Finally.
We can all celebrate the killing of Osama bin Laden in our own way. Many took to the streets near the White House, Ground Zero and other landmarks. College students at Ohio State jumped into Mirror Lake, an act usually reserved for Michigan weekend. Many were jubilant. Others were somber as well as this brought back the horror and pain of 9/11.
It shouldn’t have taken 10 years, but at least this murderer is finally dead.
The 2012 election has begun. The Republicans have foolishly embraced Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare, and President Obama saw a huge political opportunity and took full advantage of it.
Obama’s speech the other day laying out his plan for deficit reduction put forward an impassioned defense of Medicare and the safety net.
Speaking of the Ryan plan, Obama explained:
It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. It says that 10 years from now, if you’re a 65-year-old who’s eligible for Medicare, you should have to pay nearly $6,400 more than you would today. It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy the insurance that’s available in the open marketplace, well, tough luck -– you’re on your own. Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.
He then puts the proposed cuts in the context of Ryan and the Republicans proposing even more tax cuts for the wealthy.
They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That’s not right. And it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.
This vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America. Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said, there’s nothing “serious” or “courageous” about this plan. There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. That’s not a vision of the America I know.
I’m still stunned that the GOP leadership was stupid enough to let Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare become the central plank in their push for deficit reduction. It’s political suicide for a simple reason – the health care entitlement is critical to the quality of life Americans hope to have in their senior years. Imagine a person who is 85 and sick having to shop for health insurance with a voucher! It’s ridiculous.
When you also consider that much of our deficit problems can be traced directly to the Bush tax cuts, it’s even more absurd the the Republicans would try to use the current debt crisis to justify this radical change in our safety net.
It’s a political gift to Obama and the Democrats, and Obama made clear with his speech that he fully intends to take advantage of it.
With characters like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, we’ve been referring to the lunatic fringe of the potential Republican primary field as the confederacy of dunces. Many conservatives seem to have lost their mind when it comes to President Obama, so much so that they will rally around buffoons like Palin and Bachmann.
In order to appeal to the growing lunatic fringe, you have otherwise sensible candidates like Mike Huckabee joining in with idiotic comments about Kenya. We expect this garbage from bomb-throwers like Newt Gingrich, but hearing Huckabee go off the deep end is further evidence that the right wing has serious problems.
Now we have Donald Trump joining in on the idiocy. He’s now gone full birther, saying that he’s very “concerned” over whether President Obama was born in this country. Trump has always been a self-promoting charlatan despite his obvious success as a real estate mogul, but this is truly embarrassing.
The GOP establishment is rightfully terrified by the prospect of any of these dunces drawing real support in the primaries. It will be hilarious to watch, and these GOP “leaders” are getting what they deserved, as they embraced Sarah Palin and her anti-intellectual gibberish when it suited them, and now they have to live with the mass hysteria she and her ilk have whipped up on the right.
The Republican primaries might be the best comedy show in decades if each member of the confederacy of dunces decides to run. Goofballs like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann set the standard here, but other like Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee are doing their best to join this confederacy with their own idiotic statements.
And then we have Newt Gingrich, whose attempts to explain away his past adultery are pure comedy gold. Newt is smarter than buffoons like Palin and Bachman, but he’s also the smarmiest politician in recent memory. He’s mean-spirited and a hypocrite, and yet he thinks he can lecture others on morality. Lawrence O’Donnell has some fun with Newt’s most recent attempt to cite a “forgiving God.”
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The issue of Senate recruitment is in the news again, as Jim Webb decides to retire and the Democrats are now praying that Tim Kaine will enter the race for Senate in Virginia. We’ll see if President Obama can convince him, but as Ezra Klein points out, this administration has been very bad in the area of Senate recruitments.
But the White House hasn’t always taken the recruitment of challengers that seriously. In 2008, they brought Iowa’s Tom Vilsack, Arizona’s Janet Napolitano, Kansas’s Kathleen Sebelius, and Colorado’s Ken Salazar into the administration. The payoff? They almost lost Salazar’s Senate seat and Democrats had to find weaker candidates in Iowa, Arizona, and Kansas. It stands, to me, as the administration’s single most baffling set of political decisions. There were plenty of other people capable of running the various cabinet agencies. There were no other people capable of replacing the threat Vilsack would have posed to Chuck Grassley or that Napolitano would’ve posed to John McCain, and thus no one who could’ve done as much to convince them that cooperating a bit on initiatives like health-care reform would be in their interest. Similarly, Sebelius was the only Democrat in Kansas who even had a chance of winning the state’s open Senate seat. Why pull her to Washington in a different capacity?
I think the Obama administration has been unfairly attcked by many on the left, but when it comes to politics after the 2008 election, this administration clearly made some huge mistakes. It’s stunning when one considers that Rham Emanuel was helping to run things.
Frankly, I think the Obama team got way overconfident in the political situation immediately after the 2008 election. They knew they had tough fights ahead, but they had such big majorities they probably felt they didn’t have to worry to much about a handful of Senate seats.
That proved to be a disaster. McCain would have been vulnerable against Napolitano, particularly after he swung way to the right in the primary. Grassley was also vulnerable in Iowa. They plucked some of their best candidates, and none of them are critical in their current roles.
Hopefully they have learned their lesson and they will push Kaine hard to run in Virginia.
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