As I have written before, Republicans have cause and effect backwards.
The reason for the rise in food stamps, unemployment benefits and other safety net programs is Americans got clobbered in 2008 with the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. They and their families have needed the help.
This isn’t an "entitlement society." Americans weren’t overly dependent before the slump and they won’t be dependent when jobs and income return. But America is still reeling from economic trauma.
If anything, America’s safety nets aren’t strong enough. That’s why the number and percentage of Americans in poverty has increased dramatically since 2009.
The real scandal – which no speaker in Tampa will mention – is only 40% of America’s unemployed qualify for unemployment benefits. That’s because most people who lost their jobs had been working part-time on several jobs before they were let go. Or they hadn’t been working long enough on a full-time job to qualify for unemployment insurance.
In addition, only a small fraction of the nation’s poor any longer qualify for welfare. The 1996 legislation that formally ended the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program provided just five years of aid in a person’s lifetime. But given how deep the recession has been and how long it’s continued, many of the nation’s poor have reached their lifetime limit.
Meanwhile, millions of unemployed Americans and their families have lost health insurance that had been provided by their employers. What’s the Republican answer? To repeal Obama’s Affordable Care Act, so 30 million Americans will lose health-insurance coverage.
The truth is America’s safety nets are in tatters exactly when a large portion of America still needs help. And apparently Republicans don’t care.
Medicare has fundamentally transformed the experience of aging in this country by providing a guarantee of health care.
[I]t was Democrats who conceived of Medicare, passed it into law and kept it viable all these years. It was Republicans who denounced the program as “socialized medicine” — and who now want to replace Medicare’s guarantee with a system of vouchers.
Republicans may tell themselves that the GOP is the party of Medicare. But I doubt seniors will be convinced.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: AUGUST 26, 8:03 PM ET
In 1964, George Romney, then the governor of Michigan, walked out of the Republican National Convention during Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech. He was protesting his party’s sharp turn rightward and its weak platform plank on civil rights.
This week, 48 years on, Mitt Romney is set to achieve what his father never could. But his great family triumph will not represent a vindication of his father’s principles. Mitt Romney reached the summit not by battling the GOP’s staunchest conservatives but by accommodating them. Nothing better captures the absolute victory of the forces of Goldwaterism than a Romney triumph on the basis of Goldwater’s ideas.
There will certainly be no speeches akin to the one offered by Nelson Rockefeller, the champion of liberal Republicanism. He was booed and hissed by the Goldwater legions who dominated the 1964 gathering.
Scorning the militants of a new right, Rockefeller pronounced their views “wholly alien to the sound and honest conservatism that has firmly based the Republican Party in the best of a century’s traditions, wholly alien to the sound and honest Republican liberalism that has kept the party abreast of human needs in a changing world, wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the mainstream of Republican principles.”
Liberalism cannot speak its name at a Republican convention anymore. And the contemporary figure closest to the liberal Republicanism of old may well be a man named Barack Obama.
Before long, there won’t be anyone alive who has left earth orbit, let alone reached or set foot on the moon, our closest neighbor. That is, unless the Chinese get their act together. We reached for the stars and decided it cost too much. We deserve to be stuck on this rock with each other.
Need we remind you that women have achieved greater success in the sports meritocracy than in the political democracy? Forty years after Title IX, women outnumbered men on the U.S. Olympic team and in the gold medals. Ninety-two years after the 19th Amendment, women occupy only 17 percent of the seats in Congress and have never made it to the White House.
[mjh: For some reason, the Journal cut out the following paragraphs. Read the whole column at the link.]
Now for his pal Rick Santorum. Our boy Rick lost the presidential battle but won the Battle of the Sexes Badge for a pink panic attack. At a bowling campaign event in Wisconsin, Rick stopped a boy from picking up a pink ball, saying "You’re not going to use that pink ball. … Not on camera. … Friends don’t let friends use pink balls." In the pink and blue world of boys and grrrls, he is already behind our 8-ball.
Ah yes, but what about virtual games-man-ship? The annual Booby Prize for Online Sports goes to video game coach Aris Bakhtanians, who trash-talked player Miranda Pakozdi in the "Cross Assault" video game tournament, quizzing her on camera about her bra size and telling her to take off her shirt. For video harassment, we promise to crash his private hard drive.
Now on to the Backward Trailblazer Award. We censure the Census Bureau for its retro view of kiddie care. When Mom does it, according to the bureau, it’s parenting. When Dad does it, it’s child care. For sticking to the old script, we give the number-crunchers an apron emblazoned: Dad is not a baby sitter! …
As for the Romneys, our gal Ann worked not only as a mom but, we now know, also as an anthropologist studying the life of a remote tribe for her hubby. Employer Mitt gets the Patriarch of the Year Award for whining that he does so understand women because Ann "reports to me" on what they think. To Mitt, a pill for tone-deafness.
Mitty has said on other occasions that he decided to run when Ann looked at him and asked, “Can you save this country?”
I despise this apocalyptic vision. DUHbya nearly destroyed the nation, but he didn’t. In four years, with Republicans opposing every move, Obama has “failed” to bring us back from 8 years of damnation. And if we don’t let Republicans do what they have already done, we’re DOOMED. When Mitt loses, then what? Aren’t we DOOMED? Don’t Republicans have to take to the street and spill blood to “save America”? It’s nauseating nonsense that invites lunatics to load their weapons. It’s irresponsible. And it shows no faith in democracy or America.
These folks do not play well with others. They need a long time-out. Vote Democratic in every race.
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — On the eve of their national party conventions, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are locked in a close race to amass the requisite 270 Electoral College votes for victory. And the contest is exactly where it was at the start of the long, volatile summer: focused on seven states that are up for grabs.
Neither candidate has a significant advantage in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire and Virginia, which offer a combined 85 electoral votes, according to an Associated Press analysis of public and private polls, spending on television advertising and numerous interviews with Republican and Democratic strategists in battleground states.
The analysis, which also took into account the strength of a candidate’s on-the-ground organization and travel schedules, found that if the election were held today, Obama would have 19 states and the District of Columbia, offering 247 votes, solidly in his column or leaning his way, while Republican Romney would have 24 states with 206 votes.
Obama won all seven of the too-close-to-call states in 2008, and they are where the race will primarily be contested in the homestretch to the Nov. 6 election. …
Both sides are working to persuade the 23 percent of registered voters who said in an Associated Press-GfK poll that they are either undecided about the presidential race or iffy in their support for a candidate.