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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Editor’s Corner

January 13: Fighting For “Public Investment”

One of the meta-messaging challenges of our age is to defend the idea that key government programs do indeed represent “public investments” that produce tangible outcomes worth measuring–for good or for ill. I wrote about this today at the Washington Monthly:

Conservatives have for years mocked the use of the term “investment” for public expenditures, arguing that it’s just a cosmetic code word for “spending,” and an effort to borrow on the respectability of entirely non-germane business practices. But to the extent that public spending is explicitly aimed at producing non-immediate payoffs, it is ridiculous not to view–and then to measure–the future return on “investment.”
So even as Republicans perpetually seek to deride, devolve, or demolish Medicaid as ineffective welfare for those people, along comes a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research evaluating the long-term impact of covering children under Medicaid. And as reported by The Upshot‘s Margot Sanger-Katz, the results are impressive even if you limit the “payback” to measurable contributions to the beneficiaries’ earning power and subsequent tax payments:

The study used newly available tax records measured over decades to examine the effects of providing Medicaid insurance to children. Instead of looking at the program’s immediate impact on those children and their families, it followed them once they became adults and began paying federal taxes.
People who had been eligible for Medicaid as children, as a group, earned higher wages and paid higher federal taxes than their peers who were not eligible for the federal-state health insurance program. And the more years they were eligible for the program, the larger the difference in earnings.
“If we examine kids that were eligible for different amounts of Medicaid over the course of their childhood, we see that the ones that were eligible for more Medicaid ended up paying more taxes through income and payroll taxes later in life,” said Amanda Kowalski, an assistant professor of economics at Yale and one of the study’s authors.
The results mean that the government’s investment in the children’s health care may not have cost as much as budget analysts expected. The study, by a team that included economists from the Treasury Department, was able to calculate a return on investment in the form of tax revenue.
The return wasn’t high enough to pay the government back for its investment in health insurance by the time the children reached age 28, when the researchers stopped tracking the subjects. By that age, the Treasury had earned back about 14 cents for every dollar that the federal and state governments had spent on insurance. But it did suggest that, if the subjects’ wages continued to follow typical trajectories as they aged, the federal government would earn back about what it spent on its half of the program by the time the children reached 60 — about 56 cents on the dollar, calculated using a formula that took into account the time value of money.

These calculations do not, of course, include the ROI of healthier, happier lives.
Paul Krugman looks at this study and relates it to the Republican drive for “dynamic scoring” of tax measures in Congress–which means including estimates of the economic activity they believe tax cuts will produce along with their positive affect on revenues.

While Krugman is right to suggest the “dynamic scoring” fight provides a good opportunity to counter-punch with the “public investment” argument, that argument is important to progressives on its own. Instead of accepting the false premise of an irrepressible conflict between government as inherently good and government as inherently bad, Democrats should be prepared to argue that key investments are indeed effective by any honest accounting, and are irreplaceable by the invisible hand of markets or any other substitutes.


January 6: Slowly But Surely, Demographic Change Is Happening

We’re all accustomed to the reality that demographic changes are occurring that all in all are friendly to the prospects of the Democratic Party, at least as they have been manifested in recent elections. There’s plenty of argument over how fast these changes are occurring; whether they are at least partially reversible; and the wisdom or folly of relying on them. But they’re real.
Now the Center for American Progress is first out of the box with a study of how demographic changes could affect the 2016 elections. I wrote about this today at the Washington Monthly:

The write-up from CAP’s Patrick Oakford notes that two scenarios were analyzed: what would happen in 2016 if the party preferences of 2012 are projected four years down the line, and what would happen if the party preferences of 2004 are assumed to reassert themselves. This second scenario reflects the theory–understandably popular among Republicans–that not having Barack Obama on the ballot would cause the Democratic vote share to relapse to pre-Obama “normal” levels.
Obviously the first scenario would produce a larger Democratic victory than in 2012, with North Carolina rejoining the blue state ranks. I find the second scenario more interesting:

In some states, such as Florida, restoring party preferences to their 2004 levels would enable the GOP to narrowly win back states they lost in 2012 but had won in previous elections. However, in order to win back other key states that the GOP won in 2004, such as Ohio and Nevada, the GOP would need to exceed the share of support it received from voters of color in 2004.

This last observation is interesting insofar as George W. Bush won an impressive 16% of the African-American vote in Ohio in 2004. Does anyone see that performance being exceeded in 2016? I sure don’t.

Overall, the numbers suggest Democrats have a bit of a margin of error in battleground states even if percentages of minority voters drop a bit. But the turnout needs to stay up, and the whole proposition would look a lot stronger if Democrats cut into Bush04 levels among older and whiter voters.


December 26: GOP Presidential Field Closer to Christian Right Than Ever

One of the things both progressives and MSM types consistently get wrong is the tendency to dismiss, ignore, or underestimate the Christian Right as a factor in Republican politics. We can expect this bad habit to reemerge in connection with the 2016 presidential contest, which is already being billed as an Establishment Versus Tea Party battle where “social issues” won’t be prominent. But you can make the argument, as I did at TPMCafe this week, that the emerging GOP presidential field has more systemic links to the Christian Right than we’ve ever seen:

At least four frequently-mentioned GOP presidential proto-candidates have deep and intimate Christian Right ties. There’s former Gov. Mike Huckabee, of course, a Southern Baptist minister whose 2008 campaign almost entirely relied on conservative evangelical voters. His successor as the winner of the Iowa Caucuses, Rick Santorum, is a Catholic traditionalist who also appealed on moral and grounds to conservative evangelicals, and on occasion hinted that mainline Protestantism had been captured by Satan. Texas Gov. Rick Perry has long enjoyed close relationships with crypto-dominionists and radical self-styled Christian Zionists. And fellow Texan Sen. Ted Cruz frequently deploys as his warm-up act his father Rafael Cruz, a fiery conservative evangelical minister who believes Christians must “take back society” from “the progressives” who are responsible for “the blood of 57 million babies…crying out to God, just like the blood of Abel cried out to God.” Christian Right activists would have every reason to treat all four of these gentlemen as beyond the need for vetting, so thoroughly have they incorporated the requisite world view.
But there are other candidates who can be expected to compete with these claims of Christian warriorhood. Gov. Bobby Jindal has beaten the “religious freedom” drum more loudly than just about any other public figure in the debate surrounding the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby case, and his controversial school voucher program in Louisiana seems designed to shovel public money towards religious schools with a minimum of oversight. Gov. Mike Pence has been one of several proto-candidates cozying up to David Lane, a Christian Right impresario who is especially active in organizing clerical audiences for would-be presidents in Iowa. Gov. Scott Walker is a conservative evangelical who often speaks of carrying out his anti-union, pro-corporate agenda on instructions from the Almighty. Sen. Marco Rubio is (like Jindal) another traditionalist Catholic who likes to attend conservative evangelical churches, and has gone out of his way to embrace not only the Christian Right’s issue agenda but its more fundamental denial of church-state separation.
Rand Paul and his father have a longstanding connection to the openly theocratic U.S. Constitutional Party, and are especially close to Christian home-schoolers. Ben Carson was recently the keynote speaker at a fundraising event for The Family Leader, Iowa’s premier Christian Right group; he’s notorious for embracing comparisons of America to Nazi Germany, a particularly strong habit among antichoice activists. And even Establishment favorite Jeb Bush, lest we forget, was the politician who touched off the Terri Schiavo hysteria in 2003 by intervening in a family’s end-of-life decisions.
It is entirely possible that Christian Right activists will fatally split among different candidates, just as they did in 2008 and 2012 (George W. Bush was the last to unite the various tribes of conservative Christian political warriors, in 2000 and 2004). Corresponding splits among “Establishment” candidates, or the successful launching of a “crossover” candidacy (which Bush, Pence, Rubio or Walker might be able to pull off), could make that possibility matter less.
But there’s little risk of a sworn enemy of the Christian Right winning the nomination. Every “mentioned” GOP candidate for 2016 favors making abortions illegal again, and if there are any who dissent from the latter-day conservative litmus-test position defining “religious freedom” as justifying defiance of anti-discrimination laws, they have been very quiet about it.

Maybe some day we’ll learn not to issue premature obituaries for the Christian Right. This would be a very good time to stop.


December 19: Another Blow to the Big Adult Republicans

With the president’s partial normalization of relations with Cuba this week, followed by yet another explosion of fury from Republicans (other than the outlier, Rand Paul), it’s becoming obvious the original plans of congressional Republicans to showcase their positive, agenda-setting side once total control of Congress came into their grasp is looking mighty shaky. I talked about this yesterday at the Washington Monthly:

At the end of a post reciting the big moves “our bored, exhausted, disengaged president” has taken since the midterm elections, Kevin Drum makes an important point about what that means for next year:

All of these things are worthwhile in their own right, of course, but there’s a political angle to all of them as well: they seriously mess with Republican heads. GOP leaders had plans for January, but now they may or may not be able to do much about them. Instead, they’re going to have to deal with enraged tea partiers insisting that they spend time trying to repeal Obama’s actions. They can’t, of course, but they have to show that they’re trying. So there’s a good chance that they’ll spend their first few months in semi-chaos, responding to Obama’s provocations instead of working on their own agenda.

Case in point: Congressional Republicans are now going to have to spend significant time and energy in a Cold War battle with Obama over Cuba policy–one that is likely to end in failure, and that appeals only to a sliver of the U.S. population.
After all the interminable stuff we heard in 2014 about the Great Big Adult Republicans getting control over the unruly Tea Folk, I think we’ll find that Boehner and McConnell aren’t going to easily restrain conservatives with so much chum in the water. The provocation to a feeding frenzy is just becoming way too overpowering.

It will be interesting to see if the “Republicans moving to the center” meme survives months of shrieking about immigration, Cuba, and whatever else the president plans to do as the new year begins.


December 18: Jeb Bush’s Dilemma

Jeb Bush earned some extensive chatter from the political world by suddenly expressing an active interest in the race after months and years of Hamlet-like behavior, while also forming a leadership PAC to support allies and show the flag. He does have some assets along with the much-noted problem of recent friction with conservatives over his positions favoring Common Core education standards and some sort of legalization of undocumented immigrants. But at TPMCafe, I isolated what seems to be the problem he simply cannot solve:

Bush’s central problem is that in outside donor circles, he simply isn’t beloved in the way a fresher and more viscerally ideological candidate could be, and thus he needs a very strong “electability” argument to pull conservatives, however reluctantly, into his camp. And that’s the rub: despite his name ID, his resume, and his “centrist” positions on at least some subjects, this on-paper “winner” is not very popular with the general electorate. In two solid years of being pitted against Hillary Clinton in polls, Bush has not led a single one, and trails her in the latest RealClearPolitics average by over 9%. That’s a poorer margin than for Ryan (6%), Christie (7%), and Huckabee (8%), and about the same as for Paul. Ted Cruz is the only regularly polled putative GOP candidate running significantly worse than Bush against HRC (an RCP average gap of 13%), and that’s largely because he’s far less well-known.
Not having held a public office since 2006, it’s unclear what Bush can do to make himself significantly more popular with the general public in hopes of becoming seductively attractive to Republican caucus and primary voters who have a lot of other options. His signature issue used to be education, but his once-novel experiments with private school vouchers and teacher tenure “reform” are now old-hat and universally supported by Republicans. Moreover, education is a hot-button issue mostly to people angry about reform initiatives like Common Core. And there should be red flashing signs in Jeb’s camp about his business record, ranging from his involvement with Lehman Brothers and Barclays to his more recent dealings with Chinese investors. If Republicans want another Mitt Romney, the original is still available.
Can Jeb Bush buy his way to the standing he needs? His support from donors will obviously help if he runs, but as Rick Perry showed in 2012, the money can go pretty fast if it’s not propped up by positive events. And at the moment, the main way Bush can attract attention is by continuing to scold his once-fellow-conservatives for insufficient realism. Perhaps Bush will be able to elbow Christie and Rubio and even Romney out of the way and slip-slide through a demolition derby of conservatives the way John McCain did in 2008. But he could be on a trajectory to become this cycle’s Jon Huntsman, with a lot more money to run through. And just maybe he’s jollying his father and brother and various family retainers, and will not run when push comes to shove, leaving the dynasty in the hands of Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, his son, who has had the good political sense to oppose Common Core.

Don’t bet the farm on Jeb Bush.


December 12: A Reminder About Ideological and Strategic Differences Among Democrats

With yesterday’s split between the White House and Speaker Pelosi (and her Senate ally Elizabeth Warren) over the “Cromnibus” spending bill, we had the first really significant rift within the Democratic Party since the president formally became a lame duck and the 2016 presidential nomination contest–at present, but not necessarily for long, a cakewalk for Hillary Clinton–began. It clearly centered on the extent to which the Democratic Party needed to make its top priority protecting the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, and/or disassociating itself from Wall Street.
Now for some last-ditch opponents of the Dodd-Frank amendments contained in the Cromnibus, this is an ideological matter involving the financial sector as responsible for today’s economic problems or as an obstacle to progressive economic policy. For others it is a strategic issue involving perceptions of the Democratic Party or its positioning vis a vis a Republican Congress over the next four years. And there are Democrats on the other side of this particular barricade who variously have ideological or strategic reasons for feeling otherwise about the Dodd-Frank amendments specifically or anti-Wall Street “populism” generally.
But lest this dispute mestastasize into a “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party,” I’d like to remind Democrats of a plea we made at some length here five years ago about the importance of sorting out and taking seriously ideological and strategic differences before the rhetorical fur flies:

[I]deology, however muddled, is part of what makes most politically active people tick. And if we don’t talk about it–and about differences in strategic thinking as well, which should be the subject of future discussions–then all we are left with to explain our differences on this issue or that is questions of character. And anyone paying attention must recognize there’s far too much of that going on. “Progressive pragmatists”–the camp with which I most often personally identify, as it happens–often treat “the Left” condescendingly as immature and impractical people who don’t understand how things get done. Meanwhile, people on “the Left” often treat “pragmatists” as either politically gutless or personally corrupt. This is what happens when you don’t take seriously other people’s ideological and strategic underpinnings; whatever you gain in ignoring or minimizing differences in perspective or point of view is lost in mutual respect.

It’s not a bad thing to think about before Democrats start calling each other “socialists” and “corporate whores.”


December 10: Democrats Should Treat the South Just Like Any Other Region

Angst over the Democratic Party’s relationship with “the South” (variously defined) is a traditional post-election preoccupation, and given Democratic losses in the region on November 4, it’s not surprising it’s started up again. At TPMCafe, I suggested that those who favor special appeals to white southerners or conversely demand a pox on the whole atavistic area chill and consider treating “the South” just like any other region. Here’s an excerpt:

As my use of quotations around “the South” suggests, this topic is plagued by definitional problems. When The Atlantic‘s Molly Ball, for example, calls soon-to-be-former Sen. Mary Landrieu “the last southern Democrat,” she is excluding two states of the former Confederacy (Florida and Virginia) that have Democratic U.S. Senators and were carried twice by Barack Obama; non-statewide Democratic elected officials like Tennessee’s Steven Cohen who don’t fit the moderate-to-conservative stereotype of southern white pols; and most importantly, the African-Americans who are hardly an incidental presence in “the South” by any definition.
If anything is dying in southern Democratic politics, it’s the idea that you can forge successful statewide majorities with white candidates who hang onto 30 to 40 percent of the white vote by positioning themselves as far to the right as possible–and then expecting 90 percent of African-Americans to get them across the finish line. The Blue Dog model has almost certainly run its course. And I’m not remotely as optimistic as some progressives (almost invariably non-southerners) who think “populism” is some sort of magical formula for getting southern white working class voters to stop thinking about God and Guns and start thinking about their paychecks. The southern “populist” tradition (heavily associated with racism) is even more anachronistic than the Blue Dog model.
There is some room for creating a backlash against corporate lackeys like Rick Perry and Nikki Haley, whose idea of “economic development” is to eagerly sacrifice the people of their states to every whim of “investors.” But “the South” is going to be more pro-business and anti-government than other parts of the country for the foreseeable future, if only because there’s no social democratic Golden Age memories to conjure up the way there are in the once-heavily-unionized rust belt. Right now staunch support for public education, proud and unconditional anti-racism, and a vision of the social safety set, taxes, and basic regulations as something other than an inconvenience to “job creators,” is probably “populist” enough.
For the national Democratic Party, there’s really no longer any reason to agonize over “the South” as some sort of existential challenge to Democrats’ ambitions or principles. Democrats can win presidential elections while losing the region; the last Democrat to rely on southern states as anything other than electoral college gravy was Jimmy Carter way back in 1976. Nor is the decline in ticket-splitting that doomed Mary Landrieu and Mark Pryor this year an exclusively Democratic problem, as one might be misled to think by the very unusual Senate landscape of 2014. We’ll be reminded in 2016 of how many Republican senators are representing “blue states.”
But in any event, it is clear there was nothing the national party might have done to reverse the results in Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia or North Carolina this year. Just as importantly, unless you buy the dubious argument that the brief delay in the president’s executive action on immigration was purely a pander to “the South,” the national party did not really undertake any “concessions” to the South. So there’s no reason to swear off the South as an evil conservative seductress tempting Democrats to stray from the paths of righteousness.
Treating the South like the rest of the country makes the most sense for Democrats going forward. A return to presidential cycle turnout patterns should, in any close election, again make Florida, North Carolina and Virginia winnable for Democrats. The demographics of Georgia are making that state more “purple” every day, especially in presidential elections.

After noting some of the state-specific variations that too often get overlooked in discussions of “the South,” I conclude by asking Democrats for something southerners rarely request but could definitely use: less specific attention.

Seeing “the South” as a set of discrete political opportunities requiring skill, good candidate recruitment, the kind of ideological “flexibility” accorded to any other region, and resources calibrated to the risk and reward, is the best approach for Democrats. All the regional mythology should be treated as gone with the wind.


December 5: Obamacare: No Regrets

eI gotta say, J.P. Green is a lot more positive than I am about Sen. Chuck Schumer’s big speech telling Democrats the time and energy they spent enacting the Affordable Care Act was a big mistake. Here’s part of my response to Schumer–over at TPMCare:

In a much-discussed National Press Club speech last week, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York argued that by prioritizing health care reform, Democrats had elevated the interests of “a small percentage of the electorate”–the uninsured–at the expense of the interests of middle class voters who wanted economic magic. Schumer did not identify exactly what sort of proposals Democrats might have embraced to meet that demand, leading one to suspect he thinks agitating the air on behalf of the desired constituency and its demands might be enough, particularly if combined with a conspicuous decision to abandon the decades-long progressive project of health care reform as a sort of propitiatory sacrifice….
Some left-bent critics of Obama and the Democratic Party do have a specific parallel economic agenda in mind, mostly involving the financial sector: breaking up the largest banks, for example, and perhaps jailing some bankers for their role in the pain and suffering of the Great Recession. That may well represent good policy. And yes, this sort of agenda may have exerted some political appeal. But would financial shock-treatment have had any immediate effect on middle-class incomes? Would it have reduced inequality? And would it have sped up the recovery from the Great Recession? That’s all unlikely. The most-discussed positive policy prescription among progressives, an expansion of Social Security benefits, had less than a snowball’s chance in hell of being enacted by Congress even before, much less after, 2010. And it, too, like the much-derided minimum wage increase proposals of Democrats in the 2014 cycle, and like Obamacare, would have appealed to a relatively small share of voters.
If the point is simply that Democrats would have benefited from a more “populist” political message, that’s easy to agree upon, though it’s not so easy to agree on the components of such a message. You can certainly make a strong case that Democrats were incompetent in conveying their actual accomplishments in economic policy, and the threat Republicans pose to their preservation and extension. For example: how often or well did Democrats explain the Affordable Care Act as an economic initiative? When did they focus on the economic calamities risked by excessive reliance of fossil fuel energy? And in discussing poll-tested policy proposals like a minimum wage increase, to what extent did Democrats nestle these commitments in a broader agenda–that most certainly did exist–of measures aimed at boosting wages and real incomes?
In sum, there are too many variables involved, many of them having nothing to do with policy, to conclude with any degree of precision that a different economic agenda or subordinating health care and the environment to “jobs” would have made a big difference in 2014. And this entire debate is a distraction from what Democrats can do to win in 2016 when they will be in a much better position to hold a comparative “two futures” debate over economic policies instead of a “referendum” on hard times.

I guess this is the season for 20-20 hindsight. But it needs to end soon as we enter the 2016 cycle.


November 25: Were the Midterm Results Part of a Straight Line or a Cycle?

It’s now three weeks after the 2014 midterm elections, and a good time to reflect on how serious analysts differ on what happened and what it means. I did a bit of that at Washington Monthly:

I’m no big number-cruncher, and don’t have access to voter files or other data more sophisticated than exit polls, but my general take (articulated here and here) has been that the big GOP victory was the product of a number of things that happened to coincide in one cycle: a strongly pro-GOP midterm turnout pattern, a strongly pro-GOP “map” (at least for the Senate), a second-term midterm “drag” on the party controlling the White House, and negative perceptions of the economy that also hurt the party controlling the White House. I’ve conceded that individual candidates and campaigns may have won or cost a few contests, and it’s possible voter suppression (in the broadest sense of the term) may have mattered in a few places. I haven’t really come to grips with the idea that an entirely different Democratic message could have turned things around, but it’s possible, though very hard to demonstrate.
In any event, this week we’ve seen Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics demonstrate convincingly that the election wasn’t all about turnout demographics, and Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight demonstrate convincingly that it wasn’t all about the map.
What these analyses suggest to me is that the real fault line in 2014 interpretation could wind up being between those who think the factors driving the results are cyclical–whether it’s turnout, the map, the stage of the presidency, or the economy, or more likely a combination of them–or non-cyclical. Sean Trende, for example, clearly thinks Obama’s unpopularity was the crucial factor in 2014, and will probably sink Democrats in 2016 as well, despite better turnout patterns, etc. It’s really hard to prove or disprove the transitive nature of approval ratings for two-term presidents to their wannabe same-party successors, because the sample set is so small. But I’m still betting 2014 was mostly a “cyclical” election, just like the last three. That does not mean Democrats are guaranteed victory, by any stretch of the imagination, but does mean the winds should shift and give them a shorter and straighter path.

Some “analysts,” of course, who are engaged in Republican triumphalist spin, simply assume without bothering to demonstrate anything that 2014 was part of a GOP march to power that will culminate in a great gettin’-up morning in 2016. And some Democrats may too casually dismiss without scrutiny 2014 GOP gains in “Democratic” demographic groups–probably a sign of differential turnout patterns but possibly something more–or worry a bit too little about the cumulative effect of Republican gains at the state level. In the end, we probably won’t completely understand 2014 until we are looking at a fresh set of numbers two years from now.


November 21: Counter-Punching the GOP “Outrage” on Immigration

So the president’s executive action on immigration has finally been announced, and as expected Republicans are full of real and phony outrage. Outside the immigrant communities most affected, how should progressives respond? I discussed that topic today at the Washington Monthly.

For all the yelling and screaming about “Emperor Obama,” his action was temporary and could be instantly revoked by a Republican president or superseded by legislation from a Republican Congress. But Republicans are in complete disarray on the subject, though there is a distinct trend towards “deport ’em all” nativism (though not the will to provide the resources necessary to “deport ’em all,” which would make actions like Obama’s impossible).
At present, though, the Establishment Republicans who privately view their nativist “base” as a bunch of destructive yahoos can join with said yahoos in an orgy of recrimination, mooting their agreement with the substance of what Obama is doing even as they pretend they believe the procedure is the greatest threat to democracy since yadda yadda yadda.
So the appropriate response of progressives to what we’re going to hear over the next weeks and months is: What do you propose to do about it? Can Republicans agree on an immigration policy (no, “securing the border first” is not an immigration policy, but at most a component of one)? What should this and future administrations do in the face of a gigantic gap between the number of undocumented people in this country and the resources to deal with them? Is using the fear of deportation to encourage “self-deportation” what you want? And if you do want to “deport ’em all,” then exactly how much money are you willing to appropriate for police dogs, box cars, whips, holding cells, and so on and so forth? Do you suggest we just suspend the Constitution and have us a good old-fashioned police state for a few years until we’ve deported 11 million people?
And if Republicans actually have the guts to go against their “base” and take on comprehensive immigration reform, there’s this little matter of the bipartisan bill that’s been languishing in the House for seventeen months. John Boehner could at any moment bring it up and pass it with Democratic votes. Why isn’t that at least on the table?

It’s a question that needs to be asked constantly, because it’s Republican dysfunction that has produced the situation Obama is addressing. And so Republicans are the last people who ought to feel entitled to “outrage.”