The first sentence of this Politico article caught my attention.
An outside group aligned with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has commissioned a report…
I don’t remember reading about outside groups aligned with Steny Hoyer commissioning reports. If one of the parties wants polling data, they normally pay someone to do some polling for the party.
But here we have a report from “YG Network polling, conducted by the GOP firm McLaughlin & Associates” that is supposedly aligned with Eric Cantor.
And what is the message of their report?
The message is that obsessing over the national debt is a goddamned loser that doesn’t resonate with the American people.
So, what are we to make of this? Why does Cantor want this message sent to the Republican caucus? Is he tired of fighting over the debt ceiling? Is he trying to prepare them for making a deal with the president? Is Cantor the messenger because he is more trusted than Boehner?
What’s the game here?
If I were Cantor, my game would be to get enough footage of Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and Carney offering to mess with Social Security, and then to convince my fellow Republicans that if we just hold off on talking about the national debt and instead position ourselves as protecting Social Security for our senior citizens, we’ll keep the Congress, win the Senate in 2014, make Obama the lamest of ducks, and put ourselves in a great position to privatize the entitlement as we really want to.
I don’t know if the Republicans are that smart, but the Democrats are clearly that stupid.
Eric, is that you?
You had me right up until ‘convince my fellow Republicans’ at which point this became a fantasy post.
The words ‘smart’ and ‘stupid’ don’t really apply to politicians. At least not in the the normal sense. They do what they are told by the people who control their future.
For Republicans those people are the voters in the next primary. For Democrats it’s the folks who can provide campaign funds.
So, to the ordinary patriotic American they both appear to be dumb as a box of rocks, but for completely different reasons.
“If I were Cantor” got past your fantasy filter? 🙂
I assumed you are Cantor. After all, who would use up a fantasy to be Cantor? Maybe Boehner would.
Anyway, assuming you are Cantor, the part about ‘convince my fellow Republicans’ is clearly right up there with ‘then Taylor Swift writes a song about how I used her badly and then kicked her to the curb.’
The politics is really hard to understand and we can’t say anything because people always changes there mind here.
asyana
Perhaps the key to it is that they did not commission a report to say that the American people are not terribly motivated by deficit fears. They commissioned a report to find out what Americans thought of GOP messaging, and that was one of the main findings. It must have come as a surprise to Cantor.
I guess the only thing that might be unusual about it is to find anyone in the GOP leadership actually caring about what Americans actually think of them, and would actually commission a report to try to find out. That’s a new departure. The search for facts.
Nor is it surprising to me that the deficit isn’t a big concern for most Americans. Especially since the deficit is actually going down. Of course these guys have a special republican interpretation, the deficit is not a big issue because Americans are more concerned about their own fate, the deficit is too abstract. Yes, the deficit is a very abstract issue indeed when it has no bearing on reality.
I don’t think there’s any particular game here, it’s just the first rustlings of that much talked about ‘soul searching” the GOP would supposedly have to go through after they got through their anger and denial at losing the election. Not to say that many of them have gotten out of the anger and denial stage as yet.
It reminds me a little of Dick Morris’s comments the other day. “You’re messaging sucks.”
http://www.newsmax.com/US/dick-morris-demographics-abortion/2013/03/14/id/494702
Oh, and look. Rancid Priebus too.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/03/17/reince_priebus_rnc_chair_says_republicans_must_imp
rove_branding.html
But sstill, it’s all about messaging. Basically they are saying they’ve just been too honest about what they want. I expect pretty soon we’ll be seeing “the new GOP openness”, where they will be more open about providing deceptive information. (With apologies to Evgeny Morozov,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/morozov-open-and-closed.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&
;seid=auto&_r=1&
To answer your “Is…” questions: “yes, yes, and yes”.
And Democrats will again find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
As to “Why?”, the answer is the 2012 elections. As you have pointed out, they only hold the House by gerrymandering and the public rejects their policies. They (or at least Cantor) want power more than purity. IMHO they are amoral and don’t really give a hoot about their philosophy and only care about the policies that bring more power and money. A strategic retreat by them is in order. Cantor is trying to segue from the crazies to the mainstream.
Doesn’t have to be a defeat for us–if the House goes mainstream some governing can get done.
And I thought Krugman was supposed to be the only one who thought the deficit was all a hoax perpetrated by deficit scolds whose real agenda was to dismantle social protections and entitlements…
Now that the CPAC chest-beating is over and the Ryan budget fails on its own math and the clock is ticking closer to more pain than just cancellation of White House tours of less frequent cleaning of the rest rooms at Grand Canyon National Park–now that we are there, what this means is capitulation in 10…9…8…
Now watch Obama throw them a life vest so they don’t totally lose face. And allow them to kick the can down the road again.
Or is this the time to throw the punch.
Yes, time. Obama gave them a deadline to come to the table…July. Tic toc…tic toc.
What if the sequester doesn’t impact the economy as badly as some have predicted? Certainly communities that depend a lot on military spending will be impacted, but, if the rest of the economy is truly picking up steam, then maybe letting it run isn’t so bad. If Obama agrees to Social Security cuts in return for more revenue, which part do you think will upset folks the most? Not the pound of flesh collected from rich folks I bet.
Can someone please send the results of this polling to the White House? Please?
Cantor has understood at last that he can’t unseat Boehner from the right, the troops are just too crazy. But he’s the perfect person to unseat him from the left, being unburdened by any actual beliefs. The fact is that somebody has to take over the caucus and start dealing with the president.
Your theory makes sense;after all, Cantor is married, according to the recent New Yorker profile, to a liberal Democrat.
Too obvious to suggest that Cantor is (a) Jewish, (b) a neo-con, and (c) representing a district in the defense industry-heavy state of Virginia?
He wants to redo the (defense half of the) sequester, only he’s not one-tenth the muppet Lindsay Graham is.