(UPDATED) Medicare Death Panel Claims Its First Victim. Could Republican House Bigs Be Next?
While Paul Ryan’s radical deficit-reduction plan has predictably died in its crib, the Republican Party’s mission to destroy Medicare has not been forgotten by voters, who claimed their first but not last electoral victim of the year: State Assemblywoman Jane Corwin, who was expected to cakewalk to victory in a special election in New York state’s 26th District, a Buffalo area seat that the GOP has owned since we were kicking Richard Nixon around.
The special election was called after Republican Congressman Christopher Lee, a family values scold, was outted when a website published a beefcake photo of him topless that he had sent to a prospective chippie on CraigsList. He lied about his marital status and his job, and soon had joined the ranks of America’s unemployed.
Corwin was the beneficiary of millions of dollars from Republican groups, as well as a visit from no less an eminence than House Speaker John Boehner. But between her insistence in clinging to the Kill Medicare line until it was too late, her ridiculous attempts to position herself to the left of Democrat Kathy Hochul, and the entry of Democrat-turned-Tea Partier Jack Davis into the race, it became Hochul’s to lose.
Not even resorting to that old Republican reliable — mudslinging — worked for Corwin.
She endorsed a series of attack ads, including several against Davis. One included a much-publicized video that Corwin operatives said showed Davis assaulting a young Republican volunteer who was tracking him with a camera, but the attack backfired when it was disclosed that the volunteer was Corwin’s chief of staff.
And so when the sun came up this morning in NY-26, it was Hochul and not Corwin who had gotten her ticket punched for Congress, winning a seat by six points that, according to pollmeister Nate Silver, would ordinarily be won by Republicans by about 12 points.
Huge, and hugely embarrassing for a party that a mere six months ago seemed ascendant.
Lock-step House Republican support for utter foolishness is a known commodity, with electoral suicide coming in a close second. But with the hindsight of a mere six weeks, how to explain why 235 of the party’s 239 member caucus believed that tax cuts for the rich and bread and water for the middle class was a smart political move?
The over-weaning hubris of Ryan, Boehner and Eric Cantor, as well as an unwitting assist from a mainstream media and punditocracy that in its usual spectacularly superficial way anointed the plan as “serious” without bothering to understand its underlying ideological evil. That’s why.
Jack Kemp, Bob Dole’s vice presidential running mate in 1996, represented NY-26 in the 1970s and 80s, and even then he was a moderate among conservatives. Today 66 percent of district voters identify themselves as moderate to very conservative, yet President Obama is more popular than Boehner, according to two polls, and voters by a substantial margin say Republicans are doing a worse job in the House than Democrats.
Un-fricking-believable.
Conventional political wisdom has it that there is a danger in reading too much into special elections, in this case an election that was 18 months before the next national election.
Excuse me, but pundits said the same thing about the November 2009 special election to the north of NY-26 in Republican-heavy and even more conservative NY-23, which was widely viewed as a referendum on President Obama’s popularity one year on.
The outcome there was the same, although with an election eve twist: Democrat Bill Owens came out of nowhere to defeat favored Conservative Party candidate and attack dog Doug Hoffman after Republican Dede Scozzafava dropped out and threw her support to Owens.
And so based on NY-26 and NY-23, let’s stick a big asterisk on the conventional wisdom about special elections. Yes, they usually are outliers, but when they are held during times of dramatic political and social upheaval — the election of Barack Obama and then the emergence two years later of the ultra-conservative Tea Party — then special elections can mean a lot.
NY-26, like NY-23, is being called a national bellwether, and the ringing in the ears of vulnerable Republicans will only grow louder. As will calls for the ouster of a House leadership that spent too much time preening and too little time on Main Street.
Also on tap: A symbolic vote on the Ryan plan in the Senate that is sure to be defeated, but will be a test of Republican will in the wake of an upstate New York wake-up call.
34 Responses to “(UPDATED) Medicare Death Panel Claims Its First Victim. Could Republican House Bigs Be Next?”
It sometimes amazes me just how stupid the Republicans are. House majority leader Eric Cantor said he thinks Paul Ryan should run for President.
And all the while others are trying to decide whether they like Gingrich, Bachmann or Palin the best.
It’s both entertaining and a very positive plus as far as my life… my world-view… and my hopes and dreams for my grandchildren go.
A better chance is being created so that their children will still be able to ask their own Questions.
The middle class whites in the U.S. should face the prospect that there is no place in the U.S. for themselves or their families. The Democrats are sending a very clear message that the only thing that is going to happen in the future is more spending, more taxes, more government, and less freedom.
The left has decided that the best thing that the U.S. can do is drive spending much higher while letting entitlement spending crowd out everything else.
Anyone who is thinking about starting a new business, expanding an existing business, or even planning on saving for the future has to look at doing it someplace other than the U.S.
The Democrats has now clearly stated that they have zero interest in preventing entitlement spending from destroying the U.S. and thus, the white middle class who work face the prospect of becoming tax slaves to the welfare state or becoming economic refuges.
Two issues were really the decider’s here…the TP candidate and killing Medicare. We had two electable candidates, so it isn’t like some crazy Rep just lost the election. BUT, there was a crazy TP candidate that made a big difference. It doesn’t matter that the man was Dem turned TP. It doesn’t matter that the guy had no chance at winning…what matters is that the brain-dead FoxNews version of the TP voted for the guy. I think Fox is really going to regret creating this monster. Now anyone can claim TP and pull in a chunk of voters…away from Rep candidates.
Obviously, no mentally stable senior citizen is going to vote for a candidate that wants to kill Medicare….that is unless they are already wealthy and would rather have the tax cuts than Medicare.
I haven’t seen poll numbers, but I’d like to know how the 60+ Rep crowd voted. I could be wrong, but I would think they didn’t show up like they normally would for Reps…either by not voting at all or voting Dem.
ShannonLee,
Are you putting the elderly into the same category as blacks and Hispanics in that they will vote for the high tax, high spending, big government candidate just as long as they get their share of the goodies?
Why would anyone less than 50 want to live in a country where they will spend most of their working hours working for the government to pay people who paid very little in taxes but want massive entitlements. Can any country survive very long in such an economic situation?
superdestroyer:
You’ve been warned repeatedly: Keep your race-baiting screed to yourself.
ShannonLeeee:
Yes, the TP candidate made a difference, but Nate Silver figures that without him Corwin would have won by a mere percentage point in a district where Republicans routinely win by about 12 percentage points.
A couple of other observations:
* I held back from opining, as others are this morning, that NY-26 could result in the loss of 10 or more Republican House seats. It is way too early to make such projections and the Democrats remain extremely vulnerable.
* It is unfortunate that polling in House races, even this one, doesn’t go very deep, but I’m going to suggest that the Osama bin Laden take down provided something of a halo effect for Hochul. That is to say that Obama’s spectacular success in bringing some closure on the 9/11 attacks, two of which occurred across state, was in the back of more than a few Republican minds when they pulled the level for the Democrat.
SD, health care isn’t a goodie. Medicare is something they paid into and have been promises. Our current generation of senior citizens helped create the nation we have today. They worked hard and paid their taxes. Personally, I think our country is surviving on the reputation they built.
Reps want to take away something that is rightfully theirs…it is no wonder they might vote as a homogeneous block on the issue.
Shaun…I didn’t think much about the OBL angle. I’m not sure if that kind of issue really does much at the local level, but you could be right. It could have made voting Dem a little more palatable for people that have voted Rep their entire life.
Pleas make a list of countries in which it is easier to start a business, and in which there is less regulation than there is in the US…
ShannonLeee,
The elderly set up a system that was and is unsustainable and then refused to pay for it. That is why the publicly held national debt is approaching 10 trillion dollars. Just like GM and Ford set up unsustainable pension and benefit packages, just like cities across the U.S. set up unsustainable public sector pension programs, the federal government set up an unsustainable entitlement for the elderly.
So the Democrats proposal is to ensure that the elderly have to pay no cost for such an unsustainable system while sticking younger generations with more taxes, higher unemployment, lower pay (especially for future healthcare workers), and a lower standard of living.
DQ,
California has not create any net private sector jobs in over a decade because California is a one party state that is openly hostile to business, the private sector, and middle class whites. (and Shaun, the number of whites in California has been doing down for 20 years, I hope quoting a fact from the census bureau is not considered racist by progressives).
The real question is why do so many progressives want to make the rest of the country like California?
superdestroyer:
No, the question is why you insist on hijacking threads to push your own agenda. Stick to the topic of the post or shove off.
Shaun,
Since the progressives and Democrats refuse to cut spendng or planning for demographic changes, how high should taxes do and what is the maximum percentage of the GDP that the government should be able to consume.
You seem to be arguing that a tax rate above 50% will have no effect of the economy and will cause no behaviorial changes in the U.S. You seem to be arguing that people will continue to take financial risks and start new business while knowing that the government will consume a larger portion of the income generated.
Maybe you should look back at the 1970′s and remember what high tax rates and high entitlement spending gets the U.S.
Which is why Hollywood and Silicon Valley are in California, only the two biggest net exporting sectors of the US Economy…
BTW I said Country, I did not say State…
Cause they are tired of ignorant racist … such as yourself…
PS A century or so ago, The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Eastern Europeans were not considered “White”, today they are the backbone of the “White” middle class…
ok, SD and all, keep it clean and play nice.
Latina Archangel (we dont call ourselves Hispanic; that’s a made up government term)/ dr.e
http://www.slate.com/BLOGS/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/05/25/ny-26-jack-davis-and-the-spoiler-effect.aspx
Actually this wasnt about the third party candidate, the GOP would have lost anyway.
Now that both the Democrats and Republicans have been rebuked by voters in the last couple of years, maybe they will get the message extreme views on either side are unwelcome. But I doubt it.
DaGoat:
Correcto mundo. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is demanding that emergency relief aid for Joplin, Missouri, tornado victims be conditional on a ransom: Off-setting funding cuts.
Shaun, while I sympathize with Cantor’s interest in controlling spending, the guy has no idea how to choose his battles. It looks like they found some offsets and approved the emergency funds to Joplin, but the fact that the GOP was willing to fall on their swords and risk criticism over something like Joplin shows how politically tone deaf they are right now.
I must Ditto DaGoats points.
What we have just witnessed is the complete incompetence of the Republican party promoting new and justifiable changes in social programs that will happen, one way or the other. Ryan came out with a proposal that had little substance and information other than “Medicare is going broke, we need changes, trust me on that.”
Well Ryan is a politician and few people “trust” politicians. Democrats decended on this proposal, developed an ad showing grandma being pushed over the side of the mountain and demonized the proposal faster than flies decending on poop.
Please hope that Republicans come to realize that Americans are smart enough to understand data and information. They need to begin providing that specific data to build support for social program reforms. Unless they begin sharing that information with Americans daily, Democrats will continue to get the upper hand.
They can also use facts and demonize the actions of the Democrats. When Medicare continues to reduce reimbursements to doctors, more and more patients will end up like Medicaid patients. In many parts of the country, Medicaid rembursements are so low that most doctors will not accept Medicaid patients, meaning they end up in the ER. When this happens with Medicare. then the cold you can get treated today in the doctors office will become a lung infection requiring an ER visit, possible hospitalization and possible death. (I read comments on other blogs where doctors have already began dropping current patients who have Medicare and they can not find a doctor willing to accept them due to reimbursement rates.)
Republicans have to realize that the targeted “Reagan Democrat” they need voting for them is smart enough to understand data and begin sharing that with the public to gain support for social prgram changes.
If that does not happen, holding the house will be difficult, winning the senate almost impossible and defeating Obama a dream.
RP:
Your analysis is spot-on, but lacking in a crucial respect.
Not only do Ryan and his GOP peers want to do all those things, they want to provide further “relief” to the super rich and strip Wall Street of all oversight.
Shaun,
Back up that statement if you can.
SteveinCH:
Excerpt:
“On the other side are House budget chair Paul Ryan and congressional Republicans, who want to cut the deficit by privatizing Medicare and slicing programs that benefit poorer Americans, while lowering taxes on the rich.”
Link:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/30/INLK1J7M3M.DTL
Excerpt:
“[The plan] also includes a gift for Wall Street, in the form of a repeal of the provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that protect taxpayers from the situation they faced in 2008 — bailing out financial institutions or watching the economy tumble.”
Link:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2011/04/05/ryan-budget-wall-street/
gcotharn:
Media bias? You gotta be kidding?
NY-26 is a rebuke. No bout adoubt it. But that does not mean that it will have legs. As I have written elsewhere, the Democrats remain extremely vulnerable (Obama pretty much excluded.)
NY-26 was not about dirty tricks and you belabor the obvious in pointing out that Democrat hands are not clean historically.
The big takeaway — and this will have legs for at least one more presidential election cycle — is that the Republican Party, from its House leadership on down, is determinedly out of touch with voters who don’t carry pitchforks and torches or drive luxury automobiles.
I happen to think that is terribly, terribly sad.
NY 26 is indeed NY 23. So, I’ll take national implication comments only from those who want to back it up with a money wager.
However, since NY needs to give up a couple of House seats to redistricting, I’ve sent a note to the House Committee chair as to how to give Hokum a nice welcoming gift.
Dagoat and RP….to the extent you are pointing out the lack of effective communication skills and strategies by the Rs, amen to that. Boehner, mcConnell, Cantor must have learned their public speaking skills at the Pelosi/Reid communication dynamics seminars.
There’s no reason to sweat 2012 if the Senate can be flipped. Nonetheless, Romney needs to take it to Obama like Reagan took it to Carter. Those debates will decide the election without some significant exogenous event.
Because it wasn’t a rebuke of Unions, prior to the Walker cram-down Presser was expected to walk away with the election, after the election he barely squeaked back in…
A rejection of Unions would have had Presser win with 80+% of the vote, he barely got 50.1%…
Thanks Shaun,
The SFGate article is very disingenuous. It has to do with the difference between statutory marginal tax rates and effective ones. Just wanted to make sure you didn’t have some new facts.
Peace.
gcotharn:
Ah, yes, jumping the shark. Like preventing an economic meltdown in part through the $789 economic stimulus package, the most sweeping health-care reform since forever, extending veterans’ health-care benefits, returned the GI Bill to its former robust self, beginning the draw down of U.S. troops from Iraq, increasing pay and benefits for military personnel, phasing out the beyond expensive F-22 warplane and outdated weapons systems, ending the no-bid defense contract policy,instituting enforcement for equal pay for women, rescuing the domestic auto industry, which has now returned to profitability, closed offshore tax havens . . .
I could go on and on and on but you’re right, this is some seriously crazy stuff.
gcotharn-Precisely what the Dems said after the Brown election. Priceless…
…
It is amazing that the Democrats can lose over 50 seats but see no reason to change but if the Republicans lose a single election, then everything must change.
I guess the Democrats are content knowing that demographics will eventually make the U.S. a one party state and thus feel no need to listen to voters except when the voters agree with them.
Wow. I hope the Democrats put that in a video and air it again and again and again and again.
Kathy
Oh, look Ducky Lucky, a new Medicare plan, the sky will fall. Ooops, its OK it’s from our party, never mind.
Oh, no, it’s a turkey, Turkey Lurkey, but let’s support it anyway.