Month: August 2014

Obamacare supporters became very excited this
week following the release of a new ad from Sen. Mark Pryor, an
Arkansas Democrat facing a difficult reelection bid this November.
The spot touted his support for, as he says in the ad,
“a law that helps prevent insurance policies from canceling your
policy when you get sick, or deny coverage for preexisting
conditions.”

That law, of course, is the Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, though Pryor doesn’t refer
to it by either name in the ad.

Liberal pundits have dismissed the omission as trivial—after
all, this is a Democrat in a tight race and a conservative state
touting his vote for the president’s health law. Given
how timid Democrats have been about expressing support for
Obamacare, that’s a pretty big deal, right? Perhaps Democratic
politicians are finally coming around to more open and aggressive
support for the law, just as liberal commentators have been urging
for months.

I doubt it. Given the history of failed Obamacare messaging
efforts, this doesn’t seem like that big a deal, and I think the
omission of any name for the law is actually quite telling.

Pryor’s ad, and the buzz around it, are basically just extension
of the argument that health law supporters have made for years:
Sure, the law is unpopular, but many of the specific
provisions—especially provisions requiring insurers to cover
individuals with preexisting conditions—poll quite well.

It’s true that those specific provisions poll well. It’s been
true for years. But the administration and its allies have
attempted to capitalize on this since before the law even passed,
and it’s never translated into popular support. Yes, there are a
number of provisions in the law that are and have long been
popular. But the public doesn’t like the law as a whole, and it’s
been quite clear and consistent on this matter, despite efforts to
build support by pointing to the provisions that more people
like. 

Pryor’s ad is just an updated version of this familiar
approach to Obamacare messaging. It names some popular provisions,
but not the law as a whole.

So this isn’t some big shift. It’s the same old strategy
of playing up the popular provisions while playing down or ignoring
the law, and its impact, in its entirety.

If anything, Democrats in close races are still generally trying
to avoid talking about the law. And when they do talk about it,
they often make sure to voice support for fixing it. A
few states away from Arkansas, in the conservative panhandle of
Florida, for example, Democrat Gwen Graham is challenging
conservative incumbent Republican Steven Southerland for his House
seat. Thanks to name recognition (her father was governor of
Florida), Graham is one of the few Democrats
making headway against a conservative opponent in what
increasingly looks like a very strong year for Republicans. She’s
not exactly running hard on the health law. This week, she launched
an ad this week declaring that “Obamacare has got to be changed
so it works for North Florida.”

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a similar dynamic in a
number of close races. In North Carolina, Democratic Sen. Kay
Hagan, who has voiced support for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion,
actually
ran an anti-Obamacare ad against her GOP challenger last May.
Her support for Obamacare
continues to be an issue in the race. Democrat Alison Grimes,
who is challenging Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell, has treaded lightly in her support for the health law,
talking about its effects in Kentucky
without actually naming it.

Part of the story is the declining salience of Obamacare as a
campaign issue. As The New York Times
reported this week, there were 530 news releases from
legislators mentioning Obamacare last summer. Over the last three
months of this year, however, there were just 138. That’s to be
expected, given its prominence in the news last year. Now that the
initial furor has died down, legislators on both sides of the aisle
are talking about it less. But that’s not a great sign for the law.
It just shows that the fight over the issue has ebbed, and opinions
about Obamacare are basically settled. Which is why even Democrats
who support it won’t name it.  

Pop quiz: Which political
party’s press secretary put out a press release today that
criticizes Sen. Rand Paul because he “blames America… on foreign
soil,” and subscribes to a radical isolationist policy that would
“make American less safe and secure”?

Read the whole thing before you find out if your guess is
right:

“It’s disappointing that Rand Paul, as a Senator and a potential
presidential candidate, blames America for all the problems in the
world, while offering reckless ideas that would only
alienate us from the global community.

“Unfortunately, this is nothing new for Paul. Last week he
criticized American policy to the president of another
country on foreign soil. This week he’s blaming the Obama
Administration for another nation’s civil war. That type of “blame
America” rhetoric may win Paul accolades at a conference of
isolationists but it does nothing to improve our standing in the
world. In fact, Paul’s proposals would make America less safe and
less secure.

“Simply put, if Rand Paul had a foreign policy slogan, it would
be – The Rand Paul Doctrine:  Blame America. Retreat from the
World.”

And the answer is…
the Democrats. The above statement comes from DNC National
Press Secretary Michael Czin. You would be forgiven for thinking
otherwise; this is the exact criticism that Republicans have hurled
at both Democrats and members of the Paul family for years. But
with Rand Paul as the likely Republican presidential contender and
interventionist Hillary Clinton as his likely opponent, the
absurdities of party politics demand a switching of the unhinged
attacks.

Here is an excerpt from
Paul’s op-ed in
The Wall Street Journal, which prompted Czin’s reply:

To interventionists like former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, we would caution that arming the Islamic rebels in
Syria created a haven for the Islamic State. We are lucky Mrs.
Clinton didn’t get her way and the Obama administration did not
bring about regime change in Syria. That new regime might well be
ISIS.

This is not to say the U.S. should ally with Assad. But we
should recognize how regime change in Syria could have helped and
emboldened the Islamic State, and recognize that those now calling
for war against ISIS are still calling for arms to factions allied
with ISIS in the Syrian civil war. We should realize that the
interventionists are calling for Islamic rebels to win in Syria and
for the same Islamic rebels to lose in Iraq. While no one in the
West supports Assad, replacing him with ISIS would be a
disaster.

Our Middle Eastern policy is unhinged, flailing about to see who
to act against next, with little thought to the consequences. This
is not a foreign policy. …

But the same is true of hawkish members of my own party. Some
said it would be “catastrophic” if we failed to strike Syria. What
they were advocating for then—striking down Assad’s regime—would
have made our current situation even worse, as it would have
eliminated the only regional counterweight to the ISIS threat.

Our so-called foreign policy experts are failing us miserably.
The Obama administration’s feckless veering is making it worse. It
seems the only thing both sides of this flawed debate agree on is
that “something” must be done. It is the only thing
they ever agree on.

But the problem is, we did do something. We aided those who’ve
contributed to the rise of the Islamic State. The CIA delivered
arms and other equipment to Syrian rebels, strengthening the side
of the ISIS jihadists. Some even traveled to Syria from America to
give moral and material support to these rebels even though there
had been multiple reports some were allied with al Qaeda.

As evidenced above, Paul is consistent in his foreign policy
opinions, unlike many Democrats or his fellow Republicans. Expect
more soundbite switcheroo as campaign season gears up.

When President Barack Obama denounced the
jihadist group the Islamic State that beheaded American journalist
James Foley, he called for action “to extract this cancer so that
it does not spread.” The United States has been bombing its
positions in Iraq and may expand the attacks into Syria. This could
be the prelude to a bigger U.S. undertaking.

As least that’s what our leaders seem to be hinting at. Defense
Secretary Chuck Hagel claimed the Islamic State is a threat “beyond
anything that we’ve seen.” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen.
Martin Dempsey called it an “apocalyptic” group that will “have to
be defeated.”

The hysteria confirms that the U.S. government can turn any
enemy into a rampaging Godzilla posing an imminent threat to our
survival. In reality, this one is a fringe insurgency with maybe
10,000 fighters who are stretched thin and outgunned by the Iraqi
military.

View this article.

Ah, to be unencumbered by
worries or responsibilities. It’s that feeling of open horizons
known by twenty-somethings with an apartment and a first paycheck,
by healthy retirees with topped-off 401Ks—and by second-term
presidents who have stopped giving a shit about their own political
party’s prospects. In an era of expanding executive power,
President Obama looks like a guy contemplating a world of
interesting possibilities. Even his fellow Democrats seem a bit
jittery about just what the man in the Oval Office has in mind.

Timothy Cama at The Hill
writes, “President Obama’s election-year plan to win a new
international climate change accord is making vulnerable Democrats
nervous.”

So why don’t they just tell the president that any such deal is
DOA in the Senate? At least until after the election?

Because Coral Davenport at the New York Times suggests
that Obama
plans to bypass Congress entirely.

[U]nder the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally
binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of
the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate
negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding”
deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their
emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from
Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the
world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path…

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement
— a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing
1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal
that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not
require a new vote of ratification.

By…umm…creatively building off an existing treaty, the
president could unilaterally reach for the green-garbed legacy he
covets. He would also confirm the fears of everybody who worries
about executive overreach and probably torpedo the chances of at
least a few Democrats in battleground states where the economic
impact of such a deal would be an issue.

The proposal risks putting donkey party candidates in close
races “in front of the firing squad,” according to a Democratic
strategist quoted by Cama.

But how likely is the unilateral strategy? When asked about such
a Senate-bypassing scheme, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest

coyly answered, “Because that agreement is not written, it’s
not yet clear exactly what sort of role Congress would be required
to play.”

President Obama is likely to follow a similar path on
immigration issues. Karen Tumulty and Robert Costa at the
Washington Post
write:

Both political parties are in a state of high anxiety about the
possibility that President Obama will allow millions of illegal
immigrants to remain in the country, fearing that White House
action on the issue could change the course of November’s midterm
elections.

In the past few days, Democratic candidates in nearly every
closely fought Senate race have criticized the idea of aggressive
action by Obama. Some strategists say privately that it would
signal that he has written off the Democrats’ prospects for
retaining control of the chamber, deciding to focus on securing his
legacy instead.

The White House isn’t even shy on the issue. When asked if Obama
might “think twice about taking executive action on immigration,”
Earnest
answered, “No…the President is determined to act where House
Republicans won’t.”

A minority opinion among political strategists is that such a
move is actually a clever plan to get GOP nativists foaming at the
mouth so they hurt Republican prospects. But as reliably batshit as
some Republicans can be on the immigration issue, Democrats are
certain to suffer, too, from unilateral action on a controversial
issue. And the whole idea of a republic based on limited govement
power takes a hit when one person follows the “Stroke of the pen. Law
of the Land. Kinda cool” approach to ruling a country by
fiat.

Note, too, that the wisdom or lack thereof of a unilateral
presidential action is irrelevant to the dangers of growing
executive power. I would personally agree with some of the
president’s ideas on easing immigration restrictions. But the
problems of a president set free to do as he damned well wishes, on
his own, are problems of concentrated power, no matter how it’s
used.

And President Obama look like he sees a world of interesting
possibilities in using that power.

Below, Frank Buckley discusses the
rise of American elective monarchy.

Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle on The
Five
expressed her desire for Russian President Vladimir Putin, or
someone like him, to briefly hold power in the United States, and
“get it done right.” That is, dramatically escalate our war in Iraq
until the Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIL or ISIS) is eliminated.

Let’s not deprive Guilfoyle of context, though. In an
Obama-bashing session Tuesday, co-host Greg Gutfeld lauded a
proposal by London Mayor Boris Johnson to strip of their
citizenship any Brits who go into terrorist zones, and questioned
why our president isn’t doing something similar.

Gutfeld: Can we actually do this without violating their
so-called civil liberties?

Guilfoyle: Um, guess what? I don’t care. In fact, I hope we
violate a lot of their civil liberties. This is war, this is
terror. There should be no mercy involved, because they have shown
none. Can I just make a special request on the magic lamp? Can we
get, like, Netanyahu, or, like, Putin in for 48 hours, you know,
head of the United States. I don’t know, I just want somebody to
get in here and get it done right, so that Americans don’t have to
worry and wake up in the morning fearful of a group that’s
murderous and horrific like ISIS.

First, it seems that Guilfoyle has overstated the threat of
ISIL. “The FBI and Homeland Security Department say there are no
specific or credible terror threats to the U.S. homeland from the
Islamic State militant group,”
reports the Associated Press.

Second, Guilfoyle
isn’t the first neoconservative to fall for the idea that
central-power weilding strongmen like Putin are effective leaders.
They aren’t.

Perhaps the Fox personality isn’t familiar with Russia’s
equivalent to America’s War on Terror: The Chechen Wars. Putin
wasn’t around for the first one, which lasted less than two years.
But when he took power in 2000, he dragged out the second bloody
domestic conflict until mid-2009. Officially. The insurgency
continues
to this day, with over 600 reported terrorist crimes in the
region just last year. The most recent suicide bombing on Russian
soil happened
this past December. I think he’d need more than 48 hours to
take on ISIL. 

Guilfoyle’s comments seem particularly off-color, since Russia’s
latest military aggression is an unjustified land grab in
Ukraine. Did Putin “get in there and get it done right”? He
quickly, successfully seized Crimea, but six months later, it’s
proven to be a 10,000 square miles money pit. Additionally, the war
has brought the ruble to its
lowest value in years, has turned the European Union against
Russia with sanctions, and is putting the country on the
brink of recession.

Big government begets bigger government. The Fox host
admits civil liberties don’t mean shit to her at the first tenuous
sign of danger thousands of miles away. Lucky for her, violating
rights is one of the Kremlin’s favorite hobbies.
Just ask a Russian libertarian: Dissident media is
censored, activists and journalists face prison time, and exiling
is in again. 

The Obama administration has many faults, but if
neoconservatives want authoritarians, they can shuffle off to
Russia and spare the rest of us.