Saturday, October 12, 2013

The Last Days of the GOP

The Last Days of the GOP

We could be witnessing the death throes of the Republican Party

 BY JOHN B. JUDIS

I once wrote about lobbying, and this week I called some Republicans I used to talk to (and some that they recommended I talk to) about the effect the shutdown is having on the Republican Party in Washington. The response I got was fear of Republican decline and loathing of the Tea Party: One lobbyist and former Hill staffer lamented the “fall of the national party,” another the rise of “suburban revolutionaries,” and another of “people alienated from business, from everything.” There is a growing fear among Washington Republicans that the party, which has lost two national elections in a row, is headed for history’s dustbin. And I believe that they are right to worry.
The battle over the shutdown has highlighted the cracks and fissures within the party. The party’s leadership has begun to lose control of its members in Congress. The party’s base has become increasingly shrill and is almost as dissatisfied with the Republican leadership in Washington as it is with President Obama. New conservative groups have echoed, and taken advantage of, this sentiment by targeting Republicans identified with the leadership for defeat. And a growing group of Republican politicians, who owe their election to these groups, has carried the battle into the halls of Congress. That is spelling doom for the Republican coalition that has kept the party afloat for the last two decades.
American party coalitions are heterogeneous, but they endure as along as the different groups find more agreement with each other than with the opposition. After Republicans won back the Congress in 1994, they developed a political strategy to hold their coalition together. Many people contributed to the strategy including Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Paul Coverdell, Paul Weyrich, and Ralph Reed, but the chief architect was probably Grover Norquist, a political operative who, along with Rove and Reed, came of age in the early Reagan years. The strategy was based on creating an alliance between business, which had sometimes divided its loyalties between Republicans and Democrats, and the array of social and economic interest groups that had begun backing Republicans.
In weekly meeting held on Wednesdays at the office of his Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist put forth the idea that business groups, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), but also including the specialized trade associations, should back socially conservative Republican candidates, while right-to-life or gun rights organizations should back tax cuts and deregulation. What would bind the different parts together was a common opposition to raising taxes, which Norquist framed in a pledge he demanded that Republican candidates make. Business could provide the money, and the single-issue and evangelical groups the grassroots energy to win elections.
The strategy worked reasonably well, especially in House races. The Chamber and NFIB became election-year arms of the Republican Party. In Congress, a succession of leaders, including Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, Tom DeLay, and Roy Blunt, followed the strategy. Gingrich initially overreached, and DeLay took ethical end-runs, but by the time John Boehner became Minority Leader in 2007, it had been refined. Its economic approach consisted of promoting cuts in taxes, spending, and regulation. Boehner, as lobbyists close to him explained to me, wanted to use the battle over continuing resolutions and the debt ceiling to achieve incremental changes on these fronts. He did not contemplate shutting down the government or allowing the government to default on its obligations.
But Boehner was forced to adopt the more extreme strategy. Norquist blames Cruz. “Boehner had a strategy,” Norquist told me, “but Ted Cruz blew it up.” That is, however, giving Cruz too much credit (or blame) for the result. Cruz did help convince House Republicans that if they linked passage of a continuing resolution to repealing Obamacare, he could get the votes in the Senate to follow suit. But Cruz was following a script that had been developed earlier. What has happened over the last two months, leading to the shutdown, and political paralysis in Washington, is the result of deeper factors that have put Norquist’s entire “center-right” strategy in jeopardy.
Since the late 1960s, America has seen the growth of what the late Donald Warren in a 1976 book The Radical Center called “middle American radicalism.” It’s anti-establishment, anti-Washington, anti-big business and anti-labor; it’s pro-free market. It’s also prone to scapegoating immigrants and minorities. It’s a species of right-wing populism. It ebbed during the Reagan years, but began to emerge again under the patrician George H.W. Bush and found expression in support for Ross Perot and for Pat Buchanan with his “peasants with pitchforks.” And it undergirded the Republican takeovers of Congress in 1994. It ebbed during George W. Bush’s war on terror, but has re-emerged with a vengeance in the wake of the Great Recession, Obama’s election and expansion of government, and continuing economic stagnation.
In his current column in The New York Times, Tom Edsall cites the extensive polling evidence for this rising anger. According to a Pew survey in late September, anger against the government “is most palpable among conservative Republicans” and overlaps with Republicans who “support the Tea Party.” But as with the Perot and Buchanan voters, these conservatives direct their anger equally at Republican and Democratic leaders. According to another Pew survey, 65 percent of the Republicans vote in primaries “disapprove of Republican leaders in Congress.” They see Republican leaders as being complicit in whatever they find wrong with Washington.
This anti-Washington sentiment, which is loosely identified with the “Tea Party,” has overshadowed and transformed grassroots Republicanism. Republican leaders like DeLay were able to keep the evangelicals and other social conservatives in line by battling gay marriage or late-term abortions. But as I recounted three years ago, many of these social issue activists have been absorbed into the Tea Party’s anti-government, anti-establishment ethos. In their current report on the GOP, based on focus groups, the Democracy Corps affirms this conclusion. Evangelicals, the report says, “think many Republicans have lost their way” and that the party leadership “has proved too willing to ‘cave’ to the Obama agenda.” They identify with the Tea Party groups (even though they may disagree on social issues) because they see them “standing up and pushing back.”
During George H.W. Bush’s presidency, these kind of sentiments were directed at moderates like House Minority Leader Robert Michel or Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, but they are now aimed at erstwhile conservatives like Mitch McConnell and Boehner. The new grassroots Republicans are Warren’s middle American radicals. They don’t necessarily have clear overall objectives. They do want to blow up government—whether by eliminating the debt or repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. And whatever they want to do, they want done immediately and without compromise. And they regard those like Boehner who compromise and are willing to settle for incremental changes as “RINOs”—Republicans in name only.
As this Republican anti-establishment has surged, new groups have arisen in Washington to respond to it, while older groups have attempted to adapt and keep pace. The Club for Growth, perhaps the best known of these, and the one with which I am the most familiar, actually dates back to the early ‘90s when several Wall Streeters created a club to fund promising candidates. The Club’s initial agenda was to promote Jack Kemp-style growth policies, and their first big success was in getting Christy Whitman (a RINO if there ever was one!) elected governor of New Jersey on an anti-tax platform.
The current Club, under former Congressman Chris Chocola, expends much of its effort on backing conservative Republicans against other conservative Republicans whom it believes are too close to the Republican leadership in Washington. The operative terms in the Club’s jargon are “outsiders” against the “establishment.” In 2012, for instance, the Club poured over $700,000 into backing a little known dentist, Scott Keadle, against Richard Hudson. The two men had very similar positions, but Keadle, Chocola explained to me, was “very much an outsider,” while Hudson had worked for a Republican House member and was backed by Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s PAC.
Other groups have followed a similar strategy of backing maverick conservatives against establishment conservatives. They include FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity both of which came out of the breakup of Citizens for a Sound Economy, and the Senate Conservatives Fund, which was founded by South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint in 2010 before he resigned to become head of the Heritage Foundation. They are supplemented by blogs and web pages like Erick Erickson’s RedState and by policy groups like the Heritage Foundation’s Heritage Action.
These groups don’t get most of their funding from traditional Republican sources on K Street. Much of their money comes from multi-millionaires and billionaires who are not responsible to stockholders. These include the Koch Brothers, who fund Americans for Prosperity, and investors and hedge fund operators J.W. Childs, James Simons, and Robert Arnott, who are among the chief funders of the Club for Growth. Most of these funders espouse an extreme libertarianism—the Koch brothers were early backers of the Cato Institute—but they also stand to benefit from the kind of drastic reduction in government regulations and taxes that the groups and their candidates advocate.
The groups are sometimes believed to be part of a single giant conspiracy led by the Koch brothers, but that is not the case. The Koch brothers started Americans for Prosperity after they became dissatisfied with Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, and the two groups are now rivals. The Kochs are also not major funders for the Club for Growth. The groups themselves often back the same candidates and causes, but are sometimes at odds. FreedomWorks has taken a harder line on the government shutdown than Americans for Prosperity, and the Senate Conservatives Fund is currently running ads in Arizona denouncing one of the Club for Growth’s favorite senators, Jeff Flake, for opposing the attempt to link the continuing resolution to the repeal of Obamacare.
What the groups share is an attempt to tap into the spirit of middle American radicalism. They espouse a somewhat sanitized (less anti-big business and Wall Street) version of the Tea Party’s economic libertarianism. They want to elect “champions of economic freedom” who are for “limited government.” They scorn compromise and the Republicans who make the compromises. “I think the whole concept of compromise and bipartisanship is silly,” Chocola says. Their ultimate goal, Chocola says, is to elect a “majority of true fiscal conservatives” who will transform the government—or in the meantime, gum up the works by making compromise difficult, if not impossible.
To date, the groups have had a mixed record in elections. They screwed up in Nevada, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, and Missouri by backing extreme Republicans in Senate primaries who lost winnable elections to Democrats. But they helped elect Senators Toomey, Cruz, Rubio, Flake, and Paul and about 15 House members, including Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton whom they are now backing in the Arkansas senate race.
These are still relatively small numbers, but in the peculiar American system, a few people can exert an inordinate amount of power. In the Senate, the Tea Party adherents can disrupt any attempts at compromise, as Senator Ted Cruz did recently. In the House, they can threaten John Boehner’s job, because Boehner needs an absolute majority of House members to retain his speakership. And numbers aside, the threat of a primary challenge (now converted into a verb “to primary”) hovers over the all Republican Senate and House members, most notably McConnell, and has forced Boehner and McConnell to follow dutifully the shutdown strategy of Cruz and his House allies.
Under pressure from grassroots radicals and the new outsider groups, the old Republican coalition is beginning to shatter. The single-issue and evangelical groups have been superseded by right-wing populist groups, which are generally identified with the Tea Party, although there is no single Tea Party organization. These groups can’t easily be co-opted by the party’s Washington leadership. And the business groups in Washington, who funded the party over the last two decades, have grown disillusioned with a party that appears to be increasingly held hostage by its radical base and by outsider groups. The newspapers are now filled with stories about business opposition to the shutdown strategy, and there are even hints of business groups backing challenges to Tea Party candidates. “The business community has got to stand up and say we are not going to back the most self-described conservative candidate. We are going to back the candidates that are the most rational,” says John Feehery, a former aide to DeLay and Hastert who is now president of Quinn Gillespie & Associates, a Washington lobbying firm.
What Washington business lobbyists say on-the-record about the House Republicans and about Tea Party activists pales before what they are willing to say if their names aren't used. One former Republican staffer says of the anti-establishment groups, “They want to go in and fuck shit up. These non-corporate non-establishmentarian guys—that is exactly what they are doing. And the problem with that is obvious. What next? What happens after you fuck shit up?” Other lobbyists I talked to cited John Calhoun, Dixiecrats and Richard Hofstadter’s essay on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” to explain the rise of the populist right. It’s the kind of reference you’d expect to read in a New Republic article, but not necessarily in a conversation with a business lobbyist.
One could argue, of course, that the Republican Party will readapt to its rightwing base and eventually create a new majority of “true fiscal conservatives” who will disdain compromise. But there is reason to believe that Chocola and the Club for Growth will never achieve their objective. Rightwing populism, like its predecessor, Christian conservatism, is intense in its commitment, but ultimately limited in its appeal. Tea Party Republicans and the outsider groups probably had their greatest impact when they were still emerging phenomena in the 2010 elections. But when the Republican Party becomes identified with the radical right, it will begin to lose ground even in districts that Republicans and polling experts now regard as safe. That happened earlier with the Christian Coalition, which enjoyed immense influence within the Republican Party until the Republican Party began to be identified with it.
In Washington, today’s business lobbies may come to understand what the lobbies of the ‘50s grasped—that the Democratic Party is a small “c” conservative party that has sought to preserve and protect American capitalism by sanding off its rough edges. Joe Echevarria, the chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, recently told The New York Times, “I’m a Republican by definition and by registration, but the party seems to have split into two factions.” Echevarria added that while the Democrats also had an extreme faction, it had no power in the party, while the Republican’s extreme faction did. “The extreme right has 90 seats in the House,” he said. “Occupy Wall Street has no seats.” That realization could lead business to resume splitting its contributions, which would spell trouble for the Republicans.
Republicans in Washington could repudiate their radical base and shun the groups that appeal to it. That is roughly what people like Feehery are suggesting. But the question, then, is what would be the Republican base? How would Republicans win elections? Are there enough rational Republicans to make up for the loss of the radical ones?
What is happening in the Republican Party today is reminiscent of what happened to the Democrats in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At that time, the Democrats in Washington were faced by a grassroots revolt from the new left over the war in Vietnam and from the white South over the party’s support for civil rights. It took the Democrats over two decades to do undo the damage—to create a party coalition that united the leadership in Washington with the base and that was capable of winning national elections. The Republicans could be facing a similar split between their base and their Washington leadership, and it could cripple them not just in the 2014 and 2016 elections, but for decades to come.

Bachmann takes the Obamacare debate to a new low


The marketplace for Americans to buy health care insurance under Obamacare debuted Tuesday, as Republicans took aim toward President Obama’s health care law with a whole new level of vitriol.

Bachmann takes the Obamacare debate to a new low

, @morganwinn

Minnesota Republican Representative Michele Bachmann greets demonstrators with the Tea Party outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, June 19, 2013. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Minnesota Republican Representative 
Michele Bachmann 
greets demonstrators with the Tea Party 
outside the US Capito
l in Washington, DC, June 19, 2013.
 (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
“I think the reason is because President Obama can’t wait to get Americans addicted to the crack cocaine of dependency on more government health care,” Rep. Michele Bachmann said to World Net Daily. “Because, once they enroll millions of more individual Americans it will be virtually impossible for for us to pull these benefits back from people.”
“People are looking at getting, I’m not kidding, $18,000 a year worth of benefits,” she added later. “You buy a lot of love for $18,000 a year, and you know you are also going to be getting illegal aliens who are going to be getting access to these benefits. You know it.”
Believe it or not, Bachmann is not the first person to drop the word “crack” during an attack on the health reform law.
During a conversation about the exchanges opening Tuesday, Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly said on his program Friday, “it’s getting them out of the house, or the crack house,” while talking about uninsured Americans signing up for health insurance.

 


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Sen. Ted Cruz has made “addiction” to Obamacare one of the focal points of his opposition to the law.
“What the administration desperately wants is to get to January, to get the exchanges in place, to get the subsidies in place, and by the way, they eliminated any eligibility test, so they want people hooked on Obamacare so it can never be unwound,” he said on Fox back in July.
During his more recent pseudo-filibuster on the Senate floor last week, Cruz all but called the president a drug dealer.
“He wants to get as many Americans as possible addicted to the subsidies, addicted to the sugar because he knows that, in modern times, no major entitlement has been implemented and then unwound,” Cruz said.
But if the addiction rhetoric wasn’t enough, Bachmann also wants to draw connections between Obamacare and the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN.
She told WND that people working on the health care law “will be getting something like $59 a head for the people that they sign up. ACORN did that.”
“ACORN signed up Donald Duck and Minnie Mouse,” she said, “so people could make money. It was meant to be a scam.”
“We know people will get signed up in a fraudulent way,” she added.
State Rep. William O’Brien, a New Hampshire lawmaker, said the law was “as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that allowed slave owners to come to New Hampshire and seize African Americans.”
When Obama made fun of those remarks, he insisted that the president was “increasingly diminished.”
“My reaction to it was that the president has remained such a rabble-rouser and community organizer that he doesn’t want to take the time to slow up and understand why people — a majority of people — are so concerned about the effects of Obamacare,” O’Brien told the International Business Times, adding later, “This specific episode — his mocking tone and charged-up rhetoric — demonstrates that he’s not going to be a unifier.”
 
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Friday, October 11, 2013

Paul Ryan: GOP Shouldn't Give Up On 'Repealing And Replacing' Obamacare


"The way I see it, our job is to preserve our values in the 21st century," the ranking member on the House Budget Committee said in a video address at Values Voter Summit. "We need to apply our principles to the challenges of today. And that means we need to completely rethink government's role in our lives.
"We need to completely rethink government's role in helping the most vulnerable," Ryan added. "We need to completely rethink government's role in health care. That means we can never give up on repealing and replacing Obamacare."
The refrain is largely a blast from the past because the Republican Party, led by a group of conservative senators and House representatives, largely ditched the latter in favor of a quixotic effort to defund Obamacare in exchange for funding the government -- with nary a mention about alternative proposals.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who spearheaded the effort in a 21-hour Senate floor speech, has repeatedly dodged questions about the fate of existing Obamacare benefits -- such as the ability to stay on one's parent's plan until age 26 -- if the law is defunded.

Ted Cruz Is Living On Another Planet

Ted Cruz Is Living On Another Planet

Ted Cruz smileThis morning, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) spoke to the Values Voters Summit, and his speech was really weird. It's like he's living on another planet.
O n Planet Cruz, there is a massive outpouring of public support for a government shutdown over Obamacare and it's scaring the hell out of Democrats.
Read how Cruz describes the view from his corner of the universe:
The nice thing is the left will always, always, always tell you who they fear. And they fear you. They fear the American people.
The fundamental problem in Washington is Washington is not listening to America. And what happens? This fight on Obamacare, we went and made the case to the American people, launched a national website: dontfundit.com. In a matter of just a few weeks, over 2 million Americans signed that petition on dontfundit.com.
It is because of you that the House of Representatives has been standing strong because the House has been listening to the people. It is because of you that for the past two months, the country is engaged in a national debate about the enormous harms Obamacare is causing, all of the millions of Americans who are losing their jobs, being pushed into part-time work, losing their health insurance.  It is because of you that the American people are energized.
And we see the Obama administration defending positions that are utterly and completely unreasonable. Repeatedly the House of Representatives has acted to compromise, to fund vital priorities, and repeatedly President Obama and the Democrats have refused to negotiate.
Now I will note this afternoon – look, the Democrats are feeling the heat...
Listen, none of us know what’s going to happen on this Obamacare fight right now. In my view, the House of Representatives needs to keep doing what it’s been doing, which is standing strong. And that is the model for every other fight. We need no more Washington solutions. We need to go back to the American people.
Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the public hates the shutdown, Americans are 20 points more likely to blame Republicans for the shutdown than Obama, the Republican Party is scoring its worst poll numbers on record, Cruz's colleagues in the House and Senate hate him, and they're preparing to cave to the president by reopening the government and funding Obamacare.
Cruz is betting that his supporters are too stupid to notice that his strategy is failing and was doomed to fail. He's probably right.
Lots of people thought that when Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election after months of conservatives proclaiming that the polls were "skewed" and he was on course to win, the party's base might start to evaluate whether it misunderstood the world around it.
Remarkably, conservative delusion about facts on the ground is more intense than ever. The appetite for stories like the one Cruz is telling is unending, impervious to facts and sustainable no matter how far the Republican Party's poll numbers fall.
When constituencies become aggrieved minorities, seeing themselves as under attack by the establishment, they are vulnerable to hucksters like Cruz, because they disregard outside warnings and evidence that they are being had.
Usually, you see this on a smaller scale: Ohio's economically depressed Mahoning Valley sending Jim Traficant (D) to Congress for two decades even though he was obviously a corrupt politician with a mental disorder; New Orleans re-electing Bill Jefferson (D) to Congress after the FBI raided his home and found $90,000 in cash in his freezer, because maybe there was a perfectly good explanation for how it got there.
What's unprecedented about Cruz and similar Tea Party Republicans who make up about a third of the House Republican conference is that the aggrieved localized minority has gone national. Republicans once thought Fox News and the conservative media bubble were strategic advantages that allowed them to coordinate messages and organize voters; instead, they have allowed Republican voters to remain unaware that their favorite politicians are lying to them and alienating the median voter.
Losing one election wasn't nearly enough to wake Republican voters up to this problem. Ted Cruz isn't alone on his strange planet; much of the Republican Party is right there with him. And that's likely to be true for a long time.


More From Business Insider

Ted Cruz: Hecklers are Obama operatives

Ted Cruz: Hecklers are Obama operatives

By KATIE GLUECK

Sen. Ted Cruz on Friday had a pithy retort for a handful of hecklers who interrupted his speech at the Values Voter Summit Friday.
“It seems Obama’s paid political operatives are out in force today,” he said as one member of the audience interrupted with a question. “The men and women in this room scare the living daylights out of them.”
Cruz (R-Texas) received an adoring reception from most in the conservative audience as he slammed Obamacare, but his speech was interrupted at least seven times by protestors, causing him to pause his address as shouting broke out. Attendees sought to drown out the interrupters with a loud “USA!” chant.
(PHOTOS: Key quotes from Ted Cruz)
“In this brief speech we’ve heard more questions than President Obama has allowed in the past year,” he said after another protestor stood up.
Turning to the media sitting at the back of the ballroom at a Washington hotel, he made what appeared to be an impromptu offer to President Barack Obama.
(QUIZ: Do you know Ted Cruz?)
“If he wants to get 100 of his most rabid political operatives in a room I’ll answer their questions on television as long as he likes,” he said. “In exchange, all I’d ask, Mr. President, is you take not 100 but 10 of the men and women in this room” and spend half an hour answering their questions.
Cruz, speaking to the summit ahead of a meeting with Obama, said the House of Representatives needs to continue “standing strong” in the battle against the health care law as the government remains shut down.

NBC/WSJ poll: Shutdown debate damages GOP

NBC/WSJ poll: Shutdown debate damages GOP

 By Mark Murray, Senior Political Editor, NBC News

The Republican Party has been badly damaged in the ongoing government shutdown and debt limit standoff, with a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finding that a majority of Americans blame the GOP for the shutdown, and with the party’s popularity declining to its lowest level.
By a 22-point margin (53 percent to 31 percent), the public blames the Republican Party more for the shutdown than President Barack Obama – a wider margin of blame for the GOP than the party received during the poll during the last shutdown in 1995-96.

J. Scott Applewhite / AP
House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio departs the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 10, 2013, en route to the White House to a meeting with President Barack Obama.
Just 24 percent of respondents have a favorable opinion about the GOP, and only 21 percent have a favorable view of the Tea Party, which are both at all-time lows in the history of poll.Read the full poll here (.pdf)
And one year until next fall’s midterm elections, American voters prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress to a Republican-controlled one by eight percentage points (47 percent to 39 percent), up from the Democrats’ three-point advantage last month (46 percent to 43 percent).
What’s more, Obama’s political standing has remained relatively stable since the shutdown, with his approval rating ticking up two points since last month, and with the Democratic Party’s favorability rating declining just three points (from 42 percent to 39 percent).
“If it were not so bad for the country, the results could almost make a Democrat smile,” says Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff.
“These numbers lead to one inescapable conclusion: The Republicans are not tone deaf; they are stone deaf.”
A ‘boomerang’ effect for the GOPYet what is perhaps even more worrisome for the GOP is the “boomerang” effect: As the party has used the shutdown and fiscal fight to campaign against the nation’s health-care law and for limited government, the poll shows those efforts have backfired.
 For one thing, the health-care law has become more popular since the shutdown began. Thirty-eight percent see the Affordable Care Act (or “Obamacare”) as a good idea, versus 43 percent who see it as a bad idea – up from 31 percent good idea, 44 percent bad idea last month.
In addition, 50 percent say they oppose totally eliminating funding for the law, even if it that means a partial shutdown of the government. That’s up from 46 percent who said they opposed that move in a Sept. 2013 CNBC poll.
And by a 52-percent-to-44 percent difference, respondents believe the government should do more to solve problems. Back in June, the public was split, 48 percent to 48 percent, on whether the government should do more or less.
Republicans and Democrats are debating a possible short term debt extension, but it's uncertain what each side would have to give. NBC's Mark Murray discusses.
“That is an ideological boomerang,” says McInturff, the GOP pollster. “As the debate has been going on, if there is a break, there is a break against the Republican position.”
Obama’s approval rating ticks up to 47 percentWhile the shutdown has wounded the Republican Party, Obama’s overall political standing remains stable in the poll.
Forty-seven percent of Americans approve of his job performance, which is actually up two points from last month (though that’s within the survey’s margin of error).
That’s compared with just 24 percent who approve of congressional Republicans, and 36 percent who approve of congressional Democrats.
Read the full poll here (.pdf)
Obama – with a 47 percent favorable, 41 percent unfavorable rating – also is the most popular political figure or institution in the poll, surpassing the Democratic Party (39 percent favorable/40 percent unfavorable); Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas (14 percent favorable/28 percent unfavorable); Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (18 percent favorable/32 percent unfavorable); and House Speaker John Boehner (17 percent favorable/42 percent unfavorable).
At the bottom of the list are the Tea Party (21 percent favorable/47 percent unfavorable) and the Republican Party (24 percent favorable/53 percent unfavorable) – their lowest favorable numbers in the history of the poll.
And 46 percent of respondents say the president, during this budget standoff, has been a strong leader and is standing up for what he believes in, versus 51 percent who believe he’s putting his own political agenda ahead of what’s good for the country.

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By comparison, a whopping 70 percent say congressional Republicans are putting politics first.
“Obama comes into the fight in as good of shape as he entered it,” says Hart, the Democratic pollster.
But there is one silver lining for Republicans: By a 43-percent-to-40 percent margin, the public disagrees with Obama’s position that he will not negotiate with the Republicans until they reopen government and raise the debt ceiling.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., sat down with Tina Brown at The Daily Beat Annual Hero Summit to talk debt ceiling, shut down, and what's going on in Washington D.C.
Economic confidence drops like a rockBeyond the politics, the poll finds that the government shutdown and the debate over raising the debt ceiling have made Americans more pessimistic about the country’s direction and economy.
Just 14 percent believe the nation is headed in the right direction – a 16-point drop from last month. In fact, the last time it reached this level in the NBC/WSJ poll was during the 2008 financial crisis.
In addition, only 17 percent think the U.S. economy will improve in the next 12 months, which is down 10 points from September.
And 63 percent say the budget negotiations between Obama and congressional Republicans have made them less confident about the economy.
“All you can say is – what a waste,” Hart says about the government shutdown and fiscal standoff.
The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted Oct. 7-9 of 800 adults (including 240 cell phone-only respondents), and it has an overall margin of error of plus-minus 3.5 percentage points.
This story was originally published on

Establishment GOPers assail tea party on shutdown

Establishment GOPers assail tea party on shutdown

Republican establishment gripes about House tea party lawmakers over budget impasse

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- From county chairmen to national party luminaries, veteran Republicans across the country are accusing tea party lawmakers of staining the GOP with their refusal to bend in the budget impasse in Washington.
The Republican establishment also is signaling a willingness to strike back at the tea party in next fall's elections.
"It's time for someone to act like a grown-up in this process," former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu argues, faulting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and tea party Republicans in the House as much as President Barack Obama for taking an uncompromising stance.
Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is just as pointed, saying this about the tea party-fueled refusal to support spending measures that include money for Obama's health care law: "It never had a chance."
The anger emanating from Republicans like Sununu and Barbour comes just three years after the GOP embraced the insurgent political group and rode its wave of new energy to return to power in the House.
Now, they're lashing out with polls showing Republicans bearing most of the blame for the federal shutdown, which entered its 11th day Friday. In some places, they're laying the groundwork to take action against the tea party in the 2014 congressional elections.
Iowa Republicans are recruiting a pro-business Republican to challenge six-term conservative Rep. Steve King, a leader in the push to defund the health care law. Disgruntled Republicans are further ahead in Michigan, where second-term, tea party-backed Rep. Justin Amash is facing a Republican primary challenger who is more in line with — and being encouraged by — the party establishment. And business interest groups, long aligned with the Republican Party, also are threatening to recruit and fund strong challengers to tea party House members.
Tea party backers are undeterred and assail party leaders.
"They keep compromising," said Katrina Pierson, a former Dallas-area tea party organizer now challenging Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas in the 2014 GOP primary. "They all campaigned on fiscal responsibility. They just need to do what they campaigned on."
In more than a dozen interviews, Republican leaders, officials and strategists at all levels of the party blamed Obama for the shutdown but also faulted tea party lawmakers in the House, who have insisted that any deal to reopen the government be contingent on stripping money for the health care law.
An Associated Press-GfK poll released Wednesday showed why these party loyalists are so concerned: More Republicans told pollsters that the GOP is mishandling the shutdown than is handling it well. And among those who say it's being poorly handled, twice as many Republicans say the party is not doing enough to negotiate with Obama than those who say the party is doing too much.
Party leaders interviewed said the tea party's demands to defund the health care law — and the House leadership's willingness to follow suit — were distracting from what they said is the GOP's best strategy to recover from its 2012 losses: a focus on reducing long-term spending. They said defunding the health care law would not achieve that goal because the money was already flowing to the law.
"At the end of the day, you're fighting legislation that's already passed," said former South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson, describing the fight to defund the health care law as a lost cause.
Republican activists around the country also said in interviews that the shutdown — and House Republicans' demands — have deflected attention from problems with the launch of key parts to the health care bill.
Thousands of Americans were unable to shop for health insurance on the online marketplaces when they went live on Oct. 1 because of software glitches. And, these Republicans say, the GOP in Washington — and specifically tea party House members — got in the way of the troubled rollout, which the GOP could have seized on if the government were still open.
"We're not saying Obama is right. We're saying what Republicans are doing is wrong," said Matt Cox, a former executive director of Ohio's Cuyahoga County GOP. He said that instead of pursuing the shutdown strategy, Republicans in Washington could have passed — and taken credit for — a spending measure that kept dollar levels at those set by the automatic $1.2 trillion across-the-board cut approved last year, also called the sequester.
Generally, these Republicans said that because of the tea party's effort to defund the health care law, the Republican Party had missed an opportunity to hammer Obama after he hit a rough patch over Syria just a month ago.
Former Illinois state Sen. Laura Douglas wants to believe that the holdouts can win. But she has her doubts.
"My heart says, 'Keep fighting, don't give up,'" said Douglas, a resident of Quincy in western Illinois. "But my head says, 'If we keep this kind of thing up, we're going to get creamed next year.'"
Her worries are reflected in the AP-GfK poll. Roughly three-quarters of Republicans nationally said their party in Congress deserves a moderate degree or most of the blame for the shutdown.
Even among Republicans, those who don't support the tea party mostly disapprove of how the GOP is handling the budget issue. Just 17 percent of Americans overall consider themselves tea party backers.
And tea party allies are fighting back.
The Senate Conservatives Fund, an independent political action committee, has run ads asking tea party supporters to recruit primary election opponents for Republicans who voted for a measure that would have kept the government running with modifications in the health care law.
In South Carolina, Fairfield County Republican Chairman Kevin Thomas is among those on the side of tea party lawmakers.
"The only leverage we have is the budget," he said.
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Associated Press writer Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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Follow Beaumont on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/TomBeaumont

Polls Show the GOP Is Now Losing Their Faithful

Polls Show the GOP Is Now Losing Their Faithful

 

Ted Cruz may be trying to spin it otherwise, but the numbers show the GOP is even losing the support of Republican voters. By Kirsten Powers. 


Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. It’s now an official wing of the Republican Party.

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Sen. Ted Cruz speaks to reporters. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

As poll after poll after poll shows Americans angry with the GOP over the government shutdown, Tea Party Republicans are still trying to spin this disaster as a win for the GOP. This epic denial brings back memories of Election 2012, when Republicans believed right up to the last minute that the reelection of Barack Obama was a scientific impossibility.

Not surprisingly, the chief purveyor of the latest fairy tale is Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who spun it for his GOP colleagues at a Wednesday luncheon. Here is his argument, which has worked its way into Tea Party talking points: In November 1995, 51 percent of voters blamed Republicans for the shutdown; a mere 28 percent blamed then-President Clinton. Every poll shows that the GOP is being blamed for the shutdown this time as well. But it’s by a smaller margin than in 1995. Break out the Champagne.

Not so fast. A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll out Thursday found that the public blames the Republican Party more for the shutdown than President Obama, by a 22-percentage-point margin (53 percent to 31 percent). This is essentially the same as the 1995 margin. What will Cruz say now?

It’s true that Americans are less than thrilled with President Obama and congressional Democrats. Their approval ratings are nothing to celebrate. But electoral politics is a zero-sum game. If one side loses, then the other side wins. Success depends on being just slightly less odious than your opponent.  

With their shutdown shenanigans, the GOP is making Democrats look more attractive by the day. Gallup reported that the GOP’s favorability rating dropped 10 percentage points (from 38 percent to 28 percent approval) since September, giving it the lowest favorable rating for either party since Gallup began asking this question in 1992. As a comparison, the Democrats dropped only 4 percentage points in the last month, to a 43 percent approval rating. Even among the party faithful, the GOP’s unfavorability rose 8 percentage points from September. Democratic Party unfavorables among Democrats rose only one percentage point during that period.

The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll had similar bottom-of-the barrel findings: “24 percent of respondents have a favorable opinion about the GOP, and only 21 percent have a favorable view of the Tea Party. Both are all-time lows in the history of the poll.”




It doesn’t bode well for Republicans that voters in such a conservative state are greeting their antics with such disapproval.
Meanwhile, the poll found that, “President Barack Obama… has actually gained a bit of altitude during the shutdown, with 47 percent viewing him positively, compared to 45 percent in September.” A 47 percent approval isn’t a great accomplishment.  But gaining while your opponents are dropping is all you need to win in the zero-sum game.
Then there are the recent numbers for Tea Party leader Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who helped lead the campaign to shut down the government over Affordable Care Act funding. A Brigham Young University poll found that Lee’s favorability in Utah has plummeted 10 percentage points (from 50 to 40 percent) since June. Among his own party, approval has dropped to 57 percent from 71 percent. On whether Lee should compromise with Democrats on a budget, even if means funding Obamacare, 57 percent of Utah voters polled said yes. Sixty-five percent of independents and 51 percent of non-Tea Party Republicans also prefer compromise. 
The poll doesn’t appear to be an outlier. Another Utah survey, conducted by Dan Jones & Associates for KSL-TV and Deseret News, found that 56 percent of Utah voters said it wasn’t worth shutting down the government to repeal the health-care law. Nearly half reported disapproval of the Tea Party’s influence on the government shutdown, and more than one-third expressed disapproval of Sen. Mike Lee. It doesn’t bode well for Republicans that voters in such a conservative state are greeting their antics with such disapproval.
As for Democrats, they just need to keep doing what they are doing. Jim Kessler, one of the founders of the centrist think tank Third Way, put it this way to me: “It’s like the two campers in the woods. A bear shows up and one guy is putting on sneakers and the other says, ‘You aren’t going to outrun the bear’ and the other says, ‘I just have to outrun you.’ Right now, Republicans are the barefoot camper.” 

The last real Republican to hold office was.....




The 6 Dumbest Government Shutdown Myths

The 6 Dumbest Government Shutdown Myths

failThe government shutdown is awful. It's awful in a lot of different ways—to kids with cancer, to firefighters, to domestic violence centers, to goats. Another way in which this awful manifests itself is through a parade of misinformation and bad memes about what's going on during this impasse. Here are six of the dumbest myths you've probably heard about the government shutdown:
1. Obama closed the ocean.
On Saturday, Breitbart's Mike Flynn posted a piece, titled "Feds Try to Close the Ocean Because of Shutdown", that reads, "before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was 'closed' due to the shutdown." A bunch of people started tweeting about how Obama had shut down the ocean, including this Republican congressman from Arizona:

And on Monday, Fox News' Megyn Kelly had the cast of Fox's The Five on her new show to talk about what Miley Cyrus looks like when she twerks, but also about Obama closing the ocean.
Barack Obama did not close the ocean. Officials are indeed restricting access (fishing, for instance) to Florida Bay, a body of water that's part of a national park. Florida Bay encompasses roughly a half million acres, but exceptions are being made for transit, access for emergencies, and access for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to monitor the population of algae. "[I]t's an exaggeration to state that Obama has tried to shut down the entire ocean—or even to suggest that he has shuttered the Atlantic Ocean or all of the waters in the Keys," PolitiFact.com concludes. "Tourists and locals can continue to fish, swim and play in the ocean, even in the Keys."
2. Obama is personally paying to keep a Muslim culture museum open.
During the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, cohost Anna Kooiman claimed that President Obama offered to pay "out of his own pocket" to keep the International Museum of Muslim Cultures open during the shutdown—while refusing to allow World War II veterans to visit their memorial in Washington, DC. Here's the clip:




This would be outrageous and bizarre—if the claim weren't based on a piece published on a satirical website. Kooiman later apologized on Twitter, and Fox is set to issue an on-air correction this Saturday.
3. Obama shut down the Amber Alert program.
Conservative bloggers were appalled this week to find that the federal government nixed Amber Alerts during the shutdown. Though the website was down briefly, the program itself was never shuttered. Also, the child abduction alert system is actually a state-based program, two alerts went out during the shutdown, and the website is now back up and running. So that's that.
4. NASA won't tell you about world-ending asteroids because #shutdown.

 This one tweet kicked off a swirl of speculation and bad headlines about how NASA's asteroid detection staff had been axed—even though the Asteroid Watch Twitter feed clarified that many observatories and astronomers would continue to monitor the skies. Ninety-seven percent of NASA staff was furloughed, and government social-media accounts took hits across the board. But there's no reason to think that government officials wouldn't be able to tell America that a Ben Affleck movie was becoming terrifying reality just because they aren't currently allowed to do it on Twitter.



 5. Priests are being threatened with arrest.
"In a stunning development, some military priests are facing arrest if they celebrate mass or practice their faith on military bases during the federal government shutdown," the Daily Caller reported on Friday, with the provocative headline, "Priests threatened with arrest if they minister to military during shutdown." Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted the story, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor responded:


The Caller story was picked up by various right-winger pundits and bloggers, including Fox News radio host Todd Starnes, who interpreted this as yet another one of Obama's attacks on religious freedom. This all quickly morphed into the meme that Obama was threatening military chaplains and priests with jail time. This simply isn't the case, and the Obama administration has yet to initiate any kind of crackdown on Catholic priests. On Saturday, the House passed a measure allowing military chaplains to lead Sunday mass without fear of penalty. The Senate has yet to take up the bill.
6. Shutdowns are "normal."
On a recent episode of CNN's Crossfire, cohost Newt Gingrich (who, as former speaker of the House, led Republicans during the last big shutdown) claimed that shutdown-related hysteria was overblown. "There is an amazing amount of hysteria and vitriol over what is a normal part of the constitutional process," Gingrich said on September 30. "The government shut down 12 times under Democratic House speaker Tip O'Neill. It was only shut down twice while I was speaker."
The stated number of shutdowns under O'Neill is misleading, given that they were very short and that nearly half of them weren't technically government shutdowns. Of the seven genuine shutdowns of the O'Neill era, the longest lasted three days, and the cumulative duration of all seven was 13 days—half the combined length of Gingrich's two shutdowns (26 days). Via PolitiFact:
In addition, three of those happened primarily on weekends, further minimizing their impact.
A one-day shutdown in October 1982, the Washington Post recently noted, stemmed from a particularly innocuous reason: Congress delayed a session because President Reagan had invited lawmakers to a White House barbecue, and Democrats were holding a $1,000-a-plate fundraising dinner. The funding question was resolved the next day.
For more nuance, click here.

Asshole of the Day for October 10, 2013

Ship of Fools

Obamacare Has Gotten More Popular Since The GOP Shut Down The Government To Defund It

Obamacare Has Gotten More Popular Since The GOP Shut Down The Government To Defund It

 By Tara Culp-Ressler

obamacareA faction of Tea Party Republicans led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) essentially forced a government shutdown to pressure Democrats to delay or defund the health reform law. But that dramatic move hasn’t done anything to convince Americans that Obamacare is a policy they should oppose. According to a new poll, Obamacare is actually gaining in popularity at the same time as the Republican Party has taken extreme measures to take a stand against it.
A new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll finds that 38 percent of Americans say Obamacare is a good idea, which represents a 7-point jump from last month. It’s the third-highest popularity rating for Obamacare — which typically doesn’t poll well as a whole, even though Americans tend to support its individual provisions — since the health law was first enacted.
The poll also finds that 50 percent of voters don’t want to eliminate funding for the health reform law, and the vast majority are opposed to tying Obamacare to the ongoing negotiations over the government shutdown. Just 23 percent of Americans say they want to continue the current shutdown to sabotage the health law.
The government shutdown ultimately didn’t do anything to stop the major provisions of the health law from taking effect, and actually ended up coinciding with the open enrollment period for Obamacare’s new insurance marketplaces. Although the sites for the marketplaces have had some ongoing technological glitches, they’ve also received a considerable amount of interest during their first two weeks. A recent poll found that seven percent of Americans say that someone in their household has already tried to sign up for health insurance under Obamacare, which could represent up to 20 million people. That personal experience with the law could be influencing Americans’ attitudes about it.
The new findings from the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll track with surveys that were conducted right before the government shut down at the beginning of this month. In September, one poll found that just seven percent of Republican voters favored delaying or defunding Obamacare as the best strategy for moving forward with the health law. Another poll released last month found that even the Americans who oppose the health law don’t actually want to sabotage it; instead, most voters are interested in finding ways to make it work.
And as the shutdown has dragged on, there have been some signs that mainstream GOPers are breaking from the Tea Party’s far-right strategy to take the government hostage over Obamacare. Some Republican lawmakers have been distancing themselves from the House GOP’s demands, pointing out that “defunding Obamacare did not work” and it’s time for a more realistic strategy. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) recently expressed frustration with congressional Republicans for being so focused on defunding Obamacare, noting that her state needs the funding appropriated under the health law to expand Medicaid. And across the country, veteran Republicans are becoming fed up with the shutdown, accusing the Tea Party of being too intransigent and creating a “distraction” with the fight over Obamacare.

Tea party group FreedomWorks is in deep financial trouble

Tea party group FreedomWorks is in deep financial trouble

 By Travis Gettys

'Sounding Fathers' sings at rally of the Tea Party Patriots in Downtown St. Louis under the Arch, on Sept. 12, 2010The conservative activist group credited with building the tea party has turned into a nearly broke wingnut welfare slush fund, according to former staffers.
Sources told BuzzFeed that FreedomWorks was forced to take out a $1 million line of credit to keep extra cash on hand earlier this year.
The nonprofit organization raised more than $40 million last year but has taken in as little as $3 million so far this year, the site reported Friday, and staffers are reportedly fleeing the group as morale plummets.
The group had fallen on hard times since co-chairman Dick Armey tried to gain control of FreedomWorks in September 2012 from top executives Matt Kibbe and Adam Brandon, the sources said.
Armey agreed to drop his coup attempt and leave the organization in exchange for $8 million that will be paid over 20 years by FreedomWorks’ primary donor, Chicago businessman Dick Stephenson.
The former Republican House Majority Leader had been with the group since its 2004 inception as a splinter group of the Koch brothers-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy, which Armey had joined the year before as chairman.
Two sources with close knowledge of the organization’s finances told Buzzfeed that FreedomWorks had raised less than $2 million in the first quarter of 2013, although a former employee said it may have raised as much as $10 million so far this year.
But the group’s financial troubles were less related to raising money in an off-cycle year and had more to do with extravagant spending, including a craft beer bar in the office and $80,000 Las Vegas hotel bills, by FreedomWorks’ top-heavy management structure, sources said.
They also questioned the value in spending a reported $1 million a year to prop up Glenn Beck’s network, The Blaze.
FreedomWorks also faces competition for potential donors from other conservative groups, including the Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action.
Beck discussed Armey’s coup attempt Thursday on his radio program, saying he’d been waiting for the right time to reveal that libertarians such as Kibbe were escorted out of the building by armed guards.
Details of the power struggle had been reported at the time in other media, but the conservative talk show host said Armey’s coup attempt was part of an ongoing effort by establishment Republicans to diminish the influence of activist groups such as FreedomWorks and the Senate Conservatives Fund.
But Armey insists that he was angered over a book attributed to Kibbe that was written using FreedomWorks resources.
A spokeswoman for FreedomWorks dismissed the claims reported by Buzzfeed as the complaints of disgruntled former employees.
“They are part of a series of baseless attacks from salty former employees who have decided to spend their days spreading lies rather than working to advance the movement,” spokeswoman Jackie Bodnar told Buzzfeed. “It’s really unfortunate to watch the malice unfold from these nameless accusers who lurk in the shadows of ‘deep background’ interviews.”