Political Irony

Obama believes that not only was 2015 a good year, but 2016 will be even better:

And it looks like Obama has reason to be happy. According to Real Clear Politics, Obama has broken the “second term curse”.

What’s the “second term curse”? When a president is reelected, they often have problems midway through their second term. Nixon was forced out of office. Reagan had the Iran-contra scandal. Clinton was impeached. And Dubya had a double: Hurricane Katrina and a quagmire in Iraq.

But Obama has so far avoided any scandal like his two-term predicessors, and with one year left to go has already racked up a number of wins. Most recently a budget deal with the Republicans, but before that leading the push for climate change accords, the nuclear deal with Iran, normalizing relations with Cuba, huge wins for gay rights, stopping federal raids on medical marijuana users, and rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline (which especially didn’t make sense with the current low oil prices).

There is also good news that (despite the best efforts of the GOP to sabotage the economy, like with government shutdowns and tax cuts for the wealthy) the economy has finally recovered from the Great Recession. The median annual household income has just surpassed levels it was at before the recession started in December 2007.

I can’t wait to see what he accomplishes in the new year.

UPDATE: Yet another win, at least according to Jeb Bush. Bush is attempting a twofer, blaming the rise of Donald Trump on Obama, saying on NPR:

He would not exist were it not for Barack Obama. He is the [antidote] in some people’s minds to the politically correct, divisive policies of Barack Obama.

I guess he has a point. If Obama weren’t president, the GOP would not have had anyone to blame everything on, spewing hatred and lies for so long that their base doesn’t seem to be able to recognize the truth anymore. Which opened the door for Trump. Thanks Obama!

Eugene Robinson has an interesting opinion piece in WaPo titled “How Donald Trump destroyed the Republican Party in 2015”, as if it is a fait accompli. He does soften that, saying “An entity called the GOP will survive — but can never be the same.”

His point is that Trump has exploited the resentments and fears that have been so carefully cultivated and used by the Republican establishment to keep the base in line. However, the GOP action has never matched their rhetoric. Not on immigration, on abortion, on gay marriage, on terrorism, even on whether Obama was born on American soil. As Robinson puts it “Trump has given voice to the ugliness and anger that the party spent years encouraging and exploiting. He let the cat out of the bag, and it’s hungry.”

Bottom line? One of two things will happen:

The party might nominate Trump, in which case the establishment will have lost all control. Or party leaders might somehow find a way to defeat him, in which case they will have lost the allegiance of much of the base. In either event, the GOP we once knew is irredeemably a thing of the past.

Republicans keep trying to create a conservative utopia, with predictable results. First there was Kansas, where Sam Brownback showed us how to cut taxes and destroy the social safety net, and when that failed, they doubled down with even more tax cuts (for the rich) and spending cuts, with disastrous results.

But did they learn? No, then presidential hopefuls Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal just had to try the same thing in their states of Wisconsin, and Louisiana.

Wisconsin famously destroyed their public unions, but they also refused to expand Medicare and Medicaid, turned down money to build a high-speed rail system, and tried to recruit new businesses. But the result was that Wisconsin now ranks dead last in new business start-up activity.

Louisiana also tried severe austerity, but when their state university fell into the equivalent of bankruptcy and the economy got worse, Jindal became so unpopular even his own state didn’t support him for president.

What’s really embarrassing about these examples is that we have plenty of example of the opposite strategy working just fine. After the Democrats took over California from the Republicans, the economy boomed. While Wisconsin’s economy was sinking, next door in Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton raised taxes, raised the state minimum wage, passed a law guaranteeing equal pay for women, and made education a priority by pumping one third of the budget surplus into public schools. You know, all the things that Republicans say will kill jobs. But instead Minnesota’s economic growth is one of the highest in the US, and Forbes ranked Minnesota the 9th best state for business.

Note that we don’t have to compare one state to another for examples. In Minnesota itself, the previous governor was another (forgotten) presidential hopeful, Tim Pawlenty. Pawlenty called himself Minnesota’s first true fiscal conservative in modern history and prided himself on never raising taxes. But he left the state with a $6.2 billion deficit and only created 6,200 jobs in his eight years as governor (compared to 172,000 jobs created by Dayton in four years.)

Strike two. But apparently the GOP never learns. This just in, the state of Kentucky recently elected Matt Bevin as governor, and he immediately stripped voting rights from 140,000 people and lowered the minimum wage for government workers.

You may remember that Kentucky is the home state of Kim Davis, who refused to do her job and grant marriage licenses to gay couples. Well, Bevin used his new executive power to give Davis an out. As a side note, Bevin also said that he believes making same-sex marriage legal could lead to parents marrying their children.

I’ll be watching Kentucky, to see how it does. But it appears that the GOP is still testing the definition of insanity.

FactCheck.org, for the first time ever, has named a “King of Whoppers“. As they put it, “In the 12 years of FactCheck.org’s existence, we’ve never seen his match.” And that’s saying alot, as this has been a “banner year for political whoppers.”

You can probably guess the Master of Mendacity, it’s Donald Trump.

Not only is he the ultimate at untruths, he is unparalleled at doubling down on his deception, like “when he claimed to have seen nonexistent television coverage of “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 — and then topped himself by demanding that fact-checkers apologize for exposing his claim as fantasy.”

The have a (long) list of his whoppers. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that he is just warming up.

Not only that, but Trump has appeared on Fox News more than twice as much as any other candidate.