If you are feeling a sense of deja vu about where the current budget debate in Congress is headed, you aren’t alone, and I offered an explanation at New York:
In the partisan messaging battle over the federal budget, Joe Biden seems to have Republicans right where he wants them. Beginning with his State of the Union Address in early February, the president has hammered away at GOP lawmakers for plotting to gut wildly popular Social Security and Medicare benefits. This has driven Republicans into a defensive crouch; they can either pretend their proposed cuts aren’t really cuts or forswear them altogether. It’s a message that Democrats would love to highlight every day until the next election, or at least until Republicans figure out a better response than lies, evasions, and blustery denials.
But as Ron Brownstein points out in The Atlantic, there is a logical path Republicans could take to counter Democrats’ claims that GOP policies threaten popular retirement programs. It’s based on pitting every other form of federal domestic spending against Social Security and Medicare, and on making Democratic support for Big Government and its beneficiaries a political problem among seniors:
“Republicans hope that exempting Social Security and Medicare [from cutbacks they are demanding for raising the federal debt limit] will dampen any backlash to their deficit-reduction plans in economically vulnerable districts. But protecting those programs, as well as defense, from cuts—while also precluding tax increases—will force the House Republicans to propose severe reductions in other domestic programs … potentially including Medicaid, the ACA, and food and housing assistance.
“Will a Republican push for severe reductions in those programs provide Democrats with an opening in such places? Robert J. Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, is dubious. Although these areas have extensive needs, he told me, the residents voting Republican in them are generally skeptical of social-welfare spending apart from Social Security and Medicare. ‘We are dealing with a set of values here, which has a distrust of government and a sense that anyone should have to work to get any sort of low-income benefit,’ Blendon said. ‘The people voting Republican in those districts don’t see it as important [that] government provides those benefits.’”
And so Republicans will very likely return to the messaging they embraced during the Obama administration. Back then, self-identified Tea Party conservatives constantly tried to convince elderly voters that the real threat to their retirement programs stemmed not from GOP budget cutting, but from Democratic-backed Big Government spending on younger people and minorities, with whom many conservative voters did not identify. Then as now, a partisan budget fight — and the threat of a debt default of government shutdown — let Republicans frame funding decisions as a competition between groups of beneficiaries, rather than a debate over abstract levels of taxing or spending.
The big opening shot in the anti-Obama campaign was Sarah Palin’s wildly mendacious but highly effective September 2009 Facebook post claiming that the Affordable Care Act would create “death panels” that would eliminate Medicare coverage for seniors or disabled children deemed socially superfluous (the barely legitimate basis for the attack was an Affordable Care Act provision to allow Medicare payments to physicians discussing end-of-life treatments with patients).
Soon Republicans would come up with slightly more substantive claims that Obamacare threatened Medicare. In 2011, House GOP budget maven Paul Ryan, whom Democrats hammered for his proposals to partially privatize both Social Security and Medicare, claimed that Obama administration projections of health cost savings in Medicare represented a shift of resources from Medicare to Obamacare. By 2012, when Ryan became Mitt Romney’s running mate, Ryan was campaigning with his mother in tow, claiming that Republicans wanted to protect her from raids on her retirement benefits by the redistributionist Democrats.
Romney and Ryan didn’t win, of course, but they did win the over-65 vote by a robust 56-44 margin, a better performance in that demographic than Trump registered in 2016 or 2020. As Thomas Edsall explained in The New Republic in 2010, the Tea Party–era Republicans understood they had to mobilize their federal spending constituents against alleged competitors:
“Republicans understand that one axis of the resource war will be generational. All of their vows to defend Medicare are coupled with attacks on Obama’s health care reform. They implicitly portray Democrats as waging an age war—creating a massive new government program that transfers dollars to the young at the expense of the elderly. Republicans have cleverly stoked the fear that Obama is rewarding all his exuberant, youthful, idealistic supporters by redistributing resources that are badly needed by the old.”
In a 2024 campaign in which Democrats are going for the jugular with seniors, a reprise of the GOP’s 2012 Medicare counterattack, dishonest as it was, might make sense.
During this year’s budget skirmish in Congress, House Republicans are expected to take a claw hammer to domestic spending outside Social Security and Medicare, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports:
“This spring, House Republicans are expected to release an annual budget resolution that calls for large health care cuts, and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) marketplace coverage are likely to be prime targets. House Republican leaders are calling for cutting the deficit and making the Trump tax cuts permanent, while saying they will shield certain areas of the budget (Medicare, Social Security, and military spending) from cuts. To do all these things at once, it is highly likely they will propose cuts in health programs that provide coverage to millions of people.”
The House GOP has also already called for deep cuts in nondefense discretionary spending, including food stamp and nutrition programs. It’s likely the GOP’s state-based crusade against “woke” public education will lead to a renewal of ancient conservative demands to deeply cut or kill the U.S. Department of Education. Maybe those representing energy-producing areas will go hard after EPA or the Department of the Interior’s programs. Almost certainly, the GOP as a whole will embrace across-the-board cuts in federal employment or federal employee benefits under the guise of “draining the swamp.” Any and all such cuts can also be rationalized as necessary to avoid reductions in spending for Social Security, Medicare, and national defense, not to mention tax increases.
Whatever formula they adopt, there’s little doubt Republicans will find ways to present themselves the true defenders of Social Security and Medicare, just as many of them will always keep scheming for ways to damage or destroy these vestiges of the New Deal and Great Society. Biden seems committed to his effort to make seniors fear the GOP, and this is the only way Republicans can counter-punch.
Agreed, that he must use the truth. But in a sense he already does, and it does not work. What I would add to this is that he must use the truth, and do so with as much venom and punch as possible.
Lies and truth are merely types of weapons, you see. But like any weapon, they can be used well, and they can be used poorly.
You can lightly jab and tickle someone with either lies or the truth. Or you can bludgen them relentlessly into the ground with either one of them.
The problem with the American electorate is that they are lazy, and not very bright. So, they will gravitate towards the candidate that will beat people to a bloody pulp with lies, more so than they will gravitate towards a candidate who just take small, glancing blows with the truth.
So the key is to use the truth without shame..the truth all of us down on the ground floor of the campaigns already know…McCain is a bad tempered, lying and capitulating old coward, beholden to bigots. His running mate not only shows his poor judgment, but also is a two faced beauty queen with no record, no experience, and who is in favor of views so extreme that even most of the American public is against them in the polls. (For what they maybe worth.)
If we are going to use the truth… let’s use it. Don’t preface it, as Biden did the other day, with calling Palin a tough smart politician with a compelling story. She is none of those things. Preface the truth with, “a former beauty queen who has no rights to claim allegiance to America when she addressed a secessionist political convention….a politician who has lied about her views on the bridge to nowhere, Barack Obama, and her frigid religious views on pre-marital sex.”
Or something to that effect. But we all know she is not compelling, or smart or anything. We are now she is trash. We need to just say it, over and over again. You know, like the Republicans do as they win election after election after election after election…
Why are Democrats Afraid to Speak the Truth?
The Democratic campaign enjoyed a spectacular and spirited convention climaxed by a phenomenal speech by Senator Obama. The McCain campaign followed with a phenom of its own with the addition of Governor Sarah Palin to the ticket. Prior to that spontaneous decision, John McCain was experiencing difficulty attracting an audience. In fact, with the prearranged agenda including Bush and Cheney, they would likely had difficulty filling the convention hall. This situation was remedied by the creation of the John McCain traveling burlesque show. Hopefully, the same people who support Sarah Palin are those who supported Sanjaya right up until it was time to declare him an American Idol. While the Republican propaganda machine is frantically fabricating a history for Palin, scrambling like canaries in a cage startled by the appearance of a cat, Barack Obama himself appears tired, bored, deflated, and even defeated. It’s time for the Democratic Party to employ a novel strategy in the political arena. It’s time to tell the truth.
It is a foregone conclusion that multi-national corporate interests own the federal government lock, stock, and barrel, with Big Oil as the majority shareholder. George Bush is a president with no leverage over these entities in fact; he invited them to the party. When Bush proclaims, “we must protect American interests abroad,” it is these corporate interests to which he refers. The lobbyists who represent these interests have written any and all legislation passed within the last eight years. The Republican hierarchy has embedded within it, individuals in key positions who steer all government policies to favor these groups. If John McCain and the Republican Party remain in power, this situation will not change. Furthermore, if some tragedy were to befall McCain, Palin has left no doubt in anyone’s mind that she is completely capable of reading the commands issued by these individuals. While the McCain/Palin Campaign portrays itself as the reform ticket, these same multi-nationals are pouring money into the effort directly and through 527 provisions to insure its success. This phenomenon can be compared to the scenario in which a drug kingpin who has already bought-off key players in law enforcement and the judiciary, finances the campaign of the ‘law and order’ candidate who is secretly also on his payroll.
This reality is understood throughout the world (except among the religious right which is, by the way, neither) so much so that the European Union was formed in large part to insulate governments on that continent from this same corruption. Any and all candidates running for political office in democracies throughout Europe who have ties to our corrupt administration are handily voted down. The impact of this unified agreement has resulted in a blockade of many American products to a consumer base of nearly half a billion and the subsequent loss of countless American jobs. The distrust of American enterprise has facilitated a rapid increase in the demand for Russian oil and natural gas causing the current tension between the oil friendly Bush Administration and the neo-capitalist Russian government. It is no wonder that the Republican Party will never support successful programs for public education. It is to its advantage for its core electorate to remain oblivious to its true priorities and their consequences. Anyone interested in the future of these great United States must focus on the interview in which Dick Cheney openly admitted that the Republican Party, “will say what we need to, to get elected,” and then pursue, with reckless indifference, the policies agreed to prior to the campaign.
Barack Obama must reinvigorate his campaign by simply implementing the truth. In plain terminology, Obama must educate the American people in how it works, how it got this way, and how it can be fixed. He must loudly proclaim that this Republican Administration has not only undermined the Democratic process through trickery and fraud, but has nullified the legislative process by expanding the powers of the presidency which has led to the paralysis of Congress. America is not only crying for change but is also starving for truth. Somebody has to go first.