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Republicans Performed Beautifully at Health Reform Summit
Tweet Share on Facebook February 26, 2010 Comment (37)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Here in Washington, we're getting high winds, but unlike New York and Philadelphia, no snow, so life went on as usual yesterday. I had PTA meetings and carpools to drive, a meeting on fundraising for Children's Hospital; like most people, I wasn't able to sit and watch the entire seven hours of coverage of the healthcare summit. But I did listen to it on the radio and have seen video clips, which is probably about average for most of us. People I've talked to seem to be engaged and paying attention to this right now.
In my last column, my advice to Republicans was to come "loaded for bear," and marshal their best arguments about what the GOP stands for and why Republicans are not just the mindless obstructionists that Democrats portray them to be. They did that beautifully. Having Sen. Lamar Alexander speak was a great choice. And here's a clip from the star of the day, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan. It's worth watching (only about six minutes long). Jack Kemp and Bill Buckley would have been proud.
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Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels for President?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 24, 2010 Comment (32)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
You probably don't know this about me, but I'm a closet fan of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. I know there are others out there like me, but I haven't found them yet. Here are three interesting things he's done lately:
1. Along with several other governors, he cosigned a letter to the Congressional committees investigating Toyota which he paraphrased to the local Fox affiliate as saying: "Let's have the recall, fines if necessary, but they're ganging up, it seems highly suspicious given the government went into the car business and here they are beating up one of their direct competitors." He's got a point, that the government now owns GM, one of Toyota's competitors, and it appears they have a conflict of interest when it comes to shutting down Toyota's sales. I'm a former Camry owner, and of course I'm concerned about safety--that of Toyota drivers and the rest of us on the road with them--but we wouldn't be talking about a conflict of interest if the government hadn't taken over GM. One more reason the government should stay out of the market.
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Obama’s Health Reform Proposal: Too Late, Too Partisan
Tweet Share on Facebook February 23, 2010 Comment (3574)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Yesterday, the White House put out its healthcare reform proposal, and not much of it includes provisions Republicans might like. With the healthcare summit coming on Thursday, the question is, do Republicans have an obligation to put out their own bill? I asked former Senate Republican Whip Alan Simpson yesterday--the whole interview will be the subject of my column this weekend, so stay tuned--and he says that although Republicans do need to propose their own ideas, to expect a GOP healthcare bill is "hypocritical" of Democrats.
Back in the day when Simpson was in the Senate, no matter what party the president was, when it came time for major legislation, the White House would send some sort of legislative proposal on paper to the Congress--sometimes a bill, sometimes a framework--but the White House usually started the process. Most members of Congress won't compose a bill without White House political cover first, and you have to have a White House bill to "chew on," he says, before starting the negotiations. Most Americans believe the president just signs the bills into law at the end of the process, but that's not the case anymore. The executive branch is involved from the start. But with healthcare reform, President Obama didn't do that. He sat on the sidelines and asked House and Senate Democrats to write the bill, which turned into a year-long fiasco. "So to ask Republicans to cough up a bill when the White House never coughed up a bill is a little bit of a strain. I don't believe that's been done at all here," Simpson says.
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Ron Paul Wins Over the Tea Party Movement: Why Incumbents Should Worry
Tweet Share on Facebook February 22, 2010 Comment (60)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Over the weekend, Ron Paul won the CPAC straw poll for president. Many pundits immediately dismissed the win, for a lot of reasons. (The Atlantic did a roundup of all the "he's irrelevant" comments.) My take on Ron Paul is this: He says a lot of off-the-wall stuff, but his bottom line is that he's a limited-government libertarian. And he's not Mitt Romney, the establishment GOP choice. I think that's why he won.
Joe Scarborough likes to say that if you look at where Ross Perot did well in 1992, those are the same places that tea party candidates are doing well. That may be, but I think there's some overlap between Ron Paul supporters and the tea partiers, at least some of the younger ones. Ross Perot has a website, PerotCharts, that illustrates the government's fiscal responsibility; but Ron Paul supporters have an interactive site for those who want to meet up at campaign rallies (with over 100,000 people either already members or interested), and according to the timeline posted, it looks like many of them have joined in the last two years.
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Boehner’s CPAC Speech Demonstrates Energy on the Right
Tweet Share on Facebook February 19, 2010 Comment (25)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I haven't been able to attend the CPAC convention in person this week--too much going on with kids and work--but I've been following it on TV and the blogosphere. Some of the speakers are very angry, which is mystifying to me since things seem to be going well lately for conservatives from New Jersey to Virginia to Massachusetts. But there have also been a few unexpected surprises.
One of those is John Boehner's speech. I've never been that big a fan of his, but I think he's really growing into his job. He's much better now than he was even a year ago. I listened to him on the radio yesterday giving his speech, and here's the link to it on CSPAN if you'd like to watch it; he starts at 2:55.30 and the best part is at the end at 3:14.50. Here are the highlights:
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Marco Rubio Tells the Social Security Truth
Tweet Share on Facebook February 19, 2010 Comment (37)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
It was the early 1990s, and I was in my late 20s, working at the White House writing speeches. One of the ideas in the speech was that Social Security was going to run out of money by 2030. Wait a minute, I thought, how old will I be in 2030? A quick subtraction on the back of an envelope told me I’d be 67. It was an epiphany: no Social Security for me.
I went through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial (do the math again, that can’t be right); anger (what the hell?); bargaining (maybe if I live a frugal life I won’t need any money, I’ll just eat saltines from now on); depression (so this means I’ll pay in my whole life, and then get stiffed by the government and die broke); and finally, acceptance (I started my own 401K(k) that week and have been arguing for the privatization of Social Security ever since).
There are a lot of us, now in our mid-40s, who realized a long time ago that the chances of any of us seeing a dime of Social Security--or Medicare, for that matter--after a lifetime of paying in is simply unrealistic. I really don’t know anyone my age or younger who is counting on getting any benefits. Ever. And while it was “all about me” when I was younger, now I’m much more concerned with what this crisis means to our society, to families, and to our economy.
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Conservative Thinkers Try to Team Up With Tea Party Movement
Tweet Share on Facebook February 17, 2010 Comment (6)Big news on the right today: A group of conservative leaders is signing a "statement of principle" that seeks to give some structure to the ideas they share with the Tea Party movement. According to Politico, "The change we urgently need, a change consistent with the American ideal, is not movement away from but toward our founding principles," says the statement, which seeks to define those principles as "constitutional conservatism."
The drafters include former Attorney General Ed Meese, Heritage Foundation head Ed Feulner, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, and David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union, which is also sponsoring this week's CPAC conference. (Notice who is not listed: Tom Tancredo, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh.) Which do you think most on the right would rather see for the Tea Party movement: Sarah Palin in a hotel ballroom struggling to recall big ideas, or a cross-section of conservative leaders putting down on paper an intellectual framework for moving forward?
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Bayh Nails What’s Wrong With Washington: Partisanship, Cynicism
Tweet Share on Facebook February 16, 2010 Comment (16)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I'm 350 pages into the 400 pages of Game Change, the best-selling book about the 2008 campaign by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Here's how the chapter on the fall campaign opens:
John McCain and Barack Obama entered the general election jointly holding out the hope of a different kind of fall campaign ... Both candidates argued that Washington was broken, in need of root-and-branch reform, and ascribed its dysfunction to hyperpartisanship and the pernicious power of special interests ... Both cast themselves as anti-politicians and post-ideological avatars. To gain their respective nominations, both relied on the support of centrist independents and even a handful of members of the other party.
What happened with that? The rest of the chapter gives detailed examples of how much the two men can't stand each other, and how ugly the general election got. In fact, the whole book is ugly, filled with unattributed stories, obscenity-filled quotes, anonymous sniping from former aides--even the name implies that it was all one big game foisted on voters. Some people love tell-all books like this, but I find it depressing. I worked on a national political campaign and it wasn't anything like this. No wonder people are sick of what's going on Washington. And no wonder good people are leaving public service in droves.
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A Quick Jobs Bill: Pay People to Shovel the Washington Snow
Tweet Share on Facebook February 12, 2010 Comment (7)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
There's a lot of talk today about the Democrats' proposed jobs bill, but here's a much less expensive idea: let's take some of the unused money from the last stimulus bill and put it to work getting the snow shoveled this week in Washington. I drove into downtown D.C. yesterday morning, and in an hour of driving here's what I saw:
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Snow Coverage Whites Out Iran News
Tweet Share on Facebook February 11, 2010 Comment (7)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
With all the round-the-clock weather reporting in the news, it seems like two stories have been pushed aside: relief efforts in Haiti and the protests in Iran. This week is the anniversary of the revolution that overthrew the Shah, and the Iranian government has marked the occasion with massive rallies--as well as a monstrous police presence, the shutting down of communications, and a crackdown on demonstrators.
Planet Iran is reporting that Iran was the leading jailer of journalists in the world in 2009, and one look at the live-blogging there and Andrew Sullivan's site will tell you that it's not just journalists who are being arrested.
