Year: 2013

The immigration bill and its most prominent Republican supporter are under attack:

Conservative bloggers immediately seized on portions of the bill funding expanded cell phone access along the border as evidence Rubio was supplying free phones to undocumented immigrants. Some commentators connected it to the “Obama phone,” a popular meme on the right last year about a program that provides discounts on phone service to the poor. Despite the moniker, it predated the current administration by decades and rose to prominence last year mostly due to a viral video of a female black Obama supporter talking about the program.

Rubio himself was confronted with the claim on Wednesday in an interview with conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, who quoted from a blog post that read “Move over Obama phone, this is the amnesty phone.”

In response, Rubio pointed out that the phones are not for illegal immigrants but for US citizens “so they can report illegal crossings because many of them either don’t have phone service or don’t have cell phone service and they have no way of calling.” Waldman bets that the truth won’t matter much:

What folks like Ingraham understand is that when you’re trying to gin up outrage about a big, complex piece of legislation, the way to do it is to find some component of the bill that is weighted with symbolic value and will hit directly on your target audience’s resentments and fears. It doesn’t matter how minor the provision is, or how much you need to distort its actual function and intent. All that matters is that it’ll get people pissed off.

Seth Mandel sees Rubio’s outreach to the talk-radio right as essential:

[E]ven if the bill comes together and passes the Senate, Rubio and the others will have far less influence on what happens to it in the GOP-controlled House. And that is why Rubio is working so hard to dull conservative commentators’ unease with anything that resembles “amnesty” for illegal immigrants. Rubio is scheduled to appear on Rush Limbaugh’s show today, and it will be Rubio’s second interview with Limbaugh since the push for immigration reform picked up steam after the November election.

Rod explains why he is not a Republican:

Rod recently discussed his political evolution and the current state of conservatism:

When I was in college, and first became a conservative, it was the liberals who had a reputation as rigid, doctrinaire, snide, and off-putting. I’m generalizing, but in those days, liberals were the ones who were far more likely to be brittle, who weren’t willing to look around and adjust their prescriptions to changing circumstances, who seemed disconnected from the world as it was. It seemed to me that liberals had emotional and ideological touchstones in a bygone political and cultural era, and they dealt with changing times by insisting on greater ideological purity in the ranks. Whatever else 1980s liberalism wasn’t, it wasn’t attractive. It seemed outdated and exhausted, both in terms of substantive policies and in terms of the way it presented itself to the public.

I began my college career as a liberal, and it slowly began to dawn on me that I didn’t really believe in liberalism so much as I couldn’t stand Reagan and the people who loved him. I spent my freshman year fuming over the fact that my dad and all his friends were Reagan Democrats living in false consciousness; it never once occurred to me to wonder why it was working-class men had ceased to identify with the Democratic Party, and whether or not liberalism had anything wrong with it. My side was losing, but we found it easier to blame the fools who voted for Reagan, or to blame Reagan for being such an accomplished liar, than to examine ourselves and our own beliefs. (When I did begin to do that, my liberalism, which was primarily attitudinal, faded away.)

This is pretty much the case with conservatism today, I’m afraid. We could argue, and should argue, over what the policies of conservative government should be today; that’s not my point in this blog entry. My point here is that there is no creative ferment on the Right, no breathing space, few places where new ideas can emerge. All the energy on the Right seems aimed at hunting down the heretics within. That, and making life as hard as possible for the opposition, not because they have something better in mind, but as an end in itself. 

His previous Ask Anything videos are here, here, here and here. Be sure to check out his new book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life. Ask Anything archive here.

Tomasky praises the president’s remarks (above) after the Senate’s gun-control bill failed:

Obama’s words were the most powerful he’s delivered in years. Call it failed if you want, but this was leadership: knowing that he was probably going to lose on the Hill, but putting everything he had into the fight anyway. He took on not only the NRA and its whores in Congress, he took on the blasé complacency of a pundit class that said repeatedly: he’ll never win, so why do this; he should have struck while the iron was hot; he should have talked to Republicans more. Yes, it was clear that a challenge to the NRA was likely to lose, but that isn’t what always should dictate a politician’s actions. He behaved out of conviction. This is rare enough among politicians that Obama certainly should not be nitpicked for this or that little thing he did or didn’t do.

Jacob Sullum differs:

Obama does a fine job of empathizing with the parents of Adam Lanza’s victims. But that is something any decent human being should be able to manage. Where he has trouble, despite his lip service to the idea of putting himself in the other guy’s shoes, is in empathizing with his opponents. He not only says they are wrong, which is to be expected. He refuses to concede that people who disagree with him about gun control are acting in good faith, based on what they believe to be sound reasons—that they, like him, are doing what they think is right. His self-righteous solipsism is striking even for a politician.

But the way in which the NRA re-framed the debate dishonestly was “bad faith.” And after Heller, and more than a decade of looser gun restrictions, what more do Second Amendment enthusiasts want? When you look at the balance of things – and I’m not a big enthusiast for more gun control, but see the obvious sanity of universal background checks – the NRA has taken its own achievements as the middle ground and keeps moving ever further right. They remind me of AIPAC – and they distort public policy just as toxically. Drum looks ahead:

President Obama was right to call this “round one.” This kind of thing is a long-term fight for public opinion, and only after you get the public firmly on your side do you have any real chance of passing serious legislation. So the question today for liberals is simple: Is this issue important enough to keep banging away on it for years on end, the way the NRA does? If not, nothing will ever happen.

In an earlier post, Drum examines public opinion on gun control:

Gun control proposals poll decently all the time. But the plain truth is that there are only a small number of people who feel really strongly about it, and they mostly live in urban blue districts already. Outside of that, pro-gun control opinion is about an inch deep. This is a classic case where poll literalism leads you completely astray. Without measuring intensity of feeling, that 90 percent number is meaningless.

Chait adds:

Almost everybody may support background checks, but not every American knows the actual content of every bill that gets a vote. Look at health-care reform. Americans overwhelmingly favor nearly every provision of Obamacare, but oppose the law because they had a general sense of not liking it. Likewise, opponents have turned the debate into a general discussion of “gun control,” which is way less popular than a specific law about background checks. Lisa Murkowski explains her No vote thusly: “In Alaska you’re pretty much pro-gun. That about sums it up.”

Adam Winkler wonders if proposing an assault weapons ban was a mistake:

If President Obama had pushed for a law only requiring universal background checks—maybe coupled with the NRA’s proposal for more funding for school security—he might have been able to persuade Congress to consider his proposals in February, when Newtown was fresher in our collective memory. The four-month delay enabled the NRA to rally its troops—and, more importantly, its allies in Congress.

Weigel’s perspective:

Manchin-Toomey was “branded” about as well as any gun bill can be, endorsed by a man whose state handed Barack Obama a defeat in every county and a man who spent most of his life in politics trying to primary Republicans. The watered-down bill was only as watery as a background checks bill that narrowly failed in 1999, with more Republicans supporting it. Democrats had come to view the NRA as unsavory liars who had to be beaten on something legislatively, just as they were beaten at the polls in 2016, to shift back the center of debate. They failed.