MAGA Republican extremism on display
Earlier this year, we noted that President Joe Biden had started using the term “MAGA Republicans” to describe his political opponents, especially the ones who are “threatening our freedoms, by attempting to cut Social Security,” threatening women’s healthcare decisions (i.e. banning abortion), banning books in schools, etc. Now, months later, President Biden, his 2024 reelection campaign team, his White House staff and other Democrats are continuing this use of “MAGA Republicans.” We think doing so is effective.
Essentially, there are two related advantages in using the term “MAGA Republicans.” First, it’s a way of saying, “look, there are plenty of reasonable Republicans with whom I can work, but there’s an extreme wing of the Republican Party that is causing problems.” And in fact, President Biden has worked with Republicans to pass major legislation, including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, the Safer Communities Act of 2022 (which provides mental health assistance to reduce gun violence), the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, and others, all with Republican votes (and some of which the Biden Administration even terms “Bipartisan” when referring to these laws).
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2024 Election, abortion, bipartisan, Democrats, Disney, Donald Trump, GOP, gun safety, healthcare, infrastructure, LBGTQ, legislation, MAGA, Mickey Mouse, Mitt Romney, President Joe Biden, Republicans, Ron DeSantis, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate
Latest attack on Dr. Oz
In the 2012 presidential election, Republican nominee Willard Mitt Romney inadvertently and repeatedly identified himself as Mr. Elitist/Moneybags/1%, and his Democratic opponent, President Barack Obama, quickly took advantage of the theme. The Obama campaign thus followed our Messaging Maxim #4: Feed the Narrative. Indeed, Romney fed this narrative himself, for example, by talking about his dressage horse Rafalca, revealing that his family travels by car with their dog strapped to the roof, and his infamous “WaWa’s” moment, where, getting the name wrong, Romney claimed to buy “hoagies” at gas station convenience stores. Needless to say, President Obama defeated Romney in a landslide.
Now, 10 years later, TV personality Dr. Mehmet Oz is committing many of these same elitist reveals as the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. Here is a handy chart showing how Dr. Oz is the new Mitt Romney:
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2012 election, 2022 midterm elections, Chuck Schumer, Democrats, Donald Trump, Dr. Oz, John Fetterman, Mitt Romney, Pennsylvania, President Barack Obama, Republicans, Twitter, U.S. Senate
Democrats getting things done while Republicans do each other in
Right now, there is a massive split between what is going on in the Democratic Party versus the Republican Party.
The Democrats, led by President Joe Biden, have had a tremendous 100 days. First and foremost, Biden has succeeded in getting over 200 million COVID vaccinations into Americans’ arms (double his original stated goal), and taking steps to beat the pandemic using real science and competence. Next, Biden pushed through and signed the American Rescue Plan, including stimulus checks for millions of Americans, all while rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate change and undoing many of Trump’s damaging executive orders. Biden is now being compared to progressive activist President Franklin Roosevelt, who also had a very successful first 100 days (as well as being re-elected president three more times).
Meanwhile, as if to quash another Republican myth, the U.S. stock market has had the best performance during a president’s first 100 days since the beginning of John F. Kennedy‘s presidency in 1961. Biden’s popularity is substantially high (and way higher than Trump’s), especially given our polarized politics today. Biden and Congressional Democrats have also continued on offense with a positive policy agenda that includes rebuilding America’s infrastructure, creating jobs, battling climate change, support for American families, and more. While they may not get all of it passed in its current proposed form (after all, Washington is about compromise and the art of the possible), they are poised to pass a great deal more.
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2020 Election, American Families Plan, American Jobs Plan, American Rescue Plan, climate change, Coronavirus, COVID, COVID-19, Democrats, Donald Trump, Franklin Roosevelt, January 6, John F. Kennedy, Kevin McCarthy, Liz Cheney, Matt Gaetz, Meghan McCain, Mitt Romney, Paris Agreement, President Joe Biden, Republicans, Rudy Giuliani, Russia, U.S. Capitol insurrection, U.S. House, U.S. Senate, Utah, vaccination, vaccine
The reality that is splitting Republicans apart
After the tumultuous events of last week, including Donald Trump‘s Mafia phone call to Georgia‘s Secretary of State to try to overturn their 2020 presidential election results, the shocking Democratic U.S. Senate runoff election sweeps in Georgia, the certification in the Congress of the Electoral College victory by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and the deadly right wing terrorist invasion of the U.S. Capitol that temporarily halted such certification, many Republican politicians quickly had to make a choice: is their future political career or legacy safer siding with or against Trump? In other words, do these Republicans follow Donald Trump down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, rejecting and trying to overturn state-certified elections, and even inciting terrorism and sedition against the United States? Or do Republican politicians retain a basic belief in reality, government institutions, the 2020 election results, and democracy itself? Here’s where some of these Republicans have lined up in recent days:
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2020 Elections, 2022 elections, 2024 elections, Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump, Georgia, Josh Hawley, Kevin McCarthy, Lisa Murkowski, Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Republicans, Ted Cruz, U.S. Capitol
Black Lives Matter protesters, at odds with Donald Trump
In 2012, President Barack Obama and his reelection campaign team did something very smart: they came out early and defined Obama’s opponent, Willard Mitt Romney, in a very unflattering way before Romney could define himself to the voters. Specifically, the Obama campaign defined Romney as an out-of-touch elitist, Mr. One Percent, with his offshore bank accounts and his dressage horse. This reinforced an existing narrative about Romney, one that Romney himself fed with his “47 percent” video, ultimately leading to Romney’s defeat.
This year, Joe Biden‘s campaign is taking a similar approach towards Donald Trump. Biden smartly has been running a general election-style campaign against Trump from day one. This was a risky strategy, since Biden had to battle some 24 challengers for the Democratic Party presidential nomination before he could run against Trump as the nominee. However, the strategy worked, and Biden is now the official Democratic nominee, something that would have happened sooner if not for primaries that were delayed due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19).
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2020 Democratic primaries, 2020 Elections, Barack Obama, Black Lives Matter, Brad Parscale, Buffalo, Coronavirus, COVID, COVID-19, Democrats, Donald Trump, Facebook, George Floyd, Joe Biden, Meidas Touch, Mitt Romney, Republicans, social media, The Lincoln Project, Twitter, YouTube
Virginia Beach voting sticker
Yesterday, Republicans suffered stunning election losses in Kentucky and Virginia. In Kentucky, Democratic state Attorney General Andy Beshear defeated incumbent Republican Governor Matt Bevin to become the new Governor-elect (Bevin thus far has refused to concede the election). Bevin’s defeat is a major embarrassment for Donald Trump, who, on Monday night, held a rally in Kentucky’s second-largest city, Lexington, and pleaded with the audience to prevent a Democratic win in the state, saying, “You can’t let that happen to me!”
In Virginia, Democrats won the majority in the State House of Delegates and the State Senate, to go along with their Democratic Governor. This marks the first time in 26 years that Virginia has had a unified Democratic state government, which may well be a continuation of the “Blue Wave” that swept Democrats into the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections. One of the issues for Virginia voters yesterday was gun violence, after 12 people were killed in a mass shooting in Virginia Beach last May. Republican lawmakers in Virginia, as well as nationally, have dragged their feet on or even blocked taking common-sense steps proposed by Democrats to reduce gun violence. The voters may have signaled that they have had enough.
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2018 Elections, 2020 Elections, Blue Wave, Congress, David Jolly, Democrats, Donald Trump, gun control, guns, Kentucky, Lindsey Graham, mass shooting, Mitt Romney, Republicans, Susan Collins, U.S. House, U.S. Senate, Virginia, Virginia Beach
Election Day is this Tuesday, November 6
In this year’s midterm elections, there is a life-and-death issue on the ballot. No, it’s not the “caravan,” despite what Republicans and some in the media might have you believe. The life-and-death issue that we’re voting on this Tuesday (or before, if you have early voting) is healthcare.
In particular, the Affordable Care Act and its preexisting conditions coverage is on the line. There’s a lot of confusion about the ACA and preexisting conditions, but the reality is pretty simple: the 2010 ACA, based on the conservative Heritage Foundation plan and implemented first by Republican Governor Willard Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, is essentially a grand trade-off: Americans got a number of healthcare protections, including coverage of preexisting conditions at non-discriminatory prices, coverage of a comprehensive list of “essential health benefits” (meaning no more junk plans that were cheap but didn’t cover anything), removal of lifetime coverage caps, free annual preventive exams and the ability of young people to remain on their parents’ plans until age 26. In return, since all these protections cost the insurance companies a lot more, the companies got a guarantee of millions more customers, many of them younger people with few or no healthcare claims, via mandatory enrollment. It’s a delicate balance, and those protections can’t be provided under the current system without those extra paying customers.
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Presumably a pro-tax protester, 2010
Why hasn’t Bernie Sanders released his tax returns for prior years? That’s the question an increasing number of people are asking. First, Sanders answered, “My wife does our tax returns. We have been a little busy lately.” Then, Sanders falsely claimed that “Of course, we have released them in the past.” On Monday, Bernie’s wife Jane gave an interview with Mark Halperin of Bloomberg TV‘s “With All Due Respect” that was beyond embarrassing on the Sanders’ taxes issue. Jane Sanders said, in response to various questions by Halperin: “I have to go back and find them,” “We haven’t been home for a month,” “When they’re due, I would expect them to come out,” “They’ve [the Clintons] been in office all these years, they have done it,” etc. In reaction to all of these delays and excuses by the Sanders, folks are starting to say the following things:
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Ted Cruz, clowniest passenger in the GOP Clown Car?
In the 2012 Presidential primaries, the Republican Clown Car had a crackup. The GOP candidates fell all over each other to kowtow to the narrow, extreme Republican primary base (comprised, for example, in Iowa, of 60 percent Evangelical Christians). Michele Bachmann said that the HPV vaccine causes “mental retardation,” and Herman Cain mocked the very idea of having foreign policy knowledge. Then came Willard Mitt Romney‘s disastrous “Etch-A-Sketch” moment, in which Romney’s Communications Director dumbly asserted that, after lurching to the right in the primaries, Romney could simply “hit a reset button” for the general election, “like an Etch-A-Sketch,” as if no one would hold Romney accountable for the positions he was taking and as if the giant Memory Machine known as the Internet didn’t exist. Romney’s Etch-A-Sketch moment perfectly summed up the Republican Party’s 2012 problem. Romney’s Republican rivals such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum pounced on the Etch-A-Sketch statement as proof that Romney could not be trusted by the GOPs conservative base. Romney ended up being trusted by no part of the electorate. Fast forward to the present day, and it appears that the GOP is poised to repeat these same mistakes of 2012.
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2012 election, 2016 election, Barack Obama, climate change, Etch-A-Sketch, gay marriage, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Republican Party, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz, Texas
