Archive for the ‘Democrats’ Category
The Method to McCain’s Town Hall Madness
Feb20
By John Feehery
There is a method to John McCain’s madness. There must be.
McCain did a town hall meeting in his home state of Arizona on the issue of immigration. Town hall meetings, in the modern era, are fraught with peril for any politician. You get all of the crazy people at town hall meetings, all of the activists, the eccentrics, the people who have nothing better to do. You also get angry people. Lots of angry people.
We all know what happened when Democrats did town hall meetings on President Obama’s health care plan a couple of years ago. It was pure mayhem. People who showed up at those gatherings hated Obama, hated what he was doing on health care, and loved to bring their iPhones to capture their anger.
The town hall uprising on Obamacare almost side-tracked the legislation. The energy created by those town hall meetings helped Republicans take back the House in 2010.
The town hall meeting became so symbolic of conservative anger that is spawned a website called, Town Hall, where all the conservatives gather to vent online, quite often at Republican leaders.
McCain and his crack political team knows all of this. The Arizona Senator has been around the block a few times. He is pretty good in a town hall format. He is more than wiling to take on and debate people who disagree with him. I think he actually kind of enjoys it.
But doing a town hall and getting yelled at by constituents isn’t that much fun for any politician, no matter how thick-skinned.
And it isn’t like Arizonans suddenly loves their Mexican neighbors to the south streaming across the border. A certain sector of the Republican base is as virulently anti-immigrant as it was before the election. Unlike John McCain –who upon announcing his latest agreement in principle with Democrats on an immigration reform bill, said that Republicans had to do something because they were getting killed with the Hispanic vote — this disgruntled group of conservative voters don’t give a rat’s ass about the political prospects of the Republican Party. They only care about their personal safety and what they hate is the fact that so many Mexicans have made their way to Arizona (by the way, Mexicans have been making their way to Arizona for about 500 years).
McCain knows all of this, but he invited the cameras in and had his town hall meeting and the crazies came out to play.
For the former GOP standard bearer, this particular town hall served several purposes.
- First, it reminded the Washington intelligensia how hard it is for Republicans to push for comprehensive immigration reform. This is hard work folks and Republicans can only give so much before their political base deserts them.
- Second, McCain gets credit from his colleagues for showing leadership on the issue. He is not ducking his constituents. He is taking them head-on.
- Third, McCain should get credit from his constituents. He is making his case directly to them. He is selling something that many in his party don’t really want to buy. But he isn’t staying in Washington. He is engaging.
- Fourth, McCain wanted to teach the President a few things about the Republican base. The President might think that when McCain and Rubio are bargaining, that they don’t really understand their own voters. In fact, Obama does this to Boehner all of the time. But McCain can now give the President proof about how upset this makes his voters, and in the process, he might get a few more concessions out of him.
John McCain has been through more than a few of these battles. That town hall blowup was no accident.
Learning From Obama
Jan21
By John Feehery
The President’s second inaugural brilliantly pushed forward his political agenda in ways that Republicans need to understand and learn from.
Republicans will never be able to outbid the President when it comes to coalition politics. But they need to appreciate how coalition politics, as practiced by the Democrats in the Obama era, is played and they need to come up with a game plan to counter it.
The President’s message was aspirational for the country, inspirational for his coalition partners and infuriating for his opposition. He was able to make the cause of his diverse coalition – gays, immigrants, anti-gun people, African-Americans, Hispanics, poor people – seemingly the most important cause of the nation. And he dared the Republicans to oppose it.
He skillfully weaved the story of America into the story of these coalition partners, ignoring the arguments from the other side, and posited in unsubtle terms that to oppose his agenda was essentially un-patriotic.
Most importantly, the President set out a road-map to complete the mission. His message was sharply positive, and he promised to give his partners something, not take something away from the people who elected him.
Republicans keep promising the American people, and these same coalition partners, that they are going to take things away, all in the name of fiscal restraint. Republicans used to argue for growing the pie, in the name of economic growth. Now, they argue that everything is too expensive and that benefits must be cut. They are like the teetotalers who show up a Keg party and tell everybody that drinking beer is bad for you.
Mitt Romney’s campaign, for example promised to stop a tax break for wind energy in Iowa. That may have given Mitt some fiscal credibility, but it also lost him Iowa.
Republicans don’t do coalition politics very well, which could probably explain why they don’t have a very big coalition any more. But instead of outbidding Obama, they could try to talk about the universal benefits of their policies, tailored more specifically to each group.
But first, they have to stop hating people. They have to stop hating gay people, Hispanic people, black people, single females, thesbians, etc. and they have to condemn their so-called allies who go out of their way to offend them.
They have to then start talking about economic growth. And they can’t talk about economic growth only with their big donors or in their districts. They have to talk about economic growth in the big cities, in areas beset by poverty, for immigrants, for Hispanics, for Asians, for blacks.
They need to ditch their anti-government message and develop an economic growth message. They need to come up with politics where government can be transformed to help spur growth. Getting rid of all government won’t work. Making government work better will work.
They need to get onto a personal security message. They need to think critically about how to change the war on drugs into a war on addiction. They need to think less about throwing people into jail after a crime is committed and more about making sure the crime isn’t committed in the first place. This message will work especially well in high crime areas.
Republicans need a political reform message. They have got their heads handed to them on voter fraud in the last election. That was seen as an effort to suppress the vote, a bad message for a party that has inherited a good portion of the Dixiecrat coalition. Clean elections should include campaign finance reform, earmark reform and over-all making sure that more people who want to vote, can vote. We should be pushing for a bigger political pie because we want more voters, not fewer voters, to vote for us. We should drop cynicism as a political strategy. If Republicans promise and then deliver cleaner, more honest elections, they will be promising the voters something they actually want.
Republicans also need to expand the pro-family message that the party thinks it has a lock on. A two-parent family usually does better than a single-parent family, for obvious reasons. Twice the resources (quite often), twice the parental involvement, twice the efficiency in spending. But Republicans don’t need to get all preachy about it. And a pro-family message doesn’t have to be anti-gay. While marriage is important and I am big supporter of it, successful families don’t necessarily include marriage. It can include the extended family that comes from many immigrant communities. Republicans should be all for keeping these family together with common sense immigration policies. The important things that come from a family are love, stability, teamwork, and the creation of good habits for the kids, which helps makes them better citizens for all of us. The world is a complex place and it is changing rapidly. The GOP shouldn’t be stuck pining for the past. They should be promoting policies that make it easier for families (in all of their forms) to thrive in the future.
America wants a positive message from its political leaders. It also wants to know what the politicians are going to do for them, not to them. A e can trump Obama’s brand of goodies for every separate group. But first the GOP has to try it.
