GOP 30 pick up a knife
ArchPundit
And threaten to commit suicide if Tom DeLay continues to be attacked.
Shrug.
One nice thing about being in the minority–the incredibly stupid political moves that majorities always make become really funny.
April 2005
I Will Survive
Who wouldn’t pay to hear Melissa Bean do a Kareoke version of “I Will Survive”
Social Security is a political nightmare for Republicans
?Support for the Bush Social Security proposals by a member of Congress yields a net electoral loss of 24 percentage points,? conclude pollsters Guy Molyneux and Geoffrey Garin. Hart polled 811 voters April 15-19, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent. Some 19 percent ?are more likely to vote for a candidate who sides with the president, and 43 percent are less likely.?
Another poll finding that gives Dem leaders mapping strategy some ammunition: ?By 58 percent to 32 percent, voters say the Democrats in Congress are raising legitimate concerns about Bush?s Social Security proposals, not making unfair political attacks.?
The lame rejoinder that Democrats aren’t offering solutions is a bit of a joke given the Republican’s plan(s) don’t actually solve the solvency problem and that seems to be getting through as the impression to the public.
What’ll be interesting in the 8th is what will the Republicans argue for in regards to Social Security?
Private accounts? Gee, those don’t seem to solve the problem.
Bush’s Plan? Reduce benefits more than if things stay the same? That’s not compelling.
It’s going to be hard to run as a loyal Republican to the President and take a clear stand on this issue.
The SS Proposal Gets Even More Bizarre
Apparently the President’s proposal is to significantly reduce the COLAs for Social Security over time. The problem being:
The Social Security Administration calculates that the system will deplete its reserve of Treasury bonds by 2041, after which it will be able to pay out in benefits only what it receives in taxes. But even then, benefits would be almost three-quarters what is currently promised, and considerably higher in inflation-adjusted terms than they are now. If nothing is done to Social Security, the system will be able to meet the president’s promise to ensure that all seniors receive a benefit larger than current levels.
He’s apparently going to make the system worse.
But remember that the trust fund is not a real obligation and the bonds in there can just be ignored? That would appear to be a rather bad idea from which to then move to this position:
Despite opposition from Democrats and a lukewarm response from the public, he intensified his push for private accounts financed by a portion of a worker’s payroll taxes. To pacify those worried about the risk associated with investment, the president, for the first time, said one of the investment options should be no-risk Treasury bonds.
I believe we now know where CMS learned it’s accounting practices.
Speaking of Speaking
I don’t do these often, but I found this kind of interesting:
Your Linguistic Profile: |
| 70% General American English |
| 10% Dixie |
| 10% Upper Midwestern |
| 5% Midwestern |
| 5% Yankee |
I grew up in Central Illinois, but spent many summers in Georgia with my Dad who worked for Lockheed and Martin Marietta there. The legacy of both continues. Of course, I’ll be heading to Greene County for the weekend with the relatives where pop is soda.
Trib Takes Guv to Woodshed
A scathing audit released this week on one of the state’s most powerful agencies bolsters the impression that the Blagojevich administration is taking on the hue of its predecessor. The audit found so many troubling practices regarding how contracts were awarded and managed that Auditor Gen. William Holland turned the findings over to the Illinois attorney general to investigate.
This mess comes amid a growing list of cases in which the governor’s favored people seemingly have been beating the odds to get rich.
Unlike the state’s slot machines, blackjack tables and lottery tickets, this new game isn’t regulated … at least not on the surface.
A soup line of clout-heavy insiders profited from the bond work generated by a $10 billion pension deal Blagojevich pushed through the legislature.
Blagojevich’s campaign political director, John Wyma, has cashed in on his close relationship with the governor. Since being hired by Lehman Brothers to help land business in Illinois, Wyma has scored $400,000 for himself and nearly $2 billion for Lehman in state-connected bond work, according to filings with a government bond oversight board.
Lucrative rights to operate restaurants in revamped tollway oases have been granted to firms with ties to two members of Blagojevich’s kitchen cabinet. Both have raised oodles of campaign money for the governor.
Other close advisers-turned-lobbyists have been hired by hospital groups to influence action by a state board that the governor appoints. There are, however, supposed to be restrictions on lobbying of that board.
Blagojevich usually responds to these questions about insider-deals by attacking the messengers. This time, he should try something more credible and concrete. He should clear out the advisers who are making money off of him. And he should get the state to put all state contracts, including bond work, out for competitive bid.
Tone Deaf Governor
For all of his skills as a candidate, the Governor is completely tone deaf in relation to CMS with his first quote being:
“My understanding is that the conflict between the auditor general and CMS is sort of like a prize fight between accountants, OK?” the governor said. “There’s not a lot of muscle there but a lot of argument and quarrel.”
The strategy isn’t a horrible one if this was the first hint of these problems, but in this case, other Constitutional Officers have been involved on several of these issues including Hynes in relation to the time it takes to submit contracts.
The idea is to post-modernize the debate into a he said-he said argument between the two and stay above the fray, but in this case, for many reasons, this isn’t that easy to solve.
First, there is an arbiter of the legal issues called the AG and when she comes back with charges and clear findings, it comes down to state law.
Second, at this point, Holland has a lot more allies than does the Administration in the Lege. The Governor has angered most of the Democratic caucus at various times and the only real incentive is to go after him. He doesn’t have the political machine and 30 years of relationships that George Ryan had when he got into trouble.
The Republicans already have every reason to attack the guy, he just gave the Democrats a reason–to distance themselves from him and his falling poll numbers. When his numbers were up around 60%, people went with him because he had the public at his back, when that is gone, its better to oppose him if you are from a swing district and a Democrat. And safe seat Dems see little reason to back a guy who has cut him off at the shins.
Being difficult with the Lege can work–Edgar showed that, but you have to keep yourself popular and relatively clean.
Third, Holland worked for Phil Rock and knows the Lege well. He’s not just some hapless bureaucrat. He has long standing relationships on both sides of the aisle, and no one in the Lege is going to back the administration over him. He already did a bang up job on the audit response comments. As someone who has done a evaluation that include document reviews chosen from samples, everything in that audit stands as reasonable. He was smart in hitting back immediately instead of letting the administration get out in front of this and attack him.
Fourth, the audit provided a roadmap to those who want to follow-up and investigate what is going on–instead of just being one time report, this offers reporters months of stories with the documentation to back it up and a legit explanation to editors to give them the time to track down more examples.
Fifth, it hits at a time where the refrain amongst the chattering class is that he’s more of the same instead of changing business as usual. Combine this with number four and you have a meme starting just as the lines of attack for the general election are starting to get going.
Smelling Blood in the Water
I’ll go out on a limb and say Paul Campbell won’t be confirmed to head CMS–the audit is damning and his ridiculous claims that the audit gives them a chance to show off their good work is one of the most politically tone deaf statements ever heard in Springfield–right next to Wynn’s claim that he didn’t include the information on the Auditor’s office as a warning.
On top of that, Campbell is one of the few people in the entire fiasco with an easy to target problem–people don’t want to hear about state officials getting freebies and no one is going to defend him at the Statehouse.
The Economic Advantage of Safety Nets
One of the fascinating things about Barack Obama is his ability to boil down complex, but important issues to good soundbites. It is a skill he shares with Clinton and that too many damn Democrats can’t figure out–you don’t need a forty point policy paper to defend social security or unemployment or other issues, you need a simple statement that points to values and how the issue affects it. Lynn Sweet picked out one statement that is especially strong in a recent column on social security (my emphasis):
Obama talked about the origins of Social Security as a safety net for retirees who had nothing. It was intended to be the minimum, not the maximum, and never to take the place of regular savings and other investments. It was a way, said Obama, for people to share — and minimize — risk.
“Since Social Security was first signed in to law, almost 70 years ago, by James’ grandfather, at a time when FDR’s opponents were calling it a hoax that would never work and that some likened to communism,” said Obama, “there has been movement, there has been movement after movement, to get rid of the program for purely ideological reasons.
“Because some still believe that we can’t solve the problems we face as one American community, they think this country works better when we’re left to face fate by ourselves.”
The irony, said Obama, of this “all-out assault against every existing form of social insurance is that these safety nets are exactly what encourages each of us to be risk-takers, what encourages entrepreneurship, what allows us to pursue our individual ambitions.’‘
What’s funny about the quote is that the odious and statistically incompetent Charles Murray makes nearly the same point in defending unemployment insurance in his book Losing Ground. Two people could not be much further apart.
Obama comments on it over at his official blog
More on Sweet “blog”
From a Faithful ArchPundit Reader:
Agree on your point, but there was another recent article/column somehwere that also used this device (written like a blog) that TOTALLY MISSES THE POINT that the most recent entries come first and the first entries come last. Lynn’s column was therefore upside down.
I first kind of chuckled at it, but one of the more interesting things that does happen in blogging is how the story evolves and reading it from most recent to oldest does add an interesting element to how stories evolve so this is more important than one might think.
Ethics Win For Dems Appears to Be An Illinois Affair
Republican Rep. Ray LaHood of East Peoria said he told Hastert to back down while flying on Air Force One after the April 19 dedication of the Lincoln library.
LaHood said he told the speaker: “You’re the one who has got to be able to turn this thing around. Because of your special relationship with DeLay and because you are the speaker and you are the one who changed the rules. . . . You’ve got to pivot, you probably have to eat a little crow, but we’ve got to get the ability for our members to go back home and talk about our issues.”
Kirk, from Highland Park, chairs the Tuesday Group, 45 moderates who wield enormous leverage. He said he told Hastert his group “felt that we should not change ethics rules in a partisan way.”
Biggert, a Hinsdale resident, said she talked to Hastert and said: “We needed to get our business done in the ethics committee, not on the front pages of the newspapers.”
Biggert’s line may simply be covering her butt, but traditionally Biggert isn’t on the right wing so who knows…
While there are still issues of staffing, the Democrats won this one, and more importantly, citizens did–the ethics deal made between the parties only served incumbents and not the integrity of the institution. If Democrats are to face more investigations because of this as well as DeLay–well good. That’s how it should be–not a farce of truce.