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Republicans May Be Shooting Themselves in the Foot Over Abortion

by Charole1736 Posted on August 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s an interesting recent poll question:

There’s not much need to tell you I just made this up. If it were real, this bill would get 0 percent support. Everyone who saw it would be immediately appalled at the idea that someone could be casually murdered if they were born as a result of rape or incest.

But if you ask this same question about abortion, this is roughly what you get. Very strong majorities, even among Republicans, support an exception to an abortion ban for rape and incest. Among other things, this is why I don’t believe most people who claim to believe that abortion is murder. If you support a rape or incest exception, it’s pretty obvious you don’t really think of abortion as murder.

So where am I going with this? Right here, with Paul Waldman’s observation that the Republican Party’s move to the extreme right on abortion is getting much more public than in the past:

One moment in the debate that may have struck some as odd occurred when Marco Rubio got a question about him supporting exceptions for rape and incest victims to abortion bans, and he insisted that he supports no such thing. Mike Huckabee declared that “I think the next president ought to invoke the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution now that we clearly know that that baby inside the mother’s womb is a person at the moment of conception.” Scott Walker went even further, stating his opposition to exceptions to save the life of the pregnant woman (“I’ve said many a time that that unborn child can be protected, and there are many other alternatives that can also protect the life of that mother”).

In the past, most Republicans have fudged this issue. The more honest among them admit that it’s mostly for political reasons: in their hearts they don’t support any exceptions to an abortion ban, but they realize the broader public does. So the lesser evil is to do what’s necessary to move public opinion, which is the only way to eventually get to a full-blown ban on abortion.

But that fudging is apparently getting less tenable these days, and it’s forcing Republican candidates to take public positions that they know are very unpopular. If this starts to spread, it could be bad news for the incrementalists, who correctly believe that such an extreme position is likely to lose them a lot of support. I wonder what would happen in the next debate if one of the moderators asked one of those show-your-hands questions to the entire field about whether they support a rape or incest exception to an abortion ban? We know where Rubio and Walker are. But what about the rest of them?

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Republicans May Be Shooting Themselves in the Foot Over Abortion

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Is Opposition to Obamacare Finally Dying Down?

by ElkeI96cetn Posted on August 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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I missed this when it first got published the day after the Republican debate, but Sarah Kliff says out loud something that was only percolating in the back of my head at the time:

Ten Republican presidential hopefuls took to the debate stage last night to prove their conservative bona fides. They swore they’d unravel President Barack Obama’s legacy. But there was one place they barely went: repealing Obamacare.

….Last night, candidates mentioned Obamacare exactly six times during the course of a two-hour debate. Only one candidate, Scott Walker, uttered the Republican rallying cry: “Repeal Obamacare.” The near-complete absence of Obama’s health overhaul is remarkable.

The rhetorical shift shows a fundamental change in the calculus of Obamacare: It’s one thing to talk about dismantling a theoretical law. It’s another to take away insurance that tens of millions of Americans now receive. And that’s exactly where Republicans are in 2016. So while Obamacare barely made it onto the stage, it might just be the biggest winner of the night.

Kliff goes on to make the case in more detail that repealing Obamacare is fundamentally less attractive than it was four years ago. Back then, it was an abstraction. Today it’s a real live program with millions of enrollees.

Is this really why Obamacare got so little attention in the debate? Maybe. Or maybe Fox News just didn’t bother giving the candidates much of a chance. After all, if you’re looking for conflict, what’s the point of asking about something that every candidate on the stage agrees about? It’s worth noting that the only question specifically about Obamacare went to Donald Trump, and asked him why he had flip-flopped on single-payer health care. And the only question on Medicaid went to John Kasich, one of the few Republican governors to accept Obamacare funding to expand Medicaid coverage. In both cases there was some potential disagreement between the candidates. So Thursday’s debate might not be much of a bellwether about waning interest in Obamacare among Republicans.

Still, I suspect Kliff is onto something. I agree that an actual program with actual enrollees—and one that’s operating pretty successfully—is a trickier target than one that’s slated for the future. For one thing, you can predict anything you want about a program that hasn’t started up yet, but it’s harder to keep up the meme that Obamacare will destroy the economy when it’s pretty plainly not destroying the economy. For another, even a Republican candidate is going to feel a lot of pushback from constituents who are now using the program and want to know what’s going to happen if it goes away and they can’t get insured anymore.

And there’s another tidbit of evidence on this front. A couple of weeks ago CNN released a poll that asked voters what their most important issue was. Among Republicans, only 14 percent said health care. They’re far more concerned about the economy and the nexus of terrorism and foreign policy. Democrats, conversely, ranked health care very highly. This suggests that Democrats are now more committed to keeping Obamacare than Republicans are to getting rid of it.

I might be reading this wrong, and I wouldn’t want to draw any firm conclusions from a campaign that still has many months to run. Still, my sense is that Obamacare just isn’t getting as much attention from Republicans as it used to. Sure, they all want to repeal it, but their talking points are starting to sound very pro forma. Scott Walker and Jeb Bush mentioned it during the debate, for example, but only as part of a laundry list of stuff they’d do to improve the economy.

We’ll see. It will certainly get more attention during the general election, when it becomes a serious point of contention. But my guess is that it just doesn’t have the juice it used to. It’s working OK. The economy hasn’t collapsed. The budget hasn’t exploded. It’s helping actual people. And although they’ll never admit it publicly, most Republicans candidates know that repealing it takes more than the stroke of a pen. It’s a lot harder than they make it sound.

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Is Opposition to Obamacare Finally Dying Down?

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Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle on College Tuition Plan

by BryceRftuxmc Posted on August 10, 2015

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Hillary Clinton plans to offer a major proposal to deal with skyrocketing student debt:

With Americans shouldering $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, and about eight million of them in default, Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday will propose major new spending by the federal government that would help undergraduates pay tuition at public colleges without needing loans.

….Under the plan, which was outlined by Clinton advisers on Sunday, about $175 billion in grants would go to states that guarantee that students would not have to take out loans to cover tuition at four-year public colleges and universities. In return for the money, states would have to end budget cuts to increase spending over time on higher education, while also working to slow the growth of tuition, though the plan does not require states to cap it.

….Her plan does not go as far as some liberal advocacy groups would like, because she still expects families to make a “realistic” contribution to cover some tuition costs — through savings or loans — while students would contribute based on wages from 10 hours of work per week. In contrast Mr. O’Malley proposed “an aggressive goal — to give every student and their family the opportunity to go to college debt-free,” said Lis Smith, his deputy campaign manager.

Hillary is Hillary, so I’m sure when this is announced it will be accompanied by a detailed policy paper that makes a very good case for how it can work. My initial reaction is that it sounds kind of complicated, and I wonder if this kind of incentive can really keep states from finding ways to spend less and less on higher education. Will tuition costs go down only to be replaced by ever-increasing “fees”?

At the same time, this is pretty carefully crafted to appeal to multiple constituencies. It will appeal to middle-class voters by guaranteeing that tuition costs at state universities will be kept to a reasonable level. But it will also appeal to low-income voters with little chance of sending their kids to college. They probably wonder why taxpayers should subsidize a free education for mostly middle-income kids who are going to use that education to make more money after they graduate. Clinton has threaded this needle by insisting that families still have to contribute and students should work at least part-time.

I doubt this will become a major campaign issue. However, it will cost $350 billion over ten years, and Democrats have to be careful about how many programs like this they propose. Once you put a price tag on them, Republicans can start adding up the damages and asking where the money will come from. In this case, Clinton says it will come from effectively raising taxes on the rich, but that can only go so far. If she has very many more of these programs to announce, eventually middle-class families will have to shoulder some of the bill. That’s catnip for Republicans.

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Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle on College Tuition Plan

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Donald Trump Has Finally Catapulted Us Into an Alternate Universe

by FrederiVogler Posted on August 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Donald Trump saga continues its trip into Bizarroland today with the exit of Roger Stone from the Trump campaign. Trump claims he fired Stone, while Stone says he resigned—and he has the resignation letter to prove it. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m guessing Stone is the more believable party here. So why did Stone leave?

In the letter, which was obtained by The Post, Stone expressed regret for the end of a “close relationship — both personal and political/professional — since the 1980s.” But, he added, since “current controversies involving personalities and provocative media fights have reached such a high volume that it has distracted attention from your platform and overwhelmed your core message … I can no longer remain involved in your campaign.”

Not all of you are familiar with the Stone oeuvre, so how can I put this? Roger Stone complaining that Trump has become too vitriolic and combative is like the Kardashian family getting on your case for being too much of a publicity hound. It’s like Dick Cheney advising you that you’re banging the war drums too loudly. It’s like Louis XIV telling you to cool it with the mansion building.

Roger Stone is famous for calling himself a “GOP hit man.” He admires Richard Nixon so much he has Nixon’s face tattooed on his back. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he founded an anti-Hillary group called Citizens United Not Timid. He played a bit part in the Watergate scandal at the age of 19. He is famous for his many rules, one of which is “Attack, attack, attack—never defend.”

This is the guy who left the Trump campaign because Trump was too preoccupied with “provocative media fights.” The same guy who has proudly called his brand of politics “performance art” can no longer stomach the performance art that is the Trump campaign.

So this is where we are. On Friday, Erick Erickson criticized Trump for being sexist. Today, Roger Stone quit Trump’s campaign because he was being too combative. We are now officially living in an alternate universe. Mr. Spock finally has his beard.

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Donald Trump Has Finally Catapulted Us Into an Alternate Universe

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Will the Economy Help Democrats or Republicans More Next Year?

by LyleFawkner Posted on August 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Paul Krugman notes that there wasn’t much talk about the economy in last night’s debate. Why not?

The chart shows private-sector job gains after two recessions — the 2001 recession, and the 2007-2009 Great Recession — ended, in thousands. You can argue that the economy should have bounced back more strongly from the deeper slump; on the other hand, 2008 was a huge financial crisis, which tends to leave a bad hangover.

….Now, am I claiming that Obama caused all that job creation? No — policy was pretty much hamstrung from 2010 on….Recovery should have been much faster, and I believe that there is still more slack than the unemployment rate suggests. But if President Romney were presiding over this economy, Republicans would be hailing it as the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Instead, they’re trying to talk about something else.

How is the economy going to play in the 2016 campaign? It’s a bit of a mystery at two different levels:

There’s the poli-sci model level, where the state of the economy is a background factor that affects the vote. A good economy helps the party in power, a bad economy helps the party out of power. Right now, though, the economy is in the middle: not bad, but not great. Next year, when we start plugging numbers into the models, they’re probably going to show a tight race.
Then there’s the campaign level, where candidates actively offer economic proposals (and criticisms) that they think will resonate with voters. Hillary Clinton will have a hard time here, since “it could have been worse” is not a winning slogan. Nor is “Republicans would be crowing if they had done it.” But it’s going to be hard to brag on the economy when it’s only in modestly good shape.

If Jeb Bush is the nominee, he’ll be blathering about 4 percent growth and claiming that anyone who says that’s impossible is just a defeatist who’s given up on America. Unfortunately, a lot of voters will probably believe him, because voters generally believe anything a candidate says. And Hillary won’t be able to fight back much, since it really would make her look like a defeatist. Luckily, “4 percent growth” is a fairly abstract concept to most people, and probably isn’t a great campaign slogan in the first place.

In the end, I suspect the economy will be in one of those middle states where it’s just not that big a deal in the campaign and won’t help either candidate much. Instead, the big campaign issues are going to be more specific: stuff like Obamacare, Common Core, ISIS, Clinton/Bush Derangement Syndrome, etc. Unless something big happens over the next 12 months, it’s going to be one of those grind-it-out campaigns based on small-ball issues, foreign policy, and GOTV mechanics. Lotsa fun, no?

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Will the Economy Help Democrats or Republicans More Next Year?

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Donald Trump and Bill Clinton Collide in Best Conspiracy Story Ever

by AndreCulbertson Posted on August 5, 2015

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Oh man, this is the best Clinton conspiracy story ever. Except apparently it’s true:

Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House, according to associates of both men. Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.

….The tone of the call was informal, and Clinton never urged Trump to run, the four people said. Rather, they said, Clinton sounded curious about Trump’s moves toward a presidential bid and told Trump that he was striking a chord with frustrated conservatives and was a rising force on the right.

One person with knowledge of Clinton’s end of the call said the former president was upbeat and encouraging during the conversation, which occurred as Trump was speaking out about GOP politics and his prescriptions for the nation.

Conservative heads must be exploding right about now. Is the Trump candidacy just a devious Clinton scheme to screw up the Republican primaries? It’s just the kind of thing a Clinton would do, after all. Did Bill know that Trump would confirm every horrible stereotype of conservative intolerance that moderates have of the GOP, thus ensuring a Hillary win in November? Or was it really just a casual call and Trump is still the real deal? Or…or…maybe the whole thing is yet another Trump PR stunt? Or maybe Bill has a mole inside the Trump campaign? OMG, OMG, OMG.

Anyway, the most fascinating thing about this is not the fact of the phone call itself, but the fact that four Trump allies spilled the beans to the Post reporters. That’s not just one loose-lipped nitwit. It’s as if Trump wanted this to get out. But why? And why the timing right before the first debate? Does Trump want to make sure he gets asked about this?

And how does this affect Trump’s candidacy? Does it make him less attractive to tea partiers, since he was consorting with the devil a few months ago? Or is it a net positive, because it makes him more attractive to moderates, who figure maybe Trump is OK if Bill Clinton encouraged him to “play a larger role”?

I dunno. I just want to know what conservative Trump supporters are thinking about this. I don’t see anything yet at Red State or The Corner or Hot Air or Power Line or Breitbart. Maybe they just haven’t caught up. Or maybe they don’t trust the reporting of the hated mainstream media in the first place. Stay tuned.

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Donald Trump and Bill Clinton Collide in Best Conspiracy Story Ever

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Dreaming about Debates

by KristopherWylde Posted on August 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore tells us about his night:

Ugh, dreamed about the Voters First Presidential Forum a good part of the night. ‘Twas even more boring the third time around.

Oh lordy. I wonder if I dream about stuff like this? Probably. So even though it would frustrate Freud, I think it’s all for the best that I never remember my dreams.

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Dreaming about Debates

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One Pollster Has Stopped Polling the Republican Primary. Will Others Follow?

by ShannonKortig Posted on August 3, 2015

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I’ve been wondering for a while who the first pollster would be to stop polling the Republican primary. Today I got my answer:

As candidates jostle to make the cut for the first GOP presidential debate this week, the McClatchy-Marist Poll has temporarily suspended polling on primary voter choices out of concern that public polls are being misused to decide who will be in and who will be excluded.

….“It’s a problem when it’s shaping who gets to sit at the table,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute….“It’s making candidates change their behavior. Kasich is trying to get a big bounce. Rand Paul has a video with a chain saw. Lindsay Graham is hitting cell phones with golf clubs,” Miringoff said. “Now the public polls are affecting the process they’re supposed to be measuring.”

Miringoff is also concerned that candidates may be excluded from the debate due to differences between 10th and 11th place that are so close they’re within the margin of error. I think those concerns are overblown, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. There’s clearly a certain amount of arbitrariness at work here.

I doubt that very many outfits will pull out of primary polling. But a few more might, and of course that also affects which candidates will make the cut. In the end, then, McClatchy might be kidding itself here. There’s just no way for news organizations that make editorial and placement judgments to avoid affecting the events they report on. It might be best to accept that and deal with it openly instead of pretending they can make it go away.

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One Pollster Has Stopped Polling the Republican Primary. Will Others Follow?

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As Federal Aid Goes Up, College Costs Rise Enough to Gobble It All Up

by DebbraCranwell Posted on August 2, 2015

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Josh Mitchell of the Wall Street Journal writes today about the spiraling cost of college:

The federal government has boosted aid to families in recent decades to make college more affordable. A new study from the New York Federal Reserve faults these policies for enabling college institutions to aggressively raise tuitions.

….Conservatives have long held that generous federal-aid policies inflate higher-education costs, a viewpoint famously articulated by then-Education Secretary William Bennett in a 1987 column that came to be dubbed the Bennett Hypothesis.

Regular readers know that I have at least a bit of sympathy for this view. But Mitchell doesn’t really explain how the data supports this hypothesis. So I’ll give it a try. As you can see on the right, federal aid increased very modestly from 2000 to 2009. Then it went up sharply starting around 2010. If this aid were truly helping make college more affordable, out-of-pocket expenses for students (i.e., actual cash outlays net of loans and grants) would start to flatten out or even go down.

But that hasn’t happened. You can lay a straightedge on the red line in the bottom chart. Basically, families received no net benefit from increased federal aid. Actual cash outlays rose at exactly the same rate as they had been rising before.

My guess is that this will continue until universities get to the point at which students and families simply don’t value higher education enough to pay any more. That’s the gating item, not aid programs. When out-of-pocket expenses finally equal the value that students put on a college degree, prices will stabilize.1 That’s my guess, anyway.

The Journal article has more on this, and the Fed study is here if you want to read more about the methodology—much more sophisticated than mine—that the authors used to come to a similar conclusion.

1Actually, it’s when the perceived value of a college degree equals current cash outlays plus whatever burden students associate with future loan paybacks. However, the latter is pretty tricky to quantify since it varies widely depending on the university, the student’s major, and their subjective discount rate.

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As Federal Aid Goes Up, College Costs Rise Enough to Gobble It All Up

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Tell Us What You Really Think About Donald Trump

by AOZSilkepxfuwi Posted on August 1, 2015

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I’ve sort of promised myself not to write about Donald Trump, but (a) it’s a weekend, and (b) David Fahrenthold has a pretty entertaining piece about Trump in the Washington Post today. Here’s a brief excerpt of some of the reactions Fahrenthold got to a variety of Trump’s blatherings:

Mark Krikorian, a foe of illegal immigration, on Trump’s immigration ideas: “Trump is like your Uncle George at Thanksgiving dinner, saying he knows how to solve all the problems. It’s not that he’s always wrong. It’s just that he’s an auto mechanic, not a policy guy.”

David Goldwyn, a former State Department official in the Obama administration, on Trump’s plan to fight ISIS by simply bombing them and then taking all their oil: “That is sheer lunacy on so many counts, it’s hard to start.”

Some anonymous sources on the same idea: “Oil-industry experts expressed skepticism about this plan. Skepticism, in fact, may not be a strong-enough word.”

Michael Tanner of Cato, on Trump’s endless vision of new building projects combined with his insistence on lowering taxes: “You can’t spend more and collect less. That’s kind of basic math. You can argue about how the math adds up in the other people’s plans. But there’s math there. This, there’s just no math.”

Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute on Trump’s plan to jack up tariffs on countries he doesn’t like: “If you thought this had a ghost of a chance — which it doesn’t — you would sell all your stocks,” because of the damage that a trade war would do to the U.S. economy.

You know, when Mark Krikorian is critical of your anti-immigration ideas; Michael Tanner is skeptical of your tax-cutting ideas; and oil companies want no part of your oil-stealing ideas, you just know there’s something wrong.

Anyway, Fahrenthold’s piece is worth a weekend click. And you might as well do it while you can. We won’t have Trump to kick around forever.

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Tell Us What You Really Think About Donald Trump

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