The muted responses of most GOP leaders to offensive comments by talk-show host Rush Limbaugh show that they are scared of Limbaugh, conservative commentator George Will complained on ABC’s “This Week.” He noted that House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Limbaugh’s comments about a Georgetown University law student were “inappropriate.” “Using the salad fork for your entree – that’s inappropriate,” Will said. “Not this stuff.” Will noted that liberals also fail to “police the excesses on their own side,” but he mocked how GOP leaders talk tough yet won’t stand up to Limbaugh. “They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh,” Will said.
“I used to be a conservative, and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed,” former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said in a Dallas speech last week. It’s a view shared by many Republicans and independents worried about how far right the GOP presidential candidates have moved during the primaries. Bush added that it’s troubling “when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective, and that’s kind of where we are.” Bush said he hopes this changes during the general election.
When the Washington Post asked readers to name the most underrated president, the winner was George H.W. Bush. As a reader put it: “The country owes 41 a collective apology for voting him out of office. Our deficit ballooned under Ronald Reagan, and Bush was left holding the bag. Conservative purists butchered him when he tried to get the country’s finances under control. Bush also wisely understood what driving to Baghdad in 1991 would have meant — a long, bloody quagmire.” Rounding out the top five: Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Harry Truman and Calvin Coolidge.
Cal Thomas wrote about apologizing to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. Thomas made an offhand comment at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference that Maddow is “the best argument in favor of her parents using contraception.” He called Maddow the next morning and apologized. “I had embarrassed myself and was a bad example to those who read my column and expect better from me,” Thomas wrote. He said that Maddow could not have been more gracious in accepting his apology, and that they plan to meet for lunch. “To be forgiven by one you have wronged is a blessing,” Thomas said.
A CNN/Opinion Research poll found that 63 percent of Americans view Newt Gingrich unfavorably, compared with 25 percent who view him favorably. A CBS News/New York Times poll has a similar spread, with 54 percent viewing Gingrich unfavorably and only 16 percent favorably. This 38-point difference between favorable and unfavorable is the worst of any national figure in recent years, according to Aaron Blake of the Washington Post.
Going on offense after SurveyUSA polling showed the governor with a lower approval rating than President Obama in the state, the Kansas Republican Party tweeted “now here’s a real survey” about a new Gallup poll showing Kansas as the fifth-most-Republican state (after Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Alaska). Gallup also noted that Democrats have lost their solid political party affiliation advantage in 18 states since 2008. As recently as 2009, Kansas was among the “competitive” states, in which the leading party has no more than a 5 percentage point advantage.
Thomas Frank, author of the best-seller “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” will do a reading and book signing a 7 p.m. today at Watermark Books, 4701 E. Douglas. His latest book, “Pity the Billionaire,” explores how the GOP’s right wing has used the economic downturn to fuel a political comeback. In a commentary at Kansas.com, Frank argues that Mitt Romney may turn out to be the truest to the spirit of the tea party movement of all the GOP presidential candidates.
While acknowledging that predicting the future is dangerous, former Bush administration political adviser Karl Rove nonetheless made political predictions for 2012 (nearly all of which were good for Republicans). Among them: The GOP will lose seats in the U.S. House but still maintain its majority; the GOP will gain the majority in the U.S. Senate; House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid or both will leave the Democratic leadership by the end of 2012; President Obama won’t be re-elected.
Washington Post fact-checkers were kept busy this year reviewing all the exaggerated and flat-out wrong statements made by politicians. They assigned “Pinocchio” ratings ranging from one Pinocchio for some shading of the facts to four Pinocchios for “whoppers.” Among the biggest whoppers of the year were the GOP claims that President Obama apologized for America and that he thinks Americans are lazy, Obama’s claim that he passed the biggest middle-class tax cut in history, GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s claim that she hasn’t said anything inaccurate in any of the debates, and Democrats’ claim that GOP lawmakers voted to kill Medicare.
The year-end awards of Roll Call contributing writer Stu Rothenberg included: Herman Cain’s “Uzbecki-becki-becki-stan” joke, for worst mistake by a presidential candidate. The demise of the Iowa straw poll, for most noteworthy political development. Ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner (in photo), D-N.Y., for most entertaining political scandal. Solyndra, beating Tim Pawlenty and Jon Corzine as biggest flop of the year. And Newt Gingrich, for “most amazing comeback by someone disliked by his colleagues.”
In an attempt to be balanced, the media often missed the key reason the supercommittee failed to reach a deficit-reduction deal. That reason can be stated in one sentence, wrote Greg Sargent of the Washington Post: “Democrats wanted the rich to pay more in taxes towards deficit reduction, and Republicans wanted the rich to pay less in taxes towards deficit reduction.” Sargent added: “Any news outlet that doesn’t convey this basic fact to readers and viewers with total clarity is obscuring, rather than illuminating, what actually happened here.” Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal editorial blamed the failure on different visions of government: “Democrats don’t believe they need to do more than tinker around the edges of the entitlement state while raising taxes on the rich. Republicans think the growth of government is unsustainable and can’t be financed no matter how much taxes are raised.”
A petition drive to oust Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (in photo), which officially began Tuesday, faces long odds, as 540,208 signatures are required to force a new election. And Walker has some well-financed backers – including Americans for Prosperity, which is already sponsoring ads supporting Walker. Still, voters in Ohio last week repealed a law restricting bargaining rights of public unions. Walker’s support of a similar law in Wisconsin triggered massive protests. Also, Arizona is still buzzing about the defeat of state Senate President Russell Pearce in a recall election last week. Pearce was the leading force behind the state’s anti-immigration law (which was partly written by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach). So anything is possible.
Nearly 200 people were arrested when New York City police cleared out the Occupy Wall Street encampment Monday night. The protesters received a temporary restraining order and are trying to return to the park. Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the decision to remove the protesters. “New York City is the city where you can come and express yourself,” he said. “What was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that.” He said that “health and safety conditions became intolerable” and that protesters had made the park unavailable to anyone else.
Momentum and enthusiasm clearly favor Republicans going into next year’s elections, as GOP wins Tuesday in Virginia legislative races showed. However, decisive defeats Tuesday of an anti-abortion “personhood” amendment in Mississippi and an anti-union law in Ohio are also warnings to Republicans not to overreach. Though Americans are frustrated with President Obama and his handling of the economy, a majority of them don’t support an extreme social or fiscal agenda. They want a course correction, not a radical realignment.
GOP members of Congress aren’t just out of step with most Americans on key provisions of President Obama’s job bill; most Republican voters don’t agree with them either, according to a new CNN/ORC International poll. Among self-identified Republicans surveyed, 58 percent support cutting the payroll tax for all American workers, 63 percent support providing federal money to state governments to hire teachers and first responders, 54 percent want increased federal spending to build roads and schools, and 56 percent support increasing the taxes paid by people who make more than $1 million a year. The only policies GOP voters didn’t support were increasing federal aid to unemployed workers, which only 36 percent supported, and increasing taxes of people who make more than $250,000 a year, which only 37 percent supported. Overall, 60 percent of Americans want more aid to the unemployed, and 63 percent think taxes should increase on those making more than $250,000.
Former Eagle editor Davis Merritt asks a question similar to that raised in the book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”: Why is the middle class set on self-destruction? He argued in a commentary that most of the fiscal fundamentalists in the GOP are the very people who will pay the harshest price for such policies. “Despite decades of evidence to the contrary,” Merritt wrote, “millions of Americans still buy into trickle down, and the Republican leadership cynically encourages them to continue working against their self-interest.”
Even though Republicans are struggling to find a presidential candidate they can get excited about, they have no shortage of enthusiasm — which could be the key to the election. Only 45 percent Democrats and Democratic leaning Independents said they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting in the 2012 presidential election, while 44 percent said they were less so, according to a Gallup survey. Meanwhile, 58 percent of Republicans said they were more enthusiastic about voting while 30 percent are less excited. This “intensity gap” between Democrats and Republicans is largest since 2000. It also was key to GOP gains in last year’s congressional races and in recent special elections.
“The prognosis for the next few years is bad with a chance of worse,” wrote columnist David Brooks. “And the economic conditions are not even the scary part. The scary part is the political class’s inability to think about the economy in a realistic way.” The problem, Brooks contends, is that instead of recognizing the many different factors contributing to the economic downturn, ideologues “pick out the one factor that best conforms to their preformed prejudices and, like blind men grabbing a piece of the elephant, they persuade themselves they understand the whole thing.” Thus many Democrats push for more government spending to combat low consumer demand, and Republicans call for lower taxes and less regulation to combat low business investment. “If we’re stuck with these two mentalities,” Brooks writes, “we will be forever presented with proposals that are incommensurate with the problem at hand.”
Republicans take all the flak for being stupidly anti-science, usually related to evolution, global warming and embryonic stem cells. But Alex Berezow argues in USA Today that Democrats can be just as blind to science on other issues. He cites their activism against vaccination (“Unlike denying evolution, refusing vaccinations can be deadly), genetically modified food and animal research. “We can also thank progressives for blocking the construction of nuclear power plants, even though nuclear power is supported by 70 percent of the scientific community,” he writes. “Ironically, they oppose this technology despite the fact it would help reduce carbon emissions and limit the impact of global warming.”
Republicans were for energy-efficient lightbulbs before they were against them. The 2007 bill phasing in cost- and energy-saving lighting “passed the House with 95 Republican votes and was signed by President George W. Bush,” writes Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson. “There were no riots in the streets. Yet by the time Republicans took over the House in January 2011, this previously uncontroversial legislation had become the basis of an ideological war. Between 2007 and 2011, energy waste and pollution seem to have become inviolable conservative principles.” Republicans “increasingly reject the tissue of their own proposals and their own reasonable history,” she noted, citing similar retreats on the individual health insurance mandate, cap-and-trade and federal loan guarantees. “The problem here isn’t hypocrisy, which abounds at all points on the political spectrum. It’s that Republicans have abandoned market-based solutions in favor of no solutions at all,” she writes. “They’ve traded in their traditional small-government philosophy for anti-government rage, generally doing their level best to look like yahoos whenever cameras are near.”
Republican Bob Turner’s upset victory in Tuesday’s race to replace Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., does not bode well for President Obama and Democrats. This is a district that Democrats have held since 1920. On the other hand, the pundits said the opposite thing in May when a Democrat won a special election in a conservative New York district.
“Perhaps it was inevitable the American electorate would be driven to extremes by an economic crisis unlike anything in the collective memory,” Vic Fazio wrote in Politico. “And yet when the American people most needed to trust government, they found their institutions gridlocked, divided and incapable of concerted action. Indeed, since the economic crisis of 2007 and the struggle to pass the Troubled Asset Relief Program proposed by President George W. Bush, nothing of consequence has happened in Washington that was truly bipartisan. Instead, rigid and often unanimous opposition is the norm. And media coverage this summer indicates the relentless coverage of the 2012 presidential campaign will continue unabated for the next 18 months.”
“Ever since the elections last fall, the few surviving Democrats in Kansas hardly qualify as speed bumps for conservative legislation,” the New York Times reported, in an article characterizing the court challenges around the country to the year’s GOP-passed legislation relating to abortion and immigration as “the first real efforts to slow the crush of conservative legislation.” Secretary of State Kris Kobach told the Times that as the 2010 GOP wins led to swift passage of long-sought conservative legislation, “liberal groups have been quicker than usual to rush to the courthouse doors.” Conservatives seem to view the court fights over each new law as inevitable. And “I think at some level they don’t care about the judicial response,” said University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson. “If it’s upheld, that’s great for them. If it’s struck, it adds to the critique of the so-called imperial judiciary.”
“The notion of conservative purity is a myth,” Peter Berkowitz of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution wrote in a Wall Street Journal commentary. “The great mission of American conservatism — securing the conditions under which liberty flourishes — has always depended on the weaving together of imperfectly compatible principles and applying them to an evolving and elusive political landscape.” Berkowitz noted how the Founding Fathers, Adam Smith and President Reagan (in photo) wisely knew when to compromise. “Clarity about principles is critical,” he wrote. “It enables one to spot the betrayal of core convictions. But contrary to the partisans of purity, in politics winning and compromise are not antithetical.”
When Republicans dismiss “global warming,” they tend to focus on the second word. In a column on Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen observed that the first word also grates on the GOP: “Global warming is global, and reversing it would take global programs. This means that standards and limits have to be imposed by the much-reviled federal government — and it, in turn, has to cooperate with other nations. This nationalization and internationalization of a problem and solution are not, to say the least, very tea-partyish.”
The muted responses of most GOP leaders to offensive comments by talk-show host Rush Limbaugh show that they are scared of Limbaugh, conservative commentator George Will complained on ABC’s “This Week.” He noted that House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Limbaugh’s comments about a Georgetown University law student were “inappropriate.” “Using the salad fork for your entree – that’s inappropriate,” Will said. “Not this stuff.” Will noted that liberals also fail to “police the excesses on their own side,” but he mocked how GOP leaders talk tough yet won’t stand up to Limbaugh. “They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh,” Will said.
