Month: May 2015

Republicans Confront the Reality That America Just Isn’t That Into Them (February 26, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

listening-elephant

There is so much to talk about this week. Those of us not living under a rock are well aware that the budgetary disaster otherwise known as sequestration will go into effect this Friday in the absence of a bipartisan Congressional resolution. I am going to take a rare break from my genuine, liberal defensiveness and point the finger at both parties for allowing it to come to this.

It is unfathomable that playing the blame game as to who must own responsibility for developing the plan has taken precedence over coming up with a viable alternative. Further, it now seems that Democrats and Republicans may just take their chances with the sequester and let the voting public decide who’s most at fault. The theory goes that the party who is assigned the largest portion of accountability will have to scream “uncle” and ultimately compromise their position.

Well these types of tactical moves may play well in Poker and Risk, but this the real world. Real people stand to lose real jobs, and a fledgling U.S. economy just starting to show signs of life may be sent back to the precipice from which it stood in late 2008. Shame, shame, shame on this pathetic excuse for representation of the peoples’ will. I am about ready to declare big picture, long term planning completely obsolete on Capitol Hill.

And while we’re on the subject of regressive thinking, the GOP continues to wrestle with a four-month old question to which finding the answer would change nothing. The Republican Party is still wasting time and resources trying to figure out why it is that Mitt Romney lost the 2012 Presidential election in the first place. The party of fantasy, having gotten nowhere blaming voters for their unfathomable desire to put their own economic survival ahead of big business interests, and the settled question of a woman’s right to control her own body, have found a new target: technology.

Mitt Romney’s former top strategist, Stuart Stevens, has been everywhere in the media in recent days. Stevens has canvassed print and television news outlets, defending himself from the latest charges directed at the Romney campaign, to try to account for what many Republicans still view as a incomprehensible rejection of their chosen candidate. Conventional right wing wisdom has reevaluated the Obama’s mastery of viral messaging across social media, YouTube, and campaign websites and come up with one conclusion: the Romney Team’s dearth of tech savvy cost them the vote.

Sounding more common sense than reactionary, Stevens has challenged the party to look deeper for its failure to connect with the electorate. Among other arguments Stevens made in an Op-Ed published in The Washington Post earlier this week, the strategist called upon his partymates to admit that the answers are not that simple. He wrote, “There seems to be a desire to blame Republicans’ electoral difficulties and the Romney campaign’s loss on technological failings. I wish this were the problem, because it would be relatively easy to fix. But it’s not.”

Instead Stevens joins a growing chorus of GOP leaders who seem to be waking up the simple unpopularity of the party platform. ABC News summarized the operative’s view as follows: Stevens “argue[s] that it was a generation and message gap that ailed the GOP last year and ultimately paved the way for President Obama’s victory over Romney. The Democrats’ superior technology – and Republicans’ weaknesses in this area – was only part of the problem.” Ya think?

Leave it to the modern Republican Party to turn anywhere to avoid the obvious truth: Americans just aren’t that into you anymore. Stevens went on to caution the right against adopting the belief that more effective Tweeting and the right software package would be enough to convince alienated voters to give the GOP another try. He said, ” “Technology is something to a large degree you can go out and purchase, and if we think there’s an off the shelf solution that you can with the Republican Party it’s wrong.”

We know by now that the 21st century Republican ilk retreats from facts and logic when it comes to pursuing its own agenda, but it seems that they’ve only really succeeded in fooling themselves. If they haven’t learned by now that continued legislative intransigence and a loose relationship with reality is a strategy destined to fail, may they be reminded during the 2014 midterm elections.

 

Nate Silver Says Marco Rubio is as Unelectable as Mitt Romney Was (February 19, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

rubio-romney

The name of rock star statistician Nate Silver will be forever linked with the results of the 2012 Presidential election. You may recall that against the tide of Republican strategic hubris, and despite rampant voter suppression efforts taking place in communities representing large populations of poor and ethnic constituents, Silver warned the GOP talking heads that Obama was on his way to a sweeping victory. And he was right. In President Obama’s historic conquest over Mitt Romney, Silver correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Let’s take a moment to savor once more the epic meltdown of Karl Rove on Fox News as it finally sank in that there was zero chance of a Romney presidency.

It never gets old does it?

In 2010, Silver’s blog, FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver’s Political Calculus, was presciently licensed for publication by the New York Times. The blog is making news this week with an intriguing post entitled, “Marco Rubio: The Electable Conservative?”

As we know, Rubio is being championed by the beleaguered, delusional and hopelessly out of step Republican Party as the key to returning to mainstream acceptability. Rubio, a Cuban American native of Miami, Florida who rose to prominence after the humblest of beginnings, is seen as the key to making inroads with the nation’s Latino voters. Once a dependable GOP demographic, Latinos have fled the party in droves given its hard-line stance against immigration reform.

Looking to shake the Etch-a-Sketch Romney-style, the GOP has recently attempted to reverse course, proposing to get behind the Dream Act, a plan that would provide a pathway to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. Though many of the partys’  recommended measures are tied to border security improvements, the changes mark a critical pivot for Republicans – and Rubio is offered by the right as the face of that change.

Tasked with delivering the rebuttal to the President’s well-received State of the Union address last week, we know that Rubio stumbled: awkward, sweaty and apparently very thirsty. Rubio’s performance stirred reminisces of the 1960 televised debate between Kennedy and Nixon that many have theorized cost Nixon the election. But really, it was one of Rubio’s first appearances on the national stage. Is it any surprise his rehashed talking points would fail to excite, set in relief against the President’s smooth and energized delivery? The question remains: given more time to develop, could Rubio pose an electable challenge to Democrats in 2016?

Though Nate Silver presents a wealth of data in his piece (naturally) that points to Rubio’s strengths in a Republican primary, he hedges when discussing the senator’s general appeal against more moderate candidates. Silver writes, “This is not to say that Mr. Rubio is extraordinarily popular. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has favorability ratings that are much stronger than Mr. Rubio’s, for example.”

Silver goes on to say, “What makes matters tricky for Mr. Rubio is that, at the same time he is hoping to persuade Republican party insiders that he deserves their support, he will also need to maintain a reasonably good image with the broader electorate lest his electability argument be undermined. This may lead to some strange positions, such as when Mr. Rubio recently critiqued President Obama’s immigration proposal despite its many similarities to his own.”

In other words, a Republican candidate of any color may still have to adopt the 2012 losing strategy of Mitt Romney. Go hard right fringe during primary season to secure the nomination, then try to fox trot your way back to the center so you can appeal to the mainstream.

A full three and a half years before the next Presidential election, Rubio is already being setup to fail as John McCain and Mitt Romney did before him. To return to President Obama’s “lipstick on a pig analogy,” the ethnic makeup of a candidate cannot possibly surmount a losing game plan. Americans wised up to Mitt Romney’s say-anything-to-win strategy and the result was a fantastic drubbing.

The silver lining of the continuing pain of the Great Recession is a more engaged voting public with a distaste for overt manipulation. Until the GOP initiates a grassroots revamp of the outdated platform upon which it stands, it is unlikely to place a candidate in the White House. As Silver concludes, “If Mr. Rubio holds a fairly ordinary (and conservative) set of Republican positions, chances are his popularity ratings will wind up being ordinary as well.”

Republicans Don’t Want You to Know That Obamacare Is Working (February 13, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

barack-obama-thumbs-up

There’s a subtle story going around this week that you definitely won’t see covered on Fox News. You won’t hear Speaker John Boehner or Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell discussing these results in their usual rote talking points about Obamacare and the socialist takeover of the country by the President’s policies. Between all the baying about the deficit, the budget and the huge negative impacts of the upcoming sequestration plan that will be implemented in the absence of fiscal resolution, if you blinked, you could almost miss the headline:

Slower Growth of Health Costs Eases U.S. Deficit

The New York Times ran this piece on Monday morning, and to be fair, it might have been difficult for anyone to focus what with Benedict XVI’s stunning announcement that he would be the first Pope in six centuries to resign his post. There’s also the President’s first State of the Union Address since winning re-election in 2012. It has undoubtedly been a busy news cycle and that will likely continue as we move through the week.

But come on! This is a big deal!According to the piece by writer Annie Lowrey, “A sharp and surprisingly persistent slowdown in the growth of health care costs is helping to narrow the federal deficit, leaving budget experts trying to figure out whether the trend will last and how much the slower growth could help alleviate the country’s long-term fiscal problems.”

Excuse me for asking this obvious, but isn’t this precisely what both political parties claim to be after? Going back to the 2008 Presidential campaign, then candidates John McCain and Barack Obama devoted near equal time to lamenting the spiraling costs of healthcare and its affect on deficit spending. Both men vowed to do something if elected. It seemed to be an issue that most Americans and politicos could get behind.

Then low and behold, early into his first term, Obama and the Democrats actually got something accomplished – with the GOP fighting them every step of the way. It wasn’t pretty. It was embarrassing and painful for almost everybody, and the end result was a far cry from the single payer system that many liberals badly desired. But in the end the Patient Protection and the Affordable Care Act was a huge pivot away from a throughly broken system that seemed to exist for the benefit of health insurance companies, rather than the sick and injured they were created to serve.

Republicans wasted no time decrying the Act as the largest increase in government bureaucracy since ___ (fill in the blank), a measure that would drive medical costs and the Federal deficit up rather than down. Through it all, Obama held steady, confident that history would have the final say.

It didn’t even take a leap year. Lowrey goes on to write, “In figures released last week, the Congressional Budget Office said it had erased hundreds of billions of dollars in projected spending on Medicare and Medicaid. The budget office now projects that spending on those two programs in 2020 will be about $200 billion, or 15 percent, less than it projected three years ago.”

President Obama is way too gracious a person to perform the “I told you so dance” on Capitol Hill to which he is richly entitled. So I will do it for him. BOOM!!! How’s that for change you can believe?

Here’s hoping the President and his team use this data to their advantage, to head naysayers and sycophants off at the pass who stand to gain much by protecting the status quo. As the POTUS seeks to take on a host of issues this calendar year that seem to draw crazies out of the woodwork (I’m thinking gun control and immigration), let this early data from the effects of health care reform empower him to keep doing what is right.

Ron Paul’s Chris Kyle Tweets Create A Huge Headache for GOP War Hawks (February 5, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

ron-paul-twitter

I mentioned this in my column last week, but I am finding that the observation bears repeating. Hardly a month into 2013, the ideological tug-of-war taking place inside the ranks of the Republican party is both refreshing and portentous. It remains to be seen if the increasingly silenced moderate wing can wrest control of the platform and its awful messaging machine from the radicals who have come to dominate it. It’s a watershed moment for a political party that has fallen out of step with the general public on a whole host of critical issues.

Last week it was a somewhat academic David Brooks column that served as the launchpad for discussion about the GOP’s current and future ability to speak to voters that have been alienated by the right’s anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-middle class rhetoric. But this week, we examine the curious case of now-retired Congressman Ron Paul ruffling the feathers of his partymates and a constituency that the Republican Party has traditionally served very well: “war hawks.”

Jumping into the fray of the frenzied gun control debate against the backdrop of a high profile series of civilian casualties, Ron Paul (who now manages his own feed in retirement) took to Twitter this past weekend. In an effort to comment on the untimely death of Chris Kyle, a former Navy SEAL and author of the best-selling autobiography American Sniper who was shot at a Texas shooting range, Ron Paul made a subjective statement that is highly open to interpretation:

“Chris Kyle’s death seems to confirm that ‘he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.’ Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn’t make sense.”

While Paul’s flippant tweet is certainly insensitive to the victim’s grieving family at best, the former congressman does make a couple of spot-on observations. In a time when the Republican Party is contorting itself to link increased gun violence with a lack of resources for the mentally ill (with logic that eats itself as the GOP seeks to further reduce funding for the most vulnerable Americans) it does seem ironic that Kyle was killed while attempting to distract a fellow soldier suffering from PTSD. Isn’t that a bit like taking a recovering alcoholic to a distillery? There’s nothing funny at all about the incident but the way in which a certain section of the political spectrum treats access to guns as a cure-all for whatever ails you has been discredited once again.

And at the risk of reading too deeply into 140 characters, it appears to this columnist that Paul made a second, more obscure point about the long-term effects of the Iraq and Afghani conflicts on a small percentage of men and women who have carried the burdens of war. It is with this pacifist line of thinking that Paul really breaks ranks with party standard bearers. According to this element, continuous conflict is good for America, economically and ideologically. As such, Republican pundits wasted no time jumping on the former congressmen.

But as Peter Weber, a writer for The Week, noted:

“Who can be surprised that conservatives… have been falling all over themselves to condemn Ron Paul for [noting] that the violence wrought by over a decade of nonstop war in America leads to tragedy on the home front?… The most transparent were the conservatives who claimed to be former supporters of Paul who must now go support some more ‘patriotic’ politician: One who doesn’t actually question anything the military does…. This is what it comes down to for most conservatives, of course.”

The speedy vitriol heaped upon Ron Paul by his fellow Republicans is intended to punish him for walking astray of party dictates that it’s all about war and guns, baby. Mercifully the always autonomous Paul has less to lose by speaking his mind than ever – the benefits of old age and retirement. I hope he continues to act as a thorn in the side of GOP mouthpieces. The right may not realize it, but it needs these dissenting voices if it is to have any chance at survival.

Sane GOPers Tell the Crazy Republicans to Stop Talking to Themselves (January 31, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

sad-elephant

Although I respect the intellect of New York Times columnist David Brooks, particularly his application of humanistic psychological and sociological research to the formation of public policy views, there are many times when I throw my hands up in frustration. While professing a moderate approach to the role of government in American society, he often ends up sounding much like a Republican mouthpiece. I am thinking of his implausible regard for Paul Ryan’s endless circumstantial flip-flopping on budget and deficit responsibility (pro-spending under George W. Bush, austerity principles during the Obama regime) as just one example.

At the risk of welcoming angry comments and hate mail, I do believe that a sound and rational two-party system is essential to the health of our cherished democracy. No one is served by a insulated majority free of checks and balances, closed to new ideas, no matter which end of the political spectrum that party should occupy.

I would assert that underlying much liberal anger is a genuine wish that those of the right wing persuasion would embrace modern reality and take part in a honest conversation about the direction in which the country needs to move if it is to face current challenges, including but not limited to: immigration and health care reform, globalization, fiscal balance, entitlement spending, the tax code and a whole host of other issues. Unfortunately, an increasingly radicalized GOP has brought little to the table in recent years beside anger, corporate kowtowing, backward social thinking and obstructionism.

With this in mind, there are elements to admire vis a vis Brooks’ column for the Times this week, entitled “A Second G.O.P.” In it, Brooks writes “On the surface, Republicans are already doing a good job of beginning to change their party. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana gave a speech to the Republican National Committee calling on Republicans to stop being the stupid party, to stop insulting the intelligence of the American people….But, so far, there have been more calls for change than actual evidence of change.”

Well said. If the results of the 2012 Presidential election taught us anything, it’s that the Republican Party platform increasingly falls outside of mainstream views. Continuous disregard and disrespect for the middle and working classes, the social safety net, female reproductive rights and immigrants cost Mitt Romney the popular vote in a big way. Almost every GOP leader woke up the need for more inclusive messaging, but to Brooks’s point, how does that translate into real policy reform? Thus far, it hasn’t. In order for the right to begin taking steps toward relevancy, it must do more than talk to itself about change. It must actually make that change palpable.

Brooks goes on to observe, “In this reinvention process, Republicans seem to have spent no time talking to people who didn’t already vote for them.”

In other words, as the GOP seeks to rejoin productive policy dialogue, it must move away from navel gazing and the equivalent of empty locker room pep talks to doing the actual work required to attract new members. President Obama has made it clear over the last four years that he would love to count upon constructive Republican input when it comes to solving the nation’s problems – with disappointingly few results. As the title of Brooks’ column implies, the GOP needs to reverse course in the form of a total break with a failed platform.

It has been an interesting feature of 2013 that the direction of the Republican Party has been the subject of much internal criticism. Will that criticism be co-opted into sincere course correction? Stay tuned…