Why GOP Is Not the Answer
Mitchell Bard said it well on his blog today over at Huffington Post:
"As the partisan cable networks breathlessly discuss what will happen in the midterm elections in November, there is much talk about how Americans are angry and, as a result, the Republicans are set for major gains in Congress. But the connection between these two assertions -- Americans' dissatisfaction and GOP success -- strikes me as incredibly lazy, both by the media and the voters.
Nowhere is this disconnect more clear than in the financial regulation battle, which finally concluded with a bill passing the Senate yesterday.
Americans have every right to be angry. Oil has been spewing into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly three months (hopefully, it's finally been contained). Islamic extremists seek to kill Americans. We have such a muddy immigration situation, that, no matter which side of the ideological fence you sit on (pun intended), you can't be happy with the way things currently operate.
But the main point of anger is the economy. The official unemployment rate is hovering around 10 percent (with millions more not counted because they've given up on looking for a job). People are concerned about their ability to pay their bills and see an unfair system that rewards Wall Street's reckless risks while punishing middle class workers.
But if Americans want to assess blame for these woes, and if they want to choose who should help get us out of these messes, they have an obligation in a democracy to make an effort to really look at the issues before making a decision. And the media, likewise, has an obligation to sort through these complicated issues more carefully.
If the Republican campaign message for 2010 was something like, "Yes, we know that we caused all these problems in the Bush years, but we've learned our lesson, and now we are offering these new ideas to fix things in the future," I would understand (if not agree with) the equating of the problems with Republican gains. But that's not what the Republicans are offering. Rather, the GOP campaign message for 2010 is essentially the same message as the Bush years, only more militant (and more wacky, thanks to the Angle-Paul tea party influence). Their pitch is built around deregulation, lower taxes for the rich, and less government, the very things that got us into this mess in the first place.
The Republican congressional record for the Obama years consists of opposing any initiative the president offered (in an effort to make him look ineffectual), even if he proposed something the GOP itself had supported earlier, and to offer as solutions the same tired policies from the Bush years (tax cuts, even if they add to the deficit, as Sen. Jon Kyl suggested). That shouldn't be a winning election argument. But with incendiary rhetoric and right-wing-propaganda-machine-fueled lies taking center stage, the focus for the midterms hasn't been on the facts (how we got here and what the two parties have offered since).
In fact, the Republicans have been at the heart of the causes of these problems, and they have offered little other than the same policies as solutions.
Which brings us back to financial regulation, an issue directly tied to the current economic problems. We did not magically morph from prosperity to recession. Rather, the current recession and massive job loss began with the near collapse of the financial system in 2008. Wall Street played a win-lose game (they won no matter what, but we all lost) with risky financial instruments. The housing market collapsed under the weight of subprime mortgages. So the deregulation trumpeted by Republicans caused this mess, and yet the party still touts deregulation.
Certainly, Americans should be angry. And it would seem obvious that action was needed. Nevertheless, all but three Republicans in the Senate didn't think so. Given a choice of standing with the banks or the American people, the Republicans announced their allegiance loud and clear: It is the party of the financial institutions.
So what is the Republican solution to our economic woes? Based on the actions of their leaders, it seems to be to blame the victims, cut taxes and protect the banks. Not only have Republicans opposed extending unemployment benefits, they have tried to blame the unemployed for their plight, particularly cruel since it was their policies that put them out of work in the first place. Arthur Delaney pointed out two examples in HuffPost last week: Sen. John Kyl said unemployment benefits provide a disincentive for the unemployed to seek work, and Sen. Judd Gregg claimed that unemployment insurance encourages the unemployed to stay out of work. (Again, Kyl won't support adding to the deficit for unemployment insurance, but he is fine with doing so for tax cuts for the wealthy.)
Republicans have used increasing government debt as a pro-GOP argument. Generally, it is, of course, better for the government not to run large deficits. But the Republican argument ignores history and is overly simplistic. After all, Bill Clinton handed a surplus to George W. Bush, who proceeded to leave Obama with a gaping deficit. Republicans were happy to run up debt in the 2000s on tax cuts for the rich and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, none of which were paid for. But now that the tens of millions of Americans face unemployment, these same GOP leaders complain about the deficit and say we can't afford any programs to help. How is it that we could afford to spend when it was for tax cuts (and still can, according to Kyl), but not to help those hurt by the Republican-policy-induced recession?
Two polls released on Tuesday showed that Americans care more about unemployment than the deficit. Which party is more concerned with each of those issues? So why should the anger translate to GOP votes? It shouldn't.
In general, Republican policies precipitated the recession, and the party's solutions are to offer more of the same. And when it came to deciding who to stand up for, the Republicans attacked the unemployed and stood with the banks. Americans' anger is legitimate, but directing that anger by giving power back to the GOP is misplaced. The connection makes no sense.
(You could run the same arguments for the oil disaster, immigration and terrorism, showing the Republican culpability and the lack of new solutions offered by the GOP to address the problems.)
I harbor no illusions that Obama and the Democratic Congress are above critique. But I'm saddened that there seems to be no recognition that most of the messes we find ourselves in were created, by and large, by the policies instituted by Bush and his Republican allies in Congress, and that the Republicans are offering those very same policies as the solution in the current campaign. It seems to me handing the reins back to the people who created the problems in the first place (and, more importantly, are only offering more of the same) is a horrible way to respond to the challenges. I'm further saddened that GOP strategy of obstructing and lying, putting rhetoric in front of facts, seems to be working.
You would think that with an oil disaster ravaging his state's already hurting economy, Sen. David Vitter would have better things to do than vote against financial reform and endorse bogus "birther" lawsuits against the president. But this is the essence of the Republican party in 2010."
Thank you, Mr. Bard.
And it ain't just FOX!
I have long been suspicious that the mainstream media was creating false controversy where none existed. When they state, "Some people are saying . . ." without any identifying information about their sources, I always wonder if the "some people" were fictitious, created in some media producer's office in an effort to boost ratings or circulation. Well, Eric Boehlert from Media Matters caught them in the act:
(I)t was mostly the mainstream media that concocted the absurd "Obama's Katrina" claim in the first place, and then helped actively push it. Journalists did it by pointing to mostly faceless, imaginary "critics" of the Obama administration in order to float the phony storyline.
Reporters and pundits last week couldn't find independent experts on disaster or emergency response who criticized the government's actions in the Gulf of Mexico. Reporters and pundits couldn't even find Republican members of Congress to blast Obama and his team. So instead, the press just decided to do that on its own and pretend it was news.
. . .
(A)fter going back and looking at more of the coverage of the politics of the oil spill, it's now clear that in this disturbing case it was the Beltway press that hatched the bogus "Obama's Katrina" meme, and then served up on a platter to the appreciative Noise Machine, which happily amplified it. In this instance, the sloppy misinformation campaign was concocted not by feral, Obama Derangement Syndrome bloggers, but by corporate journalists working from some of the biggest names in the news business; New York Times, the AP, ABC and CBS.
Journalists had virtually no factual foundation upon which to build the "Obama's Katrina" story. But that didn't seem to stop many.
It was the Associated Press that helped kick off the misguided "Obama's Katrina" talking point with a spin-heavy report by Calvin Woodward, which hit the news wire on the night of April 29. The article rather breathlessly suggested there would be all kinds of dire political consequences for the White House (not the oil industry) because many more millions of gallons of oil were spilling into the ocean than previous believed [emphasis added]:
Did you notice the nifty trick? The AP couldn't point to anyone of importance who had actually raised serious questions about self-policing. But the AP was confident somebody would, so the AP included that claim in a news article.
That speculation-as-news approach then allowed the AP's Woodward -- based on no actual reporting -- to wonder out loud, "Will this be Obama's Katrina?" Keep in mind, nobody quoted or mentioned in the article ever raised the Katrina specter. That was introduced by the AP, and the AP alone. So with the help of the AP, the "Obama's Katrina" ball began to roll.
A few hours later on the night of April 29, the Washington Times published an article by Joseph Curl, which leaned hard on the Katrina angle:
But like the AP, Curl and the Times couldn't actually point to anybody who was making that connection with the oil spill. In fact, nowhere in the Times article were any Obama aides seen defending the oil spill response to forestall Katrina comparisons, for the simple reasons that nobody was making those comparisons.
Now questions are sure to be raised about a self-policing system that trusted a commercial operator to take care of its own mishap.
The rapidly expanding environmental catastrophe caused by the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana is presenting a growing political challenge to the Obama White House, with Mr. Obama and his aides at pains to defend the response and forestall comparisons to the Hurricane Katrina crisis.
It probably shouldn't have to be noted, but I'll do it here anyway: Journalists are supposed to be in the business of reporting news, not manufacturing it. But in this case, the "Obama's Katrina" angle appeared to be too alluring for journalists to ignore and to not manufacture. The next morning, on Friday, on ABC's Good Morning America, George Stephanopoulos interviewed Obama advisor David Axelrod and launched the Katrina meme into the big time: "Here's this morning's Associated Press: 'Will this be Obama's Katrina?' Should the federal and state governments have done more and earlier?"
That question then became the news. Meaning, the fact that the White House was now being asked to defend the "Obama's Katrina" comparison (a comparison that nobody besides journalists were actually making at that time), meant that the 'story' had entered the media bloodstream and that it was now completely legitimate to raise questions about something that nobody was actually saying. (Limbaugh followed Stephanopoulos' lead and began pushing the "Obama's Katrina last Friday.)
For example, here was the Los Angeles Times on May 1, one day after Stephanopoulos asked about "Obama's Katrina" on ABC: Slight problem: The Times article did not include any criticism that federal agencies had acted too slowly. None. So if the Times couldn't find any relevant officials making a connection to Katrina, why did the Times feel it was okay to make that connection on its own?
That same day, this New York Times headline was quite clear: "Shadow of Hurricane Katrina Hangs Over Obama After Spill." By whose estimate did the "shadow of Hurricane Katrina" suddenly hang over the oil spill? Answer: By the New York Times' own estimation, of course. Because nobody in the article ever mentioned Katrina. The best the daily could do was point to faceless "critics": "The fact that Mr. Obama has no plans to visit the Gulf Coast in the next few days has already raised the eyebrows of some administration critics, in particular as it relates to the president's plans this weekend." The Times then promptly failed to quote a single administration "critic" making that claim.
Criticism of the federal agencies as too slow to recognize the seriousness of the spill reflects the difficult balancing act faced by the Obama administration as it increasingly takes ownership of disaster response in a region still angry over the Bush administration's reaction to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Boehlert goes on to quote the Christian Science Monitor, Jake Tapper of ABC News and Katie Couric of CBS News "reporting" the same story using the "some people" reference without any identifying information or indication that "some people" really existed. There is more to read in Boehlert's piece. Click here to read the entire column.
In 1991, George H.W. Bush gave a speech to schoolchildren across the nation. The speech was intended "to motivate America's students to strive for excellence; to increase students' as well as parents' awareness of the educational challenge we face." The White house sent letters to schools across the nation encouraging the schools to allow students to listen to the speech. The Education Department arranged for live television and radio coverage. Washington Post, October 2, 2001.
Simon Maloy at Media Matters points out that George W. Bush posted a "teacher's guide" on the White House website for teachers to use to help their students understand the "freedom timeline" for the Iraq war and encouraged them to "explore the biographies of the President, Mrs. Bush, Vice President and Mrs. Cheney."
In 1988, Ronald Reagan addressed schoolchildren in a speech that was broadcast live and rerun by C-Span. The Instructional Television Network fed the program to schools nationwide on three different days. At one point in the broadcast, Reagan used the occasion to speak in favor of his tax cuts.
Following the tradition, President Obama will give a speech to American schoolchildren on the first day of school, in which he will "challenge students to work hard, set educational goals and take responsibility for their own learning. He will also call for a shared responsibility and commitment on the part of students, parents and educators to ensure that every child in every school receives the best education possible so they can compete in the global economy for good jobs and live rewarding and productive lives as American citizens." U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
So why, pray tell, did Jim Greer, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, lash out at President Obama for his plans to give a speech to the nation's school children about the importance of working hard in school? Why would he accuse the president of trying to "indoctrinate America's children to his socialist agenda?" Why would he call President Obama's planned speech an "an invasive abuse of power?" Why all this coming from Mr. Greer, who, himself, went into classrooms and talked about Republican values? Why are conservative Republicans all over the country condemning and spouting off conspiracy theories about the speech, which they haven't even read?
Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress astutely concluded, "Probably the biggest moral of the story is that the contemporary conservative movement is run by crazy people with no scruples, who’ll turn anything into a pretext to level wild accusations. "
For this to to cause so much hysteria from the right, I can't help but conclude that if Obama was a white male president, the reaction would not be so hateful and venomous. In fact, there would be no opposition. This is a pure and very sad case of racism. These people cannot stand the fact that we elected a black president. They cannot tolerate the thought of a black president speaking to their children and possibly inspiring them, because it would disrupt the hate that they are spewing and teaching their children.
It sickens me.
- There is a great article debunking myths on health insurance reform over at Media Matters.
- Very informative article setting forth the results of a Harvard University study regarding health insurance, illness and bankruptcy from the The American Journal of Medicine.
- Also, the case for health insurance reform is made on a state by state basis by the Center for American Progress.
