The Republicans are doubling down on the Ryan Budget in order to change the narrative because the status quo isn’t working for them? This is supposed to make sense in this or any alternative universe?
I guess I will never understand how Republicans think. I’m not sure if it really qualifies as thinking.
That is what drives their thinking, so the status quo is quite fine by them. This period of stagnation will be the legacy of the Obama administration, and that’s what they want at this point. They know they can hold the House during the mid-terms if their base is with them so that’s where they’re focusing, but above all things they want Obama to have no legacy of success. They’re on some old Moby Dick / Khan Noonien Singh ish:
Hate. Pure, unadulterated hate.
Here are some Republican “thoughts”:
I’ve got mine, screw the rest of you.
Democrats are subversive to my country and must be beaten at every turn.
Poor people deserve their lot in life because they are lazy and stupid.
Democrats hate religion and God. And Christmas.
Democrats want to take away all of our guns.
Obama is a secret Muslim from Kenya who cheated his way through college and stole the Presidency. And Michelle is fat. And ugly.
Well, how am I doing? Isn’t this pretty much what a lot of the Republicans have been saying for years?
don’t forget—-and Black
I think the article missed one point, the Ryan Budget fight is done to make the GOP in Congress feel important.
They might actually have a point:
Older voters, especially older white voters – that is, core Medicare/Social Security voters – are increasingly lost to the Democrats. We’ll see if this trend experiences a sudden and unexplainable reversal the moment a new President is inaugurated, unless it’s Deval Patrick.
Ooh baby. Not to get carried away, but this is how realignments happen lol.
Everywhere? Really? Even in blue states?
The more the President talks about touching Social Security the more lost they will become for sure. Which is why the Republicans keep goading him. At some point in the negotiations, you shut up and the first one to open his mouth concedes stuff. Time to let the GOP sit and stew and not prove that the President is still negotiating, still doing everything he can….
Will the argument change as the sequester begins to really bite?
The trend is everywhere, though the Democrats were starting at different points with that demographic in different locations.
The more the President talks about touching Social Security the more lost they will become for sure.
Um yeah that’s it. There certainly wasn’t any such swing to McCain two years before Social Security entered the discussion.
The cold political calculus for Obama is that he’s never going to win those voters, because they want their country back.
Actually, he almost won them in the last election. When Ryan got the VP nomination, the press started talking about the Ryan plans to privatize Social Security and voucherize Medicare. And the old folks got nervous. There was a huge shift to Obama specifically in old people – something like 10% in some polls. It was starting to look like a landslide, with Arizona up for grabs.
Then Obama said he and Romney had about the same approach to Medicare in the first debate and it all went poof.
Now Ryan has put out basically the same plan. If we spend the next two years with the Republicans calling to voucherize Medicare and the Democrats refusing, we’ll see the old folks shift again. If the Democrats keep offering cuts to Medicare and Social Security – cuts that should never happen – then, yeah, we’ll see no shifts.
So the same-sized polling shift that happened across the board after the first debate also happened among older voters, but you’re attributing it to something that was specific to them? That does not make a whole lotta sense.
Nor does it make much sense to claim that Obama’s comments about entitlement spending, which go back to mid-2011, were having no effect on those voters before the first debate, then suddenly began to influence them. It certainly doesn’t make much sense to claim that, and then say that saying those same things now would be such a powerful force.
And fer chrissakes, can we please stop pretending that racial discomfort towards Obama among older white voters is some unheard of phenomenon, and we need to look around for some other excuse (one that, hey look at that, just happens to match perfectly with what you want to hear?)
According to TPM, Louie Gohmert said at CPAC today that Vietnam was winnable, but (presumably) weak-kneed DC liberals sold us out. Now, that’s what you call changing the narrative – all the way back to 1975!!!
Truly an inspired moment by Mr. Gohmert. Or “Mr. Gomer”, as I always think of him.
I have conservative friends who are constantly saying that. He’s playing to the Vietnam Vets with an inflamed Dolchstoßlegende problem.
Really? Wow. I thought our country had at least put that baby to rest. Are you friends still saying that Truman sold us out in Korea, too? (There was a funny moment about that on 30 Rock a couple seasons ago that I wish I could find a clip for.)
No but they are big on the John Kerry and Jane Fonda were traitors. Viet Vets they are and bitter that they didn’t get to savor victory.
There was a back-and-forth in my local newspaper’s Letters section this month about Jane Fonda. Apparently, she’s playing Nancy Reagan in a biopic.
It’s 2013, and these people still buy a Fonda Jane sticker every couple of years for the Crown Vic.
Ugh, Ted Cruz is a complete ass and Lord knows I’m not a violent person, but if someone took it upon himself to cold-clock ole Teddy “McCarthy” Cruz.
Whatever you think of DiFi, the way Cruz talked down to her today like she was just his “lil woman” in today’s hearing was despicable and should make any woman, no matter what your politics, pretty darn well PO’ed.
Maddow is exactly right, the go to thing for sexist pigs like Cruz when they lose an argument to a woman is to make illusions of the woman being hysterical and emotional rather than factual.
Ugh!
BTW, DiFi totally PWNED Cruz and that’s why he went for the easy “don’t get so hysterical you emotional woman” route in response to what DiFi said.
Yep. DiFi did just about everything to try to get Cruz to understand where she was coming from but state directly “A gun nut made me mayor of San Francisco”.
Problem is we assume it is thinking. It’s not. It’s opinionATING and it’s not meant to solve anything, just fill the air during coffee.
What would you presume them do, agree with Democrats that raising taxes on the 1% is awesome and they should do it right away? Maybe congratulate Democrats for being such responsible compromisers because they only want to hike taxes by one trillion (for now), instead of two or three?
Tax-and-spend Democrats are back in business and the public not only doesn’t care, but is enthusiastically supportive(!)…so what are they supposed to do in response? They’ve got to try and scare the Dems into going back down the DLC/Fix the Debt road.
you occasionally make comments along this line. I find them strange.
Obviously, the GOP has more options than what they actually choose to do.
Do you listen to the progressives who never tire of advising the president against touching Social Security or Medicare because it will be effectively used against the party as a political hammer?
The GOP can take chained CPI and some cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and significant cuts to discretionary spending, and restore some defense spending, and then they can blame the president for the unpopular parts while bragging to their base about their accomplishments. The only people who will be truly mad at them will be the people who lost a tax loophole.
Meanwhile, progressives will be furious with the president. Seniors will blame the president more than the Republicans. (Sincere) deficit hawks will be pleased. The Beltway will be ecstatic along most of the reporting on the deal.
In a sense, the biggest problem is self-created. Now that they have taken this absolutist stance, making a deal will look like surrender and smell like weakness. But they didn’t have to do that.
Or, they can keep up with what they’re doing and keep pandering to the 28% of the country who thought Bush was doing a good job and that think defaulting on our debt is a great idea.
The thing is, the totally recognize that the status quo isn’t static. They are in the process of losing the support of the Defense and Financial sectors, which really represent their only sources of institutional support outside of the mineral-extraction industry.
Demographics are overwhelming them.
So, just making the Ryan Plan more severe is not a rational response to what they know about their situation.
If you find me strange, I find you incredibly naive.
Do you really think this is about a couple hundred billion dollars in the here and now? This is about tens of trillions of dollars. Raising taxes is like a meth addiction, once they get started they won’t stop.
There are trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities hanging out there thanks to Medicare and the 1983 SS bill. No amount of “bending the cost curve” is going to fix all of that. The GOP quite publicly wants to go back on that. They don’t want to pay for it. That’s a lot of money.
You really think appeasing a hyperliberal president and his “balanced agenda” is going to help them? Because the idiot press likes it best when mommy and daddy get along, and entitled poutragers despise seeing the successful implementation of their alleged wishlist by someone who doesn’t give a shit about them or their m.o.? It’s either sell out or die out, and I totally understand why they’ve embraced nihilism.
You’re sounding like a climate denialist here who starts rounding off how small of a percentage CO2 makes in the atmosphere. “It’s such a small number, therefore we can agree that such large changes in that small number will have a small impact.”
“TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS!!!”
So? With SS we’re talking 0.5-1% of GDP…not anything to sneeze at, but it’s not scary. You and I both know it — you laid it out pretty well when you argued with ask over the budget deficit, stating quite clearly (and imo, accurately) that Clinton’s worst mistake was convincing gullible moralists that paying off the debt is a real goal. So why treat their BIG SCARY numbers as if they’re actually big and scary to make the point that they are, in fact, acting rationally? They’re not.
Even if you understand why someone chooses to drink themselves to death rather than change their lifestyle, circle of friends, cherished habits, etc, that doesn’t make it a sane choice.
On the merits, you have a point that the true-believers think that acceptance of Obama’s first-term accomplishments will fundamentally build-in a larger government and reverse irreparably Reagan’s Revolution. The only way to stop this is to refuse to fund the government and starve it.
The problem is that they have to win elections in order to really stop this progress, and their strategy won’t allow that to happen. The GOP has never had any compunction about shifting on a dime once in power, so why are they so paralyzed now?
I think the answer is that too many people have been indoctrinated and then got elected. The talking points were just tactical, but now they’ve become strategic. And they were never intended to be a strategy or an actual plan for governing. Dick Cheney said it best when he said that Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter. That doesn’t mean that you don’t pretend like deficits are the end of the world, but you don’t actually believe it.
The GOP can’t exist as a national party if they give the middle finger to the financial services and defense industries. They can’t do anything if the Chamber of Commerce thinks they are a bunch of nihilists.
yes these things will always be mysterious to one, if one ignores the truth that the south carolina guy said, about good politics EQUALLING being against the black guy.
but i totally see how, if one excludes race a priori as being a primary driver, then one would certainly not understand what’s happening.
(shrug) so much the worse for the racism-deniers. aka racism-enablers.
of the Republican Party is unstable and it is going to come apart in some hard to predict ways.”
You said it yourself in your previous post. Whatever they try and say, the reason the GOP is doubling down on – everything – since the election that was supposed to settle matters, is that the fragile Republican coalition can’t be tweaked, adjusted or even renovated. It’s what I refer to as the Gordian Knot that is the present Republican coalition. As you see with immigration, they can’t manage to find a way to turn their policy ship to make the most basic change, even faced with an existential threat to their chances of winning the Presidency anytime soon.
If they embrace anything like amnesty, the Joe Arpaio Republicans will revolt. Take Dick Morris’ advice on birth control? Give up on fighting Roe v Wade and the Mike Huckabee Republicans are going to cause a schism and run Santorum on a third ticket.
The Republican establishment trying to pull the strings as national party actors just can’t figure out what policy tweaks can add up to a winning coalition that will allow them to advance the actual Republican policy goal – lowest possible taxes while still funding defense and energy industries. Until they can find a workable path, better to hold on to the House majority and Governorships they’ve got.
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