Dave Weigel has been all over this story, which is strange enough that it might otherwise be difficult to credit: Republicans promoting the “cut, cap, balance” proposal keep talking about robust numbers of Democrats who have supported a Balanced Budget Amendment, as evidence their pet rock is more viable than other debt limit solutions circulating around Washington. A list being circulated by Sen. Mike Lee of UT counts 23 such Democrats in the Senate alone.
As Dave points out, some of the Democrats on the Lee’s list are just talking generally about how nice it would be to balance budgets (in at least one case, at the state level), and most of the others are touting very old versions of a BBA that simply required, you know, a balanced budget, often with significant loopholes.
But what makes this gambit outrageous and significant isn’t just that it’s mendacious: it also helps underscore the fact that the constitutional amendment called for in the CCB legislation isn’t primarily about balancing the federal budget. It’s about the provisions in the amendment proposal that would create a permanent supermajority requirement for enacting tax increases (a faithful echo of the Prop 13 requirement that has made such a fiscal mess of California over the years), and a permanent limitation on federal spending linked to a permanent percentage of GDP.
Republicans are perfectly within their rights to promote these terrible ideas for writing their inflexible fiscal and economic theories into the U.S. Constitution, but they shouldn’t get away with pretending the balanced budget part of the proposal is any more than a pretext. In reality, they oppose balanced budgets unless they are achieved solely through sharp and arbitrary spending reductions. It’s sort of like Republican support for “pro-family policies”–it’s only “pro-family” if you accept their definitions of “families” and their assumptions about what is good for “families.” In other words, it’s all a smokescreen for their real agenda.
Ed Kilgore
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In a remarkably short period of time, Representative Michele Bachmann has been transformed from a fringe figure, known mainly for her abrasive and often inaccurate attacks on the president and other Democrats, into a legitimate presidential candidate. The latest national poll of Republicans (from Public Policy Polling) shows her pulling ahead of long-time front-runner Mitt Romney. The latest poll of likely Caucus-goers in Iowa has the same result. She’s even gaining rapidly on Romney in New Hampshire, and making a splash in many other states. She is now poised to win the first real contest of the cycle, the Iowa GOP Straw Poll on August 13, and could do so in a way that destroys the candidacy of her fellow Minnesotan and one-time smart-money favorite for the nomination, Tim Pawlenty.
But now that Bachmann is the real deal, her candidacy is about to endure its toughest moments yet–including intensified scrutiny of her background and character (which is already very much under way), unrealistic expectations for her candidacy, a possible existential threat from Governor Rick Perry, and GOP elite misgivings about her electability. In the coming months, this multi-faceted stress test might just send her back to obscurity well before the first delegate-selection events in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina even take place.
Heightened scrutiny of Bachmann has already begun, notably in the form of derision towards her husband, Marcus, whose Christian counseling firm and effeminate mannerisms have drawn horselaughs from such media figures as Jon Stewart, and claims in a Daily Caller piece that she suffers from “incapacitating” migraine headaches and heavy medication to combat them. So far Bachmann has done well, largely ignoring the mockery about her husband and denying the reports that she might be medically unfit to serve as president (she’s sought to turn the innuendoes around by identifying herself with the “30 million Americans [who] experience migraines that are easily controlled with medication.”) But you have to figure there is a lot more to come, including a more thorough examination of long-standing reports of instability on her congressional staff. And while a handful of progressive journalists have sought to draw attention to her extremist background (particularly her association with “Dominionist” thinkers who argue that America should be transformed into a Christian theocracy), only now can we expect the mainstream media to follow the scent and ask their own questions.
Moreover, heightened expectations surrounding Bachmann’s recent surge in the polls could also pose a problem. Iowa observers are wondering if she’s spending enough quality time in the state to satisfy the demands of its conservative activists, or building the kind of statewide organization necessary to get supporters to Ames for the Straw Poll. And she’s already a bit handicapped by the fact that two of her biggest likely stealth supporters in the state, Representative Steve King and social conservative kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats, have promised to stay neutral until after the Straw Poll. But anything short of a Bachmann victory in Ames will be billed as disappointing, and if Tim Pawlenty manages to parlay his sizable state-level organization into an upset win (unlikely but possible), all bets are off as T-Paw could recapture his early claim to be the “true conservative alternative to Mitt Romney.”
Probably the biggest challenge to Bachmann, however, may be developing down in Texas. Rick Perry, whose minions have been burning up the phone lines to potential donors, is already generating excitement (and regular double-digit poll showings) as a candidate with all of Bachmann’s appeal to Christian Right and Tea Party activists, but much better credibility with the GOP establishment and a tailor-made “story to tell” to the entire electorate about his state’s superior record generating jobs. One leading Republican observer suggested recently that Perry’s entrance into the race would instantly make it a three-way contest between Perry, Romney, and the eventual Iowa winner. Another replied that a Perry campaign could make the Iowa winner irrelevant. And that’s aside from the fact that Perry would be likely to contest Iowa as well. This weekend, in fact, the Iowa State GOP might choose to put Perry on the Straw Poll ballot even though he’s given no formal indication he’s going to run.
One indicator of the threat Perry poses to Bachmann’s base of support is the growing involvement of a broad array of Christian Right figures, including such warhorses as James Dobson and Richard Land, in the August 6 prayer gathering the governor is hosting in Houston. As Religion Dispatch‘s Sarah Posner puts it, “The religious right is signing on en masse” to the event. This infatuation with Perry has to be disturbing to Bachmann, a graduate of Oral Roberts University’s law school and a long-time soldier in Christian Right causes.
Finally, even if Bachmann can maintain her lead in Iowa, she has yet to win over conservative elites, even among those whose views are as reliably extreme as her own. Any plausible path to the nomination for Bachmann includes a win in South Carolina, a state whose Republican voters are a lot like those of Iowa, with the exception that the Palmetto State’s Tea Party movement is highly organized and active. But early indications are that Senator Jim DeMint, himself an important national power-broker, has succeeded in convincing most SC pols and donors to “keep their powder dry” in the presidential contest until such time as he has scrutinized the candidates and made his own choice. Bachmann, who visibly annoyed DeMint by initially refusing to take the “cut, cap, and balance” pledge on the debt limit issue (she eventually relented after previously vowing to vote against the CCB legislation on grounds that a repeal of ObamaCare should also be a condition of any debt limit increase), is not off to a great start in the DeMint Primary. It also doesn’t help her with party elites that she’s closely (if somewhat unfairly) associated with Sarah Palin, and thus might be expected to emulate Palin’s pattern of steadily growing disapproval ratings from political independents and more moderate Republicans. While Bachmann is faring better than Palin against Barack Obama in the few recent trial heat polls that have appeared, her approval-disapproval split among the general electorate isn’t very promising (29/45 in a recent PPP survey).
So there are storm clouds amidst the bright skies ahead for Michele Bachmann as we enter the Dog Days of the invisible primary leading into 2012. If she hopes to hold on, she’d better batten down the hatches for a very rough ride.
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
House Republicans voted on Tuesday to pass a legislative version of “Cut, Cap, and Balance,” one of the newest and most disturbing of the many conservative oaths currently being sworn by large swaths of the GOP. Of course, the bill is not going to be enacted, and for some congressional Republicans, it will just serve as cover for some ultimate debt limit vote that will anger the conservative base. But the “Cut, Cap and Balance” measure explains a lot about the actual priorities of conservatives at a time when they are supposedly fixated on eliminating deficits and debts. Instead of reflecting a concern about balancing the budget, the measure prioritizes a radically limited government agenda at all costs. Its current popular ascendance in Congress will only intensify the already-enormous pressure on Republicans to just say no to any conceivable debt limit increase.
In its original form, as developed by the conservative ideological commissars of the House Republican Study Committee, CCB was a “framework” for budget negotiations, drafted as a list of demands:
103 House Republicans sent a letter to House Republican leadership calling for a solution that could resolve the current debt limit impasse and prevent the bigger, Greece-like debt crisis just over the horizon: Cut, Cap, and Balance.
1. Cut – We must make discretionary and mandatory spending reductions that would cut the deficit in half next year.
2. Cap – We need statutory, enforceable caps to align federal spending with average revenues at 18% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with automatic spending reductions if the caps are breached.
3. Balance – We must send to the states a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) with strong protections against federal tax increases and a Spending Limitation Amendment (SLA) that aligns spending with average revenues as described above.
CCB aroused high hosannas from conservative opinion-leaders, and was heavily promoted by the RSC’s senatorial counterpart, Jim DeMint. It was soon converted into a “pledge” that omitted some of the original proposal’s specifics (i.e., the GDP “triggers”), but added the inflammatory promise to oppose any other approach, including any debt limit increase at all, until such time as Congress had acted favorably on CCB. The pledge was endorsed by a vast array of conservative advocacy groups, and was pushed especially hard on GOP presidential candidates, who were loath to offend DeMint in advance of next year’s potentially crucial South Carolina primary. By the time Michele Bachmann signed it on Monday (she initially refused on grounds of her own categorical opposition to any debt limit increase), every 2012 wannabee other than Jon Huntsman had signaled their commitment to the cause.
Meanwhile, of course, Republicans in Congress devised a legislative version of CCB, which passed the House last night by a vote of 234 to 190. It’s arguably a bit milder than the original proposal, as it exempts Social Security and Medicare from immediate cuts and phases in the GDP triggers on spending. But despite all the talk of the House vote (and a prospective, if doomed, vote in the Senate) being a meaningless Kabuki exercise that just wastes time before a “real deal” is negotiated between congressional leaders and the White House, it’s worth remembering that 38 House members and 12 Senators (plus those nine presidential candidates and virtually every conservative group you’ve ever heard of) not only endorsed the CCB legislation, but signed the pledge, which effectively makes them unavailable in any deal-making exercise. In other words, even if GOP leaders in Congress pull their forelocks in obeisance to the commands of Wall Street and endorse a debt limit deal, the lines to their office doors of Members seeking a sanctioned “free vote” against it will be very long, and many will cast a nihilistic vote for default no matter what.
It’s been a rocky personal week for presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. First she’s had to endure steadily growing mockery from TV personalities aimed at her husband’s alleged effeminacy and/or ambivalent sexuality. Now the Daily Caller has published a piece based on unnamed former staffers’ accounts suggesting she has “debilitating” bouts of migraine headaches triggered by stress or adversity and consumes a heavy diet of pills to deal with this or related conditions.
I’m demonstrably not a fan of the wacky Minnesotan, whose views offend me on religious as well as moral and political grounds. But I’m sympathetic to her on these specific “issues.” I used to half-jokingly say we needed a constitutional amendment to ban public references to the families of politicians, by the politicians or by anyone else. So who cares what somebody’s “gaydar” says about Marcus Bachmann, and who cares whether his reportedly atavistic views on gay sexuality reflect hypocrisy, repressed desires, or just good old-fashioned ignorance and bigotry? Aren’t Michele Bachmann’s own views on these subjects sufficient to establish that anyone opposing discrimination based on sexual orientation should probably look elsewhere for a presidential candidate? Leave her husband alone.
As for the “revelation” of Bachmann’s alleged “disability” and treatment for it, it’s worth noting at this point that the author of this story, Jonathan Strong, and his publisher, Tucker Carlson, have a bit of a history of making distorted mountains out of molehills. I can barely read their stuff without being deafened by the sound of axes being ground and website hits being cynically generated. More importantly, Strong’s account is much heavier on innuendo than facts. It’s a bit hard to credit the idea that Bachmann has been disappearing regularly for extended periods of time. She is, after all, rather conspicuous. And the supposed concerns of her staffers (or the writer egging them on) about Bachmann’s pill use may simply reflect the ignorance of the young about how many medications it takes to treat migraines, or for that matter, many other non-debilitating ailments common among people Bachmann’s age (I know whereof I speak, having just bought one of those big plastic pill organizers myself).
In any event, her response stoutly denied the claims she is disabled by migraines or gobbling handfulls of pills, and shrewdly identifies her with “the 30 million other Americans [who] experience migraines that are easily controlled with medication.” That’s a whole lot more people than the readership of the Daily Caller.
UPDATE: Now a story has broken that Bachmann’s staff allegedly roughed up ABC reporter Brian Ross when he pursued the candidate towards her car after an event with follow-up questions (which she ignored) on the migraine allegations.
It will be interesting to see how Team Bachmann handles this potentially bad story. Bachmann has often been unfairly conflated with Sarah Palin. I’ve argued that one difference between the two social conservative Tea Party women is that Bachmann is far less prone than Palin to rely on victimization narratives to rally her supporters. If this latest contretemps had involved Palin, there is zero doubt her supporters would instantly turn it into yet another tale of St. Joan of the Tundra being persecuted by the lamestream media. Bachmann could do the same thing–or she could just apologize, repeat her response to the underlying allegations, and move on.
I don’t mean to dwell to an unnecessary extent this week on the presidential campaign of Herman Cain, but he does seem determined to make news in a way that illustrates how not to run for president. The second quarter financial numbers from Team Cain do not paint a very reassuring picture, as noted by The Iowa Republican‘s Craig Robinson:
Cain’s campaign was able to maintain some cash on hand because of a loan of $500,000 from the candidate. However, a close inspection of Cain’s expenditures shows he is not very fiscally conservative with donors’ money. He raised $2,053,000 and spent $2,096,000. Only Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty spent more cash this cycle than Herman Cain did.
The difference is, Romney and Pawlenty raised far more than they spent. Cain is running on a “Common Sense Solutions” platform and claims that his business experience gives him an edge over the rest of the field. If Cain’s campaign was being run like a business, it might be on the verge of bankruptcy.
Comparisons of Cain to other free-spending candidates also indicate the former Pizza King has less to show for his expenses in the way of campaign infrastructure. Pawlenty, for example, has what is universally considered the most formidable field operation in Iowa. Cain’s lost key staffers in both Iowa and New Hampshire on grounds that he’s not spending enough time in either state to make a viable run.
That makes it even odder that Cain’s campaign is spending so much on travel: in the second quarter alone, $336,000 for air travel ($245,000 of that on private jets), and another $65,000 on hotel rooms. They’ve also shelled out, in one quarter, $10,000 for the critical services of Joe the Plumber.
At some point, donors will begin to wonder whether Herman Cain is going somewhere, or just nowhere fast.
When marginal candidates make it momentarily big, and then start slipping towards their natural level of support, they generally have two choices: riding it all out with dignity and building up capital for future campaigns, or getting down and dirty with hard-core supporters and trying to bubble back up on a wave of notoriety.
2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain seems to be taking the latter path. For a brief moment this spring, he was the “It” candidate, beloved of the Tea Party folk and lighting up audiences in the early Caucus and primary states. Then his stock speech got a little old; he didn’t do well in the first big candidate debate; he didn’t raise much money; and his Iowa and New Hampshire staff started abandoning him, muttering that he wasn’t running a serious campaign.
So Cain has now apparently made his choice and headed for the fringes, making himself notorious as the candidate who, well, doesn’t like Muslims or maybe even Mormons.
Right when most of us had charitably forgotten the 2010 campaign cycle’s plague of Republican attacks on mosque construction and the phantom threat of Shariah Law, Cain has brought it all back up. He showed up at an anti-mosque rally in Murfreesboro, Tennessee–not an early primary venue–to fan the flames of bigotry in that community, and get some national attention.
And now he’s drifting across another civic line and gratuitously suggesting that Mitt Romney can’t win in the South because of his religion.
It’s not clear at this point if Cain thinks this sort of pandering to the worst instincts of GOP primary voters will revive his campaign, or he’s just building a future audience for radio shows and books. But in any event, the former pizza king is giving us all some heartburn we don’t need.
As many of you no doubt know, this is going to be a grim week in politics, with Washington’s attention riveted on a completely bogus congressional debate over a “cut, cap, balance” proposal to roll back government to the 1950s and then write that into the U.S. Constitution, against the background of actual negotations (and saber-rattling) between the two parties and all sorts of ominous signs of economic disaster.
While it’s obvious the “C-C-B” debate is designed to provide Tea Party conservatives and the GOP presidential field with opportunities to strut their stuff before the real deal goes down, there is a significant risk the posturing will overwhelm the deal-making. There’s no way to know how many congressional Republicans actually think a debt default would be no big deal, just as we can’t know how many of them think an extended depression would be good for the country by crushing the aspirations of all those shiftless freeloaders who don’t simply bend the knee to “job creators” and shuffle along in the great cattle drive of life. It is obvious that if congressional Republican leaders (at the behest of their Wall Street overseers) ever crack the whip for a deal, the line of Members of Congress begging for a “free vote” to denounce the whole thing as a godless betrayal of America on behalf of Big Labor and ACORN will be very long.
Ezra Klein’s analysis of the ultimate deal that is under development is nice and succinct:
It begins with the McConnell plan, in which the debt ceiling is raised three times between now and November, and each time, Republicans are able to offer a resolution of disapproval. Then it adds in $1.5 trillion in spending cuts harvested from the Biden talks. Then it create a committee of 12 lawmakers charged with sending a deficit-reduction plan to Congress by the end of the year. Whatever they decide on would be protected from the filibuster and immune to amendments.
If this is indeed the deal, it will be immediately denounced by most conservative and many progressive activists as a total cave-in, in part because of baleful assessments of “paths not taken” and fearful expectations of what the proposed “super-committee” might actually do. Between all that noise and the shrieking over “cut, cap and balance,” it will be very difficult to figure out what’s actually going to happen as we inch towards default.
Not a bad week to go on vacation, if you are lucky enough to afford it and aren’t on the permanent vacation of unemployment.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on July 8, 2011.
Nate Silver’s well-reasoned analysis, “Why the Republicans Resist Compromise” at his Five Thirty Eight blog at The New York Times affirms the meme that the GOP is pretty much ensnared by its more conservative faction. While this conclusion is no big shocker to most political observers, Silver’s data-driven analysis, as presented in his chart “Ideological Distribution of People Voting Republican for U.S. House,” is impressive and instructive:
The Republican Party is dependent, to an extent unprecedented in recent political history, on a single ideological group. That group, of course, is conservatives. It isn’t a bad thing to be in favor with conservatives: by some definitions they make up about 40 percent of voters. But the terms ‘Republican’ and ‘conservative’ are growing closer and closer to being synonyms; fewer and fewer nonconservatives vote Republican, and fewer and fewer Republican voters are not conservative.
The chart, culled from exit poll data, shows the ideological disposition of those people who voted Republican for the House of Representatives in the elections of 1984 through 2010. Until fairly recently, about half of the people who voted Republican for Congress (not all of whom are registered Republicans) identified themselves as conservative, and the other half as moderate or, less commonly, liberal. But lately the ratio has been skewing: in last year’s elections, 67 percent of those who voted Republican said they were conservative, up from 58 percent two years earlier and 48 percent ten years ago.
Silver notes the pivotal role of disproportionate conservative turnout in last year’s midterms, and the unfortunate consequences for Dems:
This was fortunate for Republicans, because they lost moderate voters to Democrats by 13 percentage points (and liberals by 82 percentage points). Had the ideological composition of the electorate been the same in 2010 as in 2008 or 2006, the Republicans and Democrats would have split the popular vote for the House about evenly — but as it was, Republicans won the popular vote for the House by about 7 percentage points and gained 63 seats.
Many of the G.O.P. victories last year were extremely close. I calculate that, had the national popular vote been divided evenly, Democrats would have lost just 27 seats instead of 63. Put differently, the majority of Republican gains last year were probably due to changes in relative turnout rather than people changing their minds about which party’s approach they preferred.
Addressing “the enthusiasm gap within the Republican party,” Silver cites a Pew Research poll conducted a few days before the election which indicated that,
Among conservatives who are either registered as Republicans or who lean toward the Republican party, about 3 out of 4 were likely to have voted in 2010, the Pew data indicated. The fraction of likely voters was even higher among those who called themselves “very conservative:” 79 percent.
By contrast, only about half of moderate or liberal Republicans were likely voters, according to Pew’s model. That is about the same as the figure for Democrats generally: — about half of them were likely voters, with little difference among conservative, moderate and liberal Democrats.
So the enthusiasm gap did not so much divide Republicans from Democrats; rather, it divided conservative Republicans from everyone else. According to the Pew data, while 64 percent of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents identify as conservative, the figure rises to 73 percent for those who actually voted in 2010.
Silver cites data indicating that “Republicans are still fairly unpopular,” but adds,
…As long as conservative Republicans are much more likely to vote than anyone else, the party can fare well despite that unpopularity, as it obviously did in 2010. But it means that Republican members of Congress have a mandate to remain steadfast to the conservatives who are responsible for electing them.
Presidential elections are different: they tend to have a more equivocal turnout. The G.O.P. can turn out its base but it has not converted many other voters to its cause, and President Obama’s approval ratings remain passable although not good. The Republicans will need all their voters to turn out — including their moderates — to be an even-money bet to defeat him.
Silver believes that, if Romney is nominated, he would have a clear shot at turning out the GOP moderates, while Bachmann could alienate enough of them to give Obama victory.
At his TPM Editors blog, Josh Marshall applauds Silver’s analysis of conservative domination of the GOP, but adds that it shouldn’t let Democrats off the hook for their failure to take advantage of it:
When I castigate the Democrats for not having a clear message or President Obama for not having an “outside game” in the debt fight, readers will often write in to say that I’m ignoring the fact that the modern GOP is a coherent and highly ideological party while the Democrats simply are not. So Republicans are inherently more able to function as a unified force with a unified message than the Dems. In fact, these folks will argue, it’s not even right to talk about “the Dems” because that buys into the illusion that they’re a party like the GOP as opposed to a coalition of constituencies.
For my money, I don’t find this a sufficient explanation. I do think the Dems are consistently guilty of what amounts to a political failure — the failure to devise and push a consistent message and play on the weaknesses of their foes. I’ve made these points so often that there’s no need (and probably appetite) for me to restate them here. However, it is important to note these structural realities that create a genuine tilt in the playing field of our politics, one that makes it easier for 35% to 40% of the electorate to dominate the country by having virtually total control over one of the two parties.
“Still,” Marshall concludes, “…Politics matters. And on that count the Dems continue to be captive and captured by a weakness it is in their collective power — and for a president to a great degree individual power — to change.”
This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on July 6, 2011.
At TNR today, Jonathan Chait asks an important and very basic question: in doing things like supporting radical cuts in federal transportation spending, are Republicans actually expressing their vision of what the federal government should or shouldn’t do?
Do they think we’re overinvested in infrastructure? That if we reduce government involvement, the private sector will step in? Or that the economic benefits of maintaining our physical infrastructure — or, more realistically, falling behind at a slower pace — are simply smaller than the economic benefits of keeping taxes low?
There is, I suspect, no one answer. Some conservatives have very radical ideas about legitimate areas of, or levels for, federal involvement in this or domestic function. Others don’t. But particularly when the president is a Democrat, and they don’t have genuine control of Congress, they feel no particular compunction to vote in a way that reflects any honest plan for the country. Domestic spending is too high, so votes to cut it, however nonsensical when it comes to an coherent view of federal responsibility, are always the right thing to do.
The same pattern is even more apparent on issues like health care. Do Republicans all share the view that health care isn’t enumerated as a federal responsibility in the Constitution and therefore any federal health care program is illegitimate? No, and the ones who do are unlikely to talk about it in public. Do all the others reject the idea that universal access to health care is a worthy and legitimate public goal? That’s harder to say, though it was certainly fashionable pretty recently for Republicans to claim they had plans to achieve something like universal coverage, even if the details made the claim highly questionable.
But what all Republicans can agree on is that Democratic efforts to achieve universal health coverage, even if they are based on plans embraced by Republicans in the not-too-distant past, are terrible and need to be repealed immediately. As noted in my previous post, Republicans seem to feel little if any responsibility to outline what they’d do the day after ObamaCare is discarded.
Finally, there’s the Big Bertha of domestic policy disputes, the demand by conservatives for radical changes to Medicare, Medicaid and (more muted, at the moment at least) Social Security. Again, some conservatives clearly think the whole New Deal/Great Society legacy was fundamentally misbegotten and unconstitutional. Others (viz. Mitch Daniels) won’t say that, but will say these programs are inappropriate and unaffordable going forward. And still others claim that initiatives to radically reduce “entitlement” benefits (via a Medicaid block grant, Medicare vouchers, or Social Security privatization) are the only way to “save” these programs. Still, conservatives are more than willing to come together in support of proposals like Paul Ryan’s budget that get them part of the way or all the way towards their ultimate objectives.
So the question remains: does it really matter what conservatives really want in the way of ideal policies? Yes and no. Where conservatives are, as in the case of politicians like Michele Bachmann and Jim DeMint, among others, demonstrably in the grip of radical ideologies that are designed to produce a country characterized by theocracy, contempt for people in need, unfettered corporate power, and rampant militarism, then of course, progressives should make that clear. And where conservatives are demonstrably dishonest about their intentions, as with many “right-to-life” activists who weep crocodile tears for the “victims” of late-term abortions in the service of an agenda aimed at a total repeal of reproductive rights, including the use of many forms of contraception–progressives should expose the charade early and often. It’s also important to reveal what’s happening when Republican pols, whether or not they believe much of anything at all, choose to embrace the policies (or accept the litmus tests) of radicals strictly in order to achieve political power.
Beyond that, it’s probably a waste of time to worry too much about what conservatives actually want. It’s better to focus on showing what their polices would actually produce in real-world consequences. That’s bad enough.
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Let’s say you are Mitt Romney, or Tim Pawlenty, or Michele Bachmann, or Rick Perry, and, on November 6 of next year, you are elected the forty-fifth president of the United States. For the sake of argument, let’s say your party still controls the House of Representatives and has taken control of the Senate as well (under the presidency of your running-mate Marco Rubio) by one seat. Maybe the economy has even begun growing at a slightly faster rate and unemployment is down a bit, though neither improvement occurred fast enough to give Barack Obama a second term. Life looks good, right?
Not necessarily. Given, among other things, the country’s highly polarized politics, the rise of the Tea Party, and your barely-there edge in public support over your predecessor, your fate as a Republican president doesn’t look too bright.
For starters, there are the many problems you must tackle that you inherited not just from Obama but from George W. Bush as well (you know, big deficits and debt, a shaky global financial system, health care costs still out of control, the retirement of the baby boom generation, steadily worsening inequality, a housing market that looks like it will never fully recover, and crises in international hot spots like the Middle East). On top of that, you made a few promises along the path to the White House that now must be redeemed or repudiated–neither of which will be easy. In particular, in the fiendish competition for the 2012 GOP nomination, you have sworn, among other things, to disable or repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA); make the Bush tax cuts permanent, while also slashing corporate taxes; pare back environmental regulations; slash domestic appropriations and cap federal spending at a fixed percentage of GDP significantly lower than it has been for years; pass a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget; make Supreme Court appointments that would guarantee the reversal of Roe v. Wade; and pursue a “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
You must implement this agenda in a climate where the mainstream media have concluded via exit polls that you won the election strictly because of poor economic conditions and disappointment with Obama (with the latter manifested by poor turnout among traditionally Democratic constituencies) and thus have no real policy mandate. Simultaneously, the GOP’s conservative “base” is expecting a repeal of “liberal” policies enacted by both parties dating back to the New Deal; indeed, your already long list of promises isn’t long enough for them.
You plan to make an appeal to bipartisanship in your inaugural address, as virtually every president has done, but the well has been thoroughly poisoned by the GOP’s strident hostility to Obama for every single day of the previous four years. In particular, Republican obstructionist tactics in the preceding Senate have made any gambit for restoring majority rule to that chamber implausible, which, in turn, makes enactment of the more controversial elements of your platform implausible as well. Moreover, Republican control of both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government has created a siege mentality among virtually all Democrats in Washington, who are united–give or take a few random Blue Dogs or Fox-friendly pundits–in a desperate effort to defend the New Deal/Great Society legacy and exact revenge for the GOP’s behavior after their 2008 defeat.
What to do? Perhaps, you think, it will be possible to secure some Democratic cooperation for the “replace” part of the “repeal and replace” agenda for health care, given the leverage you have to unilaterally frustrate implementation of ACA via state waivers and other executive powers. This is important not only because redeeming your health care campaign pledge is emotionally the top priority for your Tea Party supporters, but also because “replace,” not “repeal,” must be central to your already virtually impossible fiscal and political goals. Indeed, just repealing the ACA without some additional health care cost-containment measures would, to use the old Al Gore phrase, “blow a hole in the deficit” of enormous proportions.
But you’re in a tough spot, to put it lightly: The single most effective post-ACA cost-containment measure–restoring the right of insurance companies to blatantly discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions–is wildly unpopular (there’s than mandate problem again!). And holding down public health care costs using the more direct method of limiting federal responsibility for them via a Paul Ryan-style Medicare “voucher” system is even more unpopular. (At least you recognized this during the 2012 campaign and slipped out of an earlier commitment to support Ryan’s scheme.) Your other options are, well, slim to none.
You have the same kind of problem on the revenue front, where failure to enact a real federal budget or achieve some sort of deal with Democrats could doom efforts to extend (or make permanent, as you promised) the Bush tax cuts, which is the key plank in your campaign platform of passing additional high-end and corporate tax cuts to help out “job-producers.” Sometimes, late at night, you secretly nourish hopes the Bush tax cuts will lapse, significantly shrinking long-term deficits, but you dare not mutter such heresy aloud, even to your spouse.
As you ponder these intractable conflicts in your own agenda, you can only hope that the first days of your administration aren’t devoted to an international crisis–or perhaps, worse yet, the retirement of a Supreme Court justice. That incautious speech you made in South Carolina back in December 2011 pledging to end “forty years of government-sanctioned death penalties for millions of innocent human beings” the moment a Supreme Court spot came open didn’t overshadow your general election campaign, but it sure could create a less than ideal climate for governance if it suddenly became relevant to an actual nomination and confirmation fight.
Maybe that inaugural address should include some rhetoric about a “fresh start for America.” You know, the kind that begins with forgetting everything you said for the previous two years.
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