“It’s Not About Fundamentals”: The Internal Republican Phony War Intensifies
For the cynical-minded, today’s front-line reporting from the Struggle for the Soul of the Republican Party can induce bitter laughter: in response to “establishment” talk that Republicans need a clearer and more systematic conservative message that is marketed un-stupidly, some self-conscious conservative activists are “pushing back,” per a deeply confused WaPo piece from Paul Kane and Rosalind S. Helderman:
After nearly two weeks of listening to GOP officials pledge to assert greater control over the party and its most strident voices in the wake of Romney’s loss, grass-roots activists have begun to fight back, saying that they are not to blame for the party’s losses in November.
“The moderates have had their candidate in 2008 and they had their candidate in 2012. And they got crushed in both elections. Now they tell us we have to keep moderating. If we do that, will we win?” said Bob Vander Plaats, president of the Family Leader. Vander Plaats is an influential Christian conservative who opposed Romney in the Iowa caucuses 10 months ago and opposed Sen. John McCain’s candidacy four years ago.
So now the shallow trenches have been dug for the phony war:
The conservative backlash sets up an internal fight for the direction of the Republican Party, as many top leaders in Washington have proposed moderating their views on citizenship for illegal immigrants, to appeal to Latino voters. In addition, many top GOP officials have called for softening the party’s rhetoric on social issues, following the embarrassing showing by Senate candidates who were routed after publicly musing about denying abortion services to women who had been raped.
Yes, years from now conservatives will sit around campfires and sing songs about the legendary internecine battles of late 2012, when father fought son and brother fought brother across a chasm of controversy as to whether 98% or 99% of abortions should be banned; whether undocumented workers should be branded and utilized as “guest workers,” loaded onto cattle cars and shipped home, or simply immiserated; whether the New Deal/Great Society programs should be abolished in order to cut upper-income taxes or abolished in order to boost Pentagon spending. There’s also a vicious, take-no-prisons fight over how quickly to return the role of the federal government in the economy to its pre-1930s role as handmaiden to industry. Blood will flow in the streets as Republicans battle over how to deal with health care after Obamacare is repealed and 50 million or more people lose health insurance. Tax credits and risk pools or just “personal responsibility?”
Look, there could be a true “period for reflection” and “struggle for the soul of the Republican Party;” the list of heterodox conservative thinkers that David Brooks trots out in his latest New York Times column would provide a good starting point. The trouble is none of these people have a bit of influence over Republican political actors, particularly when they are heterodox. The real debate is between people like Reince Priebus and John Cornyn and people like Bob Vander Plaats and Ted Cruz. They are entitled to fight with each other all day long about how many zygotes could fit on the head of a pin, and how deeply the 47% have been corrupted into permanent serfdom. But the MSM really, really needs to show it understands this isn’t a fight about any kind of fundamentals.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 19, 2012
“Sentimental Storytelling”: Beware Of Mitt Romney’s “Softer Side”
Everyone is talking about Mitt Romney’s “softer side.”
That’s how some reporters are characterizing a recent shift in Romney’s stump speeches.
Because Governor Romney has started talking about dead people: the Navy SEAL who died in Benghazi. The 14-year-old boy who died of leukemia (profiled at the Convention). The long-lost friend stricken with multiple disabilities, who drags himself to meet Mitt Romney at a campaign rally. And dies the next day.
The New York Times reports Romney’s stump speech: “I reached down and I put my hand on Billy’s shoulder and I whispered into his ear, and I said, ‘Billy, God bless you, I love you.’ And he whispered right back to me—and I couldn’t quite hear what he said… [He] died the next day.”
And a hush fell over the crowd.
What does this have to do with running for president?
Look, people tell tear-jerkers about dead people all the time. Dying moms and kids especially.
Glenn Beck did it with his book The Christmas Sweater, in which a boy turns up his nose at a particularly unattractive but dearly-bought sweater his mother gifted him for Christmas.
And she dies in a fiery car crash a few pages later.
Beck learned the genre, I once argued, from a particularly bruising subgenre of Mormon sentimentality: Sunday School manual anecdotes and movies that circle like vultures around accidental, lonely, and untimely deaths. Just to make us cry.
This sentimental storytelling is an American tradition dating back at least to the nineteenth century. It encourages us to zero-in on the anecdote—to identify with and shed tears for the helplessness of the victim—and lose complete sight of the big picture.
Is there anything in Romney’s foreign policy that will ensure that more Navy SEALS, sailors, and soldiers will come home quickly?
Does the Romney-Ryan budget maintain the social safety net on which disabled people depend?
And how will repealing the Affordable Health Care Act help out the thousands upon thousands of American families who don’t have access to medical care or who face medical bankruptcy as their loved ones fight cancer?
Time to ask harder questions about the “softer side.”
By: Joanna Brooks, Religion Dispatches, October 11, 2012
“Mitt’s Moochers”: The Dangerous Lie His Funders Love To Hear
Mitt Romney got some unwanted attention early this year when he flatly stated, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” When challenged on this remark he assured Americans that the safety net for the very poor was a given, safe from any budget and tax code tinkering in Washington. This was a sinister explanation since Romney’s tax and spending plan — or as much of it as can be deciphered — calls for further tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of social services that he claimed were safe.
Now, we see that it’s not just the “very poor” who don’t merit Romney’s “concern.” At the now-infamous $50,000-a-plate fundraiser in Florida, Romney wrote off the concerns of the 47 percent of Americans who don’t owe federal income taxes, saying that half of Americans are “dependent on government,” “believe that they are the victims,” and have the gall to “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”
That 47 percent includes families and individuals with low incomes — about 23 percent of taxpayers, according to the Tax Policy Center. It also includes those for whom tax credits for children and working families have eliminated tax burdens — about 7 percent. It also includes seniors who have left the workforce — about 10 percent. Over half of the 47 percent pay federal payroll taxes. All are subject to state and local taxes, many of which, like sales taxes, are more regressive than federal taxes. (And if we ever see more Romney tax returns, we may find some years when the Romney’s were in that entitled 47 percent.)
As conservative writer Reihan Salam points out in the National Review, policies like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit — responsible for much of this tax relief for working families — were conservative ideas meant to reduce the “dependency” that Romney so reviles, by “encourag[ing] people get on the first rungs of the jobs ladder, and to become less dependent over time.”
Romney was telling the well-heeled guests at this fundraising dinner that these people — middle-class parents, low-income workers, the unemployed, the elderly — aren’t interested in working hard despite the fact that most of them report to the IRS each year that they work quite a lot. This isn’t just tin-eared politics. Like Romney’s comments on the “very poor,” it represents a profound misunderstanding of how Americans’ lives work and how his policies would affect those lives.
But even talking about the “47 percent versus the 53 percent” belies the fact that nobody in America is free from at least some government “dependency.” We all rely on roads, hospitals, schools, firefighters, police officers, and our military — even Mitt Romney and his $50,000-a-plate friends. Romney himself has relied on the government’s safety net for businesses, securing a federal bailout for Bain & Company. Nobody succeeds without some help from a stable, functional government. That’s what President Obama was saying when his “you didn’t build that” comments were taken out of context.
Romney was clearly telling his funders a fantasy story that they love to hear. But that story is a lie, and we shouldn’t accept it from someone who could become a president representing 100 percent of the American people.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Hufffington Post Blog, September 19, 2012
“Simply A Number Decreed As Necessary”: Romney’s Budget Plan Requires Even Deeper Cuts Than Ryan’s
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will hit the campaign trail today in his first week as Mitt Romney’s running mate. Deservedly, much of the attention on Ryan so far has been regarding his radical budget, which hugely shifts taxation down the income scale and guts important government investments.
But Romney’s budget also includes substantial reductions to key federal investments and the social safety net, in order to cut taxes for the wealthy and maintain sky-high defense spending. In fact, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, Romney’s budget would require even deeper cuts to spending that Ryan’s, in order to keep defense spending at an arbitrarily set percentage of the economy:
– Under the Ryan plan, core defense spending (the defense budget other than war costs and some relatively small items such as military family housing),[11] would total about $5.7 trillion over the ten-year period 2013-2022. The Romney plan would increase core defense spending to $7.9 trillion. The Ryan plan increases core defense funding modestly relative to the existing BCA caps, but core defense would nevertheless decline to 2.6 percent of GDP by 2022. In contrast, Governor Romney would increase core defense to 4 percent of GDP.
– The Ryan plan would cut entitlement and discretionary programs (outside of core defense and net interest) by $5.2 trillion over ten years.[12] The Romney proposal would cut this spending by between $7.0 trillion and $9.6 trillion, depending upon whether the budget is balanced. Thus, Governor Romney’s ten-year cuts would range from one-third deeper than those in the Ryan budget to almost twice as deep as the Ryan cuts.
These cuts would have severe consequences for individual programs, including potentially throwing 13 million people off of the food stamp program.
As Bloomberg News noted, Ryan’s tax plan involves giving slightly more away to the wealthy than does Romney’s, but Romney more than makes up for it with his budget’s gutting of programs that aid the middle-class and low-income Americans. And he does it in order to preserve a level of defense spending that has nothing to do with defense priorities, but is simply a number that Romney decreed is necessary.
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, August 13, 2012
“The Job Creator”: Repeat After Me, Mitt Romney Doesn’t Care About Jobs
If you’re running a campaign against an incumbent president when the economy’s persistently sluggish and unemployment is over 8%, you are naturally going to harp on said president’s failure to create more jobs. This is true even if you are the nominee of the Jewish Anti-Abortion Isolationist Foodie Party (just to make something up), and really just care about “your issues.”
As it happens, Mitt Romney is the nominee of a party whose activist base and elite opinion-leaders alike mainly care about relieving businesses and the wealthy from taxes and regulations, paring back or eliminating the New Deal/Great Society social safety net (along with resisting extensions of it like the Affordable Care Act), and reversing most of the cultural trends of the late twentieth century. Do they think their agenda will generally produce a stronger society and economy, making Americans healthier, wealthier and wiser? Probably, though the “constitutional” wing of the conservative movement tends to treat small government, laissez-faire capitalism, and a patriarchal culture as having been divinely ordained via the Declaration of Independence, and thus as normative regardless of the practical consequences. Would they think that regardless of the current GDP and employment statistics? You betcha, because they were advancing much the same agenda during the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s. Would they support the same agenda if the federal budget were balanced? Absolutely, as we know from their argument prior to enactment of the Bush tax cuts that the federal government was in danger of running surpluses so large that it would have to start buying up assets to soak up the excess revenues.
I mention these familiar if oft-forgotten facts by way of presenting this snippet at The Hill from recent conservative semi-apostate Juan Williams, who is wondering what the Mitt Romney’s actual agenda might be to boost employment:
[F]ixing the economy is the entire basis of Romney’s campaign. So what plans does the GOP candidate have to rev up the economy?
His best-known idea is cutting taxes. But there is no way to specify how many jobs that will create. After-tax profits for corporations are already high.
His most concrete idea for creating jobs is to approve construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The idea has political potency because President Obama, citing environmental concerns, denied a permit for TransCanada Corp. to construct the 1,700-mile pipeline.
However, the number of jobs that would be created by Keystone could generously be described as modest.
That number, according to a study Williams cites, is 1,400. He also goes on to report that less than half of Republicans think Romney has an actual plan for the economy.
While the search for a Romney/GOP “jobs plan” is, to put it mildly, elusive, they do have very concrete ideas for reshaping the tax code and the federal government. It’s called the Ryan Budget, and whatever its long-term effect via the alleged moral tonic to the poor and the liberating impact on “job creators,” the most immediate and by far the most certain consequences for jobs are negative. I mean, you may rhetorically say that public-sector jobs aren’t “real” or “good” or that they pay too much, but they are jobs, not turnips. Combined with the restrictive monetary policies virtually all Republicans favor these days, the short-term prognosis for Republican rule is higher, not lower, unemployment.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 17, 2012
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