GOP keeps moving the line

Opinion

March 15, 2013

GOP keeps moving the line

By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Fri Mar 15, 2013, 07:00 AM CDT

PICAYUNE — Republican strategy during the sequestration fight depends upon two political givens: widespread public ignorance, and the extreme reluctance of the traditional Washington news media to exhibit “liberal bias” by stressing inconvenient facts. After all, aren’t “both sides” equally responsible for the current budgetary impasse? And shouldn’t President Obama lead by making the GOP the proverbial offer it can’t refuse?

Exactly what such an offer might consist of remains vague. Mostly, it’s coulda, shoulda, woulda stuff from celebrity pundits like Bob Woodward, the Washington Post editor who spent much of a week on national TV demonstrating that he can’t distinguish a warning from an apology.

“You do not ever have to apologize to me,” Woodward had responded to an allegedly intimidating email from longtime White House source Gene Sperling. “I also welcome your personal advice. I am listening.”

Wow, that must have been scary! Faced with incredulity after the inoffensive email became public, Woodward alibied that he’d never exactly called it threatening.

Which begs the question of why he was talking about it on TV. Look, people frequently wander into newspaper offices describing government plots against them — often spelled out in all caps, with lots of red ink underlines and rows of exclamation points. Most often they’re gently shown the door.

But I digress. Sperling’s point was that Woodward was completely off-base in saying President Obama had “moved the goal posts” by seeking to close tax loopholes enabling guys like Mitt Romney to pay lower income tax rates than his wife’s horse trainers.

Could there be anybody in America who didn’t know that?

Certainly not Bill Keller. To the New York Times editor, Obama’s big sin was building “a re-election campaign that was long on making the wealthiest pay more in taxes, short on spending discipline, and firmly hands-off on the problem of entitlements.”

Keller thinks that had President Obama campaigned on the Simpson-Bowles-style austerity so beloved by “centrist” pundits whose own finances are secure, “he could now claim a mandate from voters to do something big and bold.” Instead, a weakened president now sounds “helpless, if not acquiescent.”

True, Keller does concede that “much of the responsibility for our perpetual crisis can be laid at the feet of a pigheaded Republican Party, cowed by its angry, anti-spending, anti-taxing, anti-Obama base.”

But nowhere in all this sonorous muck will you find a factual account of exactly what the White House proposes to resolve the sequester that congressional Republicans find so abhorrent.

To do so would endanger the whole centrist enterprise, enabling Washington wise men like Woodward and Keller to masquerade as nonpartisan and above the battle.

Which brings us back to Ezra Klein, boy pundit.

When last we encountered the 28-year-old Washington Post blogger, he’d done the unthinkable: phoned David Brooks and informed him that his column lampooning the Obama White House for proposing no plan was bollocks. He directed Brooks to the White House website, where a detailed deficit reduction proposal based upon spending cuts, entitlement reforms and revenue increases has been posted for months.

Also unthinkable, and much to his credit, Brooks admitted the error in the lede of his next column. Evidently, he’d been taken in by Speaker John Boehner, who’s been doing TV interviews for weeks now urging Obama and the Democrats to get off their collective asses.

So was it really possible, Klein wondered, that Republicans didn’t actually know about President Obama’s offer? Curious, Klein got himself invited to a GOP background briefing “with one of the most respected Republicans in Congress.” As a policy wonk, Klein was astonished to learn that Republicans in attendance had no idea that the Obama administration had put “chained CPI,” for example, on the table.

That’s a way of restraining the growth in Social Security payments by reconfiguring inflation. Most liberals bitterly oppose it.

Indeed, Klein found that on a whole range of issues, “top Republicans simply don’t know the compromises the White House is willing to make on Medicare and Social Security.”

So it’s all a big misunderstanding? Or was Klein simply being naive?

The latter, chided friendly rival Jonathan Chait at New York magazine. “If Obama could get hold of Klein’s mystery legislator and inform him of his budget offer,” he predicted, “it almost certainly wouldn’t make a difference. He would come up with something -— the cuts aren’t real, or the taxes are awful, or they can’t trust Obama to carry them out, or something.”

That’s precisely what happened. Klein posted a series of Twitter posts from influential GOP consultant Mike Murphy, showing how Murphy downgraded chained CPI from an essential reform to a meaningless “gimmick” within hours of learning that the White House proposed it.

It’s all quite funny, from a cynical perspective, but perfectly illustrative of today’s GOP.

Meanwhile, Klein and Chait’s brand of irreverent, fact-driven journalism is a refreshing change in the clubby world of Washington political reporting.

(Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons can be reached by email at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com)

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Opinion

Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
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I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.”

March 29, 2013
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist

Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.

March 29, 2013
VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008.

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Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists

When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”

March 27, 2013
Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing.

March 23, 2013
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered.

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1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun

The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
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Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.

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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.

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Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
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March 20, 2013
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