Karl Rove provides his party with some bad analysis and some even worse advice. Steve Benen did a completely adequate job of explaining why, and I encourage you to read his piece. But, I want to focus on something else. The Republicans adore Ronald Reagan, but they don’t really understand his success. To understand this, first look at the incumbent he displaced. Whatever you might say in Jimmy Carter’s defense, he was a major downer. This is a guy who put on a sweater to tell us from the Oval Office that the party was over, that we weren’t going to go back to $5 barrels of oil, and that we needed to turn down the thermostat. He told us our country was disillusioned and lacking focus. He may have tried to convey a can-do attitude, but he really just exuded negativity. We’d be a lot better off if we’d listened to more of his advice, especially on energy. But that doesn’t matter for our discussion here. Reagan beat Carter because he radiated optimism. He has a positive message for Americans (those not in need of help, anyway) and his disposition was a tonic much of the country felt we needed.
What’s the Republicans’ message these days? Basically, it’s this message, delivered by Sen. Marco Rubio yesterday in a video that defended Paul Ryan’s gonorrhea.
“But Medicare is going bankrupt,” he said on Thursday. “Anyone who says it is not is simply lying. And anyone who is in favor of doing nothing to deal with this fact is in favor of bankrupting it.”
He then goes on to say that any changes won’t affect current Medicare recipients and that he won’t support any plan that raises taxes. For Karl Rove, speeches like this are the answer.
Next year, Republicans must describe their Medicare reforms plainly, set the record straight vigorously when Democrats demagogue, and go on the attack. Congressional Republicans—especially in the House—need a political war college that schools incumbents and challengers in the best way to explain, defend and attack on the issue of Medicare reform. They have to become as comfortable talking about Medicare in the coming year as they did in talking about health-care reform last year.
There needs to be preparation and self-education, followed by extensive town halls, outreach meetings, visits to senior citizen centers, and the use of every available communications tool to get the reform message across.
A good starting point is Mr. Ryan’s message from his speech at the Economic Club of Chicago that his Medicare reform package “makes no changes for those in or near retirement, and offers future generations a strengthened Medicare program they can count on, with guaranteed coverage options, less help for the wealthy, and more help for the poor and the sick.”
The populist note is especially important..
Benen focuses on the fact that no matter how much you dress it up, people simply don’t want gonorrhea. That’s true, and it’s important. But I want to focus on the spectacle of an army of trained and war college-educated Republican congressmen criss-crossing the country with a message of fiscal doom.
The Republicans are experts at selling what they’re doing as the opposite (clean skies, healthy forests, Operation Iraqi Freedom), but they usually do it by telling us that we’re good, moral, decent people who deserve our awesome greatness. Ronald Reagan never would have run a campaign on how we’re all screwed.
Never mind that we’re in this position because of Republican fiscal and regulatory policies. The GOP is going to run next year on the idea that America sucks and is completely broke.
That’s the kind of malaise it takes a Reagan to overcome. No wonder the rank-and-file are unhappy with their candidates.
The problem that they will have trying to ply Rove’s mantra about Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security is that it runs headlong into the the actual realities of life for everyday Americans.
My grandmother, were it not for Social Security and her small pension from the Public Employee Retirement System, would have had to live out here later years living with one of her children. And were it not for Medicaid, when she had to go into a nursing home for a time prior to her death, her children would have had to sell her home and begin liquidating her assets in order to pay for her end of life care.
My father, who has worked hard all of his life, would have been living with one of his kids right now if it wasn’t for Social Security and especially for Medicare. His health problems in the last 12-15 years would have bankrupted him very quickly, were it not for the existence of Medicare. And he certainly would not have been able to afford any kind of private insurance. He most certainly would be dead right now were it not for Medicare.
So Rove can talk in circles all he wants about “setting the record straight” and “strengthening Medicare for future generations”. It is plainly obvious to most all us rubes out here in flyover America that he and his colleagues have no interest in preserving the things that we know have saved the lives and quality of life for our parents and grandparents.
Rove is just a lying sack of BS. And there is no way for him to disguise it.
Here’s the real kicker.
So, we’re broke. We’re so broke that we have to give up our entitlements. You know the next question, right?
Why do I get screwed? Why don’t you make rich folks pay their share? Why are we all over the globe meddling in other people’s problems?
Suddenly the anti-tax mantra doesn’t sell very well. Suddenly, our empire doesn’t seem so virtuous. Suddenly, the shit Republican’s have been selling us begins to really stink.
You can’t combine austerity with faux-populism. And you can’t sustain the Empire if your message is that we’re broke.
The GOP is going to crack-up on the shoals of its own rhetoric.
Do you think would we see the same thing here that they are seeing in Britain if the GOP got their way on their vision of austerity?
As long as all this cutting and slashing and taking away is nothing more than an abstract notion, no one really seems to give a damn, do they? But when someone like an Eric Cantor stands up and tells someone who is weeping in front of their destroyed home in Joplin, “We can’t help you or your community, you’re on your own”; and all the while continuing to proudly give away benefits and breaks to the wealthiest of people and corporations in the name of “job creation”, it becomes a very tenuous and slippery moral and political slope. But it is a slope the Republicans seem hell-bent on trying to navigate.
See, crap like this is why I’ve said for a long, long time that Rove is far from being the genius that everyone wants to credit him as being.
He’s not a genius and he never has been. He’s myopic – he views politics purely as propaganda (I swear to Grod I’m almost positive that he was the source of GWB thinking that his job was to “catapult the propaganda”) and his only tactic for political elections is the “go lower” tactic. If his opponent is only willing to go as low as, say, kicking puppies to get votes, then Rove is willing to throw a puppy in a woodchopper. That’s not “genius”, that’s just holding yourself to a lower standard – and I’ll admit he’s the master of THAT.
I honestly think that liberals want to credit Rove as being an evil genius because “he got an idiot like George W Bush elected”. Except Rove’s “genius” lost the popular vote for Bush and in fact almost cost Bush the election. What got W elected was a number of factors including the fact that Gore decided that the best strategy for winning in 2000 was to “distance himself” from Clinton in a whole host of ways that prevented him from touting the idea that if you liked Clinton you’d like him too. Instead of running as a successful incumbent he ran away from Clinton’s record. Rove had, as far as I know, nothing to do with that bit of stupid, and without that bad bit of strategy, Florida probably wouldn’t have been a deciding factor and people wouldn’t even know Rove’s name today.
Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter because he made a deal with the hostage-takers to hold the hostages until after the election. He was a bucket of slime every bit the equal of Nixon.
He did enormously more damage than Nixon. If the country is indeed as fucked as the GOP now says it is, historians will trace the downfall directly to Reagan.
I don’t disagree, but don’t forget that Nixon invented the tactics that got Reagan elected in the first place.
They are lying as usual. In fact they are going to start screwing seniors immediately. It didn’t get much attention but there a provision in it that would rescind coverage for the donut hole in the medicare drug program. Obama’s plan is to eliminate the donut hole all together. It started this year. The Republican plan would immediately rescind donut whole coverage.
The Republicans have their teary-eyed, depressing (and false) message and we have ours.
Game on.
Well done, BooMan. But that’s why you get the big bucks.
you’re a funny man. b2.
Hardball had Mark McKinnon on, who from time to time has seemed the only reasonable R on the globe; but when asked about the Ryan plan and Medicare he bluntly put it that the R’s should double down on it.
Didn’t know he and Rove coffeed together.
McKinnon’s gotta pay the bills.
Too bad. with Trump gone, I don’t know where they’ll find another neo-fascist whore to compete with Reagan.
So what else is new? The GOP have been selling this country nothing but gloom, doom, and fear since 9/11.
It’s a technique. It worked, actually. But it’s getting kind of old.