“Zombies Against Medicare”: The Right Has Never Abandoned Its Dream Of Killing The Program
Medicare turns 50 this week, and it has been a very good half-century. Before the program went into effect, Ronald Reagan warned that it would destroy American freedom; it didn’t, as far as anyone can tell. What it did do was provide a huge improvement in financial security for seniors and their families, and in many cases it has literally been a lifesaver as well.
But the right has never abandoned its dream of killing the program. So it’s really no surprise that Jeb Bush recently declared that while he wants to let those already on Medicare keep their benefits, “We need to figure out a way to phase out this program for others.”
What is somewhat surprising, however, is the argument he chose to use, which might have sounded plausible five years ago, but now looks completely out of touch. In this, as in other spheres, Mr. Bush often seems like a Rip Van Winkle who slept through everything that has happened since he left the governor’s office — after all, he’s still boasting about Florida’s housing-bubble boom.
Actually, before I get to Mr. Bush’s argument, I guess I need to acknowledge that a Bush spokesman claims that the candidate wasn’t actually calling for an end to Medicare, he was just talking about things like raising the age of eligibility. There are two things to say about this claim. First, it’s clearly false: in context, Mr. Bush was obviously talking about converting Medicare into a voucher system, along the lines proposed by Paul Ryan.
And second, while raising the Medicare age has long been a favorite idea of Washington’s Very Serious People, a couple of years ago the Congressional Budget Office did a careful study and discovered that it would hardly save any money. That is, at this point raising the Medicare age is a zombie idea, which should have been killed by analysis and evidence, but is still out there eating some people’s brains.
But then, Mr. Bush’s real argument, as opposed to his campaign’s lame attempt at a rewrite, is just a bigger zombie.
The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful. But when they make their case to the public they usually shy away from making their real case, and have even, incredibly, sometimes posed as the program’s defenders against liberals and their death panels.
What Medicare’s would-be killers usually argue, instead, is that the program as we know it is unaffordable — that we must destroy the system in order to save it, that, as Mr. Bush put it, we must “move to a new system that allows [seniors] to have something — because they’re not going to have anything.” And the new system they usually advocate is, as I said, vouchers that can be applied to the purchase of private insurance.
The underlying premise here is that Medicare as we know it is incapable of controlling costs, that only the only way to keep health care affordable going forward is to rely on the magic of privatization.
Now, this was always a dubious claim. It’s true that for most of Medicare’s history its spending has grown faster than the economy as a whole — but this is true of health spending in general. In fact, Medicare costs per beneficiary have consistently grown more slowly than private insurance premiums, suggesting that Medicare is, if anything, better than private insurers at cost control. Furthermore, other wealthy countries with government-provided health insurance spend much less than we do, again suggesting that Medicare-type programs can indeed control costs.
Still, conservatives scoffed at the cost-control measures included in the Affordable Care Act, insisting that nothing short of privatization would work.
And then a funny thing happened: the act’s passage was immediately followed by an unprecedented pause in Medicare cost growth. Indeed, Medicare spending keeps coming in ever further below expectations, to an extent that has revolutionized our views about the sustainability of the program and of government spending as a whole.
Right now is, in other words, a very odd time to be going on about the impossibility of preserving Medicare, a program whose finances will be strained by an aging population but no longer look disastrous. One can only guess that Mr. Bush is unaware of all this, that he’s living inside the conservative information bubble, whose impervious shield blocks all positive news about health reform.
Meanwhile, what the rest of us need to know is that Medicare at 50 still looks very good. It needs to keep working on costs, it will need some additional resources, but it looks eminently sustainable. The only real threat it faces is that of attack by right-wing zombies.
By: Paul Waldman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 27, 2015
“The Southern Strategy Doesn’t Work Anymore”: Rick Perry Wants To Reach Out To Black People. He’ll Have To Do A Lot Better
Yesterday, Rick Perry went to the National Press Club in Washington to deliver a speech that may have seemed unusual, in that it was characterized as an effort to reach out to African Americans, but actually contained much less than meets the eye. Perry presented traditional Republican priorities — tax cuts, regulatory rollback, slashing safety net programs — as a gift the GOP wants to bestow on African Americans and acknowledged that his party hasn’t exactly been welcoming to them. But if this is “reaching out” beyond the whites who form almost the entirety of the GOP’s voters, it isn’t going to accomplish much. Here’s an excerpt:
There has been, and there will continue to be an important and a legitimate role for the federal government in enforcing Civil Rights. Too often, we Republicans, me included, have emphasized our message on the 10th Amendment but not our message on the 14th. An Amendment, it bears reminding, that was one of the great contributions of Republican party to American life, second only to the abolition of slavery.
For too long, we Republicans have been content to lose the black vote, because we found we didn’t need it to win. But, when we gave up trying to win the support of African-Americans, we lost our moral legitimacy as the party of Lincoln, as the party of equal opportunity for all. It’s time for us, once again, to reclaim our heritage as the only party in our country founded on the principle of freedom for African-Americans.
We know what Democrats will propose in 2016, the same thing, the same things that Democrats have proposed for decades, more government spending on more government programs. And there is a proper and an important role for government assistance in keeping people on their feet. But few Presidents have done more to expand government assistance than President Obama. Today we spend nearly one trillion dollars a year on means tested antipoverty programs. And yet, black poverty remains stagnant.
Let’s be clear about one thing: The GOP didn’t “give up” trying to win the black vote. It spent decades building and maintaining electoral majorities on the encouragement and exploitation of racism. It was a sin of commission, not a sin of omission. And the reason the party is now reevaluating the “Southern strategy” isn’t that it had some kind of moral epiphany, it’s because the strategy doesn’t work anymore.
While we’re on this topic, permit me a digression on this “party of Lincoln” business, which is something Republicans say when they’re trying to convince people they aren’t actually hostile to black people. As Antonin Scalia would say, it’s pure applesauce. Here’s the truth: One hundred fifty years ago, the Republican Party was the liberal party, and the Democratic Party was the conservative party. They reversed those positions over time for a variety of reasons, but the Republicans of today are not Abraham Lincoln’s heirs. Ask yourself this: If he had been around in 1864, which side do you think Rick Perry would have been on? If you took more than half a second to answer, “The Confederacy, of course,” then you’re being way too generous to him, not to mention the overwhelming majority of his fellow Republicans.
All that isn’t to say that it’s impossible for Republicans to turn over a new leaf and truly give African Americans a reason to consider their party. But if they’re going to be at all successful, it will take both a change in policy and a change in attitude.
A change in policy, at least outside of some very specific areas, is extremely unlikely to happen. Perry discussed the issue of incarcerations related to the drug war, and that’s one example where Republicans really are coming together with Democrats to reevaluate the policies of recent decades. They deserve credit for that. But there’s almost nothing else they’re offering, other than to argue that the things they already wanted to do, such as cutting taxes, will be great for black people, too.
Then there’s the argument Perry and others make about safety net programs: that people of color are being enslaved by them, and if we only cut those shackles then they’ll rise up. This argument — that the Republican Party wants to slash the safety net only because it cares so much for the poor — has never persuaded anyone in the past, and it isn’t likely to in the future.
And what about the change in attitude? The most fundamental reason Republicans can’t get the votes of African Americans is that the party communicates to them, again and again and again, that it isn’t just ignoring their needs but is actively hostile to them. When conservative justices gut the Voting Rights Act to the cheers of Republicans, and then states such as Perry’s Texas move immediately to impose voting restrictions that they know will disproportionately affect African Americans, it sends a very clear message.
Perry began his speech with a harrowing story of a lynching in Texas in 1916, which was surely meant to convey to African Americans that he understands the legacy of racism. But it also sends an accompanying message: that he believes racism is about the violent oppression of the past and has nothing to do with the lives African Americans lead today. And that’s another message African Americans hear loud and clear. Every time any issue of race comes up, whether it’s about police mistreatment or discrimination in employment or anything else, the first response of conservatives is always to say, “Oh c’mon, what are you complaining about? Racism is over.”
If Perry really wanted to “reach out” to African Americans and convince them that something has changed, here’s a way he could do it: He could say something about the endless stream of race-baiting that comes from the most prominent conservative media figures. If you’ve listened to Rush Limbaugh or watched Bill O’Reilly, you know that one of the central themes of their programs is that white people are America’s only victimized racial group, while African Americans form a criminal class that deserves to be constantly harassed by the police because they’re a bunch of thugs the rest of us need protection from. Day in and day out, those programs’ white audiences are told that Obama is some kind of Black Panther enacting a campaign of racial vengeance upon them. “All too often I have seen this president divide us by race,” says Perry, when the media figures his party lionizes are constantly telling their audiences to see politics through the lens of their own whiteness and nurture their racial resentments.
And Perry can tell black people that it’s welfare that’s really keeping them down, but because of his party, the first African American president had to literally show his birth certificate to prove he’s a real American. That’s just one of the things it’s going to take an awful lot of reaching out to make them forget.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, July 3, 2015
“John Roberts To America; I’m In Charge Here”: A Blunt Message To Politicians To Stop Abusing The Judiciary
When, just over two years ago, right-wing superlawyer Michael Carvin filed his first lawsuit seeking to deny Affordable Care Act tax credits to millions of individuals in states with federally operated exchanges, die-hard ACA opponents saw one reason why the Supreme Court might use an isolated four-word phrase to sabotage the ACA—that all five conservative justices would vote their political gut. As decision day approached, many ACA supporters (including me) suspected that the challengers’ political appeal might only be overcome if one or two of the conservative justices—Anthony Kennedy and/or Chief Justice John Roberts—would embrace states rights–based constitutional arguments to save the law.
Last Thursday, when the Court issued its decision in the case, King v. Burwell, all these hopes and fears about the political and ideological vectors at play, specifically, with Roberts, turned out to be dead wrong. The chief justice had bigger fish to fry—personal, institutional, and policy priorities—that led him to uphold the Obama administration’s decision to make tax credits available nationwide:
- Asserting his personal leadership of the Court, by mobilizing a 6-3 bipartisan majority, and taking the heat for writing a no-holds-barred, decisive opinion in the most politically divisive case on this year’s docket;
- Continuing an ever more evident drive to advance the Court’s power vis-à-vis the two elected branches, as the final decider and major direction-setter on the nation’s most fought-over policy issues;
- Sending a blunt message to conservative activists, lawyers, and politicians to stop abusing the judiciary as a handy back-door gimmick to reverse political defeats they have been unable to reverse in political arenas—in particular, to stop bringing cases designed to “undo” the ACA;
- Sending a subtle, gratuitous, but nevertheless quite discernible piece of policy advice to Republican politicians and policy-makers, in the form of a reminder of the ACA’s Republican ancestry in Massachusetts’ 2006 Romneycare reform law, referencing that model’s conservative credentials as a way to “expand coverage” while relying on private health insurance markets.
As the litigation made its way toward the high court, ACA opponents had been upfront about their bet that conservatives on the bench shared, and would act on their animus to the president’s signature legislative accomplishment. In September 2014, after the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had voted to vacate and rehear a 2-1 decision in his favor, Carvin candidly opined that raw partisan politics would drive the Supreme Court to preempt the appellate court’s consideration of the case: “I don’t know that four justices, who are needed to [grant review of the case] here . . . are going to give much of a damn about what a bunch of Obama appointees on the D.C. Circuit think.” Asked if he believed he would lose the votes of any of the five conservative justices, he smiled and said, “Oh, I don’t think so.” Carvin’s cynical take was hardly unique; some of his allies openly forecast that Roberts would feel a need to appease conservatives who excoriated him for his 2012 vote to save the ACA.
Last Thursday, Roberts dashed conservative hopes and liberal fears of a partisan political decision. To the contrary, as conservative blogger Josh Blackman ruefully explained on a Federalist Society post-mortem conference call, the decision effectively seemed to elevate the ACA into a kind of “untouchable super-statute that is beyond reach.” Blackman characterized Roberts’s message as, “This is over . . . We’re through”—meaning, we’re through hearing cases ginned up by our clever lawyer friends to precipitate judicial de facto repeal of the law. Roberts’s brush-off of these core allies was foreshadowed by remarks he made at the University of Nebraska a few days before Carvin bared his cynical partisan take on the conservative justices. Then the chief justice said he was “worried about people having [the] perception” that the Court is no less a political body than Congress or the presidency. He attributed this trend to polarization in the elected branches, saying that he did not “want that to spill over and affect us.” Though widely disregarded at the time as standard civics class pap, it now appears clear that Roberts was serious and motivated by clear-eyed concern about the Court’s stature. As he observed in his 2005 confirmation hearings, “It is a very serious threat to the independence and integrity of the courts to politicize them.” King v. Burwell posed just such an institutional threat, and it was his job as chief justice to dispel it.
But to Roberts, protecting the Court’s reputation does not mean staying above the fray, much less retreating to the sidelines. On the contrary, the decision showed how focused he is on enhancing the Court’s power, well understanding that its non-political image is, ironically, essential to its clout. His opinion reasoned that, read in the context of the overall statute and Congress’ “plan,” the four-word phrase “established by the state” on which the challengers relied was “ambiguous.” When statutes are ambiguous, long-standing black-letter law requires courts to defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation, rather than impose an interpretation that the court considers correct. But Roberts did not take that route. Instead, he said, the Court must decide for itself what the law means, on the ground—never before asserted so categorically—that the availability of ACA tax credits is “a question of deep economic and political significance that is central to this statutory scheme.” Of course, he then held that the administration’s interpretation was the right call. Administrative law experts were quick to note that, in the words of Ohio State law professor Chris Walker, “King v. Burwell—while a critical win for the Obama Administration—is a judicial power grab over the Executive in the modern administrative state.”
Roberts’s yen to project the Court as a player on the policy question of “deep economic and political significance” posed by the case was also manifest in another theme of his opinion, understated but audacious. Not only did he note the ACA’s roots in Romneycare, but he underscored that law’s record of effectiveness in reducing the “uninsured rate in Massachusetts to 2.6%, by far the lowest in the Nation,” and then went on to observe that the ACA “adopts a version of the three key reforms that made the Massachusetts system successful” (emphasis added), including the affordablity tax credits at issue in King, as well as the “individual mandate” that Roberts upheld as a pay-or-play tax incentive in 2012 in NFIB v. Sebelius. This and other notably favorable descriptions of the ACA in Thursday’s opinion seem aimed at Republican policy-makers and politicians. His message recalls his 2012 approval of the law’s individual mandate as an optional tax incentive—preferable, he wrote, because the “taxing power does not give Congress the same degree of control over individual behavior” as a Commerce Clause–based absolute mandate.
As I wrote after the NFIB decision, Roberts took this policy argument from a 2011 D.C. Circuit opinion by fellow George W. Bush appointee Judge Brett Kavanaugh; that opinion favorably portrayed the ACA as potentially “the leading edge of a shift” to “privatize the social safety net and government assistance programs.” In these opinions, Kavanaugh and Roberts seem to be pitching a line favored in conservative policy circles prior to the recent rise of tea party-style anti-government absolutism—keep and expand the national safety net, but privatize and regulate it through incentives rather than commands. With his decisions in NFIB v. Sebelius and King v. Burwell, however, John Roberts has gone further than merely touting that big-government conservative model for safety net governance, casting the ACA as a product of that model. He has used his power to entrench it—against demands from the left for a command-and-control version of the ACA individual mandate, and against conservatives’ strategy of killing the ACA in court. This, Roberts concluded, is “the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid”—and which, the chief justice made crystal clear, he will be loath to permit, in this case and any other challenge the law’s opponents might cook up.
By: Simon Lazarus, Senior Counsel to the Constitutional Accountability Center; The New Republic, June 27, 2015
“The Enemy Within”: The Koch Brothers, Where Money Equals Freedom And Government Equals Evil
I love a good fight between bad entities, which is why I’m enjoying the brawl that’s taking place between the Koch Brothers and the Republican Party. Too bad they can’t both lose.
The controversy over the effort by libertarian ideologues Charles and David Koch to, in essence, buy the Republican Party provides us an opportunity to once again point out the fundamental malevolence of libertarian ideology. Libertarianism is nothing more than a shameless effort to glorify selfishness, which is why the ideology has such a narrow appeal.
In the libertarian world, the only citizen who has any actual rights is the wealthiest citizen. That citizen can pollute for free, pay people slave wages, put unsafe products on the shelves, and ignore common-sense work safety standards. Local, state and federal governments would, in essence, stand down as the tycoon abuses the population for profit.
This is the sick, dark vision of people like Charles and David Koch–a vision in which money equals freedom and government equals evil. It’s a vision in which being poor and sick means being dead and buried. It’s a vision in which severe economic inequality is considered the natural and logical order, the way things ought to be. It’s an amoral, abhorrent vision.
It was the vision that guided David Koch’s 1980 vice-presidential bid, as Vermont Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders noted in April 2014:
In 1980, David Koch ran as the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1980.
Let’s take a look at the 1980 Libertarian Party platform.
Here are just a few excerpts of the Libertarian Party platform that David Koch ran on in 1980:
“We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.”
“We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.”
“We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.”
“We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.”
“We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.”
“We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service. The present system, in addition to being inefficient, encourages governmental surveillance of private correspondence. Pending abolition, we call for an end to the monopoly system and for allowing free competition in all aspects of postal service.”
“We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.”
“We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.”
“As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.”
“We support repeal of all laws which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.”
“We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.”
“We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.”
“We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.”
“We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
“We support abolition of the Department of Energy.”
“We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.”
“We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.”
“We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called ‘self-protection’ equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.”
“We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.”
“We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.”
“We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.”
“We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.”
“We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.”
“We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.”
“We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”
“We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”
In other words, the agenda of the Koch brothers is not only to defund Obamacare. The agenda of the Koch brothers is to repeal every major piece of legislation that has been signed into law over the past 80 years that has protected the middle class, the elderly, the children, the sick, and the most vulnerable in this country.
Libertarian ideology is nothing less than an existential threat to America’s security, cohesion, safety and health. It seeks to undo the social bonds that tie us together. It wishes to turn rich against poor and powerful against weak. It recognizes no moral code except for that established by the self-serving billionaire.
All of us–progressives, centrists, moderates, even the handful of rational conservatives left–have a moral obligation to fight the cancer of libertarianism and keep it from growing within the body of our democracy; if we don’t fight it, our democracy will soon wind up in hospice care. We must condemn libertarianism as a radical ideology that’s every bit as pernicious as the radical ideologies of the past. We must educate our young people to understand that the end result of Ayn Rand is a social and economic wasteland. We must challenge libertarian ideologues and denounce them for their efforts to destroy the policies that have kept our nation strong since the New Deal. We must, in essence, declare war on libertarian ideology, for it is at war with America’s best values.
Since libertarianism is an assault on our country’s protections and principles, one cannot be both a libertarian and a patriot.
The Kochs have chosen sides.
Which side are you on?
By: D. R. Tucker, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 14, 2015
“Same Conservative Talking Points”: Jeb Bush Won’t Win the GOP Primary If He Keeps Giving Bland Speeches Like This One
On Wednesday, Jeb Bush delivered the biggest speech of his young campaign in Detroit, Michigan, where he promised to lay out a positive agenda in the months ahead. “I will offer a new vision,” the former Florida governor said. “A plan of action that is different than what we have been hearing in Washington D.C.” Political analysts quickly tried to parse Bush’s words to discern any hints about that plan of action.
Those hints are hard to find. Read the transcript; it’s an utterly ordinary speech, filled with bromides against liberalism and big government. Bush cited rising income inequality, stagnant wages, and slow growth as problems that demand big solutions. He talked about the opportunity gap and mentioned Uber and deregulation. And he used the downfall of Detroit as a warning sign for the rest of country. Nothing new, in other words.
Bush did try to spin conservative talking points in a more positive, wonky manner. His most notable comments came about halfway through, when he criticized Washington, D.C.—as in, the Obama administration—for “recklessly degrading the value of work, the incentive to work, and the rewards of work.”
We have seen them cut the definition of a full-time job from 40 to 30 hours, slashing the ability of paycheck earners to make ends meet. We have seen them create welfare programs and tax rules that punish people with lost benefits and higher taxes for moving up those first few rungs of the economic ladder.
In the first sentence, Bush is referring to the provision under the Affordable Care Act that requires employers with more than 50 workers to offer health insurance to any employee that works more than 30 hours. Republicans have criticized the rule as incentivizing employers to reduce their workers’ hours below that threshold. They have suggested changing the definition of a full-time employee to 40 hours per week—a change that the Congressional Budget Office says would increase the deficit and lower the number of Americans with health insurance. Even some conservatives like Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, have come out against it. But it’s a good sound bite—one that shows Bush is aware of ongoing policy arguments in Washington—so he jumped on it.
“Instead of a safety net to cushion our occasional falls,” he added, “they have built a spider web that traps people in perpetual dependence. We have seen them waive the rules that helped so many people escape welfare.”
I had not heard any politician compare the safety net to a “spider web” before, and based on a quick Google search, Bush has not made the comparison before either. It’s reminiscent of Representative Paul Ryan’s analogy of the safety net as a “hammock” that traps the poor in poverty, an analogy that has been harshly criticized. But while a hammock evokes images of laziness and gives agency to the poor, a spider web suggests that the poor are trapped. With many Americans believing that Republicans don’t care enough for the poor, you can understand why Bush settled on the “spider web” analogy.
But does Bush actually reject the “maker and taker” rhetoric? At the Washington Post, Greg Sargent argues yes—or at least that Bush will do so rhetorically. “Message: Jeb Bush will not be 47-percent-ed. He will not be Mitt-ed,” Sargent writes. “He will present a conservative pro-economic-freedom case without committing the fatal political misstep of showing contempt for those who currently depend on government in any form.” That seems broadly right, at least insofar as we can determine Bush’s rhetorical strategy from one speech. Yet, it’s always a tight line to blame government for making the poor dependent without actually blaming the poor themselves.
And when Bush argues that Obama tried to “waive the rules that helped so many people escape welfare,” he’s harkening back to an old, disproven conservative meme against the administration. During the 2012 election, Mitt Romney argued that Obama was undoing welfare reform by offering states waivers allowing them to forego the welfare work requirements, as long as they accomplished the goal of the law— moving welfare recipients to work. In fact, Republican governors had requested the waivers. The Washington Post fact checker gave Romney four Pinnochios for the baseless assertion. But Bush has brought the attack line back.
Overall, Bush seemed to be trying to use the same conservative talking points and attacks, with a more positive spin. Yet, it’s still hard to look at this speech and see what part of the Republican Party it appeals to, at least compared to his competitors. Florida Senator Marco Rubio has a far more comprehensive agenda at this point. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker offers a very conservative governing record and has won three statewide races in four years. Many Republican candidates have switched their economic message to focus on wages and inequality, if only to find a new attack against the president as the recovery strengthens.
Granted, this is just one speech. Bush has plenty of time to deliver concrete policy proposals. But there’s something telling about the ordinariness of his speech, of its generic GOP talking points. There’s no natural constituency for his candidacy, at least in the primary. Bush has said that the GOP nominee must be willing to “lose the primary to win the general.” In other words, to avoid taking far-right positions that doom the candidate in the general election.
Thought about in that light, Bush’s speech makes more sense. Spinning conservative talking points in a positive light, while promising a new agenda, is a campaign platform that could appeal to the full electorate. If he somehow emerged as the Republican nominee, he could be a very credible challenger to Hillary Clinton. Yet, the underlying problem remains: He has to win the nomination. His willingness to lose the primary will, in all likelihood, prove self-fulfilling.
This isn’t just his problem, though; it’s the Republican Party’s. The primary electorate makes it hard for a candidate like Bush, who despite being extremely conservative is nonetheless moderate compared to the other candidates, to win. It forces the eventual nominee to move to the right, eventually putting himself in an almost impossible position to win the general election. The complete blandness of Bush’s speech Wednesday only underlines this dynamic.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, February 5, 2015
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