GOP’s new message of helping the middle class is hot air.

The GOP’s change in tune has a sour note.  Have you noticed a shift in message?. It has switched from “trickle down is good for you”   to “the GOP cares about the middle class and families”. The GOP must have been reading recent polls that showed they were 10 points behind Democrats when asked if the Republican party” cares about my problems” (CBS News Poll, May 16-19) and 20 points behind in “helping the middle class” (ABC/Washington Post poll April 24-27). The GOP’s  newly touted support of the middle class is  an empty glass  filled with hot air and the Democrats need to call them out on it.

Democrats  have either been silent or stuck in the wonky weeds of defense on middle class issue, recently. The best defense in the 2014 midterms is a good offense by  answering the question themselves:” Who can best help the middle class?”  For example:

Here is how the GOP, including Cory Gardner running for Senate in Colorado,   plan to help the middle class.

 The GOP in Congress  recently blocked legislation allowing those with older student loans to refinance  at a lower rate . How does that help the middle class?

Killing Obamacare  is still their main refrain.   They want to leave families once more  deeply in debt with medical bills and policies that deny coverage of pre-existing conditions or preventative care. The past system left the middle class one medical event away from  foreclosure and bankruptcy whenever an uncovered major medical event occurs.  The GOP has provided no alternatives that would provide  those protections. Instead,  they have proposed “ solutions” of malpractice reform and cross state insurance competition that even  the Congressional Budget Office estimated would have little effect in making insurance affordable for the pre Obamacare uninsured.. How does that help the middle class?

The GOP  makes it difficult for women who need to work to keep their families afloat financially by  putting barriers to family planning, whether making choice of when and how many children to have. Some, including Gardner,   have advocated making some forms of birth control illegal or  favored  preventing women from getting low cost pills from their employer’s insurance.  Most oppose equal pay for equal work .Many in the  GOP oppose raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, which would bring those working a 40 hours week above the poverty level. How does that revitalize the middle class?

Creating jobs? The GOP has opposed funding rebuilding highways and bridges and infrastructure improvements that would have long lasting higher paying jobs for millions over the years. (Keystone pipeline they tout  as a jobs program creates only  two years of  temporary jobs). Their jobs plan mostly consists of  giving  more tax breaks to big business.   If we learned anything over the years,  trickle down theories have failed in practice. How has that helped the middle class?

Visit http://www.pollingreport.com/dvsr.htm for both the ABC and CBS polls .
A version of the above appeared in the www.skyhidailynews.com, all editions, 6/27/2014

Some additional thoughts that fill in some blanks:  Can we afford to do these things to help the middle class?
There are deficit hawks who put cutting the deficit  above everything regardless of the impact on the economy and the tool in their toolbox of government shutdown.  (The GDP took a serious dip when that was last tried and political approval ended in the toilet).  Their one and only pathway is to reducing  the deficit is to cut government expenditures without raising revenues. However, the only government expenditures they want to cut are social programs and education; defense gets fed well.
The problem is two fold:  every serious look at the deficit, i.e. Simpson Bowles,  said we must raise more revenues.  My fear:slashing and burning middle class perks  and poverty safety nets will only increase the disparity between the rich and poor....a destabilizing element in any democracy,  politically unsustainable and therefore unattainable.

Update: Polls are showing a great decline in middle class income and hope. Below is one released in July 2014.  Buried in this is the middle class decline and loss of hope.  Who gets the blame will determine much of the 2016 presidential race and it could impact the 2014 midterms. If the Democrats can pin the blame on Republicans and sell it, they may have a chance. When all is said and done, that is why the 47% issue that scuttled the Romney momentum.  http://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-are-down-on-america-190304928.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory

How candidates' first impressions count and how policy positions fortify them

My column in the Sky Hi News today..
Print

Copyright 2012 Sky-Hi Daily News. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. January, 24 2012 3:01 pm

Felicia Muftic: This long trial by fire

Sky-Hi Daily News

The cost of modern presidential campaigns is staggering, and the money flowing into the process is corrupting.

The length of it is brain-numbing, but there is an offsetting value. This long trial by fire gives us greater insight into the candidates' character, perspectives, priorities, and background that soars beyond the issue of the moment.  We get a better initial impression of which direction his/her knee will jerk, and how that translates into policies that affect us.

Publicly stated Issue positions and platforms are still important because they support or contradict first impressions . A wealthy candidate may be “of and by” a certain background, but what that candidate is “for” could either contradict or validate first impressions. We have had many wealthy presidents who still advocated policies benefiting the less fortunate. Mitt Romney does not fit that mold.

Barack Obama in 2008 made some good initial impressions: In ringing rhetoric and quiet interviews he convinced Americans he understood them because his life story of coming from a white, struggling middle class family of loyal American grandparents. He was of, by and for policies that recognized the declining income of the middle class relative to the upper 20 percent that began years before the Bush crash of 2008.

That impression, fortified by supporting policies, trumped the attempt by the Republicans to paint him as an angry black, or a secret Muslim who would sell out America to the  jihadists.

Familiarity can also bring contempt. Documented character flaws could be Newt Gingrich's Achilles heel, but so far it has not stopped him. It is yet unknown how that would translate on the national stage when contrasted with Romney's or Obama's living the ethic of family values.

Romney is coming across as not being comfortable in his own skin. He seems to be a person who fears that if voters realize what a cold-hearted, privileged businessman he is, they would not believe he has their good interest at heart. His caginess about releasing his tax returns and discomfort with his 15 percent personal income tax indeed plays right into the hands of the Occupy Wall Street movement that  raised the awareness of the unfairness of income disparity.

An initial impression of Romney as a rich guy disconnected from the middle class is backed up by what policies he supports. They are not for the middle class. On public record is his throwing Romneycare under the bus, dumping it on the states with no requirement to make heath care affordable to many more than can pay for it now. On his website he promotes a tax structure that decreases taxes on the rich and increases taxes on some poor. Missing is how he will pay for increasing spending on the Pentagon, a more interventionist foreign policy, and reduction of the wealthy's income tax contributions to the Treasury. His priorities would leave little money for investment in education to enable the middle class to achieve their American dreams or to provide infrastructure job creation or to fund block grants to states to provide services, in spite of his lip service to those goals.

Romney has been a flip-flopping pig in a poke when it comes to Social Security and Medicare. He has changed views and now differs from the remaining GOP field by not yet subscribing to their “privatization” or “replacing it with savings accounts invested in Wall Street.” His disquieting solution: Let's sit down and talk.

However, for sure he wants to make employees pay entirely for their own unemployment insurance by investing it in a savings account. He proposes no safety net if those unemployment savings accounts run dry . He rests most solutions on his brand of job creation proposals, lax regulation of business and lower taxes for the well off, the very same policies that led to the middle class's income disparity and the economic disaster Obama inherited.

Recommend

Romney and the real pious baloney

Column in the Sky Hi News Jan. 18 2012
The world of politics should be forever grateful to Newt Gingrich for introducing to the English language “pious baloney,” or how to call an opponent a hypocrite without using words not suitable for primetime.  

I recall another primary that gave birth to an icon of political speech, “Where's the Beef.” Walter Mondale in 1984 fired away at Presidential nomination contender, Gary Hart, for sloganeering his “New Ideas” without explaining its substance. The phrase was a play on a hamburger business' ad that was dramatized by a feisty senior complaining about a competitor's miniscule patty in a big bun.

This year's icon is the 1 percent (or the 99 percent, depending how it is used in context). Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, it is shorthand for either class warfare or “fairness.” 

Most politicians are guilty of pious baloney, some to a greater degree, some to a lesser degree, shorting the beef, and appealing to a class or special interest. To paraphrase George Orwell's “Animal Farm,” “all politicians are equal; some are more equal than others,” and this year Mitt Romney qualifies for the “more equal” category.

Gingrich attacked Romney for trying to appear as something that he was not. Such posturing happens when a campaign consultant looks at the polls to see how best their candidate could position him/herself, and then attempts to cram the client into a costume that does not cover the body. In the game planning for 2012, a poll must have shown voters wanted a non-DC insider, probably because they were disgusted with the gridlock antics of politicians within the Beltway.

To use Bill Clinton's 1992 iconic phrase, the top concern of voters this year? “It's the economy, stupid,” so drawing on Romney's business background, his advisors saw a good match. A successful businessman, even a cold-hearted “vulture capitalist,” was a person who knew how to cure the slow recovery. Exclusively accenting his business background served more purposes, too, helping the GOP overlook some of his less than conservative record as a governor and his fatherhood of Obamacare. As Gingrich pointed out, Romney had been an aspiring candidate for office throughout much of his life, anyway, and was hardly the non-politician he portrayed himself.

Others in the Republican field are or were not as vulnerable. Rick Santorum is mostly “pious.” Ron Paul is true to an ideology of every person on his/her own and for his/her self regardless of wordly realities, fair or not. Rick Perry's less than intellectual astuteness could not have been invented by any campaign consultant.   Less said about Herman Cain the better, but his 999 flat tax proved to be unfair to the 99 percent. Former candidate Michele Bachmann's frequent gaffes that did not pass the fact checkers substituted some baloney for the beef. Ron Huntsman failed to qualify as a politician since his support was nearly none. 

Romney is not out of the woods, yet. In an era of populist anger at whatever is big (government, corporations) and with 50 percent of America poor or nearly poor,  he is an icon of the 1 percent, of, by and for Wall Street, while Obama is from a struggling middle-income family and genuinely gets the fairness factor. 

Last week Romney tried to convince us that “he is concerned about the middle class,” while at the same time condemning “class warfare” and defending his questionable job-creation record. More pious baloney. Romney's balm to middle class pain is to kill Obamacare that would make health insurance affordable in all 50 states for even those without employer insurance. He promises to kill Wall Street reform with its protection bureau empowered to save consumers from predatory credit practices. His tax proposal would increase average taxes on many poor and would decrease taxes on the rich, per an analysis in the current “Atlantic Monthly.” With friends like him, the middle class does not need enemies.