Opinionator: On Second Thoughts

Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.

Tags:

Akin, Todd, American Crossroads, Chambliss, Saxby, Cleland, Max, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, King, Steven A, Obama, Barack, Presidential Election of 2012, Republican Party, Rove, Karl, The Price of Politics (Book), United States Economy

President Obama is pushing hard to persuade Congress to back off from the brutal spending cuts — $1.2 trillion — mandated by the sequestration provisions of the Budget Control Act, which he signed into law on Aug. 2, 2011.

In a simultaneous, but unrelated development, Karl Rove is pressing top Republican donors to back his Conservative Victory Project, an organization designed to snuff out the candidacies of right-wing extremists in Republican primaries who, in 2010 and 2012, prevented the party from winning a Senate majority.

These otherwise different situations have at least one thing in common: Obama and Rove are trying to claw their way out of holes they dug for themselves. Obama's fingerprints are all over the sequestration he is now determined to avoid, and Rove played a central role in the creation of the ideologically rigid Republican Party he would like to guide back toward the center.

The most serious issue is the sequester, about which we have heard a lot lately. As part of the 2011 debt ceiling-budget agreement, the administration and Congress included a provision calling for $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts over nine years, amounting to $85 billion this year. The cuts would be split, half in domestic programs, half in military programs, if no agreement on deficit reduction is reached.

The Sword of Damocles is about to drop.

In his weekly radio address on Feb. 9, Obama warned:

If the sequester is allowed to go forward, thousands of Americans who work in fields like national security, education or clean energy are likely to be laid off. Firefighters and food inspectors could also find themselves out of work – leaving our communities vulnerable. Programs like Head Start would be cut, and lifesaving research into diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's could be scaled back.

In terms of national defense, Obama said:

Already, the threat of deep cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf. As our military leaders have made clear, changes like this affect our ability to respond to threats in an unstable part of the world.

Seeking to buttress its case against sequestration, the White House has issued a "Fact Sheet: Examples of How the Sequester Would Impact Middle Class Families, Jobs and Economic Security." Obama has declared that if sequestration takes place, all of "our economic progress could be put at risk."

The president took his case against sequestration to the nation in Tuesday's State of the Union address:

These sudden, harsh, arbitrary cuts would jeopardize our military readiness. They'd devastate priorities like education, and energy, and medical research.  They would certainly slow our recovery, and cost us hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The Jan. 30 Department of Commerce report which showed that Gross Domestic Product had unexpectedly fallen by 0.1 percent in the last quarter of 2012 strengthened Obama's argument that cutting government spending weakens the economic recovery. Almost every analysis of the decline in G.D.P. attributes it to a sharp fourth quarter reduction in defense spending, cuts that are scheduled to increase drastically under sequestration.

If the country experiences a major economic setback as a result of the inability of Congress and the administration to resolve the deficit dilemma, Obama will not emerge with clean hands.

The Washington Post's fact checker, Glenn Kessler — and Bob Woodward, in his book "The Price of Politics" — clearly identify administration staffers as the originators of the sequestration proposal as part of the 2011 negotiations with Congress.

Obama's role in the lead-up to the sequestration crisis has deep roots. The president, even before taking office, led the charge in emphasizing the deficit, arguably undermining the fledgling economic recovery.

On Jan. 15, 2009, five days before his inauguration — and before the first hiccup of the Tea Party — Obama announced plans to hold a "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" to address the issue of rising red ink.

When the summit was held a month later, Obama's commitment to cutting the deficit was unequivocal. The president declared:

We cannot, and will not, sustain deficits like these without end.  Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration, or the next generation.

Speaking from the depths of the fiscal collapse, Obama warned:

We are paying the price for these deficits right now.  In 2008 alone, we paid $250 billion in interest on our debt — one in every 10 taxpayer dollars. That is more than three times what we spent on education that year; more than seven times what we spent on V.A. health care.

He then made an impossible-to-keep promise:

Today I'm pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office. This will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we've long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay — and that means taking responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control.

Obama survived these early tactical missteps and won re-election by a strong margin, but he opened the door to the initiation of austerity policies well before the country had reached anything approaching a secure recovery, policies that a substantial number of economists believe hindered the creation of new jobs. The post-2008 economic expansion has been the weakest of any recovery since the end of World War II.

The Congressional Budget Office predicted on Feb. 5 of this year that G.D.P. would grow at a very modest 1.4 percent if the sequestration takes place as currently scheduled. By reducing the amount of disposable income taxpayers have to spend, the elimination of the temporary payroll tax cut and tax hikes for the well-to-do will also contribute to slow growth, according to the C.B.O.

In political terms, when Obama placed the deficit at center stage he gave the Republican Party the leverage to push through $917 billion in spending cuts enacted in the 2011 Budget Control Act  – over and apart from the looming $1.2 trillion sequestration.

Sequestration is scheduled to begin on March 1.

Now, what about Karl Rove's second thoughts?

Here is the way in which Rove's bid to purge his party of general election losers like Todd Akin of Missouri and Richard Mourdock of Indiana unfolded.

Back in 2001, Rove was the key player laying the groundwork for the eventual emergence of seriously right-wing candidates.

In the aftermath of George W. Bush's fraught 2000 victory, Rove – along with key advisers including Matt Dowd, Bush's pollster — analyzed election survey data and realized that there had been a dramatic change in the political landscape: the percentage of undecided or swing voters had dropped to 7 percent or less of the electorate from levels ranging from 34 percent in 1976 to 18 percent in 1996.

Rove and his fellow Republican strategists saw that the "compassionate conservative" approach of the 2000 campaign had, in fact, led to Bush's losing the popular vote and to an electoral college victory based on a 5-4 Supreme Court decision.

"Most voters looked at Bush in very black-and-white terms. They either loved and respected him, or they didn't like him," Dowd concluded. With the dwindling of the swing vote, Bush operatives under Rove's guidance abandoned traditional conciliatory approaches and shifted to a hard-core turnout strategy for 2004. "The media, the voter targeting, the mail — all were based off that strategic decision," Dowd told me after Bush was re-elected in 2004.

The way to heighten turnout among Republican sympathizers – for example, white Christian evangelicals or Glenn Beck acolytes – was to get their blood boiling by focusing on hot-button issues. Alex Gage, an operative hired by Rove soon after the 2000 election, developed and honed techniques to identify voters' "anger points." What made conservative voters angry in 2004 turned out to be, among other things, gay marriage, which abruptly rose to the top of the right-wing agenda — in part because of the 2003 Massachusetts court decision that made such unions legal.

Rove's commitment to this strategy remained steadfast, even in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which briefly appeared to erase partisan divisions. Sticking to his guns, Rove decided to use the "war on terror" to split the electorate into pro and anti-Bush wings.

Reasoning that with the security of the country at stake voters would be receptive to war as a campaign theme, Rove argued at a Jan. 18, 2002 Republican National Committee meeting that the upcoming campaign should focus on the message that Republicans can "do a better job of keeping our communities and our families safe," and that Republicans are better at "protecting and strengthening America's military might." This seemingly innocuous appeal to patriotism was, in fact, the opening volley of an onslaught of campaign ads and speeches using the war on terror as a weapon against Democrats.

It's worth remembering that in 2002, Saxby Chambliss —handpicked by Rove to challenge Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a decorated Vietnam veteran and a triple amputee — adopted the strategy of using war as his central campaign theme. A now-famous television ad for Chambliss opened with images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, then switched to shots of the severely handicapped Cleland against a backdrop of roll call votes, while the announcer declared:

As America faces terrorists and extremist dictators, Max Cleland runs television ads claiming he has the courage to lead. He says he supports President Bush at every opportunity. But that is not the truth. Since July Max Cleland has voted against President Bush's Homeland Security efforts 11 times. Max Cleland says he has the courage to lead. But the record proves Max Cleland is just misleading.

In fact, Cleland had co-sponsored the legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security and the 11 votes "against President Bush's Homeland Security efforts" were for amendments to allow employees of the new department to join federal unions. Cleland also voted for the invasion of Iraq. It didn't matter. Chambliss won.

Bush won with 51 percent of the vote in 2004. Rove remained the single most influential figure in the Republican Party.

In 2010, after the Supreme Court decision Citizen United v. Federal Election Commission, Rove created two conservative tax-exempt independent expenditure committees, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, to collect unlimited contributions from Republican donors. The two committees quickly became "the heavy hitters of the multicandidate outside spending groups," according to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign spending. American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS spent $176 million, most of it on the presidential campaign ($99.9 million against Obama and $17.1 in support of Romney) and the rest on behalf of Republican candidates in 13 Senate and 18 House races.

Rove first began to show signs of anxiety that candidates might be going over the edge in 2010 when he faulted Tea Party insurgent Christine O'Donnell, the Republican Senate nominee in Delaware, as "nutty," although he shifted gears when conservative talk show hosts took him to task. He and American Crossroads did, however, support such ideologically fringe candidates as Sharron Angle of Nevada and Ken Buck of Colorado, both of whom lost.

In the 2012 election, Rove's American Crossroads continued to finance divisive commercials attacking Obama, including a spot that showed Obama bowing as he met the Chinese premier while a disembodied voice intones, "The more America borrows from China, the more America will have to bow to China." A second American Crossroads ad tapped anxieties about security:

Your mission is simple, Mr Obama: "Win one last election to gain unchecked flexibility, weaken our defenses, and fundamentally transform the world."

In the aftermath of the 2012 Republican drubbing, Rove doubled back and now appears to be convinced that his party can no longer afford to run knuckle-dragging candidates.

Rove is executing a backflip, turning against the kind of far-out candidates for whom he himself laid the groundwork.

The Conservative Victory Project has already identified its first target: Steve King, an Iowa congressman gearing up to run for the Senate.

"We're concerned about Steve King's Todd Akin problem," Steven J. Law, president of Rove's American Crossroads, told Jeff Zeleny of The Times earlier this month. "All of the things he's said are going to be hung around his neck."

King, who is now in his 11th year in Congress, has repeatedly stunned friends and foes with his unrestrained rhetoric. He has compared immigrants to dogs and has described illegal immigration as both a "slow-motion terrorist attack" and a "slow-motion holocaust." In 2008, King predicted that terrorists would be "dancing in the streets" if Obama won. He once presented the House with a model of an electrified border fence, telling colleagues "We do that with livestock all the time."

Obama and Rove each created the circumstances they are now fighting – the sequester and the wingnuts – and both are having second thoughts.

One measure of political skill is your flexibility: the ability to successfully reverse direction. Obama and Rove are in the midst of repudiating past errors. The stakes are high: for Obama, the future of the American economy; for Rove, the future of the Republican Party. The coming months will determine whether these two talented political strategists can beat back the tide they unleashed.

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

Opinionator: On Second Thoughts

Dengan url

http://opinimasyarakota.blogspot.com/2013/02/opinionator-on-second-thoughts.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

Opinionator: On Second Thoughts

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

Opinionator: On Second Thoughts

sebagai sumbernya