“America Moving Farther Apart”: Hillary Clinton Probably Can’t Get Gun Control Passed. But She Should Talk About It, Anyway
Hillary Clinton is talking about guns, and everyone seems surprised. After all, doesn’t she know the issue is a sure loser for Democrats?
The truth is quite a bit more complicated than that — in fact, pushing for measures like expanded background checks is likely to help Clinton in the 2016 election. But if she’s going to promise to make headway on this issue, she needs to offer some plausible account of how as president she could make real progress where Barack Obama couldn’t.
Let’s address the matter of the gun issue’s political potency first. As is the case on so many issues, the Republican position is more popular when the questions are vague, while the Democratic position is more popular when the questions are specific. If you look at polling on guns, what you see is that the country is split pretty evenly on the broad question of whether gun laws should be more strict or less strict. But particular measures to regulate guns get much more support, especially universal background checks, which as many as nine out of ten Americans endorse.
At some point in this discussion, someone will always say: “But what about the NRA? They’re so powerful!” The NRA’s power is real in some ways and illusory in others, and it’s important to understand which is which. When it comes to lobbying, the NRA is indeed hugely powerful. It has the ability to stop any legislation on guns, often before it even gets written. But elections are an entirely different story. Almost all the congressional candidates who win the NRA’s supposedly coveted endorsement are Republican incumbents from conservative districts who win their elections by huge margins. When Republicans have a good election, as they did in 2014 and 2010, the NRA rushes to reporters to claim credit, saying the election proves that voters will punish any candidate who isn’t pro-gun. But when Democrats have a good election, as they did in 2012 and 2008, the NRA is strangely silent.
Gun ownership has been steadily declining since the 1970’s, and guns are more concentrated among voters that Democrats already won’t win and don’t need. For instance, according to the Pew Research Center, whites are twice as likely as Hispanics to own guns. If winning over Hispanic voters is the sine qua non of a Republican victory, advocacy for loosening gun laws isn’t exactly going to be part of a winning formula for the GOP. The person most likely to be a gun owner is a married white man from the South — in other words, probably a Republican.
When people argue that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t touch the gun issue, watch out for comparisons to how Bill Clinton did in the Electoral College, because America’s political geography is very different than it was two decades ago. For instance, I guarantee you that Senator Joe Manchin will at some point loudly advise that Clinton needs to tread carefully on guns if she’s to win his home state of West Virginia like her husband did twice. But the truth is that Clinton is probably not going to win West Virginia no matter what she does, and she doesn’t need to. Barack Obama’s two comfortable Electoral College victories were built on combining Democratic strongholds in the Northeast and West with the more liberal states in the Midwest and the fast-changing Southwest, where Hispanic votes are key. Clinton will almost certainly seek to assemble the same map — and it’s one where advocacy for the more popular gun restrictions will help her, not hurt her.
Still: if Clinton says it’s vital to enact universal background checks and other “common-sense” gun laws, she has to explain how she’s going to do it. Let’s not forget that in the wake of the horrific Newtown massacre, a bipartisan measure to expand background checks failed to overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate, falling six votes short of the 60 it needed. If a bill that had the support of 90 percent of the public couldn’t make it past congressional Republicans just after 20 elementary school students had been murdered, how is Clinton going to convince them to vote for whatever she proposes?
But talking about gun measures in the presidential campaign could still have a practical impact, by elevating the issue and thereby making it more likely that more gun laws might be passed on the state level. And that’s where all the action has been of late: since the Newtown shooting, there have been dozens of laws passed at the state level on the subject of guns, and they tell a story of red and blue America moving farther apart.
In Red America, one state after another has passed laws to expand who can get a gun and where you can take it. Last year Georgia passed a law allowing people to take guns into churches, government buildings, and bars. “Stand your ground” laws have proliferated in Republican-run states (despite the fact that research indicates that they increase the number of homicides).
Meanwhile in Blue America, dozens of laws have been passed to rein in guns. Legislatures in states like California, Maryland, and Connecticut expanded background checks, restricted access for those with mental illness or domestic abuse convictions, and made it harder to get assault weapons. In 2014, voters in Washington state passed a ballot initiative mandating universal background checks by a wide margin.
So when we talk about the gun issue, we have to keep three things in mind. First, the kind of restrictions Clinton is proposing are hugely popular. Second, there really are two Americas when it comes to guns. And third, one of those Americas has the ability and the desire to stop any gun legislation in Congress. If Hillary Clinton has a plan to deal with that last reality, it would be interesting to hear.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 10, 2015
“Bernie Sanders Is Not The Left’s Ron Paul”: Representing A Wing Of The Democratic Party Whose Influence Is Increasing
Ever since Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination for president, he has drawn comparisons to a similarly disheveled, longtime politician with a cult-like following and a strong independent streak: former Congressman Ron Paul, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2008 and 2012. It’s true that Sanders and Paul have a lot in common: They both have rabid fan bases, don’t hold their tongues, and embrace ideologies that are rejected by the establishment of their respective parties. And like Paul, Sanders could challenge his party’s frontrunner early on, but doesn’t stand much of a chance of winning the nomination. As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie wrote this week:
Sanders won’t be the Democratic nominee. But that doesn’t mean he won’t be important. Here, it’s useful to think of Ron Paul … He helped bridge the divide between libertarians and the Republican right, and he inspired a new group of conservative and libertarian activists who have made a mark in the GOP through Paul’s son, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. If Sanders can sustain and capture the left-wing enthusiasm for his campaign, he could do the same for progressives.
I disagree; Sanders’s campaign isn’t simply one that will put “democratic socialist” ideas on stage against a more mainstream Democratic view, as Paul sought to do with his libertarian ideas. Rather, his candidacy represents a wing of the Democratic Party whose influence on the establishment is increasing with each election, as moderate Democrats (and their Republican counterparts) become extinct.
For a more apt Republican analog to Sanders’ campaign, one must go back to 2000. John McCain, like Sanders, was thought to have little chance to defeat George W. Bush, who, as the son of a former president and governor of a major electoral state, had more money and more party support. But McCain harnessed the anti-establishment sentiment of the time to build a strong online following, at a time when the internet’s infancy as a political tool. He fought a hard campaign against Bush, even winning the New Hampshire primary, before being knocked out of the race in early March.
Apart from the major issue of campaign finance reform, however, he had very little major policy or ideological differences with Bush and the Republican establishment. What set him apart was his press-appointed “maverick” status: He was willing to say things in public that no other candidate would—what David Foster Wallace, in his classic profile of the McCain campaign, called “obvious truths that everyone knows but no recent politician anywhere’s had the stones to say.” (His campaign bus was even called the “Straight Talk Express.”)
Likewise, Sanders refuses to hold his tongue. In June, he opened an interview with HBO’s Bill Maher by saying, “This campaign is about a radical idea: we’re going to tell the truth.” And that message seems to be working with liberals and even disaffected voters. As one New Hampshire resident, a self-described undecided independent voter, told The New Republic recently, “Do I think he can win? No. But I do like the somewhat fresh take of being a straight shooter.”
And much like Bush and McCain fifteen years ago, Clinton and Sanders are closer on the issues than a lot of progressives would like to admit. Sanders is championing reforms—a legislative or constitutional fix to Citizens United, universal healthcare, increased regulation of the financial system, income inequality—that most Democrats have supported for years, including Clinton; she was the face of the universal healthcare fight during Bill Clinton’s first term and has focused on income inequality and Citizens United in her 2016 campaign. Similarly, McCain’s biggest issues in that 2000 campaign—national defense and the Middle East—would define the Bush administration and the neoconservative movement as a whole for the next decade.
On the major issues that Sanders and Clinton disagree on—the extent to which the banking system should be reformed, surveillance, and free trade—Sanders’s position is just as popular within the party as Clinton’s, if not more so. These are the battles for the future of the Democratic Party, and where both Sanders and Clinton will seek to stake out a position independent of the other. And in those few instances where McCain and Bush disagreed, like the McCain-led campaign reform act, a McCain bill that expanded rights for terrorism detainees, and how much of a role social conservatism should play in the Republican Party, the disagreements were public.
McCain’s challenge to Bush was ultimately unsuccessful, but both were neoconservatives working toward the same goal. McCain campaigned for Bush, voted with the administration’s position 95 percent of the time, and was an ardent supporter of the war in Iraq. Although we can’t possibly know how often Sanders would vote with a hypothetical Clinton administration, we do know they voted together during their two years spent as Senate colleagues 93 percent of the time. And given Sanders’s endorsement of Obama in 2008 and 2012, it’s likely that, should he lose, he would throw his weight behind Clinton. John McCain may not have liked Bush much, but he supported him in both 2000 and 2004. In 2008, Ron Paul snubbed both McCain and the Libertarian Party candidate, instead endorsing the Constitution Party candidate, and refused to “fully support” Mitt Romney in 2012.
Similar to 2000, a dark-horse candidate running a candid campaign has emerged as the principal challenger to the frontrunner, one he’s a long shot to defeat. And like that first McCain bid for the presidency, Sanders’s loss would be because Clinton is a strong nominee who is more well-known and deemed an acceptable general election candidate to a majority of Democrats—not because his ideas are too fringe, as Paul’s were in his campaigns, for his party’s base.
By: Paul Blest, The New Republic, July 9, 2015
“Trump’s Got The GOP By The Balls”: Trump Has The Power To Elect Clinton, And Both He And Priebus Know It
Deflating as it is, the likely Donald Trump scenario is this: He burns hot for a little while longer; he says something really out there in the first debate that roils up the base but makes Reince Priebus and Karl Rove break out in canker sores; but by the time of the baseball playoffs maybe, his act gets old, and somebody else becomes the Herman Cain of October. Then, next year, the primaries will start, and he’ll have to get votes. He’s not going to be all that competitive in Iowa, so it’s New Hampshire where he’ll need to deliver something. And if he doesn’t, he’ll just go away.
That’s the pattern anyway. I seem to recall that at this point in 2011, Michele Bachmann had a pretty good head of steam going. So maybe we shouldn’t get too overheated about him.
But Trump is different from Bachmann, and even from fellow entrepreneur Cain, in one major respect: He doesn’t give a crap about the Republican Party. He cares about Trump. And don’t forget he has the power singlehandedly to make Hillary Clinton president. He knows it, and you better believe Priebus knows it, and it is this fact that establishes a power dynamic between Trump and the GOP in which Trump totally has the upper hand and can make mischief in the party for months.
How does he have the power to elect Clinton all by himself? By running as an independent. Two factors usually prevent candidates who lose nominations from running as independents. One, they lack the enormous amount of money needed to pursue that path (pay the lawyers to get them on 50 state ballots, etc.). Two, they have a sense of proportion and decency, and they figure that if primary voters rejected them, it’s time to go home.
Well, Trump has the dough and lacks the decency. In an interview this week with Byron York, he left the door open a crack to such a candidacy. And that would be all it would take. Given his fame and name recognition, he’d likely hit the polling threshold needed to qualify for the fall debates. And with that kind of exposure, he’d do well—enough. All he needs to get is 5 percent of the vote in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado, and the Republican, whoever it is, is sizzled. Another electoral landslide.
The question is would he, and the answer is who knows? To York, he expressed awareness of the obvious drawbacks, pointing to the spoiler role he says Ross Perot played in 1992: “I think every single vote that went to Ross Perot came from [George H.W.] Bush…Virtually every one of his 19 percentage points came from the Republicans. If Ross Perot didn’t run, you have never heard of Bill Clinton.” He is—shocker—wrong about this, but what matters for present purposes is that he believes it, so maybe that means he wouldn’t follow through.
But he is an unpredictable fellow. Suppose Priebus and the GOP piss him off in some way, and he thinks the hell with these losers. Suppose he decides—and don’t doubt the importance of this—that an independent run would be good for the Trump brand in the long run. And suppose he doesn’t actually mind so much the idea of Hillary Clinton being president. We already know he retains a soft spot for old Bill. And he donated to Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign.
All that’s speculative. But even in the here and now this dynamic has consequences. It means the GOP can’t afford to offend Trump. This is why Priebus’s spokesman characterized the chairman’s Wednesday evening phone chat with Trump as “very respectful.”
And it’s why the other candidates’ criticisms of him have been a little, ah, restrained. Politicians aren’t always real smart about any number of things, but one thing in my experience that they almost always have a very keen sense of is risk. Members of Congress, for example, generally know exactly what percentage of their electorate they’re going to sacrifice by casting X vote. Jeb Bush’s Trump criticisms are muted because he has a lot to lose by offending Trump and his supporters. Chris Christie, who’s little more than an asterisk in the polls, has less to lose, so he’s willing to be a bit more blunt. Same goes for Rick Perry.
We’ll see if Trump has developed that politician’s sense of risk. If he goes too far, one or certainly two more equivalents of “Mexican rapists,” it’ll be open season on him. He’s at a point of maximum leverage right now, and if he wants to stay there, he’s got to tuck it in about 10 or 15 percent and start employing the kind of racialized euphemisms that are not only tolerated but celebrated within the Republican Party—build the damn fence, no amnesty, Al Qaeda is storming the mainland through Obama’s porous border, etc. That way, he’ll hang around. And he’ll build enough of a following that the threat of a viable independent candidacy remains a real one. And that is Trump’s trump card. And it makes Reince Priebus a very nervous man.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Dail Beast, July 10, 2015
“No Longer Any Political Margin To Be Gained”: Why Republicans Won’t Object To The Return Of ‘Death Panels’
There was a lot about the period leading up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act that was ridiculous and maddening, but perhaps no episode was worse than the controversy over “death panels.” Here you had a small provision of the bill that doctors, patient advocates, and health care experts all agreed would lead to better care, not to mention cost savings. Then Republicans concocted a lie about it, spread that lie as far as they could, and finally saw the provision removed from the final legislation.
Well, now Medicare is finally doing what that provision of the ACA would have done.
Under a newly proposed rule, it will reimburse doctors for the time they spend with patients planning how they want to be cared for near the end of their lives. And just you watch: this provision that Republicans said six years ago was so horrifying? They’re not even going to bother opposing it anymore, now that doing so serves no political purpose. It’s barely going to be a controversy at all.
That’s not what everyone else seems to be predicting. All over the web there are articles about this issue, many illustrated with photos of Sarah Palin, predicting that this is going to blow up into another angry debate. But I say it won’t. Here’s why: Republicans’ opposition to end-of-life counseling was always utterly cynical, a performance enacted for no purpose other than undermining the legislation. At this point, with the law implemented long ago and the major legal challenges over, there’s no longer any political margin to be gained in shaking their fists at patients and doctors talking about the options for end-of-life care.
Let’s review a little history. This whole thing got started when conservative activist Betsy McCaughey appeared on the radio in 2009, when versions of the legislation were working their way through Congress, and said this about the one in the House:
“And one of the most shocking things I found in this bill, and there were many, is on Page 425, where the Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go in to hospice care. And by the way, the bill expressly says that if you get sick somewhere in that five-year period — if you get a cancer diagnosis, for example — you have to go through that session again.”
To paraphrase what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman, every word of that statement is a lie, including “and” and “the.” The actual provision stated that if a patient wanted to have a consultation about their options, including how to create an advanced directive that would lay out what sorts of treatment they wanted and didn’t want if they got to a point where they couldn’t communicate it themselves, Medicare would pay the doctor for the time counseling the patient. Nothing was mandatory, nothing would require doctors to “tell them how to end their life sooner,” and nothing required anyone to have the session again. It was all lies.
But that didn’t prevent the claim from taking off like a rocket. Sarah Palin floated the “death panel” talking point. Chuck Grassley told a crowd back home, “We should not have a government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.” Although media outlets tried to explain that the allegation was false, millions of people believed it anyway. Chastened Democrats removed the provision from the bill.
So now that Medicare is finally moving ahead with this provision, are Republicans really going to fight it? No, they won’t. I’ve been looking around for condemnations from conservative media outlets or prominent Republican politicians, and so far I’ve come up empty. There was one small item on the National Review’s blog, with no substantive objection, just a little harumphing about bureaucracy. No outraged statements from Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, no thunderous denunciations from the presidential candidates, nothing.
Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it yet, and the indignation is on its way. But I wouldn’t bet on it. In this somewhat cooler environment, it isn’t going to be easy for them to argue that patients shouldn’t sit down with their doctors and plan for their future care. And with congressional Republicans all but giving up on repealing the ACA, this isn’t a battle that offers much to be gained.
So five years after the ACA was passed, doctors will know that they can get paid for this absolutely vital service, explaining the options to their patients and making sure that when the time comes, those patients’ wishes are honored. The people like McCaughey, Palin, and Grassley who back then lied to the country in order to score a few points against Barack Obama ought to hang their heads in shame. But at least it’s finally happening. Better late than never.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 9, 2015
“A Stunningly Adacious, Inveterate Liar”: Why A New Jersey Puffer Fish Should Not Be President
When Mitt Romney’s campaign was investigating potential choices to be his 2012 running mate, they gave each prospect a fish-themed code name, such as Lake Fish, Filet-O-Fish, etc. Their name for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a tireless self-promoter known for his bloated ego, was Puffer Fish.
The Romneyites determined that the prima donna governor was wholly unqualified to be America’s vice president, but the rejection didn’t deflate Christie’s puffed-up self-esteem one dot, and he has continued to brag, bluster, and bully his way into national politics. Having convinced at least himself that he’s the can-do, big-idea, forceful leader America needs, the Jersey guv is now offering to be our president and has become No. 14 on the Republican presidential dance card! How exciting is that?
Before accepting, however, you might check with one group of voters who are less than enchanted: the people of New Jersey. With a moribund economy, a state budget mess, a growing pension crisis, the state infrastructure crumbling and his own office caught in a web of scandals, Christie is not faring well with the homefolk, earning a sorry 30 percent approval rating, with most voters saying they dislike “everything about him.”
Nationwide, only Donnie Trump is rated lower than Christie by Republican primary voters. But he has found one friend — Maine governor Paul LePage has enthusiastically endorsed him! Problem is, LePage is even more insufferable and insolent than Christie, so arrogant and autocratic that he’s even alienated fellow Republicans in Maine and is now threatened with impeachment.
Still, if anything, the Puffer Fish’s ego is puffier than ever. Asked on Fox News why 65 percent of New Jersey voters say he’d make a poor president and shouldn’t run, the vainglorious governor actually said: “They want me to stay. Don’t leave to run for president, because we want you to stay.”
It’s one thing for a politician to say that, but — far scarier — Christie is so out of touch with reality that he actually believes it!
The Big Man from New Jersey entered the race with all the chutzpah and hullaballoo that marked his five and a half years as governor of the Garden State, promising to be a truth-telling leader: “There is one thing you will know for sure,” he roared in his announcement speech. “I say what I mean and mean what I say.”
Swell, Chris… but when your campaign slogan is “Telling It Like It Is,” it would help if you were not infamous in your home state as a stunningly audacious, inveterate liar. Even the editor of Jersey’s largest newspaper felt a journalistic duty to warn America about Christie. “Don’t believe a word the man says,” the editor wrote, pointing not to a few fibs and fabrications, but a lengthy “catalog” of “over-the-top, hair-raising type of lies,” including these gems:
- Having assured public employees that their pensions were “sacred” to him, Christie then made cutting their pensions the centerpiece of his first term in office.
- This June, he bragged on national TV that a court had approved those pension cuts — but the court actually ruled them unconstitutional.
- At a recent South Carolina gun rights meeting, Christie crowed that “no new (gun laws) have been made since I’ve been governor,” when in fact he has enacted three gun-control measures.
- After he and his family racked up a $30,000 hotel bill during a luxurious weekend getaway at a Jordanian resort, paid for by the King of Jordan, Christie claimed the junket was not a violation of the state gift ban, for he and the king were personal friends — but he’d only met the king once at a political dinner.
Beware of Christie the compulsive liar. As the newspaper editor bluntly put it: “He’s a creep.”
By: Jim Hightower, Featured Post, The National Memo, July 8, 2015
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