By now it's clear that the Senate Finance Committee won't cough up a healthcare bill before the summer recess. As Nick Bauman points out in Mother Jones, the delay is sure to sap momentum for reform. Worse, the break will give healthcare reform's opponents more time to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Disinformation is already running wild.
Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent points to July 31 memo from House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) entitled "A Very Hot Summer," in which he announces that the GOP has launched an "entrepreneurial insurgency" against healthcare reform.
And now the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is openly celebrating the angry mobs of anti-reform protesters that are disrupting town hall meetings and shouting down pro-reform Democrats, as Eric Kleefeld of TPM DC notes. "Roaring Chants Interrupt Healthcare PR Campaign As Dems Lose Their Cool and Town Halls Turn Into 'Town Hells'," gloats one NRCC email message to reporters. This campaign's official logo depicts a donkey being roasted alive.
If the reformers used the NRCC's playbook, reporters would be deluged with retaliatory tweets claiming that teabaggers are killing babies and raping old women, but facts are stubborn things. As of press time, the Pulse is not aware of any ritual sacrifices by teabaggers at townhall meetings.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly warns that the GOP's strategy to egg on the wingnuts could have unintended consequences:
"It's probably the one angle the corporate interests and their lobbyists haven't considered: the unintended consequences of rallying confused right-wing activists to shout down policymakers who'll improve their health care coverage. Once you wind up the fanatics and point them in the direction of a town-hall meeting, you never really know what they're going to say, do, wear, or hold. In at least one case at the Doggett event, there really was a sign with Nazi "SS" lettering."
Top Obama adviser David Axelrod denounced groups like Conservatives for Patients Rights for stoking the protesters. Axelrod pledged to aggressively combat misinformation about the Obama administration's reform plan, as Rachel Slajda of TPM reports. Is it a coincidence that Axelrod was abruptly issued a Secret Service detail this week without explanation?
In the American Prospect, Paul Waldman describes how Republican members of Congress are promulgating the urban legend that the healthcare bill includes mandatory euthanasia:
"In some tellings, government bureaucrats will visit the elderly to force them to choose their manner of death. In another, their doctors will be required to "tell them how to end their life sooner" (this one is being popularized by Betsy McCaughey, as despicable a merchant of lies as has ever slithered through our public debate). One GOP member of Congress after another has simply dispensed with all the complexity and said that the Democratic health plan will cause seniors to be "put to death by their government" or some variation thereof."
The rumor grew out of a provision to reimburse doctors for end-of-life care, including discussions of living wills, as Waldman explains.
Speaking of misinformation, Rep. Kent Sorenson (R-Iowa) is tweeting nonsense about a shadowy healthcare commissioner who decide's everything for you, as Jason Hancock of the Iowa Independent reports. "Page 42 healthcare bill 'Health Choices Commissioner' will decide health benefits for you. You will have NO choice," Sorenson breathlessly informed his followers. In fact, according to an analysis by the Pullitzer Prize-winning website PoliFact, the healthcare commissioner would regulate insurance companies to make sure they don't exclude people for preexisting conditions.
At the rate misinformation is mutating, perhaps Republicans will have convinced themselves that the bill will create Health Care Commissar who will involuntarily euthanize you and make your grandmother have an abortion by tomorrow morning.
Congress will return from summer break on September 4. Expect heated rhetoric and increasingly frenzied political theater in the weeks ahead.
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The National Republican Congressional Committee, trailing its Democratic counterpart considerably in cash on hand, has secured an $8 million loan to spend on House races during the last few weeks of the campaign, according to sources.
The NRCC reported $14.4 million in cash on hand as of Aug. 31, compared to $54 million in the bank for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. As it did last cycle, the NRCC is procuring its loan from Wachovia Bank, sources confirmed.
Now, I guess this is legal because the loan will be paid with hard money donations later on. However, in the short term, this is effectively an $8 million donation to the NRCC from Wachovia at a time when Wachovia is supposedly in dire straits, about to be bought out by other banks, and will receive money from the government via the bailout. Does anyone see the attack ad in this move?
Campaigns and political parties that operate on hard money donations probably shouldn't be allowed to receive such large loans. I know that Democrats have done this in the past, too, so blame can be found on both sides. However, this still seems like a real violation of the spirit and purpose of campaign finance laws.
How bad is it for Republicans in 2008? So bad that John McCain looks like their best candidate for this cycle. The result is that big GOP donors are so far only willing to give to him because the prospects for winning back the Senate or House seem so small:
Yesterday, the DSCC released a list of 11 races being held in GOP-held seats, and the Democrats were nearly on par or ahead in every race, according to the most recent fundraising report. Question: Are we seeing the reverse '96 effect taking place inside the GOP? In 1996, the word went out that Dole was a lost cause, and all of the GOP's resources went to saving House and Senate candidates in order to preserve their control of Congress. This cycle, the chance of the GOP winning control of either the House or the Senate appears beyond remote. Does that mean many of the professional GOP-givers are gravitating toward sending money to causes that help McCain? It sure looks like it.
Despite this, the Obama campaign is still beating the McCain campaign in fundraising. But the chance to pile on the victories comes in the congressional races where Democrats are far ahead in fundraising. Let's take a deeper look at the most recently released numbers for the Senate and House campaign committees for the Republicans and Democrats on the flip.
Money tends to be a statement of priorities. And while the Democrats might look divided, the fundraising cycle is just horrible for the GOP. It's not just John McCain's poor numbers. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is in even worse shape than previously understood.
As the National Republican Congressional Committee last week released the first details of the accounting scandal involving former Treasurer Christopher Ward, the committee's top official also asserted for the first time that the debt left over from the 2006 elections was actually in the range of $19 million.
NRCC Chairman Tom Cole (Okla.) had previously said that the committee's debt from last cycle was about $16 million, even though the highest amount reported to the Federal Election Commission was $14.5 million.
That's outright fraud, which cuts at the trust large donors have in the committee. And frankly, this could be more widespread in the GOP than it appears, as Ward was the treasurer for multiple committees.
The commitments from participating organizations, who have banded together to "Take Back America" --
AFL-CIO - $50M program, targeting labor households, of course
Women's Voices Women's Vote Action Fund - $30M, targeting single women
National Council of La Raza - Democracia USA -- $4M - $6M
ACORN - $35M, targeting households in communities of color
Rock the Vote - $10M
Move On - $30M
The groups' effort will be supplemented by related PAC activity -- to the tune of $200M
And Change To Win - $100M
Todd Beeton explores this with this excellent post. I expect that McCain's favorables among union members - which right now are quite high - will decline as members hear from their union that McCain voted against overtime pay, against the minimum wage, and for the far right-wing economic agenda. The AFL-CIO and Change to Win budgets will see to that.
Rock the Vote and Women's Voices Women's Vote are both substantially ramped up. WVWV is a remarkable organization with a proven model tackling an immense civic challenge: the large number of unregistered single women. I would expect districts that have lots of them to shift their voter universe and makeup quite substantially, so any budding demographers that want to figure out where the single unregistered women are located will have a leg up in understand which districts and states will be better pickup opportunities. I don't yet understand Rock the Vote's strategy, but the youth space is exploding with innovation.
Moveon's budget is not substantially larger than it was in 2006, but they have become more effective at using their members for phone banking and GOTV. It's a pretty impressive set of outside actors, frankly, and one that has gotten better and better at working together over the last six years.
The blog post announcing the contest said the following:
For more details on the contest, check out Josh's killer YouTube video announcing the contest which already has been viewed more than 111K times on YouTube (viral much?)
After the judging panel views the videos, the top five videos will be hosted on NRCC.org and voted on by the general public.
Well, the deadline for the contest has passed, and it looks like every entrant will reach that final stage, since there are only five entries (viral, what?). Personally, as a member of the general public, I have already decided which of the five entries I will vote for: Cool Dudes on the Democratic Congress. In fact, with the general public voting, I'm pretty sure that this video will win easily, thus earning the $500 Apple Gift Card, a press release distributed to political news outlets across the country, and an on-camera interview to be aired and distributed on NRCC TV.
I'm not really sure why Republican activists have apparently no ability to engage in self-starting activism of this nature. I've floated some theories on this in the past, but this complete lack of creativity and self-directed content production stuns even me. Republicans are clearly facing a massive creativity gap at the grassroots level, one that cannot be easily explained away. In fact, the NRSC recently asked supporters to post videos saying what they were thankful for, and only got one response.
Truly and utterly pathetic. Republicans seem to have created an army of zombies that can't think for themselves. In the past, I have been reluctant to apply the term dittohead to the Republican rank and file, but their continuing failures to conduct any self-starting activism whatsoever is making the word more apt all the time.
Update: Certainly, there are examples of self-starting, grassroots, conservative activist creativity. However, I see virtually none on behalf of Republicans. If Ron Paul supporters, who have been banned from several Republican blogs, are the closest they can come, then that really says something.
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