Tag Archives: maggie-haberman

Obamacare Repeal Is Dead

by RudolphDkw Posted on March 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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Well, that’s it. Obamacare repeal has failed. The House will not vote on the Republican health care bill.

So what’s next? The first thing, of course, is for Trump to insist that he bears no blame for this. Possible candidates for being thrown under the bus include Paul Ryan, the Freedom Caucus, Democrats, Obama, and illegal immigration.

But what’s next after that? This is the depressing part. From a partisan perspective, I imagine the best bet is to sabotage Obamacare as much as possible and wait for it to fail. Then Trump can say that he was right all along (isn’t he always?) and now we really have to do something.

But there’s also the perspective of what’s best for the country. If Obamacare repeal can’t pass, the best bet is to work on making Obamacare better. This could be done fairly easily, since it’s mostly tweaks that are needed. There are even deals to be made here. Democrats would probably be willing to give Republicans some things they want (tort reform, expanded HSAs, etc.) in return for modest changes that would make Obamacare more stable (higher penalties, tweaks to the subsidies, funding the risk corridors, etc.).

But that’s a fantasy. There’s little chance of anyone in Congress these days working across the aisle to do what’s best for the country.

UPDATE: And the winner is…Democrats!

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Obamacare Repeal Is Dead

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Being President Is Seriously Cutting Into Trump’s TV Time

by ArnoldDunne564 Posted on January 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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Maggie Haberman reports on how President Trump spends his days:

His mornings, he said, are spent as they were in Trump Tower. He rises before 6 a.m., watches television tuned to a cable channel in a small dining room in the West Wing, and looks through the morning newspapers: The New York Times, The New York Post and now The Washington Post.

But his meetings now begin at 9 a.m., earlier than they used to, which significantly curtails his television time. Still, Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.

….Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, went back to New York on Sunday night with their 10-year-old son, Barron, and so Mr. Trump has the television — and his old, unsecured Android phone, to the protests of some of his aides — to keep him company. That was the case after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump appeared to be reacting to the Bill O’Reilly show on Fox News, which was airing a feature on crime in Chicago.

Naturally, I am reminded of this famous photograph:

Like LBJ, Trump watches a lot of TV to see how he’s being portrayed, and then spends a big part of his day seething over slights real and imagined. In the end, that didn’t work out so well for President Johnson, but of course television was a new and unsettling thing for him. Trump, by contrast, is a media native, having spent his entire life in front of the tube. Maybe endless seething will work out better for him. Maybe.

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Being President Is Seriously Cutting Into Trump’s TV Time

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Democrats and Republicans Have Mirror Image Race Problems

by SonWinburn Posted on July 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Sunday, Chuck Todd asked Donald Trump about former KKK grand wizard and famous white nationalist David Duke:

On Tuesday, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman asked about Trump’s reply to Todd:

And here is longtime Republican policy wonk Avik Roy:

“Conservative intellectuals, and conservative politicians, have been in kind of a bubble,” Roy says. “We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism. In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

….He expands on this idea: “It’s a common observation on the left, but it’s an observation that a lot of us on the right genuinely believed wasn’t true — which is that conservatism has become, and has been for some time, much more about white identity politics than it has been about conservative political philosophy. I think today, even now, a lot of conservatives have not come to terms with that problem.”

Trump’s politics of aggrieved white nationalism — labeling black people criminals, Latinos rapists, and Muslims terrorists — succeeded because the party’s voting base was made up of the people who once opposed civil rights. “Trump tapped into something that was latent in the Republican Party and conservative movement — but a lot of people in the conservative movement didn’t notice,” Roy concludes, glumly.

The problem for Republicans is simple to describe: it’s not that their leaders are racist, but that they’ve long tolerated racism in their ranks. They know this perfectly well, and they know that they have to broaden their appeal beyond just whites. But they’re stuck. If they do that—say, by supporting comprehensive immigration reform or easing up on opposition to affirmative action—their white base goes ballistic. In the end, they never make the base-broadening moves that they all know they have to make eventually.

For Democrats, the problem is the mirror image. Bashing Donald Trump and his supporters for their white nationalism helps with their base, but it’s the worst possible way to attract working-class whites who might be attracted to traditional Democratic economic messages. Once you say the word “racism,” the conversation is over. Potentially persuadable voters won’t hear another word you say.

As long as this remains the case, Democrats will routinely win the presidency because their non-white base is growing every year. But Republicans will routinely win the House—and sometimes the Senate—because way more than half of all congressional districts are majority white. Result: endless gridlock.

I wish I knew the answer.

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Democrats and Republicans Have Mirror Image Race Problems

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