Tag Archives: political parties

Herman Cain and the Debate

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Herman Cain has withdrawn from the Republican campaign, sidelined by allegations of sexual misbehavior.  Some find it hard to believe that there was nothing to those allegations, even though no substantiation ever has been offered.

Cain himself, and fellow Republicans, thought the allegations too much a distraction, and so he believed himself unable to discuss the real issues at hand.  Apparently none of these worthies have ever heard of gorilla dust.

But this surrender comes against the backdrop of other Republican candidates who’ve been called out for similar misbehaviors—that actually have occurred—and who have successfully answered those manufacturing the distractions, thereby canceling attempts to move the discussion away from the issues facing us.

No, the real problem with Cain’s retreat is that this is another instantiation of the Republicans’ inability to control the debate, their inability to keep the discussion on topic.  They routinely allow the other party to decide the terms of reference, whether it be gutting Social Security with payroll tax cuts rather than giving Americans real, income tax cuts; or ad hominem attacks to which the Republican targets respond, and respond, and respond; or class warfare, to which the Republican response is to…claim class warfare, but not to push a coherent tax reform plan of their own; or a tax and spend plan masqueraded as a jobs bill, to which the Republicans respond by saying, “No,” without offering a coherent jobs plan of their own.  The list goes on.

They don’t even talk about the budget the House passed at the start of the current session that reduces the deficit and addresses the national debt, and that sits ignored in the Democratic Party-controlled Senate.  They don’t even talk about the 15+ jobs bills the House has passed that sit languishing in that same Senate.  Because the Progressives don’t want to talk about these things, the Republicans won’t; they can only respond to Progressive initiatives.

And yet manufacturing “distractions” is exactly what the Progressives intend to do to their eventual Presidential campaign opponent in 2012.  And to all of their Congressional opponents.  Because they have no hope of arguing the issues themselves, and because they know they can get away with it.

Removing the Progressives from office in 2012 is very uncertain, regardless of any early poll suggestions.

Candidate Gingrich

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I wrote off Newt Gingrich early on in the present Republican primary campaign.  As he’s done with so many professional pundits, he’s showing me up (how must they feel to be in my company…).

He’s made a lot of mistakes, and he carries a lot of baggage.  It’s suggested that his flip-flopping skills rival the best of others.

But he also has an aspect that few politicians have: an openness about his positions, a willingness to acknowledge his mistakes rather than to weasel-word those positions.  A willingness to address directly the premise that his positions have evolved.

A few examples will illustrate.  He did a spot with Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi supporting government responses to global warming; now he freely—and repeatedly, since television talking heads can’t get enough of it—admits to the error: “that is probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years. It is inexplicable.”  He endorsed a liberal Republican congressional candidate, Dede Scozzafava, who wound up supporting taxpayer funding of elective abortions.  He’s since acknowledged his foolishness in this endorsement.

On the beef about his flip-flopping, the argument assumes that men cannot change, that once they’ve taken a position, it’s been carved in adamantine, never to be reconsidered.  This is little more than hubris on the part of those who would exclaim this about a man.  Gingrich, for instance, once supported an individual mandate for health care programs.  What he said, later, to explain that “support,” was this: “I agree that all of us have a responsibility to help pay for health care.  I’ve said consistently, where there’s some requirement you either have health insurance or you post a bond or in some way you indicate you’re going to be held accountable.”  One can argue that this evolution of a position is a flip, but there’s clearly been no change back to the original—no flop to reverse the flip.  And the argument ignores the fact that Gingrich’s “responsibility” is a far cry from the version of individual mandate that is the heart and soul of Obamacare: buy the government-approved program or pay a fine.  Every year, pay the fine or buy the government-approved program.  There is no option to otherwise demonstrate that an individual has his health care costs covered in some way satisfactory to him and costlessly to his neighbors.

Then there’s his consulting work with a GSE, for which he was paid a ton of money.  The beef here is as much about the amount he was paid as it was for the advice he actually provided.  Some of us think, though, that we should be paid for our labors at the rate we can get an employer, or a client to pay us.  It’s only a Progressive meme that it’s somehow wrong to aspire to be a part of the 1%.

As to the work itself, part of that included his touting of Freddie Mac as an exceptionally viable business model.  Frankly, I agree with him.  Any time I can start up and run a business where I can con someone else into picking up a significant fraction of my costs, I’ll go for it.  Freddie Mac succeeded in that, and Gingrich acknowledged it.

There’s also the beef that “He used the influence he had earned while he was in the political field….”  I’m not convinced that’s, of necessity, wrong.  Certainly such influence can be used abusively.  Certainly there are advantages to being a true outsider, and so devoid of such influence in one’s tool kit.  But influence strongly affects how things work, too, at all levels of government, and in the board room and the cubicle farms.  Having political influence and the skills to use it isn’t all bad.

To be sure, the heaviest baggage he carries is the way he’s comported himself in his private life: working on his third marriage while having cheated on his previous two wives.  However, as Bob Vander Plaats, President and CEO of The Family Leader, puts it, “He did not have a road to Des Moines conversion. He’s had five, six, seven years where he’s been repentant, he’s been humble, he’s been transparent….”  Certainly, once integrity has been broken, we can never be sure again.  All we can do is observe the man’s behavior since, and if that behavior warrants, make a leap of faith in trust.  This is as true with Newt Gingrich as it is with any man.

In short, Gingrich has shown himself to be an imperfect man who makes mistakes.  It might seem that he’s made a lot of them—too many, in fact—but we have to consider other factors, as well: whether he’s really made all that many more mistakes than his rivals or than politicians generally; or whether his mistakes are more visible, both because of his personal baggage and because his rivals, and politicians generally, work hard to conceal their mistakes, or explain them away with current rationale so they don’t seem like mistakes anymore.

On the other hand, Gingrich has strong attractions.  He’s not averse to pushing back against journalists who ask foolish questions, and calling them out over their foolishness.  (That’s a particularly favorable characteristic to me.)  We may disagree with him on the legitimacy of a particular question, but it’s hard to miss the fact that he’s willing to try to keep a conversation on track.  He’s also alone among the present Republican candidates who actively refuses to criticize his rivals during the debates, preferring (correctly) to argue why he’s the best candidate to beat the incumbent, rather than why the other candidates are dolts.

But more substantively, he’s not afraid to take a position because he believes it, even if it’s politically risky.   He has, for instance, proposed immigration reform that would allow illegal aliens who’ve been here for 25 years and are otherwise upstanding members of their community to stay—just not as citizens or with a right to vote.  This has drawn “illegal immigrant magnet” criticism from many conservatives.

He’s actively pushed for oil drilling off the South Carolina shore, saying this will produce 8,800 jobs and $1.3 billion for the South Carolina economy.  This has drawn the ire of environmentalists and NIMBYers alike,

He’s proposed, however clumsily in the minds of the politically correct, paying local students to take care of their school.  The kids would actually do work, they would have cash that they’ve earned, they would develop a measure of pride in their school, they’d “begin the process of rising.” (One might pay the students out of the funds saved by reducing the janitorial staff.  One might let the VoTech shops (remember those?) do some of the plumbing and carpentry maintenance.) This is a technique that works very well in Japan; although those students aren’t paid for the work—it’s viewed as part of their duty.

He’s proposed a far more active and direct strategy for dealing with Iran than anything put forward by President Obama.

He’s proposed privatizing much of Social Security, but maintaining a Federally funded floor under retirement payouts.  He’s proposed a dual track of maintaining the current Social Security system for those who don’t want the privatization.  He anticipates the current system will wither and disappear as more and more opt into the private system.

All of these ideas pose political risks, if only by their existence as targets for rivals.  But his ideas are worth articulating openly so they can be discussed openly, as few other candidates are willing to do during their campaigns.  As Gingrich said about Herman Cain and his 9-9-9 plan, at least he’s gotten serious conversation going on the matters.

Newt Gingrich is a flawed man, but who among his rivals, who among the Progressives, who among any of us, is not?  Gingrich also is a man who’s entirely willing to say what must be said, regardless of the risks to him.  That counts for something, too.

It’s the Wrong Fight

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Republicans say that any tax cuts must be paid for with spending cuts elsewhere, and this is certainly true.  But what they’re talking about in the present case is payroll tax cuts.  Certainly, these cuts also must be paid for with spending cuts from somewhere else, but the logic ends there.

Senator Dick Durbin (D, IL) even calls out the Republicans on the matter, as I’ve written elsewhere.  But why are the Republicans letting themselves be drawn into this at all?  They’re ceding the terms of the debate and the entire debate to the Progressives.

On what basis do the Republicans—or anyone—agree that funding for Social Security should be cut?  This is a program that is already widely acknowledged to be desperately in need of reform or it’s destined for failure, yet the Progressives refuse to allow any reform.  Cutting funding by cutting payroll taxes that are intended for the Social Security Trust Fund only hastens that collapse.  Instead, we get Senator Jon Kyl’s (R, AZ) lame answer that “The payroll tax doesn’t go into general revenue. It supports Social Security.”  While true, it misses the whole point.  What is the Republican’s plan for reforming Social Security (and Medicare)?  Congressman Paul Ryan (R, WI) put forward ideas for both programs in the budget the House passed in 2010 that are worth serious discussion.  Yet Republicans have barely mentioned those ideas since: were they not serious about these reforms?

More to the point, why didn’t Kyl turn the argument back on Durbin and ask him why he’s opposed to really leaving money in the hands of Americans and our businesses by supporting income tax cuts for everyone?

Senator Durbin has agreed that tax cuts are good for Americans (he said so with the payroll tax cuts); Republicans should be arguing for income tax cuts, and permanent ones, not just via the annual argument over extending the Bush tax cuts, or some subset of them.  Republicans should be challenging the Progressives to offer legislation that provides for permanent income tax cuts for individuals and for businesses; they have a willing ally in Senator Durbin.  Or he’ll be shown by the debate to be disingenuous.  Republican candidates for President have offered real, broad tax reform; Republicans should be discussing these ideas more—in town hall meetings, on the floor of the House and Senate, on the radio and TV talk shows, at every chance they get—and they should make chances to talk about them.  Since they don’t do any of that, I have to ask: of what are they afraid?

The US already has the most progressive individual income tax structure in the developed world.  The President is openly engaging in class warfare as he campaigns for reelection and for his More Taxes More Spending ideology.  The Progressives in the Senate have not allowed the Senate to satisfy its statutory duty to propose an actual budget—of any sort—for nearly three years.  The Progressives nearly blew up the debt ceiling negotiations over their refusal to cut spending and their demand to raise taxes.  The Progressives did succeed in blowing up the Super Committee with their nonnegotiable demand to raise taxes by $1 trillion dollars.  The Republicans need to be calling out the Progressives on all of this.

Instead, Republicans let the Democrats control the argument and limit it to a narrow, doomed to fail path.

On top of this, the only jobs program that gets debated is the Progressives’ tax and spend Jobs Bill, while the Republicans don’t even have a coherent jobs message of their own, much less an actual plan.  Oh, yeah, there’s that Ryan bill from nearly two years ago.  About which they’re absolutely silent.

By letting the Progressives have the debates on their terms—again—and by having no coherent message of their own, the Republicans are in danger of giving control of the House right back to the Progressives in 2012 and of leaving control of the Senate and of the White House in their hands, too.  We’ve seen how well that’s worked for our country.  Four more years will only extend the damage to national disaster proportions.

Do Progressives Represent all Americans?

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I don’t often read the jobs welfare program for hack journalists that is The New York Times, but a post by Neptunus Lex drew my attention.

The answer to my question is—apparently not.

As Thomas Edsall writes,

…preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

…in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

As Lex points out, the chosen classes for this Progressive blatantly open class warfare election campaign, does not include educated Americans who do constructive work—doctors, for instance.  Or engineers.  Or scientists.  Or technologists.

Nor need the middle class, of any stripe, apply.  Nor any Americans of Asian heritage, regardless of their “class.”  The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King longed for the day when men would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.  The Democratic Party itself claims to have fought for the interests of working families and equal opportunities for all Americans for 200 years.  But apparently some groups should have prior claim to these things.  Other groups can come for the ride, maybe, but if they do, they gotta sit in back.

Why is the Party of Obama pushing this divisive class against class, group against group, warfare?  Edsall is clear here, too: so that Obama and his cohorts can get re-elected.

Obama’s alternative path to victory…would be to keep his losses among all white voters at the same level John Kerry did in 2004, when he lost them by 17 points, 58-41….  Obama can afford to drop to Kerry’s white margins because, between 2008 and 2012, the pro-Democratic minority share of the electorate is expected to grow…and the white share to decline….

Their campaign has nothing at all to do with leading our country, or offering solutions to our economic problems.  Just personal political gain.  No matter the divisions he attempts to inflict in the process.

Who’s setting the dogs on whom?

Distorting the Question

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There they go again.

Senator Dick Durbin (D, IL) suggests that the Republicans are being a tad disingenuous with their reluctance to extend the payroll tax “cut” of two per centage points on employee payrolls.  Pretending to not understand the reluctance, Durbin asserts

The Republican position is they’d raise the payroll tax on working families.  That just defies logic.  What we should do is to help these working families struggle through.

What defies logic, though, as Durbin understands full well, is the concept of reducing the payroll tax in the first place.  Regardless of what we might think of the present structure of Social Security and Medicare, the fact is both of these programs are within just a very few election cycles of being utterly bankrupt, and the payroll tax is the only way—by design—of funding these programs.  Reducing that funding only hastens those failures.

Americans aren’t as dumb as Progressives like Durbin would have it, either, and so we’re fully capable of seeing the foolishness of a payroll tax cut, and we’re fully capable of not confusing such a cut with an income tax cut.  Indeed, far from the jobs stimulus the Progressives claimed this would be when President Obama proposed the cut, most Americans promptly saved those few extra bucks, or used them to pay down personal debt.  Of course, since businesses had no such cuts to their payroll expenses, they received no incentive to hire, and the missing “cut” spending potentiated that lack.

Aside from this, though, the Durbin claim is little more than a Progressive distortion of the opposition party’s tax position.  To use the payroll tax reluctance in this way—as a “demonstration” that Republicans want to raise taxes in the middle of this deep recession—is to isolate one irrelevant position, payroll taxes that have nothing to do with jobs and everything to do with the way Social Security and Medicare are funded, and to ignore the whole position: that lower income and business tax rates are themselves job creators and further that they increase tax revenue through increased economic activity—producing, selling, hiring—which leads to additional hiring in a virtuous circle.  Which “help[s] these working families struggle through.”

Further, Republicans have been advocating for some time closing tax loopholes and ending subsidies as an additional means of raising revenues, another aspect of their composite tax position that Durbin carefully elides.  And his distortion ignores the fact  that the Progressives themselves insist on outright tax rate increases—to the tune of $1 trillion, as Obama threw in at  the last second to blow up an already tentatively agreed deal during the debt limit increase talks last summer, and which the six Progressives on the recently deceased Supercommittee used to blow up that group’s chances of fulfilling its mandate.

Then Durbin added a wholly irrelevant canard to explain Obama’s absence from the just concluded Supercommittee charade:

This was a congressional undertaking. And the Republicans made it clear that if President Obama weighed in, it would become another presidential issue.

Really?  In what way?  Durbin chooses to offer no facts to support his assertion.  He does choose to ignore, though, the fact that Obama has repeatedly refused Republican invitations to talk about any economic matter, preferring instead to hit the campaign trail and to dally in Bali for East Asia summit talks.