“Elizabeth Warren’s Real And Imaginary Appeal”: The Trap Of The ‘Hidden Majority’ Is Too Often ‘Fools Gold’
Friday night on the floor of the U.S. Senate as part of a doomed effort no one is much paying attention to is not the ideal context for a Big, Memorable Speech. But the excerpts of Elizabeth Warren’s speech against the Wall Street derivatives swap language of the Cromnibus touted by Miles Mogulescu at HuffPost are indeed pretty powerful, though again, comparing them to Obama’s 2004 Democratic Convention speech viewed live by a big chunk of the politically active population seems more than a bit of a stretch.
If, however, Warren keeps this up, she could very quickly make herself the kind of big public figure she has long been to smaller circles of progressive activists. What’s most interesting about her speech is that she placed as great an emphasis on Wall Street influence in the Obama administration Treasury Department as she did on the legislative provisions in the Cromnibus. She’s pulling no punches. And not only does this indicate she will go to the mats to stop the nomination of Antonio Weiss to a top position at Treasury–a fight she looks likely to win–but that she’s launching a broad challenge to the acceptability of any recent Wall Street vets in the ranks of Democratic executive branch officials or advisors. This represents a clear collision course with the administration, and with Hillary Rodham Clinton (Warren’s constant references to Citi in her speech–so closely identified with the key Clintonian advisory Robert Rubin–could not be a coincidence), even if Warren’s public disavowals of interest in a primary challenge to Clinton represent an unshakable private conviction. You could see, say, Bernie Sanders taking up the banner of a primary challenge with Warren playing a key role in the background whether or not she’s formally in the insurgent camp.
Mogolescu, however, probably reflects the views of a lot of Warren’s fans in thinking that she and only she can topple Clinton, but that she can also put together the transformative super-partisan coalition that progressives once thought Barack Obama might spearhead:
It [Warren’s speech] transformed the conventional wisdom about American politics that the main divide is between left, right, and center, when it is really between pro-corporate and anti-corporate. Her declaration that neither Democrats nor Republicans (meaning the voters, not the Washington politicians) don’t like bank bailouts rings loud and true. Tea party supporters don’t like bailouts and crony capitalism any more that progressives do.
I’m afraid we need to call B.S. on this idea of Elizabeth Warren (or any other “populist) becoming a pied piper to the Tea Folk, pulling them across the barricades to support The Good Fight against “crony capitalism.” Yes, many “constitutional conservatives” oppose corporate bailouts. But they also typically support eliminating not just subsidies but regulation of big banks and other corporations; oppose most if not all of the social safety net (and certainly its expansion); and also oppose legalized abortion and marriage equality, for that matter. It’s not even all that clear that Warren-style “populism” will improve Democratic prospects with the white working class, which harbors a host of grievances with the traditional liberalism that Warren embraces beyond her signature financial “issues.”
To most Democrats most of the time, Warren is raising important and legitimate concerns about Wall Street that must be addressed, not just dismissed as “class warfare.” To some Democrats some of the time, she represents a decisive break with the Clinton and Obama traditions that is morally necessary. But let’s don’t pretend there’s a slam-dunk “electability” case for this kind of politics. Yes, the “median voter theorem” of politics that dictates a perpetual “move to the center” by general election candidates has lost a lot of its power just in the last few years. But the countervailing “hidden majority” argument for more ideological politicians of the left and the right is hardly self-evident, and has in the past often been fool’s gold.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, December 15, 2014
“And Has The Legal Authority”: Poll; Americans Broadly Back Obama’s Immigration Executive Action
Americans are very open to President Barack Obama’s newly announced executive action to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation, according to a Hart Research Associates survey released Friday.
The poll, which was conducted on behalf of the liberal 501(c)(4) “dark money” group Americans United for Change, described the president’s policy as follows:
The action would direct immigration enforcement officials to focus on threats to national security and public safety, and not on deporting otherwise law-abiding immigrants. Immigrants who are parents of children who are legal US residents could qualify to stay and work temporarily in the United States, without being deported, if they have lived in the United States for at least five years, pay taxes, and pass a criminal background check.
After hearing that description, voters overwhelmingly backed President Obama’s move: 67 percent viewed it favorably, while just 28 percent viewed it unfavorably. The support was fairly bipartisan, with 91 percent of Democrats, 67 percent of Independents, and 41 percent of Republicans viewing the executive action favorably. Among Tea Party Republicans, however, 64 percent opposed the policy while just 30 percent viewed it favorably.
The results underscore the importance of President Obama’s sales job with regard to his executive action. Previous polls have found that voters abstractly disapprove of the president circumventing Congress to deal with immigration. A USA Today poll released Monday, asking “Should President Obama take executive action this year to deal with illegal immigration or should he wait until January for the new Republican Congress to pass legislation on this issue,” found that 42 percent wanted the president to act now, while 46 percent preferred that he wait. Similarly, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Wednesday found that 48 percent disapproved of President Obama taking executive action while 38 percent approved, without being told any of the details of the president’s plan.
But, as Hart Research found, voters strongly support the specifics of President Obama’s executive action. They favor allowing the parents of children living legally in the United States to stay in the country by a 40 percent margin, expanding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program by 36 percent, providing temporary work permits to qualifying immigrants by 55 percent, and shifting more security resources to the U.S.-Mexico border by 63 percent.
Democrats already seem to be winning one important aspect of the messaging fight; the poll found that — despite outspoken Republican outrage — voters agree, 51 to 41 percent, that President Obama has the legal authority to change the nation’s immigration enforcement policies.
The Hart Research Associates poll surveyed 800 likely 2016 voters from November 19 to 20, 2014, and has a +/- 3.5 percent margin of error.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, November 21, 2014
“Gridlock Only Gets You So Far”: Voters Will Catch On To The Fact That The GOP Is Using Obstruction To Win Elections
There are three reasons that the Republicans pursue gridlock: ideological purity, hatred of President Barack Obama and because it helps them win elections. The first two they may be able to get over, but not the third.
Republicans discovered in 2010 that by opposing anything and everything of any consequence that Obama proposed, gridlock would ensue and the public’s anger and cynicism toward Washington would grow. Rallying around the tea party’s themes and the deep economic frustrations from the near depression, they swept out incumbent Democrats by the score.
Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell made it known that his number one goal was the defeat of Obama in 2012. That did not work out so well, but the Republicans quickly pivoted to 2014, where there was clearly fertile ground to elect more of their party. Part and parcel of this strategy was to not pass any meaningful legislation on immigration reform, job creation, education, tax reform or to improve America’s infrastructure and, finally, doing their very best to rally the base against anything having to do with government. The growing anger towards Washington and the party in control of the presidency – the Democrats – provided another windfall.
The difference now is that the anger which pollsters determined in 2010 created a majority for “standing up for principle” has now shifted to “it’s time to compromise, to get things done.” In short, voters want government to work and are sick and tired of the obstruction and gridlock.
Despite their efforts to shift blame, the Republicans now are boxed in, because it is pretty clear that they are the problem, not the party proposing solutions. Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, respected political analysts, have laid this out very clearly in their writings, including the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” So even if Republicans decide that the “shut the government” caucus led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz should be hidden away in the basement of the Capitol, they are still confronted with many political players who believe they were elected by being obstructionists.
The goal of the Democrats, then, should be to revise and reinvigorate the plans to legislate and solve America’s problems and convince the voters that the Congress, controlled by Republicans, is once again blocking progress. When the Republican leadership is convinced that gridlock is now a losing game politically, they may actually change their behavior. Their rigid ideology and their hatred for Obama will give way to a new political reality – the public is on to them and, much like President Harry Truman in 1948, the “do-nothing Congress” label will be laid at their feet.
The Republicans have to confront these past six years and change their behavior. They will only do so only if it becomes crystal clear that the public understands and is sick and tired of their embracing of Washington gridlock.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, November 26, 2014
“Forcing The Contradictions Of The GOP”: With Immigration Action, Obama Calls His Opponents’ Bluff
Obama’s decision to back away from our government’s policy of ripping apart the families of undocumented immigrants has called forth utterly contradictory responses from Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives. It should now be clear that the two sides don’t see the facts, the law or history in the same way.
Conservatives say the president’s executive actions on immigration are uniquely lawless and provocative. Progressives insist that Obama is acting in the same way that President Reagan and both presidents Bush did. They recall that after the second President Bush’s immigration reform bill failed in the Senate in 2007 — it was very similar to the 2013 bill Obama supports — White House spokeswoman Dana Perino declared flatly of the administration’s willingness to use its executive powers: “We’re going as far as we possibly can without Congress acting.”
Yet perhaps facts are now irrelevant. There was an enlightening moment of candor when Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) visited MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on the morning of Obama’s immigration speech. “The president ought to walk into this a lot more slowly, especially after an election,” Coburn said. “This idea, the rule of law, is really concerning a lot of people where I come from. And whether it’s factual or perceptual, it really doesn’t matter.”
Yes, for many of the president’s foes, the distinction between the “factual” and the “perceptual” doesn’t matter anymore.
But mainstream Republicans seem as angry at Obama as the tea partyers. They argue repeatedly that by moving on his own, Obama has made it impossible for Congress to act.
You’d think that Republicans who genuinely support immigration reform would want to prove the president wrong in a different way: by passing a comprehensive bill. That only a few of them are saying this is an obvious sign to the president’s supporters that Obama is right in suspecting that the House GOP would continue to bob and weave to avoid the issue — as it did for the one year, four months and 24 days between the passage of the genuinely bipartisan immigration reform bill in the Senate and Obama’s announcement.
In a superb reconstruction of why the president decided to move on his own, Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin, Ed O’Keefe and David Nakamura note that the last straw for Obama was House Speaker John Boehner’s refusal to say after the election that he would bring up an immigration bill if the president agreed to postpone executive action. In the absence of concrete pledges that something would get done, there was no point in waiting any longer.
All this explains the jubilation among progressives. They not only agree with the substance of what Obama did but also see him as finally calling his opponents’ bluff. He has forced the contradictions of the Republican establishmentarians into the sunlight.
Such Republicans were counting on Obama to be an enabler. He’d once more accept their quiet (and now obviously hollow) promises of goodwill and thus allow them to avoid a straight up confrontation with the right wing of their party.
Now, they can no longer have it both ways. Many of them claim they agree with the substance of what Obama did and also that Congress should pass a broader immigration bill. If this is true, then why should they spend all their energy trying to undo the constructive steps he has just taken? If they punt and simply join the rancid attacks on Obama as an “emperor” and a “monarch,” they will demonstrate for all to see that the GOP really is dominated by its right wing and that those of more measured views are simply too timid to take on their internal adversaries.
No wonder they’re so angry with the president.
For the six years since Obama’s election to the presidency, the Republican right has been on offense, continually blurring those distinctions between the “factual” and the “perceptual.” They keep charging that Obama is a dangerous radical even when he pursues middle-of-the-road policies. Their supposedly more temperate colleagues go along because they don’t have to pay a price.
Obama has just told them their free ride is over. The stakes in American politics will be much clearer because he did.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 23, 2014
“A Backwards Looking Losing Theme”: The GOP Already Has The Wrong Message For 2016
Let’s “restore” America.
This theme has been an undercurrent of Republican politics since the 2008 elections, when President Obama and the Democrats won control of two of the three branches of the U.S. government. It was also an explicit goal of the Tea Party. Now, it looks like Republicans are testing it out as a slogan for the 2016 elections, including the key presidential contest.
If Jeb Bush runs, and wins, the GOP might mean “restore” almost literally, in the dynastic sense. But mostly the message is that the Republican Party is volunteering to clean up the mess those Democrats made, bringing us back to some idyllic time in America (probably the 1980s).
At The Atlantic, Peter Beinart has an entire article dedicated to “the Republican obsession with ‘restoring’ America,” including its many iterations in today’s GOP politics. “Restore” appears in the literature — both press releases and upcoming or recent books — from 2016 GOP hopefuls Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Mike Huckabee, for example. It is a word that has inherent appeal for those whose politics are conservative, but it also has vaguely sinister overtones for groups that didn’t exactly have it better in the good old days.
The Week‘s resident linguist, Arika Okrent, notes that along with Rubio’s upcoming campaign book American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone, fellow presumptive 2016 presidential hopeful Paul Ryan is “Renewing the American Idea” in his book while Rick Santorum is “Recommitting to an America That Works.” All those “re-” words are “supposed to call up the idea of freshness and new blood,” she muses, “but something about the re- screams ‘do over!'”
The problem with the pledge of restoration is that it is inherently backward-looking. Americans may like the idea of America’s Golden Age — well, some Americans: “older, straight, Anglo, white, and male voters,” in Beinart’s analysis — but what they really want to hear is what a party will do to improve their future.
Democrats learned this lesson in 2004. After trying out a host of campaign themes, presidential nominee John Kerry settled on “Let America Be America Again” in late May. It’s from a 1938 Langston Hughes poem of the same name, and the message to the electorate was that President George W. Bush had broken America, or at least veered it off the right path, and Kerry would resurrect a more idyllic era (probably the 1990s).
Kerry used that line for the rest of the campaign, at times quoting extensively from the poem, and it didn’t work.
This wasn’t the only reason that Kerry lost, of course — he was leading Bush for much of the “Let America Be America Again” phase of the campaign, until “Swift Boat” August — but compare Kerry’s theme with Obama’s 2008 mantras of “Our Moment is Now” and “Hope and Change.” Big difference.
In any case, Republicans should already know that “restore America” is a losing theme. Mitt Romney’s 2012 super-PAC was the poetically nonsensical Restore Our Future. The first substantive section of the party’s 2012 platform was entitled “Restoring the American Dream.” And even the GOP’s “Great Communicator,” Ronald Reagan, couldn’t unseat fellow Republican Gerald Ford with his 1976 speech “To Restore America.”
Nostalgia is great for selling merchandise and rebooted TV and film franchises, but it’s not a very effective political cri de cœur for a national campaign. Republicans have been telling us what they’re against for the last six years — Obama — and if they want to be viable in 2016, they need to spend the next two telling us what they envision for the future.
By: Peter Weber, Senior Editor, TheWeek.com, November 17, 2014
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