“Not To Worry, The Negativity Is Coming”: Why The GOP’s 2016 Bloodbath Is Going To Be Great Fun — And Instructive
If there are any Republicans out there who haven’t joined the presidential race, they’ll probably be getting in soon — even if a Donald Trump campaign is too much to hope for.
With a remarkable 15 announced or soon-to-announce candidates, including such dynamos as Lindsey Graham and George Pataki, there’s still one thing we haven’t seen yet: the Republican candidates attacking each other. There’s been a vague insinuation here and an implied criticism there, but no real verbal fisticuffs to speak of. But worry not: The negativity is coming, and when it does, it will come fast and hard.
The first contest of the primary season is still eight months away, but as it gets closer, each candidate will start seeing their relative place in the contest come into focus. And the more it does, the greater the incentive will be to take potential opponents down a peg.
Whoever’s in front (if anyone actually moves to the front) will want to beat back challenges from below. Those behind will want to punch upward to pull down the leader. And everyone will want to strike out laterally to make sure they’re the ones with a chance to climb upward.
Once the primaries begin, desperation will set in for some candidates, which inevitably leads them to sign off on nastier rhetoric and advertising than they ever thought they’d engage in. If all goes well, it’ll be a spectacle of insults, attacks, and character assassination. Should be great fun.
Lest you think I’m being too cynical, let’s not forget that just because you’re criticizing another candidate instead of touting your own virtues doesn’t mean you aren’t contributing something valuable to the debate. There are reasons to vote for candidates, but there are also reasons to vote against them — and if their opponents don’t tell us, we might not learn about them at all. As I heard a political consultant say once, no candidate is going to tell voters, “I hope you vote for me, but before you do, there are a few things you ought to know…” If Jeb Bush’s diligent opposition researchers discover that Scott Walker once shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, then we should hope they’ll share that information with the rest of us.
So when the race gets adversarial, we shouldn’t reflexively condemn the fact that the candidates are criticizing each other. It’s important to remember that when candidates are being “positive,” they’re just as likely to be feeding the voters pabulum. In fact, research on political advertising I did in my former life as an academic showed that positive ads were less likely to concern policy issues and more likely to contain inaccuracies than negative ads. What’s more helpful to voters: showing them a soft-focus picture of my family and sharing my deep love for America, or telling them that the numbers in my opponent’s tax plan don’t add up?
There are better questions to ask than whether the candidates are being “positive” or “negative.” Is the criticism they’re making accurate and fair? Does it tell us something meaningful about the candidate being criticized? Is it relevant to the job he or she will be doing as president? If the answer to those is yes, then there’s nothing wrong with it.
For instance, if I were running against the newest entrant, Lindsey Graham, I might note that while he touts his experience in foreign policy as the foundation of his campaign, on foreign policy questions he’s perpetually wetting his pants in terror, which has some disturbing implications for his decision-making as president. Is there anything illegitimate about that?
But nobody’s naïve here — we know that the accurate, meaningful, and relevant criticisms are likely to be fewer than the ones charging candidates with sins like insufficient ideological purity or dangerous flip-floppery, not to mention the ones that delve into the candidates’ personal lives. And with so many candidates, the chances that the race will devolve into a thunderdome of pummelling and recrimination are pretty high. But in and of itself, that doesn’t mean the Republican primaries will be any less edifying than they would be if they were entirely civil and polite. At least it’ll be entertaining.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Week, June 3, 2015
“The Political Consequences?: Will Republicans Suffer Politically If The Supreme Court Strikes Down ObamaCare? Don’t Count On It
Next month, the Supreme Court might rule in King v. Burwell that the Affordable Care Act does not make subsidies available on insurance exchanges established by the federal government. In a rational world, this argument would be laughed out of court, as even former Republican politicians and congressional staffers have suggested. But that’s not the world we live in.
So it’s worth considering the political fallout if the Supreme Court’s Republican nominees throw the U.S.’s health care market into chaos. The short answer is that, with some notable exceptions, Republicans could very well get away with it.
The policy consequences of such a ruling are much clearer: It would be a disaster. Without subsidies, the vast majority of people would not be able to afford insurance, and therefore would not be subject to the mandate to carry insurance. As a result, younger and healthier people would drop out of the insurance market, creating an actuarial death spiral in which more and more expensive policies are offered to fewer and fewer customers — until the exchanges collapse. Millions of people stand to lose their insurance as a result.
This, of course, is why Congress did make subsidies available on the federally established exchanges. It certainly didn’t go to the trouble of creating a federal backstop that was designed to fail. And until a few libertarian fanatics willfully misread the law as a Hail Mary in their legal war on the ACA, nobody on either side of the aisle involved in the bill thought otherwise.
Should Republicans be careful what they wish for? Possibly. “Fear of change has been the right’s most powerful weapon in the health-care wars since they began under Harry Truman,” writes New York‘s Jonathan Chait. “Seeing their weapon turned against them is a frightening sensation, one they are likely to experience many times again.” The GOP “might be better off if the court just left the law as is,” agrees The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent. Even The Wall Street Journal editorial page is worried.
The idea that destroying ObamaCare would be politically counterproductive is superficially plausible. Any such decision would be a 5-4 opinion with only Republican-nominated judges in the majority, over at least one lengthy dissent. The Republican-controlled Congress could restore the subsidies by passing a one-paragraph bill, as President Obama will surely emphasize repeatedly.
Congress could try to pass the buck to Obama by passing a “fix” loaded with poison pills that the president would have to veto, but I agree with Chait and Sargent that the Republican conference is too dysfunctional to pull this off. And when Congress fails to act, overwhelmingly Republican-controlled statehouses could solve the problem by establishing their own exchanges — could, but in most cases won’t.
So a Republican Supreme Court takes health insurance away from millions of people, and Republican-controlled governments fail to take simple steps to solve the problem. That has to be a political disaster for the GOP, right?
Not necessarily. “If the Obama Administration loses in the Supreme Court,” argues New Yorker legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, “the political pain will fall almost exclusively on the president and his party.” And counterintuitive as it might seem, political science favors Toobin.
The problem is that a separation-of-powers system dilutes accountability, and voters generally lack the information that will allow them to sort out the blame for a given disaster. Presidents generally get both more credit and more blame for what happens under their watch than is justified by their power.
This is reflected in the fact that the ACA — a statute that required immense congressional skill on the part of Democrats to pass — is commonly known as ObamaCare. To voters who aren’t Democratic partisans, Republican assertions that Obama is at fault for any bad outcomes that arise from ObamaCare will carry a lot of weight. The media, which tends to give credence to even hare-brained Republican notions out of a misguided effort to remain balanced, is unlikely to make it much clearer.
It may also seem as if Republicans would take the rap for a decision written by a bare majority of Republican-nominated justices, but this overlooks how little the public knows about the Supreme Court. Only a little more than a quarter of the public can name the chief justice. The vast majority of voters will have no idea whether the decision was 5-4 or unanimous, let alone the partisan details of the split. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might write her greatest dissent, but it’s hard to imagine it changing many minds, given that only a tiny minority reads Supreme Court opinions and almost all of them know what they think about the case beforehand.
So in general, I do think Toobin is right. Republicans in Congress and in deep red states can probably avoid any consequences. But there is one twist. Republicans are most vulnerable in states with federally established exchanges that are led by the GOP, but tend to swing to the Democrats in presidential elections. Voters in those states are more likely to blame Republicans for not establishing a state exchange.
As it happens, one such state is Wisconsin, whose governor is a frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2016. The Republican primary electorate will prevent Scott Walker from signing a bill establishing a state exchange, but his refusal will make it harder for the GOP to duck the issue. In this instance, it might be harder for Republicans to deflect responsibility to Obama than it would be otherwise.
Ultimately, the political consequences of a Supreme Court ruling against the government are difficult to predict. But what we know for sure is that it would be best for the Supreme Court to uphold ObamaCare — so we don’t have to find out.
By: Scott Lemieux, The Week, May 27, 2015
“A Party In Search Of A Message On ISIS”: Republican Presidential Candidates And Their Magical Unicorns
Likely Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump appeared on Fox News last night and boasted he knows exactly what to do to “defeat ISIS very quickly.” He quickly added, however, “I’m not going to tell what you it is.”
When host Greta Van Susteren suggested he should share his secret plan, Trump replied, “If I run, and if I win, I don’t want the enemy to know what I’m doing.” He added, however, that there really is “a method of defeating them quickly and effectively and having total victory.”
He just doesn’t want to tell anyone what this method is.
It’s obviously easy to laugh at buffoonery, but there’s a larger significance to exchanges like these: Republican presidential candidates are eager to talk about ISIS and U.S. foreign policy in the region. They’re just not sure what to say.
On msnbc yesterday morning, for example,Joe Scarborough asked Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) about the ISIS threat. The Republican senator has apparently come up with a plan:
“You know, I think the ultimate answer is getting Arab coalitions and boots on the ground that will stop them. You need Turks fighting. The Turks need to have their army up on the board and they need to fight. […]
“I would recognize the Kurds, I would give them weapons, I would take all the weapons in Iran and Afghanistan and give them to the Kurds. But I would do simultaneously is, I would get a peace treaty between the Kurds and the Turks and I would say, ‘Look,’ the Kurds, ‘you’ve got to give up any pretensions to any territory in Turkey. Turkey, let’s go ahead and get along and together wipe out ISIS.”
He neglected to mention his intention to rely on magical unicorns to help establish peace throughout the land.
I mean, really. Paul is going to defeat ISIS, right after establishing peace between the Kurds and the Turks? Does he realize they don’t quite see eye to eye? There’s some history there? As a rule, telling a country like Turkey, “Let’s go ahead and get along” – because Rand Paul says so – isn’t a sure-fire plan for a diplomatic solution.
But this goes beyond Paul and Trump.
One of my favorite examples of the problem came up in February, when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) insisted the United States must “aggressively … take the fight to ISIS” and demonstrate that “we’re willing to take appropriate action” against terrorist targets. When ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked Walker, “You don’t think 2,000 air strikes is taking it to ISIS in Syria and Iraq?” the governor had no idea how to respond.
The New York Times added last week on the familiar dynamic:
Based on recent interviews with several declared and likely candidates, as well as their foreign policy speeches and off-the-cuff remarks, a picture emerges of a Republican field that sounds both hawkish and hesitant about fighting the Islamic State – especially before its warriors find ways to bring the fight to American soil, a threat that Mr. Bush, Mr. Walker and Mr. Graham foresee. […]
Yet most of the Republicans are also reluctant and even evasive when it comes to laying out detailed plans, preferring instead to criticize Mr. Obama’s war strategy.
Yes, that’s where they excel. President Obama has launched thousands of airstrikes against ISIS target, and he’s helped assemble an international coalition, but Republicans are absolutely certain that the White House’s approach is wholly inadequate.
If elected, they would instead pursue a totally different policy, consisting of … well, that’s where things get a little hazy. The Guardian’s Trevor Timm added this week:
The vague, bulls****-y statements made by Republican candidates would be hilarious if it wasn’t possible that they’ll lead to more American soldiers dying in the coming years. “Restrain them, tighten the noose, and then taking them out is the strategy” is Jeb Bush’s hot take on Isis. Thanks, Jeb – I can’t believe the Obama administration hasn’t thought of that!
Marco Rubio’s “solution” is even more embarrassing: according to The Times, he responded to a question about what he would do differently – and this is real – by quoting from the movie Taken: “We will look for you, we will find you and we will kill you.”
Yep, that was dumb, though I suppose it’s marginally better than last night’s Trump special: “I’m not going to tell what you it is.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 28, 2015
“How Dems Can Peel Off GOP Voters”: The Birth Of The Left-Wing Wedge Issue
Here’s a little datum that may have slid by you: Gallup has just found that on social issues, the country is now equally split between liberals and conservatives. The question was: “Thinking about social issues, would you say your views are” very conservative, conservative, liberal, or very liberal?
And the answer came back: Grouping the first two into one category and the last two into another, it was a dead heat at 31 percent each. This is pretty close to seismic. Just five years ago, the conservative edge on social issues was 39 to 22 percent. Now it’s totally wiped out. The implications for our electoral politics are obvious and enormous, and I mean good-enormous.
I’m not sure when people started using the phrase “wedge issue.” But we’re all sure what wedge issues are: They’re cultural politics issues used in elections by the right—and always only the right—to drive a wedge into the liberal coalition. Nixon did it expertly, even though the phrase wasn’t in use back then. Reagan did it well, cleaving so many working-class white ethnics away from the Democratic Party. George H.W. Bush and Jim Baker did it—remember Willie Horton (race was the original wedge issue). And Bush the younger and Karl Rove expanded it out to include guns and gays.
And now, Gallup is suggesting to us, the era of the wedge issue may be over.
But wait! Why should it be over? Maybe it’s time for some liberal wedge issues! I like the sound of that a lot.
Gay marriage was a great wedge issue for Dubya and Rove in 2004, as you’ll recall. They got anti-gay marriage initiatives on the ballot in 11 states, many of them key swing states; studies have tended to find that in Ohio, which Bush carried and which was the difference between victory and defeat in the Electoral College, the initiative did goose evangelical turnout a bit (and remember, Bush won the state by just 118,000 votes out of around 5.6 million cast). It may have also helped him win more African Americans than he would have otherwise, hence the wedge.
Well, in 2016, same-sex marriage can be a wedge issue again, but this time, for our team. The numbers are now so decisive that surely in the key swing states with the bushels of electoral votes, the likely Democratic candidate can cast shame upon the head of her opponent. In Florida, support for gay marriage was 57 percent a year ago, and it’s probably a little higher now. In Ohio, support-to-opposition was 52-37 in 2012, and that’s surely higher now. In Virginia in 2013, support registered at 56 percent. The issue isn’t a loser in any important swing state, with the possible exception of North Carolina, which of course is just icing for the Democrats anyway.
How could Hillary Clinton and her party use this, exactly? That gets a little harder to say. The thing that makes a wedge issue a wedge issue is that, historically anyway, it’s been about fear. The blacks are coming. The gays are coming. The anti-gun nuts are going to be pounding on your door, warrant in hand. As has often been said, it’s the best motivator in politics.
The crucial psychic element of fear-mongering is that you have to persuade the majority that some minority is “taking over” and they, your majority, will soon be the trampled minority unless they act. That’s what gets the blood cooking in the old amygdala. (What?! Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize amygdala?!) Conservatives are much better at this than liberals are, and in any case, if liberals tried this it just wouldn’t make sense or work. Everybody knows that the anti-same-sex-marriage side is losing fast, so fear is a non-starter here.
No, the psychic ingredient of the liberal wedge campaign has to be something else. And of course it has to resonate with people on some level, be in tune with what they’re actually thinking. So, what are people (not just liberals, but average, quasi-informed people) thinking about conservatives right now? I’d suggest it’s that they’re just out of it. Out of touch with the times. Holding us back.
Certainly this is so with respect to same-sex marriage, although the problem is hardly limited to that by a long shot. One issue I’d really love to see Clinton and the Democrats plop down smack in the middle of the table this election is the way conservatism today just strangles opportunity for middle-class people, and for young people in particular, in the name of their messianic tax-cutting.
TPM ran a great piece Friday on how the Republican governors who are running for president are destroying their higher-education systems in the name of cutting state income taxes and never, ever raising another tax of any kind. Bobby Jindal has cut taxes six times in Louisiana, which has produced a $1.6 billion shortfall. To plug the gap, he’s cutting higher-ed funding by as much as $600 million, which is 82 percent of state higher-ed aid. Scott Walker’s half-a-billion dollars in tax cuts in Wisconsin have led to a $2 billion shortfall, so he’s slashing higher ed by $300 million.
These, too, are wedge issues, if you ask me. Republicans send their kids to college too. Yes, they like their tax cuts. But I would assume that they don’t like whopping tuition hikes, or their kids having to drop out of college altogether, any more than Democrats or independents do. If the Democrats can connect these dots in the right way—on this and a whole range of Warrenesque “household economics” issues—they can peel off a decent chunk of voters who have been traditionally Republican.
Republicans will still roll out their wedge issues, but it seems that the pickings are pretty slim. Fear just isn’t selling. To borrow from A.J. Liebling’s nice line about sweet Louisiana corn, fear just doesn’t travel well anymore outside the right-wing base. Muslim-bashing may be the exception to that, but even that won’t work without a triggering event of some kind. Republicans might actually have to talk about issues. Which of course is even worse for them.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 26, 2015
“Koch Brothers’ Humiliating Secret”: Why Even Their Billions Can’t Save The GOP From Self-Destruction
Faced with the nightmare of up to 20-something GOP presidential candidates in 2016, Fox News last week announced its bid for sanity: It would limit its debate to the top 10 candidates in national polls. Now David Koch tells Larry Kudlow that he and brother Charles are likely to distribute some of the $900 million they’ve socked away for 2016 to “several” contenders, not just one Republican candidate.
Paul Waldman reads this as an attempt to cull the GOP field, and so do I. The Kochs can spread the wealth, at least among Republicans, because the entire 2016 roster supports their tax-slashing, regulation-gutting, climate-change accelerating policies. Their real interest is having a limited debate among the “grown-ups” of the party and sending a strong candidate off to face the Democratic nominee, most likely Hillary Clinton.
Charles Koch said something similar last month to USA Today, specifically mentioning Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. ”Those are the ones we have talked to the most and who seem to be the possible leaders,” Koch said.
At the time, Charles’s comments were widely interpreted as cleaning up an earlier mess made by brother David, when he told New York GOP donors that the Kochs would only get involved “when the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination.” That was taken as a sign they backed the man who turned Wisconsin into an arm of Koch Industries.
When Charles Koch came out days later and said the brothers would in fact back “several” GOP candidates, I took it as evidence that they recognized that Walker had stumbled early and often in his first forays into national politics, and he shouldn’t be their only bet.
Now I think it’s a sign of many things, none of them good for the GOP.
First, even though the Democrats’ 2014 effort to raise awareness of the Kochs’ control of the GOP was widely perceived as a failure, it succeeded in making the Kochs edgy about their public image. They don’t want anybody IDed as the Kochs’ man.
It’s also a signal they don’t see anyone who’s a slam-dunk winner: Walker and Jeb Bush have matched each other for missteps all year, and the Kochs can’t afford to back a loser.
But it’s also a sign that for all their influence with the GOP field, the Kochs can’t force a change in the top candidates’ political platform. Despite their claims that they’re still libertarian on abortion rights and marriage equality, and despite evidence they support comprehensive immigration reform, the brothers don’t even pretend to be searching for a candidate who’s moderate on any of those things.
Even the great and powerful Kochs can’t force GOP moderation on those issues — and they don’t really care that much, because their political commitments are all about their bottom line, anyway.
While the Kochs look for a way to prop up “the possible leaders” of the GOP field, Fox will try to stage-manage the clown show. Fox’s decision to use national polls, rather than polling in key primary-state races, has the benefit of wider inclusion. Biographic and demographic curiosities like neurosurgeon Ben Carson and businesswoman Carly Fiorina, two “non-politicians” who don’t have a prayer of running serious, nationwide campaigns, will likely make the cut.
Thus the Fox debate stage will likely feature two Latinos (Cruz and Rubio), plus an African American and a woman, vying to lead a party in which white men make up the majority of voters.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported Friday that the Kochs’ efforts were eclipsing Karl Rove and his American Crossroads empire, which failed spectacularly in the 2012 cycle. Rove is suffering for his ties to the last, spectacularly unsuccessful GOP president, George W. Bush – but he doesn’t particularly get along with Bush’s brother. Not to worry: Crossroads seems to be carving out a role in attacking Hillary Clinton.
But Rove, too, was supposed to be seeking the great GOP moderate after Tea Party extremists hijacked his party and made it unelectable in presidential races. Neither Rove nor the Kochs seem able to steer the field away from demographically destructive policies on gay rights or immigration. Money can’t buy moderation on social issues, at least not yet, so the GOP’s best hopes involve trashing the Democratic nominee in 2016.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 26, 2015
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