Rich Lowry has penned a conventional-wisdom-challenging piece on the Republicans’ transformation into the Party of Austerity:
If political life were fair, (Republicans would) be rewarded for their farsightedness. Medicare’s trustees report that the trust fund that covers hospital stays will go broke in 2024, five years earlier than forecast just last year. But bureaucratic reports about threats more than ten years off don’t hit people where they live, especially not during a recovery that still feels like a recession.
If you are worried about the security of your job, if your personal income is stagnant, if the value of your home is still declining, and if you are paying more for food and fuel, the perilous state of a government program circa 2024 that you know, one way or the other, will never be permitted to go bankrupt is not a subject of proverbial kitchen-table conversation.
The special election in New York’s 26th district served as an early, albeit imperfect, referendum on the Republicans’ new calling card. Democrats made the Republican plan to transition Medicare to a premium-support program the overwhelming issue. It worked. Henry Olsen of the American Enterprise Institute points out that blue-collar independents and Democrats who swung the GOP’s way in 2010 swung against them in that race. The Republican candidate, Jane Corwin, even bled blue-collar Republicans to a bogus “tea party” candidate.
These voters are especially sensitive to economic conditions and especially chary of changes to government programs they will come to depend on. They also are absolutely essential to Republican hopes in 2012.
A couple of observations.
First, as has been discussed previously on this site, Republicans have absolutely lost a handful of blue collar voters between the 2000s and the elections of 2011. We saw this in Wisconsin earlier this year, where Prosser underperformed George W. Bush in key working class counties. This was to be expected. The 2000s were all about national security and culture, issues where blue collar voters tend to agree with the Republicans. The last few years have been about economics. Naturally, there are going to be some blue collar voters from the Bush years who will abandon the GOP on economic issues. But thus far, Republicans have actually experienced a net gain in terms of their share of the electorate in Obama’s America, largely because of white collar suburban voters, who are terrified of Obama-nomics, and who are open to a GOP that is less stridently socially conservative and less prone to foreign adventurism.
Secondly, as I noted last week, the MediScare campaign, while effective, wasn’t the sole reason for the GOP’s loss in NY-26. There are no exit polls from that election, unfortunately, but the pre-election poll that I cited last week mirrors the actual results from Tuesday. In that poll, the number of voters pulling the lever for the Democrat in order to preserve traditional Medicare was fairly equal to the number of voters casting ballots for the Republican in order to stave off the red menace of the debt. What killed the GOP was the fact that only 17 percent of voters who cared most about the jobs issue were voting Republican.
In that sense, Lowry is correct that the GOP essentially has a jobs problem. There is simply no good reason that, in a Republican congressional district, fewer than 1 in 5 voters trust the Republican candidate to do the right thing when it comes to jobs. The lion’s share of the jobs vote went to the anti-free trade Tea Party candidate, because, as Bill Clinton once told his fellow Democrats, bad ideas will always defeat no ideas.
Republicans can’t run away from austerity, nor should they. The GOP nominee, whomever it ends up being, will probably present to the nation an entitlement reform plan that is a bit less bold than that of Paul Ryan, but the issue will still be on the table. But again, the GOP can lose on MediScare as long as it wins on jobs. It’s still the economy, stupid. If Republicans can’t win on the economy in an environment like this, there is something seriously wrong with this party.
May 27th, 2011 at 8:39 pm
Dave:
I’d also add on NY-26 that Hochul got a mere 1% more than Obama did in the District. Regardless, you are correct; we do need a jobs message better than tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts.
I know it’s almost impossible, but there needs to be a way of combining the Bush voters (the blue-collar types we carried in 2004) with the white-collar ones we took in 2010. Getting both would almost guarantee a victory in 2012. I think a focus on jobs but also making serious proposals about reforming entitlements will help us grab both voting blocs.
May 27th, 2011 at 8:47 pm
In 1980, the Democrats thought that raising the nuclear-scare (Reagan will blow up the world, etc.) would bury Reagan like it did to Goldwater. Their scare tactics made the race close, until Reagan debated Carter and showed that he wasn’t a mad-bomber and he brought it back to Carter’s stewardship of America. That buried Carter under.
May 27th, 2011 at 8:58 pm
What makes you think Republicans won’t have a plan for jobs? Romney has been talking about jobs for months.
May 27th, 2011 at 9:15 pm
Jonathan,
Good analogy. If Democrats decide to demagogue instead of create their own vision, then voters will turn on them if we have a candidate who can show voters that we don’t hate old people, or poor people, or people with dark complexions. Then voters will wonder why Democrats never came up with a plan to save Social Security or Medicare.
May 27th, 2011 at 9:20 pm
#4:
Of course that’s why a candidate like a Romney, Pawlenty or Huntsman would fare so much better against Obama than one of the Fringies. Frankly the likes of the Fairfax Three seem too boring and normal to be painted as crazy radicals. That should go without saying but sadly, some people need to be reminded of it.
May 27th, 2011 at 9:28 pm
In an NRO interview today, Pawlenty seemed to criticize the Ryan plan for not balancing the budget within 10 years. So it’s entirely possible, at least from him, that we’ll see a slightly bolder version of the Ryan-budget (albeit lighter on entitlement reform). But you’re right about jobs. I dunno. I tend to think it’s going to be hard to persuasively push a jobs agenda while pushing major debt reduction and entitlement reform. The kinds of tax reforms which are pro job-creation, as we’ve seen with Ryan’s budget, are easily demagoged as tax cuts for the rich and corporations. That’s awful optics when we’re asking for sacrifices in the middle class entitlement reforms. T-Paw has a nice video out today which highlights what I think, is a winning direction. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPQUtdS5AgA
Listen to the four stops in his “truth” tour. All four are geared towards the debt but the last two, tackling unions who are filching the tax-payers and tackling Wall Street’s bailouts and carve-outs are quite explicitly pitched the middle class over and against Powerful Interests. Even the ethanol stop, when you combine it with his promise to take away subsidies from other corporate interests like oil companies, has a whiff of fighting for the working man against powerful interests. I think there’s going to have to be an explicit jobs agenda but Republicans will have to do these kinds of “helping the middle class at the expense of the elites” to make up for the fact that most of real jobs reforms (cutting the corporate tax rate for instance) will at least look fishy to a middle class being asked to sacrifice a lot.
May 27th, 2011 at 9:32 pm
Jonathan,
Of the Fairfax Three, TPaw would be most difficult to demagogue. He’s from MN, and has nothing in his past that could be construed as racist, or even racially insensitive. He has the blue collar cred, with the son-of-a-trucker-and-first-to-college background, so it’s hard to play the class warfare card. He’s not old, by Presidential standards, so they might try to make him out as hating grandma’, but that’s where Minnesota Nice comes in and puts up the force shield.
Romney and Huntsman, on the other hand, are going to be MUCH easier to demagogue, because they’re rich (sorry guys). Romney made money off of companies that collapsed (yes), and quite frankly, reminds you of the guy who laid you off. Huntsman, of course, is a son-of-a-billionaire. If Perry expands the Fairfax caucus back to four, he gets the Southern Republican tarring. Remember, he talked about secession, and we all know what that really means, right???(wink wink)
May 27th, 2011 at 9:37 pm
Matthew,
#6, and we’re back to the conservative populism we discussed in ’09, which centers on a Southern/Midwestern axis. I still think that’s a winning combination. TPaw is starting to show some of the skills necessary to make that happen. His seizure of the Truth Teller mantle just days after Daniels demurred was brilliant. I don’t know if they decided on that brand before Daniels decided to not run, but it became brilliant when Mitch didn’t run.
May 27th, 2011 at 9:38 pm
#7:
Pawlenty will have some shield from that, but the thing about Huntsman is that I think he’s got a bit of a shield against Obama too. The President can’t rip into him too much because the former Governor can go and say “well Mr. President why then did you appoint me as your representative to China?”
May 27th, 2011 at 9:41 pm
The US is in between a rock and a hard place…stressing budget cuts, Medicare reform and raising the age for Social Security is a losing issue for the GOP right now….Times are harder than our politicians in Washington think they are….and there are people who for the first time are concerned about their future.
This election is going to be all about jobs and the economy…The unemployed, and those who take on second jobs at night delivering pizza just to make ends meet, could care less about the deficit right now…
May 27th, 2011 at 9:42 pm
Here’s the issue. It’s not that the public doesn’t realize the debt crisis is serious stuff. They may not quite comprehend the magnitude of it or the scale of necessary solutions but they rate it as a pretty important issue. But if you listen to these townhalls, and I’ve listened to all of Ryan’s and a few others, they want “shared sacrifice”. Shared sacrifice almost always means “tax the rich as much as possible before dragging us into it”. But it doesn’t have to mean that. There are other ways of conveying the message that everyone’s getting pinched here. Ryan’s plan, as much as I love it, is very poor at this aspect of the debate. Because it lowers tax rates, for everyone but, by extension for the rich- but it doesn’t get very specific in “how” exactly it’s going to get rid of tax shelters for millionaires and billionaires. And then it just cuts and fundamentally changes two middle class entitlements (Medicare and Medicaid). Again, bad optics. A really, seriously hard sell.
Pawlenty’s plan not only does the things I outline above but, on tackling Social Security for instance, it takes that two step approach. Raising the retirement age hurts mostly the lower and middle class (who need to work until those checks start coming in) while means-testing the COLA hurts the rich. Any jobs agenda is going to have to somehow take this approach. And it won’t be easy. One opinion which has become almost universal in Republican circles is the economic waste of “carve-outs” and “exemptions”. It’s hard to pitch a middle-class jobs agenda, which is geared around tax reform, if you can’t add exemptions.
May 27th, 2011 at 9:45 pm
MEM 6. That “truth” tour should plan ahead so as to get to tax code simplification and major reductions in regulations. It’s not just the growth of government and the overspending that are hurting, but the growth in the regulatory state that most specifically hurts mid-sized business along with their hiring plans. The estimated costs of complying with federal regulations is close to two trillion at this point.
If you want job creation, innovation, and growth, you’ll have to commit to eliminating whole executive branch departments and the endless string of rules they write each year, which is something like 80k pages. If you want to run a business these days, you first need to hoard enough cash to pay a bunch of lawyers and accountants to make sure you’re not violating some obscure federal, state, or local reg.
May 27th, 2011 at 9:50 pm
Jonathan,
I don’t know. Maybe that works for foreign policy (or maybe just China policy) but I have a hard time seeing how it helps him on jobs, on entitlements, or on class-warfare. One thing that people keep pointing to, in Huntsman’s biography, that’s indicative of his appeal to “regular guys” is the fact that he dropped out of high school to play in a band. Well yes…except not at all. When I first heard that story I thought, “well it’s a good thing Jon Huntsman Jr’s dad is Jon Huntsman Sr. because if I’d dropped out of high school I wouldn’t be going to an Ivy League school two years later”. It’s exactly the sort of thing a trust fund kid is inclined to do and not something that the ordinary 9 to 5′er is going to be able to relate to.
May 27th, 2011 at 9:54 pm
MEM,
#13 Exactly. It sounds like Spoiled Trust Fund Brat.
May 27th, 2011 at 9:59 pm
#13:
That’ll be tough to overcome, no doubt about it. But George Bush and George W. Bush were able to beat the “spoiled rich guy” shtick. I think Huntsman can frame it as “I’ve made some dumb decisions but I’ve learned from them and I’ve tried to give back for my blessings”. After all, the Huntsman’s adopted their two youngest children from China and India respectably.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:04 pm
15,
To be fair – part of the reason W. was able to beat that was because he ran against Al Gore and John Kerry.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:05 pm
#16:
It almost impossible but even though he’s nowhere near as rich or has the pedigree of those two, Obama still seems just as snooty.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:11 pm
It also helped that W. was a Southerner. In the important ways, W. was much more of a child of privilege than his dad. But, and this goes back to the familiarity with northern cultural cues I wrote about elsewhere, it’s a lot harder for us Yankees to tell a privileged Southerner from a humble one. They all seem, especially in comparison to most people in the north, pretty regala’. Which is probably another reason both parties have nominated scads of Southerners since the beginning of the TV age.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:13 pm
You guys… Nothing Huntsman can do will ever get him the nomination.
Huntsman wrote a love letter to Obama:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-huntsman-letters-20110415,0,4908404.story
Huntsman is a RINO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV8HFHkX3PA&feature=channel_video_title
And Huntsman took Obama’s stimulus money to balance his budget.
You guys… Get Real. We will not nominate a “McCain Lite” this time.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:13 pm
That’s true. I wouldn’t have guessed that Fred Thompson wore Gucci loafers if he only heard him on the radio.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:14 pm
If I only heard him*
May 27th, 2011 at 10:15 pm
The candidate who says that before they propose changes in Medicare and Social Security, they will go after the fraud and misuse first…
May 27th, 2011 at 10:23 pm
Every time I hear a politician talking about “waste, fraud, and abuse” I want to pitch them off a cliff.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:24 pm
Right where they’re sending our country.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:33 pm
MWS #7
I guess you don’t have it in you to tell the truth about Romney…You know more things about Romney than I do, so why do you want to slander him like that?
And oh yeah,…..The soundbite “reminds you of the guy who laid you off” was one of Huckabee’s low points of the debate.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:38 pm
#22
Really, When was the last time you heard a politician say they wanted to get rid of Government fraud and waste?
May 27th, 2011 at 10:40 pm
#24:
“The soundbite ‘reminds you of the guy who laid you off’ was one of Huckabee’s low points of the debate.”
Are you nuts? That was probably Huckabee’s best line from the 2008 campaign (other than “Jesus was way too smart to get involved in politics”). It crystalized the unease that folks felt about Romney and probably helped sink his chance of winning.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:45 pm
#26 Continued:
Whether you agree with it or not, it was a very effective line. Really, the problem with many Romneyites is that they seem to dismiss all barbs against their man as somehow beneath contempt, rather than looking to see if there is some merit to the criticism.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:49 pm
This party is so divided. Jesus.
God help us.
May 27th, 2011 at 11:02 pm
#27
Huckabee loved to play class warfare, populist card….
May 27th, 2011 at 11:47 pm
Beard scratchers are back spewing nonsense and tons of stupidity.
T-Yawn and Jon the lib,Obama operative?!
Guys you are so far in the left field,you are in the wrong party.
May 27th, 2011 at 11:50 pm
TE is TEX
Kavon fix this if you can.
May 28th, 2011 at 7:52 am
LV,
The point of #7 is not to “slander” Romney. The point is the Democrats would unload both barrels into him on the class warfare front. You think Huck’s devastating The guy who laid you off line was over the top? We’re talking about the Democratic party that used the child of James Byrd (the black man dragged to death behind a truck in Texas) to tie Bush to his brutal murder.
Yes, Romney had wild success at Bain Capital, and yes, most of the time it was from improving companies and even saving them. But the fact is, Bain also made some money off of companies that ended up going under, after they sucked the equity out. If you think the Democrats won’t use that to the hilt against Mitt, you’re mad.
If you haven’t heard of that yet, it’s because the Democrats save their best ammo for the nominee, usually post Convention.
May 28th, 2011 at 7:59 am
Jonathan,
Indeed, if Huck’s line was delivered in a debate in October of the general election, it would rank up there with I knew Jack Kennedy…. and Reagan’s I will not exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and experience as one of the most devastating lines ever delivered.
Was the shot a little below the belt? Sure. But Mitt threw plenty of low blows himself in his quest to be the only Three Legged Stool®. Rombots are still smarting from that shot because it was so effective. The more candid Rombots admit it landed with great effect.
May 28th, 2011 at 9:03 am
To acknowledge ‘a good line” or a posible attack the democrats would use against one of our nominee possibilities is one thing, but to push it as a truth within our own party when we know it is false, because we are set in our devotion to another candidate is disingenuos.
May 28th, 2011 at 10:17 am
DaveG’s analysis/commentary is superior to Rich Lowry’s IMO. Lowry is pointing out the obvious re people under current economic stress and their lack of immediate concern over an entitlement program headed for bankruptcy in 2024. While noting Reagan’s emphasis on economic growth, Lowry does little to offer a suggested framework or policy construct for enhancing economic and job growth. As DaveG suggests, this is the primary challenge for the GOP, and developing such a credible framework is mandatory if we are to have any chance at winning the WH next year. In addition, the fundamental economic situation at present is significantly different from that in 1979-1980, and the solutions are likely to be different. Excessive debt, both government and personal, is problem now and most people realize that.
May 28th, 2011 at 1:25 pm
#7 and #33 -
May 28th, 2011 at 1:31 pm
#36 – (hit the wrong key) – Pawlenty still has to be vetted – Romney has been thoroughly vetted. The democrats will use whatever they can to incite class warfare – we just haven’t republicans use a class warfare attack against another republican until Huckabee used it against Romney.
June 2nd, 2011 at 9:37 pm
[...] our Dave Gaultier has eloquently explained, jobs and the economy matter first and foremost to a plurality of Americans. They worry about the [...]