GOP: White vs. White

Yesterday some Republicans saw the handwriting on the wall, or at least in the polls, and realized that the shutdown/debt ceiling grandstanding is hurting them a lot more than it is hurting the Dems. So many are backing off the “kill Obamacare” fight.

So what now? Brian Beutler thinks they’re about to make things even worse for themselves

Republican leaders want to phase out the fight by changing the terms and terrain. And their new targets are — wait for it — Medicare and Social Security. See this Op-Ed by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., in which he mentions Obamacare precisely zero times, and argues instead that Congress’ central focus should be cutting much more popular, durable programs. He even names a couple of specific Medicare adjustments Democrats might support, but only in a plan that includes new tax revenues. Guess how many times the word “revenues” appears in the piece.

This is not the battle you want to pick if your electoral imperatives require you to pander to white voters. Maybe in the days ahead, once the government is reopened and the risk of immediate default has passed, Republicans will walk away from the past month’s events and pretend they never happened. The Obamacare defunders chastened. The establishment just grateful to have the latest embarrassment behind them.

17 thoughts on “GOP: White vs. White

  1. Jeez,
    They have even less of a case now than when Simpleton met Bowel-movement, and a commission was formed!

    The nation’s debt is now half of what it was when President Obama was first sworn into office – partly due to the Stimulus, partly due to the tax raise, and also partly due to the Sequester – and, now the shutdown.

    SS is an easy fix – eliminate the cap, and you could actually INCREASE today’s and tomorrow’s payments.
    And PPACA is starting to lower Medicare costs.

    So, if you want to go after “Earned Benefits,” Republicans, all I can say is, “Please proceed, GOP. Please, proceed…”

  2. What, we aren’t supposed to remember last Monday, when ObamaCare was the end of civilization as we know it and must be resisted at all costs?

  3. It’s so great watching these people back themselves into a corner. “Please proceed”, indeed.

  4. “The nation’s debt is now half of what it was when President Obama was first sworn into office – partly due to the Stimulus, partly due to the tax raise, and also partly due to the Sequester – and, now the shutdown”

    Not quite, the deficit is projected downward but the nations federal debt is up almost 60% under President Obama. Much of it can be traced to the recession and spending on wars but it is still technically on his watch. The path we are on is defiantly unsustainable, we are only taking in around 2.7 trillion in taxes yet we are spending 3.5 trillion. We need to increase revenues and cut spending (including defense), that’s the only viable long term solution. The problem is the baggers want to inflict all the pain on social programs and they want it all enacted now.

  5. Eddie Munster emerges from his undisclosed location! Still a bit wobbly, I see, from the beat-down he received in the V.P. debate a year ago.

    Oh well, Eddie, that’s OK. We all understand that, for you, “Thinking iz harrrd!” Say no more.

    No, I mean it. Say. No. More.

  6. uncledad,
    Thanks for the correction.
    Nothing that another small tax increase wouldn’t take care of. And some smart cuts to our military budget.

  7. uncledad, no, I think spending has been cut quite enough at this point. In fact, pretty much across the board (including defense spending) spending has been cut too much. What we need now is revenue increases.

    And, I would say our path is quite sustainable, IF you keep in mind that as the economy gets better, we get an option to start paying off some of the debt.

    -me

  8. Going into “White vs White”, Jack Whelan’s Understanding the Angst of the Right:

    …In the six focus groups of Republican voters, according to Greenberg’s report, “few explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms,” but –

    – the base supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities. Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities. Race remains very much alive in the politics of the Republican Party.

    Voters like this, according to the report, are convinced they have lost the larger battle:

    While many voters, including plenty of Democrats, question whether Obama is succeeding and getting his agenda done, Republicans think he has won. …Republicans see a president who has fooled and manipulated the public, lied, and gotten his secret socialist-Marxist agenda done. Republicans and their kind of Americans are losing.

    …It’s not about ideology; it’s about survival. These people feel cornered and desperate. They are not interested in working within a political process they see as fundamentally illegitimate. Their adrenaline-soaked brains are in lizard mode, and they see their situation as eat or be eaten. They see the government as their predator. Is there any wonder they want to destroy it?

    Why do people feel this deep anxiety when so many others don’t? For me the best explanation lies in understanding how Conservative anxiety is rooted in the social psychology of identity. The main difference between Conservatives and Liberals lies in that conservatives derive their sense of identity from their community, its norms, beliefs, and mores; Liberals derive their sense of identity from their sense of themselves as individuals who choose their own norms, beliefs, and mores.

    Liberals may join a group and submit to its community norms, but they choose to join, and they can choose to quit. They might join and quit many groups in the course of a lifetime. For conservatives, there is no choosing or quitting. Your identity is deeply linked with the community you were born into. When the community’s norms, etc., are attacked, they feel attacked as individuals in a way that Liberals find hard to imagine.

  9. Paulie is just a watery bag of shit! Now he’s trying to pan himself off as the voice of reason. He needs to grow a pair..really! Maybe he should go back and check how he voted to initiate the Obamacare shakedown. Be a man Paulie. Your weaseling antics might pull the wool over the eyes of some of the yokels in Janesville, but it’s not playing very well with intellectually mature audiences in the rest of the country. Give it up, Paulie. You’re not even fit to be a scout master.

  10. “What we need now is revenue increases”

    I agree but if you think that we can get that without spending cuts than you are just as delusional as the baggers.

  11. This is like giving a desk-jockey a chainsaw with a big-ass bar; he
    S gonna hurt himself of break something.

    Those kayakers I commented about earlier this week have made it through the everglades to flamingo, which is at the end of the everglades and the beginning of the Florida keys. You can track them at go team bravery.com, the next challenge.

  12. This just in..

    Breaking News: Obama Rejects Republican Proposal for Short-Term Debt Limit Plan

    Homie don’t play dat game! 🙂

  13. Swami; kinda. There was a survey team on site, and since I was wearing a dayglow green shirt, they assumed I was a surveyor. I am that rick, happy to have been helpful for their cause.

  14. Music to my ears/Make my morning: Establishment GOPers Assail Tea Party on Shutdown:

    From county chairmen to national party luminaries, veteran Republicans across the country are accusing tea party lawmakers of staining the GOP with their refusal to bend in the budget impasse in Washington. The Republican establishment also is signaling a willingness to strike back at the tea party in next fall’s elections.

    “It’s time for someone to act like a grown-up in this process,” former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu argues, faulting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and tea party Republicans in the House as much as President Barack Obama for taking an uncompromising stance.

    Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is just as pointed, saying this about the tea party-fueled refusal to support spending measures that include money for Obama’s health care law: “It never had a chance.”
    The anger emanating from Republicans like Sununu and Barbour comes just three years after the GOP embraced the insurgent political group and rode its wave of new energy to return to power in the House.

    Now, they’re lashing out with polls showing Republicans bearing most of the blame for the federal shutdown, which entered its 11th day Friday. In some places, they’re laying the groundwork to take action against the tea party in the 2014 congressional elections…

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