Salon.com > Jamelle Bouie

New Congress, same Republicans

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:18:00 +0000

The new Congress was sworn in today, which was cause for various writers to note the abysmal performance of the last Congress. Here’s Ezra Klein, for example, on the many, many failures of the 112th:

What’s the record of the 112th Congress? Well, it almost shut down the government and almost breached the debt ceiling. It almost went over the fiscal cliff (which it had designed in the first place). It cut a trillion dollars of discretionary spending in the Budget Control Act and scheduled another trillion in spending cuts through an automatic sequester, which everyone agrees is terrible policy. It achieved nothing of note on housing, energy, stimulus, immigration, guns, tax reform, infrastructure, climate change or, really, anything. It’s hard to identify a single significant problem that existed prior to the 112th Congress that was in any way improved by its two years of rule.

The 112th, which was gaveled into being on Jan. 3, 2011, by newly elected House Speaker John Boehner, wasn’t just unproductive in comparison with the 111th. It was unproductive compared with any Congress since 1948, when scholars began keeping tabs on congressional productivity.

The Republican Party is the problem

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:21:00 +0000

After weeks of negotiating, we have a deal on the fiscal cliff, which — in true, congressional fashion — passed hours after the government went “over” the cliff.

The details of the deal are straightforward: Tax rates will rise permanently to Clinton-era levels for families with income over $450,000 and individuals with income over $400,000. For everyone below that ceiling, taxes will remain at Bush-era levels. Likewise, for families and individuals at that income threshold, the taxes on capital gains will rise to 20 percent, while staying at 15 percent for everyone else. Given the financial situation of most Americans — who don’t earn much, if anything, from investments — this is a good move, considering the circumstances.

Wayne LaPierre’s bizarre pop culture references

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 21:48:00 +0000

The National Rifle Association has been in a tough spot since the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. As an advocacy group for gun manufacturers and a particular set of gun enthusiasts, it has no interest in new gun-control regulations. But as a powerful political force, it has to say something — otherwise, it’s vulnerable to continued criticism.

This morning, NRA president Wayne LaPierre held a press conference — occasionally interrupted by protesters — in which he explained where the organization stood in light of last week’s violence. But rather than stand behind the modest gun-regulation efforts brewing in Congress or even offer a simple message of condolence, LaPierre decided to go on the offensive, blaming everything from video games, movies, and music — "Natural Born Killers," a 20-year-old film, received a shout out — to Obama’s budget for the proliferation of mass shooters.

Gun owners can’t hurt Democrats

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 16:04:00 +0000

The most notable thing to come out of President Obama’s speech last night—eulogizing the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut—was his unambiguous commitment to pursuing new gun regulations in the coming weeks. Granted, he didn’t use the word “gun,” but the implications were clear:

If there’s even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief that’s visited Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try.

In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this, because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine.

Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?

Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?

In defense of 2016 speculation

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Over at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf mocks the breathless 2016 speculation with a post "gearing up for the 2048 presidential election." It's genuinely funny:

Although it is still early, Mitt Romney, who has 16 grandchildren, is leading among the patriarchs of America's dynastic political families, in part due to the present childlessness of George P. Bush and Chelsea Clinton, whose presence in articles on this subject is an apparent journalistic convention. Starting families now could give the hypothetical grandchildren of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton a head start on the theoretical grandchildren of Barack Obama, whose daughters are years away from having children if they decide to procreate at all.

New York Times trolls women

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 15:40:00 +0000

It’s hard to overstate the role of demographics in shaping the challenges that face the United States over the next few decades. To use one prominent example, the rush to reform entitlements and the focus on restraining health care costs owe themselves to demographics—an unusually large cohort of people are due to retire from the workforce and begin to strain our social insurance programs. Likewise, efforts to prepare for this inevitability—such as the Affordable Care Act—are hampered by, again, demographics—as we saw in the 2010 midterm elections, older voters are loathe to sign on to anything that looks like a change to the status quo.

With that said, if the United States has a distinct advantage over its similarly–situated fellow travelers in Europe and elsewhere, it’s due to demographics. Thanks to mass immigration, our birth rate has held steady, and in a prosperous society, more people is a recipe for more growth.

Does anyone want Medicare cuts?

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 16:05:00 +0000

One of the more interesting results in yesterday’s Washington Post/ABC News poll, as the Post's Greg Sargent alluded to this morning, is the overwhelming opposition to Medicare cuts from Republican voters. Sixty-eight percent of self-identified Republicans—and 68 percent of self-identified conservatives—oppose cuts to the health-care program for seniors.

Are Republicans losing the South?

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:41:00 +0000

One of the more interesting elements of President Barack Obama’s re-election victory was his strong performance in the South. He won Virginia and Florida—again—and came close to a win in North Carolina, where he lost by just two points. “Obama’s 2012 numbers in the Southeastern coastal states,” writes Douglas Blackmon for The Washington Post, “outperformed every Democratic nominee since Carter and significantly narrowed past gaps between Democratic and Republican candidates.”

Indeed, Blackmon—who won a Pulitzer for the book Slavery by Another Name—sees this as a crack in the Republican Party’s otherwise solid hold on the South. A growing African American population, combined with greater Latino immigration and a shrinking white electorate (the share of white votes in Florida dropped to 66 percent, for example) has allowed Democrats to make gains in states that were once GOP strongholds. Judging from Election Day, this is most true in the five states that hug the coast: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Worse than the Tea Party

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:16:00 +0000

If there was anything Republicans should have been surprised about in this month’s elections, it was their rout in the Senate. Not only did they lose races against vulnerable Democratic incumbents in GOP leaning states—Missouri, Florida, and Montana, for instance—but they also lost almost every competitive open race and failed to hold a vacant one in Indiana.

Politico reports that GOP leaders are working to prevent a repeat of this scenario by exerting more control over the nomination process. Republicans believe that they would have done better had they kept politicians like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock out of the picture. The goal for the next four years is to erase the Tea Party-versus-Washington narrative that has made it difficult to get establishment Republicans through the primary process:

Ugh, not Erskine Bowles for Treasury

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:48:00 +0000

By this point, it’s clear that former Clinton administration official and twice-failed North Carolina Senate candidate Erksine Bowles is on the short list to replace Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary. For reasons outlined by Paul Krugman, and our own Robert Kuttner, Bowles would be a terrible choice for Treasury: He’s a deficit scold more concerned with lowering taxes than reducing unemployment and providing a strong base for economic growth.

But he has his advocates, among them William Cohan, a former investment banker and investigative journalist. Cohan sees the deficit as the chief problem facing the United States, and thinks Bowles is the only candidate for Treasury who can craft a bipartisan deal to get our “fiscal house in order” and bring some accountability to Wall Street.

George W. Bush still haunts the GOP

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 14:30:00 +0000

At this point, there’s wide agreement that the GOP faces a profound demographic problem—its longtime coalition of middle-aged whites is not enough to win national elections. Rush Limbaugh’s lament is correct: Republicans are (increasingly) outnumbered. President Barack Obama won the overwhelming majority of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos; overall, his nonwhite share of the electorate was larger than any winning presidential candidate in history, and it contributed to his wins in Florida, Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada.

It’s easy to focus on these demographic problems as the core challenge facing the GOP, but in reality, they’re only part of the problem. The larger issue—by far—is the extent to which Republicans have yet to reckon with the failures of the Bush years. Not one of the GOP candidates for president this year—including Mitt Romney—made a significant break with Bushism. Each, especially Romney, doubled down on the Bush agenda of belligerence abroad and fiscal profligacy at home.

Four more years to enact a new Great Society

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 16:52:00 +0000

If you want a sense of how remarkable Barack Obama’s re-election victory is, think back to last summer. At the time, the president was struggling to reach a deal with House Republicans, who were threatening not to raise the debt ceiling and plunge the economy into a second recession. Unemployment was high—9.2 percent—Obama’s approval had dipped to the low 40s, and to anyone paying attention, the first African American president looked like a one-term failure.

But beginning in the fall, Obama began to reassert himself. With the American Jobs Act, he outlined a viable plan for generating economic growth and kick-starting the recovery. With his widely praised speech in Kansas, he outlined a populist agenda of greater investment and higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Over the course of 2012, he built good will with important communities, from LGBT Americans with an endorsement of same-sex marriage to Latino immigrants and their families with a measure meant to emulate the DREAM Act. What’s more, the economy began to pick up: Job growth increased, unemployment dropped, and the overall economic picture began to brighten.

Bank on the economy bouncing back

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Bloomberg finds that—regardless of who wins the election tomorrow—the economy is set for stronger growth in 2013 and beyond:

Consumers are spending more and saving less after reducing household debt to the lowest since 2003. Home prices are rebounding after falling more than 30 percent from their 2006 highs. And banks are increasing lending after boosting equity capital by more than $300 billion since 2009.

“The die is cast for a much stronger recovery,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist in West Chester, Pennsylvania, for Moody’s Analytics Inc. He sees growth this year and next at about 2 percent before doubling to around 4 percent in both 2014 and 2015 as consumption, construction and hiring all pick up.

Yes, there’s the fiscal cliff. But odds are best that Congress and the White House will avoid a situation where the economy is hit with a burst of contractionary policy.

Politico: Women, blacks, Latinos and young people don’t count

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:35:00 +0000

It goes without question that, if President Obama wins reelection, he will have done so with one of the most diverse coalitions ever assembled by a major party nominee. He will have won large majorities of women, young people, African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans.

To most observers, this narrow majority of voters represents a broad cross-section of the country. To Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, it’s a dangerously limited coalition. Why? Because it doesn’t include enough white people, and particularly, downscale white men:

If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites. That’s what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it’s possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.

A broad mandate this is not.

Will undecideds break for Mitt?

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 13:38:00 +0000

One piece of zombie conventional wisdom — it comes up every election — is the idea that undecided voters will always break for the challenger. It’s what gives hope to Republicans in this race, who assume that the last-minute decisions of undecided voters will push Mitt Romney to the top. Unfortunately for Republicans, there just isn’t much evidence for this assertion.

Yes, there are elections where undecided voters broke decisively for the challenger: 1980 for Ronald Reagan, 1992 for Bill Clinton. But by and large, undecided voters tend to break evenly, with a slight advantage for the challenger. This past summer, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver tried to quantify this trend. What he found was that the incumbent party candidate — George H.W. Bush in 1988, or Al Gore in 2000 — gains an average of 3.5 points between the September polls and his actual performance on Election Day. The challenger gains slightly more — 3.9 points. Among true incumbents, like Obama, the numbers are a little better for the challenger, but not by much.

Can a centrist win in Arizona?

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 13:42:00 +0000

Richard Carmona might be new to campaigning, but he’s not exactly new to politics. In 2005, he was a recruiting target for Republican Senator Jon Kyl and his ally in the statehouse, then-secretary of state Jan Brewer. Phone calls were made, meetings were held, and Kyl even sent Carmona a handwritten note on his personal letterhead: “For someone who’s ‘not so political’ you sure leave an audience in awe,” Kyl wrote. “Thanks for all you did for me in Phoenix last week. I look forward to continuing our discussion at your convenience.”

It’s not hard to see why Kyl—and by extension, the Republican Party—had an interest in Carmona. Just look at his biography: A Puerto Rican raised in Harlem, he dropped out of high school at 16, and shortly after enlisted in the Army. He earned his G.E.D, joined the special forces, fought in the Vietnam War, and received training as a combat medic. He’s received degrees in nursing, biology, medicine, and public policy. He's run hospitals, health care systems, and served in law enforcement.

Dems just might win the Senate

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 21:50:00 +0000

Six months ago, liberals were preparing for the worst. After a winter of fast growth, the economy had begun to slow down and unemployment had begun to creep back up. Mitt Romney was close behind in the race for the White House, and there was little indication that President Obama could pull ahead and win. And the Senate, a stronghold for Democrats over the last six years, looked vulnerable.

For most of the last eighteen months, the conventional wisdom on congressional elections was straightforward: Due to large majorities, Republicans would hold onto their House majority, and bolster it with a slim majority in the Senate. It wasn’t hard to see why; of the 33 contested seats this year, 21 belonged to Democrats and two were held by Independents Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders.

Will Virginia swing the election?

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 19:45:00 +0000

In a tiny Virginia Beach office belonging to Scott Rigell, an auto dealer who swept into Congress on the 2010 Tea Party Republican wave and is running for re-election, volunteers for Mitt Romney gather for a morning of voter outreach. Dunkin Donuts and coffee are available for those interested—namely, kids there to help their parents. “Vaaah Beach” (as its known to locals) is my hometown, but I’m unfamiliar with this particular neighborhood, a development of McMansions in a wealthy area called Bayside, since it’s 20 miles north of Pungo, the rural patch of town where I went to high school.

Yes, 20 miles. One of the odd things about Virginia Beach is its vast size. Located in the southeast corner of Virginia and part of the larger metropolitan region called Hampton Roads, it touches the ship-building city of Norfolk and the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and reaches down to the North Carolina border; along its eastern edge runs the Atlantic coast with endless beaches defined by a redneck surfer vibe—pickup trucks with Confederate flags, carrying surfboards instead of gun racks.

Obama lowers the boom

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 13:13:00 +0000

So far, the conventional wisdom for the presidential debates has been on target. Pundits correctly saw the first debate as an outstanding victory for Mitt Romney, and the second as basically a draw, with Barack Obama winning a small victory and stopping the bleeding of the previous engagement. For the final presidential debate—a bout over foreign policy, held in Boca Raton, Florida—the conventional wisdom is that Obama won, handily, but that Romney proved himself capable of taking over as commander-in-chief.

I’m not so sure.

It’s not that Romney performed poorly—he was mediocre from beginning to end—as much as it is that he already passed that plausibility test. It seems that in the excitement of the debate, pundits have forgotten that Romney’s image as a plausible alternative to the president was the whole reason he won the Republican presidential primary. Indeed, it’s the basis of his political persona: Mitt Romney might not have a position on the issues; he might not have core convictions; but he does project “leadership” and a sense of general competence. His political pitch, from his first race in 1994 to the present, has been a variation on this: “I can fix things, and when you hire me, you’ll find out!”

Mitt’s “sketchy” plan for economic growth

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 18:36:00 +0000

Mitt Romney’s entire presidential campaign is premised on the idea that—as a former businessman—he is best qualified to fix the economy. It went unnoticed, but while talking tax reform, President Obama pushed against that with an effective attack on the shaky numbers behind Romney’s tax plan:

Now, Governor Romney was a very successful investor. If somebody came to you, Governor, with a plan that said, here, I want to spend $7 or $8 trillion, and then we’re going to pay for it, but we can’t tell you until maybe after the election how we’re going to do it, you wouldn’t take such a sketchy deal and neither should you, the American people, because the math doesn’t add up.

Since then, “sketchy deal” has become something of a catchphrase for the president; to wit, in an Iowa speech yesterday, he used it to contrast Romney’s plan with “deals” of the past: