moderate Republicans like David Brooks and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who resent the extremists but won’t break from their party, are particularly susceptible to this “pathological” notion.
The prevalent expression of this psychological pain is the belief that President Obama is largely or entirely responsible for Republican extremism. It’s a bizarre but understandable way to reconcile conflicting emotions—somewhat akin to blaming your husband’s infidelity entirely on his mistress. In this case, moderate Republicans believe that Obama’s tactic of taking sensible positions that moderate Republicans agree with is cruel and unfair, because it exposes the extremism that dominates the party, not to mention the powerlessness of the moderates within it.
Yes, Brooks wrote that Dems think Obama should “invite a series of confrontations with Republicans over things like the debt ceiling—[to] make them look like wackos willing to endanger the entire global economy.”
Chait:
Worse, argues Brooks, Obama is nastily choosing an agenda intended only to harm Republicans. Obama’s proposals on gun safety and immigration, he writes, are “wedge issues meant to divide Southerners from Midwesterners, the Tea Party/Talk Radio base from the less ideological corporate and managerial class.”
Brooks asserts, but does not actually explain, that Obama chose these issues for the purpose of dividing the opposition—as opposed to trying to cut down on mass murders and fix a huge field of broken policy.
What Obama does do, by being a politically moderate and emotionally calm leader with a beautiful family, is hold a mirror up to the chaotic and hysterical Republican leadership. This strikes them as very mean, and they blame Obama for what they see, Man of La Mancha style.
So now they are struggling to dream an Impossible Dream: taking back the political momentum by simply agreeing to the “poison pill” plan that the sequester was supposed to be, cutting $1.2 trillion from the budget spread equally between defense and domestic spending. The corporate end of the party will scream at those cuts, and fear the economic impact of austerity; the ultra base, now increasingly gerrymandered into scarlet congressional districts with little incentive to compromise, would get, given the $1.2 trillion Obama has already agreed to cut from the budget, something like the Ryan budget’s $2.4 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years. “I think the sequester’s going to happen,” Ryan said today on Meet the Press.
In a game of chicken like this one, the GOP has to convince us all that they mean it in order to win, so there may be a lot of play-acting here. But they also need to concentrate the minds of every Republican in the House to make the threat real. And nothing does that like the threat of “annihilation.”
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, January 27, 2013
“Madman”: NRA’s Wayne LaPierre Is The Best Witness For Gun Control
Democrats and Republicans may never come to an agreement on issues like gun control and health insurance coverage of birth control, but Democrats did show they are ahead in one department: how to hold a hearing.
When the Obama administration announced it would require insurers to cover birth control—a basic health cost for many women, and much cheaper than dealing with an unwanted pregnancy—conservatives went batty. They said it was religious persecution to require religion-based schools and hospitals to adhere to the rule, since the host institutions oppose birth control. Mind you, the institutions don’t oppose the federal student aid, Medicare, and Medicaid that ends up supporting their universities and hospitals. But they didn’t think they should have to play by the government’s rules on health.
House Republicans held a hearing on the issue, and invited no women to testify. The glaring omission not only detracted from the credibility of the hearings, but ended up buttressing the other side’s case. Georgetown University Law School student Sandra Fluke complained, and ended up becoming a media star. Rush Limbaugh’s description of her as a “slut” and prostitute merely brought fence-sitters over to Fluke’s side.
Democrats made no such mistake when they held hearings on gun violence Wednesday. They invited the very vocal, unapologetically anti-any-kind-of-gun-restriction executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, to testify. They invited a woman who opposes gun control and who described it as something of a feminist issue. They also invited powerful witnesses in favor of gun restrictions and background checks, and their testimony (especially that of former representative Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, who talked emotionally about the day Giffords was shot in the head by a deranged gunman). Had the committee followed the path of the House panel on contraception, it would have limited its witness list to pro-gun-control voices alone. Their statements might have been moving, but alone—without the controverting comments of LaPierre and others—they would have seemed more manipulative.
Further, LaPierre’s absolutist stance on any kind of restrictions or background checks ended up helping the progun control side. He may well have ginned up his base and fundraising (which may well have been the point), but he did not appear to the general public as someone interested in pursuing a reasonable accord. He had his say, and had his day in the court of public opinion. And that ended up creating a more powerful case for the committee Democrats than if they had held a show trial.
By: Susan Milligan, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 31, 2013
“At Stake, The Core Of The GOP”: How Conservatives Might Hurt Republicans On Immigration
Us. Them.
There is quite a lot of posturing about who will introduce what part of comprehensive immigration reform (CIR), 2013-style. It seems an article of faith that Republicans will take the lead on several initiatives, because they know that a bill associated with President Obama will be too much for them to sell to their base, and because party leaders genuinely want to take the issue off the front burner.
But how is this supposed to work?
GOP strategists and the establishment certainly understand that the party has a problem with Hispanics. And yes, the inability of Congress to pass immigration reform has contributed to the idea that Republicans don’t want it.
But the real thing that’s turned off Hispanics has nothing to do with legislation or even enforcement. (If enforcement was correlated with political adulation, President Obama would be in trouble with Latinos. He is not.)
What mattered is what the party stood for at its core: What it expects of others and what it expects of everyone else. And the core of the Republican Party today does not believe that the immigration reform approach now championed by its own leaders is right for the country or fair to Americans who already live here.
And for Republicans who are looking to shake up the party, immigration remains a fabulous issue. Fabulous. A conservative revolt is inevitable, I think. The talk show vocalists of the base just hate the idea that de-facto amnesty will depend upon President Obama’s enforcement initiatives. They hate the fact that the GOP leadership has bought into the (Democratic/media) idea that undocumented Latinos need and want government subsidies and sanction for their crime. They don’t believe that Hispanics will shift toward the GOP anyway, unless the GOP truly focuses on the things that conservatives like to essentialize about Hispanics: They’re family-oriented, religious, entrepreneurial.
But they recognize that Marco Rubio is the best voice the party has right now, and it’s still January of 2013.
Give it time.
Is it fair to magnetize U.S. borders and give businesses a cheap supply of new labor at the expense of Americans who are looking for jobs? Will the tax base really broaden because most new immigrants won’t make enough money to pay federal income taxes?
The moment conservatives make immigration into a 2014 election issue, insisting that their candidates either disavow what they voted on in 2013 or promise to repeal it is the moment that the party’s attempt to make amends with Hispanics gets put on hold.
An enterprising 2016 presidential candidate (Sen. Ted Cruz? Sarah Palin?) could step in to represent this part of the party.
Truth be told, I don’t know how Republicans solve their “Latino” problem anytime soon. It is manifold and multi-causal. But the coming “us versus them” backlash will not be helpful.
By: Marc Ambinder, The Week, January 30, 2013
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