Karl Rove Group Attacks Democrats—For Wanting to Cut Entitlements

Over the past two weeks,
Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-fronted mega-group devoted to putting
Republicans in office, has launched multiple ads hitting vulnerable
Senate Democrats Mark Pryor (Ark.) and Kay Hagan (NC) for their
positions on old-age entitlements Social Security and Medicare.

You can understand why a Republican group might go after
Democrats on these issues. Far more than Obamacare, Medicare and,
to a lesser extent, Social Security are the nation’s two biggest
long-term fiscal problems, its most significant drivers of
long-term debt, and arguably the hardest government programs to
reform.

Here’s the funny part. Crossroads is knocking both Democratic
candidates from the left—criticizing both candidates for
wanting to cut and reform entitlements.

“It’s troubling that Senator Mark Pryor said we should overhaul
Social Security and Medicare,” the first ad says.

“Kay Hagan is a ‘big believer’ in a controversial plan that
raises the retirement age, reduces the home mortgage deduction, and
increases out-of-pocket Medicare costs,” the other ad
charges. From the dark music to the accusatory tone of the
narrator, it leaves little doubt that this supposed to be a bad
thing.

Watch the ad below:

We’ve seen this strategy before. In 2012, GOP presidential
candidate Mitt Romney ran on a promise to “protect Medicare,” and

attacked President Obama for cutting Medicare to pay for
Obamacare.

There are all sorts of issues here. One is that the ads are
exaggerating the cuts and reforms the two Democrats support. As
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent
noted recently, the first ad is based on an interview in which
Pryor talked hypothetically about raising Social Security’s
retirement age for today’s teenagers. The second ad
plays on Hagan’s support for the Simpson-Bowles debt reduction
framework, a Beltway-favorite plan to raise taxes and tweak the
entitlement system into something like sustainability over the next
six decades. The retirement age would rise with glacial speed,
going from 65 to 69 between now and 2075.

This is what Republicans are telling people to vote against:
hypothetical entitlement reforms and benefit tweaks that take
decades to implement.

Yes, there were problems with the Simpson-Bowles plan, and
reasonable people can disagree on its merits and particulars. But
in this case, it’s a mistake to worry too much about the details,
which are secondary at best. Instead, it’s important to focus on
the essence of the ad, its lizard-brain appeal to a kind of
inchoate fear of collapse and change.

It is almost totally incoherent. In an delightfully absurd
twist, the Hagan ad also goes after Hagan for “voting for trillions
in wasteful spending and debt.” This is like criticizing someone
for being anti-sunshine and then immediately warning that she
supports a plan to ban clouds.

Sure, the ad sticks carefully the word “wasteful” in the mix,
and alludes to Hagan’s spending priorities, but again, the details
aren’t the point. If rising federal debt is the problem, the
cutting federal spending on Medicare is eventually going to be
necessary. There’s no way to solve the federal debt problem without
touching Medicare.

Too many Republicans don’t know how to talk about entitlement
reform, or at least really don’t want to. You can see that
inability on display in this local
news interview with Elise Stefanik, a Republican candidate for
Congress in New York. She talks about preserving and protecting
entitlements, promises no cuts for those at or near the retirement
age, and then literally cuts off the interview and walks away when
pressed for more details.

Here’s what you learn from all this: that the Karl Rove-wing of
the Republican party is happy to mislead and exaggerate in order to
attack Democrats, that the Bush-era party establishment’s
commitment to fiscal reforms remains puddle-deep, that at least
through the mid-terms the GOP aims to be the party of seniors, that
parts of the party remain unwilling to discuss even the most basic
details of the reforms they claim to support, and, most
importantly, that Republicans are likely still far from making
anything like a meaningful and unified push on entitlement
reform.

Not everyone in the party is playing the game like this. As with
just about every issue right now, Republicans are fractured and
confused on how to handle entitlements. But with these sorts of
well-funded ads (the Hagan spot is a $1 million ad buy),
influential parts of the party are making it more difficult to sort
out that confusion by walling off even the most timid of
reforms. 

And even more than that, these ads illustrate the ways that the
Republican party is still struggling to figure itself out, and they
offer a glimpse into the state of policy discourse—not so much on
the broader right, but within certain factions of the GOP power
structure. These shallow, shell-game attack ads are meant to play
on voter fear and confusion about important policy details, but
what they end up revealing is the party’s own fear and confusion
about how to answer some of the biggest policy questions of the
day.