“A Rebuke To Mob Mentality”: Dick Lugar Sounds the Alarm against GOP Extremism
After conceding to Tea Party challenger Richard Mourdock, Senator Dick Lugar released a statement assailing his party’s ideological rigidity.
There’s been a lot of talk about how veteran Senator Dick Lugar could have salvaged his campaign. The Indiana Republican was soundly defeated by nearly 20 points yesterday in primary race against a Tea Party-backed challenger. He lost amid criticisms that he’s too close to Obama and not dogmatic enough for the GOP. Many of those criticisms came from outside groups, including Grover Norquist’s Club for Growth and Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which poured money into the effort to defeat the well-liked senator. In the end, Tea Party favorite Richard Mourdock won the primary—and in response, Dick Lugar sounded a call of alarm for Republicans about the fate of the party.
Lugar noted his own Republican bona fides, including that he’d voted with Reagan more than any other senator. Then he went after Mourdock, the Tea Party, and the general intractability that’s taken hold of his party:
If Mr. Mourdock is elected, I want him to be a good Senator. But that will require him to revise his stated goal of bringing more partisanship to Washington. He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it.
This is not conducive to problem solving and governance. And he will find that unless he modifies his approach, he will achieve little as a legislator. Worse, he will help delay solutions that are totally beyond the capacity of partisan majorities to achieve. The most consequential of these is stabilizing and reversing the Federal debt in an era when millions of baby boomers are retiring. There is little likelihood that either party will be able to impose their favored budget solutions on the other without some degree of compromise.
Lugar’s statement didn’t stop there. He outlined what he saw as the necessary mindset for politics—one that “acknowledges that the other party is also patriotic and may have some good ideas.” He noted that Reagan himself had worked with Democrats “and showed flexibility that would be ridiculed today.” Then he noted the how many subjects had become taboo amongst Republicans, like the idea that climate change may be more than a myth or that immigration is anything but a bad thing. While he gave a brief mention of Democratic partisanship as well, Lugar saved almost all his focus for his own party.
Lugar was probably one of the most respected members of the Senate in either party, and like his colleague Olympia Snowe, was a member of the shrinking group of Republican moderates. Michael Tomasky has argued, fairly I think, that when it really counted, Lugar fell in with his party’s extremism rather than fighting the tide. Paul Waldman had his own critique of the senator Tuesday, explaining that such moderates “gnash their teeth some and make lots of statements about how they really hope we can come up with a bipartisan solution to the problem at hand, but in the end they’ll be there for the GOP when it matters.”
Lugar’s hardly been a profile in courage these past few years and releasing an honest statement about the state of the party would likely have been significantly more impressive if he had done it when he was active and wielded influence, rather than after his party gave him the boot. But nonetheless, this may be one of the most forceful and direct criticisms of the GOP from someone in office. Lugar’s come to the obvious conclusion: For the Republican Party to succeed, it must divorce itself from some of its more extreme elements. Lugar’s note isn’t a victory letter to Democrats or even a call for bipartisanship. After all, for Democrats, this is largely a win—with Lugar in the running, they had no shot at the seat, whereas now they may be able to put the state in play. Instead, Lugar’s statement served as a rebuke to Republicans’ mob mentality.
“Like Edmund Burke,” Lugar’s statement read, “I believe leaders owe the people they represent their best judgment.”
Too bad the senator waited until he lost to give those he represented for over three decades his own best judgment.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, May 9, 2012
“No Bank Bailouts”: Tea Partiers Take Contributions From Bailed Out Banks After Opposing Bank Bailouts
Tea Party-backed candidates swept into Washington in 2010 on a wave of opposition to bank bailouts. Now that they’re in Washington, however, their campaigns are drowning in campaign cash provided by the very banks that benefited from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The 10 freshmen Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee who have Tea Party backing have taken more than $100,000 from the political action committees affiliated with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs — the nation’s five largest banks — Bloomberg reports:
Yet the anti-bailout fervor that drove the messaging of Republican candidates during the campaign cycle of 2009 and 2010 has dissipated, and those same lawmakers are now collecting money from the firms bailed out by President George W. Bush’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. […]
The political action committees of those institutions have distributed $169,499 through March 31 to the campaign coffers of the 10 freshman Tea Party-backed lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee, according to an analysis of campaign finance disclosure records.
The Tea Party hasn’t succeeded in ending “too big too fail” because they haven’t tried. Though the five biggest banks are now bigger than they were before the financial crisis, the Tea Party members haven’t proposed a single piece of legislation to limit their size. Instead, they’ve focused on repealing financial reform and blocking efforts to protect consumers from Wall Street’s predatory practices.
Multiple Democrats have proposed legislation to cap the size of large banks, while others have proposed new ways to unwind large banks without taxpayer-funded bailouts should they collapse. The efforts have drawn no support from the Tea Party. “No more bailouts,” Tea Party Express’ website proclaims. The candidates it and other Tea Party organizations backed in 2010, however, apparently no longer feel the same way.
By: Travis Waldron, Think Progress, April 30, 2012
Sen. Olympia Snowe Does Not Understand Budgets
It seems Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) isn’t even trying to make sense any more:
Fiscal shenanigans such as permanent tax increases to pay for one-year temporary measures are precisely the problem that drove our nation into a $15 trillion debt crisis.
Huh? Passing a permanent tax increase to pay for a temporary measure would, logically, decrease debt, not increase it.
And, indeed, if we look back over history, we don’t see “permanent tax increases” as drivers of debt. Tax cuts, on the other hand — like those signed by Ronald Reagan and supported by Olympia Snowe and those signed by George W. Bush and supported by Olympia Snowe — have contributed to increasing deficits and debt. Meanwhile, tax increases — like those signed by Bill Clinton and opposed by Olympia Snowe in 1993 —reduced deficits.
Given Snowe’s ongoing embrace of Tea Party Economics and shunning of basic economic concepts —not to mention her record of supporting measures that increased the deficit and opposing things that cut it — it isn’t surprising that she’d adopt the up-is-down, black-is-white economic fantasy that tax increases cause deficits and tax cuts increase revenue. But it should help put to rest the notion that she’s some kind of “moderate” or “sensible” Republican.
By: Jamison Foser, Media Matters Political Corrections, December 7, 2011
More Damaged Than All Other Candidates Combined, Newt Is A Risky Bet
Despite frenzied prognostications from the political commentariat about Newt Gingrich’s inadequate war chest, lack of an actual campaign operation in the early voting states, potential absence from key ballots and even burdensome debt, they matter little as long as the former House Speaker continues to snooker GOP voters into thinking he can beat President Obama.
New polls showing Gingrich at the top of the field in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida explain why his sudden vault to front-runner status is genuine and durable; how (at least for now) Gingrich has surmounted the insurmountable and convinced voters who know him well that he is viable in a general election.
In focus groups Democratic pollster Peter Hart conducted for the Annenberg Public Policy Center last week, respondents characterized Gingrich as “grandfatherly.” In some polls voters have called him “authentic,” and a new New York Times/CBS News poll found that Iowa voters think Gingrich has the best chance of defeating President Obama, is most empathetic, the strongest commander in chief and best prepared for the job of president. Evangelical Christians, who don’t trust Mormons like Mitt Romney, are throwing their support by 3-to-1 behind the twice-divorced Gingrich, also an admitted adulterer.
Although Gingrich would conclude that his new popularity is a testament to his brilliance or at least to his powers of persuasion, it actually reflects an unrelenting resistance to Romney that has caused GOP voters to swerve chaotically from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump to Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry to Herman Cain. Gingrich was always a choice, but never a palatable one until the circus had finally folded tents and left town. Unlike the favorites before him, in Gingrich voters have someone steeped in critical policy matters, deeply interested in the problems the nation faces and effective at debating. But as a general-election candidate he is far more damaged than all of the other candidates combined.
Most who know him expect Gingrich to soon perform a campaign-ending act of self-destruction, with his trademark recklessness. No one will be surprised by new reports in The Washington Post that Gingrich has spent $3 for every $2 he raised in his campaign and that he paid himself back $42,000 for a mailing list his business gave the campaign, before paying back other vendors.
He sure doesn’t plan to stop running his mouth — just capturing the lead in polling last week led him to boast he would be the nominee, take credit for defeating communism in Congress and then suggest that poor people don’t work and are raising their children to be criminals. Indeed, Gingrich is just getting warmed up, and feels free to say almost anything at this point. After all, he practically embraced amnesty for illegal immigrants and didn’t see even a slight dent in his support. The voters have decided to overlook his personal failings, policy flip-flops, questionable ethics and even his attempts to explain that making more than $100 million representing interests like Freddie Mac in Washington wasn’t lobbying because he never needed the money because he makes $60,000 every time he gives a speech.
Unless they change their minds, Tea-infused Republican voters are opting for everything they have criticized: Gingrich is a controversial insider their party already turned away once because of his failed leadership and who has enriched himself with his access ever since. He isn’t a pure conservative, he isn’t fresh and he has no credibility as someone prepared to cut off the stranglehold of special interests.
Republican primary voters might be comfortable gambling on Gingrich, but it’s not a gamble independent voters are likely to feel comfortable with next year.
By: A. B. Stoddard, Associate Editor, The Hill, December 7, 2011
Where Oh Where Are Gingrich’s Enemies?
For many members of Congress, it must seem truly strange to observe the current Newt Gingrich boomlet. This is, after all, the same Gingrich who was run out of Washington 13 years ago after his party suffered a rare midterm loss that left Republicans barely hanging on to control of the House. Gingrich not only stepped aside as speaker but resigned his congressional seat. He left the chamber with his tail between his legs and did not exactly endear himself to his fellow members on the way out, calling the other congressional Republicans “hateful” and “cannibals” who blackmailed him out of office during a conference call announcing his departure. With his bombastic style, Gingrich was well set for a life of public speaking and book career far away from any other elected office.
That was the mind-set of the political class when Gingrich entered the presidential field earlier this year (especially after his entire staff fled his campaign over the summer), and yet now Gingrich has—at least for the time being—replaced Mitt Romney as the front-runner for 2012. One would expect those representatives who revolted on Gingrich—many of whom are still in Congress—to rush to the press to divert Republican voters from making the same mistake they made in 1994 when they elevated Gingrich to speaker.
Instead, they’re keeping their thoughts largely to themselves, according to Politico. The group of Republicans who ousted Gingrich in ’98 are hesitant to disparage the new Tea Party favorite, and some have even switched sides and are supporting Gingrich. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey corralled support to replace Gingrich back in the day but demurred from offering comment for Politico‘s article. That’s a strikingly different tone than earlier in the year. “It’s typical of Newt to be whimsical,” Armey told Politico in May. “We always say: Newt always has so many great ideas. Well yeah, but then he shifts between them at such a rate it’s pretty hard to track it let alone keep up with it.” Or take former Representative Bob Livingston, the Louisiana congressman whose challenge to then-Speaker Gingrich incited that harsh resignation conference call. Now Livingston has endorsed Gingrich and is raising money for his former foe.
Not all of Gingrich’s former colleagues have held back. On Sunday, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn—a member of the House during Gingrich’s reign—ripped into the presidential candidate on Fox News. “I’m not inclined to be a supporter of Newt Gingrich,” Coburn said,
“having served under him for four years and experienced personally his leadership…I just found his leadership lacking and I’m not going to go into greater detail in that. And I think if you were poll the gang—the group of people that came in Congress in 1994, in which he did a wonderful job in organizing that, he’s brilliant, he has a lot of positives. But I still—it would be—I will have difficulty supporting him as president of the United States.”
Coburn isn’t alone in that view; if it becomes clear that Gingrich’s surge is not the short-lived bubble of Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann, his former colleagues will likely start bringing those attacks out in droves to block his accession back to the top of the party.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, December 6, 2011
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