“The Kicking Mules Vs The Lying Turtle”: The GOP Civil War Is Now Basically Between Mitch McConnell And The Tea Party
There will not be another government shutdown, says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
“It was a strategy that I said both publicly and privately could not work, and did not work,” McConnell told The Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan.
“All it succeeded in doing was taking attention off of Obamacare for 16 days,” he added. “And scaring the public and tanking our brand—our party brand. One of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is that there’s no education in the second kick of a mule. It ain’t gonna happen again.”
This sounds as if he’s vowing to compromise when the resolution funding the government and the debt ceiling issue come up again early in 2014.
And to the Tea Party, that only means one thing: Treason!
The leader knows what the Tea Party thinks of him and he’s ready to take them on, along with his Tea Party challenger, Matt Bevin.
“They’ve been told the reason we can’t get to better outcomes than we’ve gotten is not because the Democrats control the Senate and the White House but because Republicans have been insufficiently feisty,” he told Noonan. “Well, that’s just not true, and I think that the folks that I have difficulty with are the leaders of some of these groups who basically mislead them for profit. . . . They raise money . . . take their cut and spend it.”
And in case that wasn’t clear enough, he called out the Senate Conservatives Fund, one of the key supporters behind Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and the plot to defund Obamacare that forced the shutdown.
“That’s the one I’m prepared to be specific about,” he said, adding that the group “has elected more Democrats than the Democratic Senatorial Committee over the last three cycles.”
Tea Party hero Erick Erickson responded to McConnell’s comments on Friday with “Question for Mitch McConnell: Will Any Reporter Ask It?”
The Red State editor-in-chief states that “the Senate Conservatives Fund has only helped nominate two Tea Party candidates, who went on to lose the general election.” In contrast, he points out, “On the other hand, Mitch McConnell supported Rick Berg, Denny Rehberg, Carly Fiorina, Linda McMahon, George Allen, and Tommy Thompson. All lost to Democrats.”
This leads to Erickson’s question: “So some enterprising reporter should ask Mitch McConnell this question: Given that the Senate Conservatives Fund has a better record than Mitch McConnell of getting Republicans elected to the Senate, shouldn’t he be supporting Matt Bevin?”
McConnell has successfully been able to persuade Ted Cruz to stay out of primaries. But the Tea Party, Erickson and the Senate Conservatives Fund are going all in. We’ll see who gets shut down this time.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, November 8, 2013
“Very Well-Insured Critics”: Serving The Smug, Shortsighted, Dopes And Demagogues, Obamacare Will Be There Even For Its Enemies
Obamacare’s enemies are right about the disastrous Web site launch and the president’s misleading mantra about “keeping your plan.” I’m furious at the White House myself for having botched these technical and messaging challenges — issues that anyone could have seen coming three years ago and whose amateur handling has given needless ammunition to the foes of expanded health coverage.
But for those of us who think the health security the Affordable Care Act provides marks a fundamental advance in America’s social contract, these White House failures don’t come close to the vices of Obamacare’s adversaries. Let’s just say it: To judge by their behavior, the Affordable Care Act’s enemies couldn’t care less about helping millions of low-income workers achieve health security, and every time they open their mouths, it shows.
When conservatives rant about the latest mess-ups attending the rollout, they never add the obvious empathetic refrain. It would be simple, really. They’d just need to preface or append to their daily attack a line like this: “Of course we all agree we need to find ways to get poor workers secure health coverage that protects their family from ruin in the event of serious illness.”
That’s all it would take. But they don’t say that. None of them. At least none that I can hear. A single omission might seem an oversight. A few might be a sign of distraction. But when day after day you wait in vain to hear such empathy amid the torrent of anti-Obamacare venom being spewed, you realize something bigger psychologically is at work.
Obamacare foes are more than just angry with the “lying” and the bungling they disdain. They are Very Well-Insured People. We all know about “VIPs.” Well, these are VWIPs. Or at least, a certain conservative species of VWIP.
For many on the right, being a VWIP seems to bring with it a certain blindness. They see the Web site comedy of errors and cry (rightly) “incompetence!” They see some people who have to change their health plan and cry (with some fairness) “liar!”
But that’s all they see. What they don’t see is nearly 50 million uninsured Americans, 20 million or so of whom stand to have relatively desperate lives made immeasurably more secure thanks to this law. These Americans will finally know what it’s like to go to bed at night certain that they can’t be wiped out financially by illness — and that free or affordable preventive care may help their loved ones uncover disease while there’s a chance for a cure.
Obamacare’s well-insured critics don’t see these Americans at all. And they seem unable to imagine what it would feel like to be one of them.
I want to be careful here. I know this isn’t the outlook of every Republican or conservative. John Kasich’s Medicaid expansion makes him the most prominent exception (though even Kasich can’t see the benefit for many Ohioans of Obamacare’s big private insurance expansion). Meanwhile, in yet another case in which your zip code seals your fate in the United States, millions of citizens who could have had Medicaid coverage will remain vulnerable, abandoned by well-insured GOP governors who think their job involves tending to well-insured GOP voters.
Poor uninsured workers didn’t make U.S. health care the costliest, most inefficient system on the planet. But these workers are the ones who suffer most under it. And VWIPs on the right don’t care.
New rule (as Bill Maher would say): Politicians and pundits who bash Obamacare should have displayed under their talking head or byline the source of their own coverage. Let’s caption Ted Cruz in flashing neon that reads, “Enjoys Gold-Plated Health Coverage from Goldman Sachs Spousal Plan.” Let’s have the subtitles for John Boehner and Eric Cantor read, “Has Never Worried About Going Broke From Illness A Day in His Life Thanks To Federal Government Insurance.”
And let Obamacare supporters begin their response to absurd claims that “Obamacare is the enemy” with this simple line: “Spoken like a Very Well-Insured Person.” (I’ve tried this on radio and TV — not only is it accurate, but it feels great to say so, too.)
My wife and I discovered we were uninsurable in the individual market in 2003. It was scary. And we’re the lucky ones — bona fide members of the Lower Upper Class with the wherewithal to maneuver to protect our family (and with access to the New York Times Magazine to write about the experience).
Obama said, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”
The Very Well-Insured Obamacare critic effectively says to the uninsured, “If you enjoy being vulnerable to financial ruin or death from serious illness, under our plan you can keep that, too.”
Both of these positions are wrong.
But which, at the end of the day, seems more like a hanging offense?
The irony is that Obamacare’s protections will be there even for its enemies if, God forbid, they (or someone they love) find themselves sick, unattached to a large employer and looking for coverage in the individual market. I suppose that’s the beauty of the rule of law — it serves the smug and the shortsighted, the dopes and the demagogues along with the rest of us. Might be a more just world if it didn’t now and then, but them’s the breaks.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 6, 2013
“The Grand Old Party In Reverse”: Christie, Cuccinelli And What The GOP Didn’t Learn In 2012
Elections, the saying goes, have consequences. Of course, some have more consequences than others. Consider the 2012 election – and then ponder this week’s gubernatorial races. You’d imagine that the big nationwide election would do more to jar the GOP than a couple of off-year gubernatorial races. But given the right’s nonreaction to 2012, reality-based Republicans must hope otherwise.
Think back a year. Given the results of the 2012 elections – Barack Obama won re-election by 4 percentage points and 5 million votes; Senate Democrats gained seats, and House Democrats drew more votes (if not more seats) than House Republicans – you would not be faulted for thinking that the GOP was in for a course correction. And, for a brief while, it seemed likely. The Republican National Committee issued a postmortem with a slew of recommendations on how to turn the party around, with a focus on reaching out to female, minority and young voters. Washington pundits declared comprehensive immigration reform inevitable because Republicans had to do something to get on the right side of Hispanic voters. That was then. Now?
“At this point, we’ve gone backwards because of the government shutdown,” says Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “That doesn’t mean we can’t be resurrected in time to do very well in the 2014 elections given the gift of Obamacare. But it’s hard to look at the state of the party today versus Election Day in 2012 and think we’ve made much progress.”
What happened? The party leaders who wanted to adjust to the facts of reality were rolled by the alliance of the tea party and the right wing’s media-industrial complex, which is more interested in whipping up the base (and then fundraising off of it) than what movement conservatives like Erick Erickson derisively refer to as the “‘governing’ trap.” The Republican reboot was lost in a miasma of conservative windmill-tilting that culminated in the ill-conceived, predictably disastrous shutdown.
“They don’t care [about polls], but they need to care,” says Cook Political Report’s Jennifer Duffy. “When you need to pick up as many [Senate] seats as Republicans need right now, you can’t afford to have your brand hurt.” As former Rep. Tom Davis, a moderate Virginia Republican, said recently, “You’ve had the diagnosis, and now there’s the denial.”
When asked whether the GOP is better off a year later than immediately after getting trounced last November, one veteran Republican lobbyist offers that sometimes a party has to hit rock bottom. “At some point you have to cleanse your system,” the lobbyist says. “The question is how do you respond when you hit rock bottom?” The twin events of the dismal shutdown and this week’s contrasting gubernatorial elections give the GOP a fresh chance to hit the rock bottom reset button.
And there’s some hope that the 2013 elections will have the consequences that can finally penetrate the right’s bubble. Mitt Romney might have been challenging Obama in 2012, but he was also stalked by a phantasm of the right – a “true” conservative candidate that could set their hearts aflutter. The far right says “look, Romney wasn’t conservative enough … you need to shut the government down over Obamacare,” according to Davis. A true conservative, the theory goes, would have delivered the victory over Obama that the right wing fully expected right up until Fox News declared the president re-elected last year.
The 2013 elections, while more narrowly focused, present a starker contrast. You have conservative darling Ken Cuccinelli in the purple state of Virginia losing to Terry McAuliffe of all people; and you have New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the Republican who literally embraced Obama last October after Superstorm Sandy, winning by a landslide in a true-blue state. As pollster Ayres said when asked about this scenario last week: “It certainly presents a pair of compelling case studies whose message is obvious to all who are willing to see.”
So where to from here? Two things to keep an eye on: First is the budget battle rerun due in January – to what extent is the Ted Cruz-led conservative cabal able to drive the party into another vain, self-destructive shutdown? Early signs give reason for skepticism. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, for example, has ruled out another shutdown. “Ted Cruz went out and led a parade that he said would be a success … and then he walked down the alley like that character at the end of ‘Animal House,’ marched the whole band into the wall – and then he ran out and had a TV interview,” says conservative activist Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, who adds that the next time Cruz has an idea, Republicans are either “going to throw something big at him” or otherwise politely dismiss him.
A second focus point will be the 2014 primaries. McConnell faces a serious challenge and a slew of other incumbents have primaries as well. “Rest well tonight, for soon we must focus on important House and Senate races,” former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin wrote on Facebook recently. “Let’s start with Kentucky – which happens to be awfully close to South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi – from sea to shining sea we will not give up.” The latter references were to GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham, Lamar Alexander and Thad Cochrane – all incumbents facing challengers. It’s early to say whether any are credible, says Duffy, “but for a collection of safe incumbents, that’s a lot of primaries.” If the primaries produce few or any upsets, it could mean the tea party’s influence has receded.
“Republicans are only one election and one candidate away from resurrection in 2016,” says Ayres. Time will tell.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, November 8, 2013
“An Obvious Problem”: Chris Christie Needs Republicans To Have A Terrible 2014
I wouldn’t say that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is the presumptive frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016—though, like Ross Douthat, I’m not sure who could beat him—but it is true that he is the official candidate of the GOP establishment. And, with a reelection coalition of Republicans, Democrats, young people, Latinos, and African Americans, Christie stands as the only potential presidential nominee that can claim a credible path to victory.
It doesn’t come as a surprise, then, to learn that his rivals are already throwing shade in his direction. NBC News has a good round-up of the Republican presidential contenders who have opened fire on the New Jersey governor:
Even after the disaster of the shutdown and Ken Cuccinelli’s loss in the Virginia gubernatorial race, the operating assumption of right-wing Republicans is that success will come when conservatives take a doctrinaire approach to their ideology. The available evidence makes clear that this isn’t true—Ted Cruz, for instance, won his election, but he underperformed Romney—but this doesn’t matter to either the GOP base or lawmakers like Cruz.
This poses an obvious problem for Christie. Insofar that his message of electability has any chance of resonating with Republican primary voters, it will be because they have given up the quest for purity, and are desperate to win, which means that, for Christie, the best thing that could happen is for Republicans to have a terrible 2014. If the GOP continues down its path of extremism, and loses its shot at capturing the Senate as a result, Christie has perfect ground for making his pitch.
Unfortunately for him, the more likely outcome is that Republicans do pretty well. The combination of a sluggish economy and voter discontent will hurt incumbents, which threatens the Democratic majority in the Senate and precludes the party from making real gains in the House. And a GOP base that does well—or even okay—in next year’s midterms is one that doesn’t have much interest in Christie’s message.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, November 7, 2014
“Old Time Crackpot Patriarchy”: Behind The Right’s Crazy Crusade To Make Women Pay More For Health Insurance
In a sane world, when Rep. Renee Ellmers asked rhetorically last week “Has a man ever delivered a baby?” she would have been arguing not against, but for the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that men and women pay the same insurance premiums. After all, the special physical burdens borne solely by women to ensure the life and health of the next generation obviously benefit both genders, right? Healthy men today can thank their mothers for eating well and getting good prenatal care; likewise fathers are grateful to the mothers of their children for the same. (Michael Hiltzik runs down the case for sharing those costs publicly here.)
But no, Ellmers asked that question of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in order to rail against the ACA’s equal premium requirement. She thought it was a clever “gotcha” moment, designed to show the craziness of requiring all insurance policies to cover maternity care and contraception without a co-pay. (The doofuses at Breitbart agreed, declaring “Ellmers brings her A game.”) Amazingly, Ellmers chairs the House GOP’s “women’s policy committee” – so how could she be so tone-deaf in attacking the way the ACA helps that increasingly elusive GOP constituency, female voters?
Because the right-wing base of the modern Republican Party is dedicated to restoring men as the head of the household, and the nuclear, husband-headed family as the principle social unit. From Rick Santorum railing against contraception and preaching the nuclear family as the answer to poverty in last year’s GOP presidential primary, to Rafael Cruz Sr. telling an audience that “God commands us men to teach your wife, to teach your children—to be the spiritual leader of your family,” today’s right-wing Republicans are increasingly comfortable with open displays of old-time crackpot patriarchy. This week Sen. Ted Cruz Jr. courts the right-wing preachers of the South Carolina Renewal Project, which is thought to be a key stop on his way to the GOP nomination in that early-primary state.
Let’s face it: The only way charging women more for health insurance and healthcare makes sense is if they have a partner who either shares that burden or shoulders it entirely. As in … a husband. Then it’s clear that the male of the species is doing his part to keep the species healthy and reproducing itself. A woman who doesn’t have a husband to play that role? Well, there shouldn’t be women like that – and certainly if there are, they shouldn’t be having children anyway, or even having sex, so they don’t need maternity care or contraception.
That’s the only way I can explain the GOP’s willingness to openly endorse an enormous transfer of wealth from women back to men by not only advocating the repeal of the ACA but specifically railing against its equal-premium provisions. But don’t worry, gals: You’ll get that wealth back once you get yourself a man!
I got a glimpse of this mind-set from an otherwise open-minded Republican, former RNC chair Michael Steele, last year, when he argued against the ACA’s contraception without a co-pay provision on “Hardball.” As Steele told me:
The problem is that you have effectively absolved the male of any responsibility in the relationship with this woman, whether it’s a sexual nature or beyond that. It’s not just about giving women access to contraception. It’s about the responsible behavior that goes with that access. It’s nice for Barack Obama to tell women, ‘I got your back. Here, have a pill.’ Men have a responsibility here … It’s this other piece that doesn’t get talked about in terms of the responsibility of fathers, or potential fathers, in this relationship.
I tried to reassure Steele that men could continue to be responsible to the women in their lives, even if they got contraception without a co-pay, but he wasn’t having it. I saw the uneasiness with female autonomy that’s at the heart of modern Republicanism, even if Steele himself handles that anxiety better than folks on the far right.
The father of the man who led the crusade to shut down the government over Obamacare, Rafael Cruz Sr., is quite clear about his belief that women must be subservient to men. As David Corn revealed in Mother Jones, Cruz told an Irving, Texas, mega-church last year:
As God commands us men to teach your wife, to teach your children—to be the spiritual leader of your family—you’re acting as a priest. Now, unfortunately, unfortunately, in too many Christian homes, the role of the priest is assumed by the wife. Why? Because the man had abdicated his responsibility as priest to his family…So the wife has taken up that banner, but that’s not her responsibility. And if I’m stepping on toes, just say, ‘Ouch.’
Ouch. I’m waiting for mainstream reporters to ask Cruz whether he shares his father’s beliefs – including his claim that President Obama should “go back to Kenya.” Rafael Cruz is a leading surrogate for his son, and has played a core role in his political rise. I don’t think it’s unfair to ask how much their views overlap, especially as Cruz courts the extremists in the South Carolina Renewal Project.
Right now those extremists matter more to key GOP leaders than ordinary women do. But if Ken Cuccinelli loses the Virginia governor’s race to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, as polls indicate is likely, he’ll do so because of the women’s vote. Republicans can’t win women because they’re still fighting a culture war to restore men to their “rightful” place as the head of the family and society. They’re profoundly uncomfortable with women’s autonomy – and that makes women voters increasingly uncomfortable voting Republican. Making Renee Ellmers the face of the backlash won’t help.
But I don’t expect a Cuccinelli loss to sober up the GOP either. Already right-wingers are telling reporters that McAuliffe is winning because the stridently antiabortion lieutenant governor didn’t campaign hard enough on culture-war issues. Antiabortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser, who leads the Susan B. Anthony List, told Politico that Cuccinelli bowed to a GOP establishment-mandated “jobs, economy, that’s all that matters script.” Dannenfelser says “that script didn’t work in the presidential with [Mitt] Romney, who is not viewed as conservative as Ken is, and it has been problematic in this gubernatorial race. Sometimes, when it gets to social policy, everyone gets in the fetal position on the Republican side.”
Democrats have to hope the GOP listens to Dannenfelser heading into the 2014 midterms.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, November 5, 2013
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