For weeks the constant refrain of the GOP has been the absolute imperative to defund the Affordable Care Act. That was their sole rationale for shutting down the government and their opposition to lifting the debt ceiling.
Their lily-white base appaluded their antics to shut down the government over Obamacare. In the minds of many crusty old Republican voters, "Federal worker" is synonymous with African-Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, people undeserving of the privileges they enjoy in their bureaucratic D.C. cubicles. Why, most of them probably have a trunk full of food stamps awaiting them as they trundle home in various forms of publically subsidized transportation. The shutdown gave them something to really be lazy about. No damn government-run health care for them, by God. We're the Tea Party and you're going to learn your place, boy (chuckle, chuckle).
No more. Suddenly defunding Obamacare has completely vanished from the Republican Party's "to-do" list. Instead, in the space of a single news cycle, they're back to gutting Social Security and Medicare.
From today's Post:
Under the new proposal, the House would vote as soon as Friday evening on a plan to raise the debt limit through Nov. 20 — the week before Thanksgiving — to create space for talks over broader budget issues. Republicans have also offered to reopen the government as soon as next week in a bill that would replace some of the deep budget cuts known as the sequester with cuts to entitlement programs, including Medicare, according to people familiar with the proposal who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Wait--what? Brian Beutler of
Salon makes an
excellent observation:
Earlier this year, when the [Republican] party reached a crossroads between becoming a more ethnically inclusive, moderate party, and doubling down on its whites-only strategy, it chose the latter. This shutdown fight, intentionally or otherwise stands to rupture the white-white coalition.
Remember their pained soul-searching after the 2012 elections when Hispanic turnout for Obama exceeded 70%? Remember those African-American precincts in Philadelphia where Mitt Romney failed to garner a single vote?
That was supposed to have been a wake-up call for the GOP to at least pretend to embrace some kind of ethnic diversity in the name of the Party's survival, if for nothing else. But after a few half-hearted efforts and quickly forgotten op-eds, "cooler heads" prevailed and the strategy was quickly abandoned:
Today these prescriptions lie in tatters. The GOP has instead reprised the “monochromatic insularity” blueprint that served it so well in 2012. It’s a strategy that might pay off in a midterm. But to have the faintest hope of winning a national election, a party of white people for white people must truly serve the interests of white people.
So it made perfect sense to attack the Affordable Care Act--after all, wasn't that just another big government handout?
Their continued crusade against Obamacare was part of the same pattern. The law remains unpopular, but it’s especially unpopular among white people. Its greatest bases of support are in minority communities. That made it an especially appealing target.
The problem was there was no way to hit that target. The Affordable Care Act was the law of the land, approved by the Supreme Court. And Obama was never going to give it up. Why should he?
So now, what to do? The GOP, stymied in its efforts to repeal or defund the hated Obamacare, and plunging in the polls (please check out the beautiful GOP favorability/unfavorability charts in Beutler's piece, linked above), is now, wittingly or not, training its sights on the one demographic it cannot afford to lose: old white people:
Instead, Republican leaders want to phase out the fight by changing the terms and terrain. And their new targets are — wait for it — Medicare and Social Security.
What could they possibly be thinking, you ask? Apparently
they're not thinking too much at all:
This is not the battle you want to pick if your electoral imperatives require you to pander to white voters. Maybe in the days ahead, once the government is reopened and the risk of immediate default has passed, Republicans will walk away from the past month’s events and pretend they never happened. The Obamacare defunders chastened. The establishment just grateful to have the latest embarrassment behind them.
If that’s the plan, they could spend the next year or three repairing the damage. But they’ve made it very hard to extract themselves from this cycle of brinkmanship. And if the only way for them to end it is to spearhead a campaign to swap sequestration with cuts to so-called entitlements, while Obamacare finds its sea legs, they’ll lose the activists, the marginally attached, and everyone in between.
And that is exactly what they're doing. After alienating the rest of the Electorate, they're going after Grandma and Grandpa Whitey, the last demographic willing to pull the lever for them.
We'll see how that goes.