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Showing posts with label Ron Fournier. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ron Fournier. Show all posts
Monday, August 11, 2014
Thursday, August 7, 2014
Reince Priebus calls out Mo Brooks’ ‘idiotic’ #WarOnWhites
ReincePriebuscallsoutMoBrooks’‘idiotic’#WarOnWhites
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Reince Priebus calls out Mo Brooks’ ‘idiotic’ #WarOnWhites
posted at 2:01 pm on August 7, 2014 by Noah Rothman
One of the more reprehensible features of modern political life is how liberal pundits, egged on by administration officials in many cases, have sought to inflame racial tensions in order to achieve some fleeting political end. It is an appalling irony that the country’s first African-American president and those loyal to him have, with only rare exceptions, thought nothing of acting in ways which harm race relations so as to bolster their own political prospects. History will not look kindly on this administration’s record of advancing racial comity.
That is not to say that Republicans do not have empirical problems appealing to minorities, and some of those problems are of their own making. There is no question, for example, that African-Americans justifiably revere the outmoded and flawed Voting Rights Act of 1964. The Supreme Court did the right thing in 2013 by invalidating the VRA’s Section 5, which shortsightedly enshrined into biding law for all time the racial realities of the 1960s. Times and people change, and the GOP was right to celebrate that victory for federalism. But the Republican Party missed an opportunity by not welcoming, much less spearheading, reforms to the weakened VRA. A smart approach to that issue may have won the GOP some goodwill with a minority group that is, at the moment, reflexively opposed to Republican policy prescriptions.
Republican strategists believe they are facing what many fear is a similar predicament brewing among Hispanic voters. While two general elections do not make for a trend, and I remain unconvinced that President Barack Obama’s electoral coalition is now the Democratic coalition, the drop off of Latino support for Republican presidential candidates from 2000 to 2012 has properly terrified the GOP. To address what they view as a political crisis, the Republican National Committee commissioned a report in 2013 (dubbed the GOP’s “autopsy” report), which proposed some ways to address that potentially lethal predicament:
If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e., self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs, or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.
Notice that passage says nothing about immigration reform, though embracing reform was among this report’s political recommendations. There is, in fact, some pretty compelling political analysis which suggests Republican support for reforming the immigration system with the only aim being to amnetize illegal residents does not yield much in the way of goodwill from Hispanic voters. This passage has much more to do with tone; how the GOP talks about minority groups about their interests, their concerns, and their cultures.
In an interview with Huntsville, Alabama-based radio host Dale Jackson recently, National Journal’s Editorial Director read the above passage to Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) during a debate about minority outreach.
Below is Fournier’s account of what followed:
Brooks replied, “By golly, we should not be dividing people as you just have in your commentary by race, by nationality, rather we should talk about …”
I interrupted. “That was not my quote. That was your party’s quote. That’s the RNC …”
Brooks cut me off. “I don’t care that you made the statement or somebody else made the statement that triggered my remarks, but that statement—that argument—is playing hand in glove with the Democratic race-baiting strategy, and it has to come to a stop.”
Brooks would have been wise to stop there. “The Democratic race-baiting strategy” does have to stop. But the Alabama congressman latched onto a theme – that Americans of European heritage are among the last groups which the elite political and media class believes can, and maybe even should, be discriminated against. He decided this phenomenon represents a “War on Whites,” and went on to make it a mantra.
“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party,” Brooks went on to tell radio host Laura Ingraham. “And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else. It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things.”
There is a right way to talk about the poisonous racial dynamic which the Democrats have cynically used to secure their advantage among minority voters, and there is a wrong way. Brooks’ strategy invites media scorn and derision, it closes minorities off to the GOP’s message, and it is self-evidently counterproductive.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus was asked if he agreed that “there is a war on whites out there.” He did not, and went so far as to call Brooks’ claim a “pretty idiotic thing to say.”
“At the end of the day, we have to be a party that grows,” Priebus said. “And that means we have to have more people in our party, not less.”
Priebus noted that it is unfair to judge a party based on the statements of one of its members. That is a game that the press plays relentlessly, and it is a standard that is never applied to Democrats. But Priebus understands that he has his work cut out for him in the effort to appeal to a broader electorate over the heads of Democrats and the media elite. In that effort, Brooks did Priebus and the GOP no favors.
When asked if the Romney campaign did enough to reach out to minority communities in 2012, Priebus noted that “they could have done more.” He added, however, that attempting to appeal to minority groups in the midst of a presidential campaign is already two years too late.
He’s right. There is a productive way for the Republican Party to perform minority outreach, grow the base, and win elections. Reaching out to white, working-class voters disaffected in the Obama-era and rapidly abandoning the Democratic Party must be part of a winning Republican strategy, but alienating minorities along the way does not help the party.
Brooks apparently knows he went too far. “Sometimes you have to use hyperbole in order to force a discussion on much more serious and fact-oriented perspectives associated with that hyperbole,” he told Huntsville News. But you haven’t heard that quote. Why? It only softens Brooks’ inflammatory comments and clarifies his thinking, which is precisely what the forces arrayed against the GOP’s minority outreach mission do not want.
Brooks did his party no service this week, and now it is left to the GOP’s committee brass to clean up his mess.
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Monday, July 7, 2014
Dems troubled by Obamacare’s politically toxic employer mandate
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Dems troubled by Obamacare’s politically toxic employer mandate
posted at 1:21 pm on July 7, 2014 by Noah Rothman
In a fanfare-free announcement on the Treasury Department’s Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy’s blog in February, the administration announced that the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that medium-sized businesses cover their employees’ health coverage or pay fines was delayed… again. The implementation of the employer mandate was previously delayed for businesses of all sizes until 2015, but the administration determined that this was still not enough time to allow for the majority of American firms to comply with the 2010 law. That latest delay pushed off the employer mandate for businesses with between 50 and 99 employees until 2016.
In June, National Journal’s Ron Fournier predicted that the White House would have no choice but to embrace the mandate – it is the “law of the land,” after all – and they should do it sooner rather than later. He noted that the mandate is a critical funding mechanism designed to help subsidize expanded insurance coverage, and that it would require an act of Congress in an election year to repeal it.
“They’ve already delayed the mandate twice,” Fournier wrote. “A third time would further diminish the credibility of the law and of the administration.”
But the political and technical problems the mandate presents for the party in power have long been a greater source of concern for liberals. In July of last year, Vox.com founder Ezra Klein praised the delay of the ACA’s employer mandate and recommended that it be repealed entirely. In April, former White House Press Sec. Robert Gibbs predicted that the mandate would be jettisoned entirely.
It seems that liberal advocates and activists are leaning more in that direction than in Fournier’s. On Monday, a Politico report detailed how liberals are giving up on the employer mandate.
“More and more liberal activists and policy experts who help shape Democratic thinking on health care have concluded that penalizing businesses if they don’t offer health insurance is an unnecessary element of the Affordable Care Act that may do more harm than good,” Politico reported.
The employer coverage rules were part of the ACA’s core philosophy that individuals, employers and the government should all contribute to paying health care costs. Some Democratic constituencies, including labor unions and Obamacare proponents like Families USA, still see it that way.
But the shift among liberal policy experts and advocates has been rapid. A stream of studies and statements have deemed the mandate only moderately useful for getting more people covered under Obamacare. And they too have come to see it as clumsy, a regulatory and financial burden that creates as many problems as it solves.
The objections Klein raised to the employer mandate in 2013 are similar to those being raised by liberal policy advocates:
- By imposing a tax on employers for hiring people from low- and moderate-income families who would qualify for subsidies in the new health insurance exchanges, it would discourage firms from hiring such individuals and would favor the hiring — for the same jobs — of people who don’t qualify for subsidies (primarily people from families at higher income levels).
- It would provide an incentive for employers to convert full-time workers (i.e., workers employed at least 30 hours per week) to part-time workers.
- It would place significant new administrative burdens and costs on employers.
Fully repealing the employer mandate would require an act of Congress; an unlikely prospect. The last two delays to the mandate were enacted when the administration requested that the IRS delay the implementation of penalties on noncompliant businesses. “Republicans won’t pass any legislation that makes the law work better,” Klein wrote. “Improving the law, they fear, will weaken the arguments for repeal.”
Moderate Republicans, meanwhile, say that the administration is to blame for the lack of legislative fixes to the ACA. “The White House is putting a lot of pressure on the Democratic leadership to not allow a vote on a significant change to Obamacare that would likely pass,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), one of the cosponsors of a bill to repeal the employer mandate, told Politico.
Fourier’s prediction was based on the assumption that the White House’s credibility was on the line if they refused to implement the employer mandate. It would seem, though, that the White House believes that their credibility would be more imperiled if the implementation of the mandate was a disaster or if they suffered a political rebuke in Congress when a major portion of the health care reform law is repealed in a bipartisan vote.
Though it is a cynical strategy, the White House is probably right.
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Thursday, May 22, 2014
CBS poll: Voters blame Shinseki, Obama for VA scandal
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CBS poll: Voters blame Shinseki, Obama for VA scandal
posted at 12:01 pm on May 22, 2014 by Ed Morrissey
Who deserves the blame for the wait-list fraud and lack of medical care for veterans at the VA? According to a new CBS poll, a third of Americans blame the man who has been in charge of the VA for more than five years. And another 17% blame his boss:
Americans are split in their thoughts over who they think is most to blame for the problems at Veterans Affairs department medical facilities, which involve allegations that VA hospitals kept delays in treatment off the books and that patients may have died waiting for care.
But Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki and the VA (33 percent) receive more blame than either local VA hospitals (28 percent) or President Obama (17 percent). About a quarter doesn’t have an opinion.
Partisan differences emerge: While 31 percent of Republicans blame Shinseki and the VA for the problems, nearly as many blame Mr. Obama (30 percent). Fewer Democrats and independents say the president is at fault; they are more likely to blame Shinseki and the VA and local VA hospitals.
The poll does suffer in one respect in the way that the question was framed. Those were the only choices offered to respondents. Had they offered an option to blame Congress, it would be interesting to see how many would have opted for that choice, and that number may be represented in the relatively high number (23%) who didn’t make a choice at all.
The next question on the poll also hints at that impulse. Respondents ended up in a virtual split (42/41) over whether long waits are caused by inadequate resources or poor management of resources. Interestingly, each of the three political demographics have 42% blaming inadequate resources. A plurality of Republicans (47%) blame poor management, while Democrats (39%) and independents (40%) are less focused on that explanation. Perhaps the media should be exploring the massive increases in resources given to Shinseki by Congress over the last five years, as the OMB data clearly shows.
Obama’s defenders have begun mumbling about “Green Lanternism” again in response to his executive management failures. Ron Fournier blasts that argument into orbit:
The inconvenient truth is that Klein’s kind of thinking lets the president off the hook, unaccountable for promises broken and opportunities lost. Rather than change Washington’s culture of polarization, zero-sum game politics, and spin, Obama surrendered to it almost immediately. On health insurance reform, government debt, and loosening immigration laws, Obama shares blame with obstinate House Republicans for fumbling potential compromise. On climate change and gun control, Obama knew (or should have known) his rhetoric was setting up voters for disappointment. Rather than roll back Bush-era terrorism programs that curb civil liberties, Obama deepened them.
The launch of the Affordable Care Act and the worsening of conditions at the Veterans Affairs Department are emblematic of Obama’s inattention to the hard work of governing. He is slow to fire poor-serving Cabinet members and quick to dismiss controversies as “phony scandals.” To the Obama administration, transparency is a mere talking point. The great irony of his progressive presidency: Democrats privately admit that Obama has done as much to undermine the public’s faith in government as his GOP predecessor. The Green Lantern Theory is an excuse for failure.
Let’s recap on this. Candidate Obama campaigned on this issue, and president-elect Obama and Shinseki were briefed on it during the transition, and VA officials had been warned as early as 2010 that wait-list fraud was still occurring. Congress has increased Shinseki’s budget by 78% since the 2009 inauguration as demanded by Obama. Yet the White House claims to be shocked, shocked that this problem exists — and that the man to deal with it is the same man who let it fester for five-plus years while Congress poured money into his organization.
You don’t have to be Green Lantern to address that issue. You just need to be a competent executive. Right now, we don’t have that at the VA, nor at the White House either — and voters are starting to notice.
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Thursday, April 10, 2014
Manchin to Reid: Lay off the Koch brothers
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Manchin to Reid: Lay off the Koch brothers
posted at 10:41 am on April 10, 2014 by Ed Morrissey
This may be one reason why Republicans could woo Joe Manchin to the GOP after the midterms. Would Angus King ever go on Fox to defend Charles and David Koch from Harry Reid’s asinine demagoguery? Doubtful, but the West Virginia Democrat did just that earlier today (video via the Free Beacon):
“People want jobs. You don’t beat up people. I mean, I don’t agree with their politics or philosophically, but, you know, they’re Americans, they’re doing— paying their taxes,” Manchin said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.”
“They’re not breaking the law. They’re providing jobs,” he added. …
“If you’re trying to rally the base, the bases have already been rallied. The right and left bases have been rallied,” Manchin said. “It’s us in the middle that have to start making something happen here in Washington to move this country forward.”
So far, Reid hasn’t taken Manchin’s advice. In fact, the Senate Majority Leader went on the Senate floor to announce that the upper chamber might be able to take its recess later today, and oh by the way did you know Koch money stinks?
Another campaign attack from Reid against Kochs: Koch money "stinks. … The two richest brothers in the world want to be richer."
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 10, 2014
Mitch McConnell offered a jab in return:
While Sen. Reid's speech is focused on attacking two Americans for disagreeing with him, Sen. McConnell's speech will focus on #jobs
— Stew (@StewSays) April 10, 2014
National Journal’s Ron Fournier warns that Senate Democrats will pay a high price for Reid’s “lies” and demagoguery — and so will the media, if they don’t do a better job of pointing those out. “Shame on us” if that happens, says Fournier:
Shame on us if we in the media let him get away with this. First of all, his PAC has its own wealthy billionaires who are donating to him. Second of all, the ad is false, outright false. Representative Cassidy actually fought against the Koch brothers here — that’s not pointed out in the ad. The ad is a lie. Third, this is the third time in a row that Harry Reid’s PAC has had an ad that’s been labeled patently false by the Washington Post. He is making facts up. He is lying. Eventually it’s going to come around and get you. Even in this media environment we have now, I’ve got to believe that Stephen [F. Hayes of theWeekly Standard] is wrong and the Democrats will pay a high price for lying in these Senate ads. They’re lying.
That might be another good reason for Manchin to rethink his affiliation after the midterms.
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Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Powers: I’m getting tired of defending ObamaCare, too
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Powers: I’m getting tired of defending ObamaCare, too
posted at 12:01 pm on February 12, 2014 by Ed Morrissey
The obvious question, then, is … why continue? Both Kirsten Powers and Ron Fournier have spent the last day offering cris des coeurs over the incompetence of the White House, as the National Journal columnist did yesterday and Powers did last night on Fox News Special Report (via RCP and Truth Revolt):
KIRSTEN POWERS: Well, I think his explanation is probably the true explanation, that they need to do this, but at the same time, it’s now gotten to the point where it seems like there’s an exemption made for pretty much everybody except for individuals. A lot of people who have really been screwed over by the law, you know, who are left without insurance or with extremely expensive insurance. So, I think that Ron Fournier of The National Journal wrote something that ran today about –
BRET BAIER: This was after he expressed himself last night on the panel.
POWERS: The headline is why I’m getting tired of defending Obamacare. And I’m going to say amen, brother, because it’s exactly how I feel. People who have supported the law, who support universal health care, are constantly put in the position of having to defend this president, who has really incompetently put this together, rolled it out, and that’s why he has to do this. It’s why he has to keep doing this, because it’s not working.
The objection from both assumes that this project had a hope of succeeding in the first place. Let’s not forget that ObamaCare passed nearly four years ago, and HHS had 42 months of lead time until its rollout date. Four months after that, the White House keeps shifting deadlines, plainly to avoid the political consequences of its utter failure and ineptitude. How long is long enough to climb off the bandwagon?
Fournier’s argument on that question rests on a supposed lack of alternatives:
I want the ACA to work because the GOP has not offered a serious alternative that can pass Congress.
That, however, is a circular argument — because a Congress controlled by Democrats in one chamber will not pass any kind of replacement for ObamaCare, no matter how “serious” or workable it might be. Harry Reid wouldn’t even bring it onto the agenda, let alone schedule a floor vote, and Democrats would close ranks with the White House even if he did. Fournier’s argument boils down to the acceptance that Democrats won’t change their minds, so we may as well keep cheering on the failure, and hope that the incompetents that produced it over four years can fix it in six months. That’s absurd, but it’s the final fig leaf for less-partisan supporters of ObamaCare.
Fournier’s colleague Sam Baker argues that Obama’s doing most of the damage to his law now, not Republicans:
Republicans have done everything they can think of to strike down Obamacare, but they’ve still only managed to come in second place. For all the House votes to repeal, defund, or weaken Obamacare, some of the most significant setbacks for the law have come from the administration itself.
Monday’s delay in the law’s employer mandate was just the latest in a series of self-inflicted wounds, just like the HealthCare.gov launch and delays in several programs that simply weren’t ready for prime time.
To be clear, the self-inflicted wounds haven’t been fatal. Obamacare is moving forward—and the doomsayers’ prophecies have fallen flat: People are signing up, premiums are lower than expected, and the law’s basic survival is assured. It gets stronger every month as more people pour into new insurance marketplaces in each state.
But the law does have a specific vision of the future of health insurance. And to hit that vision, it relies on a delicate balance of popular carrots—think coverage for those with preexisting conditions—and unpopular sticks, such as the ever-controversial individual mandate. And the administration keeps chipping away at unpopular parts—sometimes directly, and sometimes by handing Republicans a political weapon.
By the way, who’s going to fix the website, which defenders have mostly cited as the main obstacle on the path to Nirvana? The names have changed, but the faces look awfully familiar:
After denigrating the work of CGI and replacing it as the largest contractor on the federal health care website, the Obama administration is negotiating with the company to extend its work on the project for a few months.
And the new prime contractor, Accenture, is trying to recruit and hire CGI employees to work under its supervision.
I’m sure that will work out well…
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Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Halperin: Wow, this ObamaCare change just “screams of politics,” huh?
Halperin:Wow,thisObamaCarechangejust“screamsof
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Halperin: Wow, this ObamaCare change just “screams of politics,” huh?
posted at 12:01 pm on February 11, 2014 by Ed Morrissey
As opposed to what? The original delay of the employer mandate in ObamaCare was equally political, and designed for the same purpose, which was to push most of the market disruptions past the midterm elections. No other rational reason existed for the delay except to prevent the entire electorate from getting body-slammed by plan changes and spending most of 2014 looking to take it out on Democrats in November. Unfortunately, no one in the Obama administration appeared to realize that a January 2015 compliance date would mean that disruptions would start taking place in the open-enrollment period that begins in November, just a few weeks before the election.
Thus we get yesterday’s partial delay for yet another year, in the hope that group insurance plans won’t get disrupted until well after the midterms. Mark Halperin argued on Morning Joe that this change doesn’t even have a fig leaf of rationalization, and is just pure politics:
In my column at The Week, I muse on the reversal and the damage it does to the strange celebration of disincentives that took place among Democrats and their apologists this past week, after the release of the CBO report. If the disincentives are so wonderful, why delay any part of the bill? Democrats finally met a disincentive they don’t like, that’s why:
Four years ago, Nancy Pelosi promised that ObamaCare would add four million jobs to the economy. This week, the new catchphrase became “job lock.” Now people would be free to not work, the argument went, thanks to the subsidies provided by those who do work for their health care. Democrats declared this an end to so-called “wage slavery,” but the White House couldn’t quite figure out how to square a smaller economy with bigger taxpayer-financed subsidies into a win for American consumers.
Now, suddenly, one of the main mechanisms of this supposed job-lock freedom bill has to be postponed. Why? According to an unnamed “senior administration official,” medium-sized businesses “need a little more time to adjust to providing coverage.” The law passed in March 2010, nearly four years ago, and the original statutory deadline of January 2014 was in place for more than three years. One would think that business owners, who have to create budgets and capital plans on an annual basis, would already know how to provide coverage — since most businesses have done precisely that, for decades before ObamaCare.
The real problem for the White House is that many of these employers will find ways to get out of providing that coverage — and the Obama administration has known that almost ever since the law passed. HHS’s own analysis showed that as many as 93 million Americans might find themselves out of their current plans when the employer mandate goes into full effect, and the financial disincentives to provide coverage as premiums skyrocket this year means many of those will find themselves in the individual market. …
Suddenly, Democrats have met a disincentive they won’t embrace — the disincentive to vote for the politicians who imposed this unpopular system on taxpayers in the first place. That tells us all we need to know about their embrace of the other disincentives in the ACA.
Even some of the supporters of ObamaCare have had enough. Ron Fournier at National Journal says he’s tired of defending it while the White House keeps manipulating it for its own political purposes:
Advocates for a strong executive branch, including me, have given the White House a pass on its rule-making authority, because implementing such a complicated law requires flexibility. But the law may be getting stretched to the point of breaking. Think of the ACA as a game of Jenga: adjust one piece and the rest are affected; adjust too many and it falls.
If not illegal, the changes are fueling suspicion among Obama-loathing conservatives, and confusion in the rest of us. Even the law’s most fervent supporters are frustrated. …
I want the ACA to work because I want to health insurance provided to the millions without it, for both the moral and economic benefits. I want the ACA to work because, as Charles Lane wrote for the Washington Post, the link between work and insurance needs to be broken. I want the ACA to work because the GOP has not offered a serious alternative that can pass Congress.
Unfortunately, the president and his team are making their good intentions almost indefensible.
Which road, according to an old proverb, was paved with good intentions? The continuous need to change the law should give Fournier a big clue that the law itself is a badly-written disaster, even if the disastrous results haven’t taught that lesson yet. The law creates a command economy and the results of such economies are sadly and easily predicted, not just in theory but in actual experience. Unfortunately, we didn’t learn from history, and are in the midst of an unnecessary and expensive repetition, to paraphrase another apposite proverb.
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