| The GOP's Crackpot
Agenda |
| The top Republican candidates share a
single, radical vision: to trash the environment, shred the
safety net and aid the rich. |
| by Tim Dickinson (From
Rolling Stone) |
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 By all rights, 2012 ought to be a cakewalk
for the GOP. Unemployment is pandemic. Riot police are
confronting protesters in public squares and on college
campuses. In an epic fail of foresight, the Democratic
convention will be held in one of the world's banking centers,
Charlotte, North Carolina – setting the stage for violent
clashes not seen since the streets of Chicago, 1968. "I hope
they keep this up," gloated Grover Norquist, one of the
Republican Party's most influential strategists. "Hippies
elected Nixon. Occupy Wall Street will beat Obama."
But don't go writing the president's political obituary just
yet: He may wind up being resurrected by the GOP itself. The
Republican Party – dominated by hardliners still cocky after the
electoral sweep of 2010 – has backed its entire slate of
candidates into far-right corners on everything from the
environment and immigration to taxation and economic austerity.
Whether the GOP opts for Mitt Romney or an "anti-Mitt" is almost
entirely beside the point. On the major policy issues of the
day, there's barely a ray of sunshine between any of the viable
Republicans, not counting those who have committed the sin of
libertarianism (Ron Paul) or moderation (Jon Huntsman). No
matter who winds up with the nomination, it appears, Obama will
face a candidate to the right of Barry Goldwater.
Take it from one of the most divisive figures in the history of
GOP presidential politics: "Those people in the Republican
primary have got to lay off," the televangelist Pat Robertson
warned recently. "They're forcing their leaders, the
front-runners, into positions that will mean they lose the
general election." Robertson knows fringe politics: In 1988, he
ran for president on a platform that included abolishing the
Department of Education and adopting a constitutional amendment
to prohibit deficit spending. At the time, Robertson was
dismissed as an unelectable candidate of the far right. Today,
he would be somewhere to the left of Texas governor Rick Perry.
And that way lies ruin: "You'll appeal to the narrow base, and
they'll applaud the daylights out of what you're saying,"
Robertson cautioned. "And then you hit the general election and
they say, 'No way!' They've got to stop this!"
But Republican candidates show no signs of moderating their
positions. In fact, with the first primary contests rapidly
approaching, all of the top contenders are tripping over
themselves in a race to the far right. Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan
kicked off a flat-tax bidding war: Perry is calling for an even
more regressive rate of 20 percent, while Newt Gingrich
advocates a flat tax of just 15 percent. Even Mitt Romney – who
once blasted such proposals for enriching "fat cats" – now
exclaims, "I love a flat tax!" The candidates have also lined up
behind a host of other extremist positions: waging war with
Iran, slashing or privatizing benefits like Social Security,
extending constitutional rights to zygotes, eliminating
restrictions on Big Oil and other deadly polluters, and freeing
up Wall Street to return to the lawlessness that buzzsawed the
global economy. Individual candidates have embellished this
partywide radicalism with wingnuttery all their own: Gingrich
calls child labor laws "truly stupid," Perry likens Social
Security to "a bad disease," and Romney wants to privatize
unemployment insurance.
To many GOP stalwarts, conditions today seem ripe for a repeat,
not of the 1968 election of Richard Nixon, but of the setback
the party experienced four years earlier, when embattled
incumbent Lyndon Johnson won re-election in a landslide over
Republican hardliner Goldwater. "I can't imagine that we expect
– even with the economic situation the way it is – anything but
a Goldwater-like drubbing if we persist with these guys," says
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to
Secretary of State Colin Powell. "Even Romney is in many ways
unelectable. He's been a hardliner during the primary on key
issues – and then he's going to do this dance where he suddenly
shifts to the middle and is a centrist in the general election?
He can do that – but Obama will trounce him."
PROMOTE DIRTY JOBS
Nowhere is the GOP's lock-step approach to governance more in
evidence than on the question of employment. At a moment when 25
million Americans lack full-time jobs, this is obviously going
to be the central issue of the 2012 election. Yet the Republican
candidates all have the same jobs plan: to put the unemployed to
work on behalf of big polluters.
Take the plan proposed by Rick Perry, which calls for boosting
employment through "increased domestic energy production" –
including renewable power. But every one of the 1.2 million jobs
that Perry claims his plan would create involves the extraction
of climate-polluting fossil fuels. There are 20,000 jobs from
building the Keystone XL pipeline to burn more of Canada's tar
sands, 100,000 from oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge, 240,000 from drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off the
Carolinas, and 500,000 from "onshore oil and gas development" in
the West.
With minor variations, this is the same jobs plan put forth by
every GOP candidate. The only true disagreement among them is
just how many dirty-energy jobs can be created by allowing Big
Oil and other polluters to pillage America's landscape and
shorelines. Gingrich pegs it at 1.1 million jobs. Michele
Bachmann says it's 1.4 million. Romney, whose plan is predicated
on the return to the kind of fast-track permitting that
precipitated the BP disaster in the Gulf, promises 1.6 million
jobs – including 1.2 million from offshore drilling alone. "The
United States is blessed with a cornucopia of carbon-based
energy resources," Romney writes in his plan. "We do not even
know the extent of our blessings."
TRASH THE ENVIRONMENT
To clear the way for the orgy of drilling, mining and fracking
the GOP candidates have proposed, it's first necessary to gut
the Environmental Protection Agency, which has been authorized
by the Supreme Court to curb climate pollution. Many of the top
Republican contenders, in fact, once sounded the alarm on
climate change; today, they scoff at its very existence.
In 2008, for example, Gingrich filmed a commercial for Al Gore's
Alliance for Climate Protection with then-House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi. In the spot, Gingrich gazed into Pelosi's eyes before
looking into the camera and declaring, "We do agree: Our country
must take action to address climate change." Gingrich vowed to
"strongly support" mandatory caps on carbon pollution. But now
that the likes of Peabody Energy have pumped hundreds of
thousands of dollars into his lobbying coffers, Gingrich is
singing the polluters' tune. In November, he said he no longer
believes climate change is real: "I actually don't know whether
global warming is occurring.
Romney's flip-flop was even swifter. In June, at the start of
his campaign, he declared, "I believe that humans contribute" to
warming through "our emissions of greenhouse gases." By October,
he had fully embraced climate denial, insisting that "we don't
know what's causing climate change." His jobs plan, meanwhile,
casts the industries driving the climate crisis as victims of
"the Obama administration's war on carbon dioxide." Like every
other top Republican in the race, Romney also insists that the
EPA be effectively barred from enforcing the Clean Air Act,
calling the hallmark environmental legislation "outdated" and
insisting that it must be "streamlined" to benefit coal plants
by "removing carbon dioxide from its purview."
To date, Romney has received $300,000 in oil and gas
contributions. That's a pittance in comparison to Perry, who has
pocketed $740,000 from the same industries. Perry is a shameless
climate denier who maintains – against all evidence – that "we
have been experiencing a global cooling trend" and that climate
change is "all one contrived phony mess" cooked up by Gore, that
"false prophet of a secular carbon cult." The Texas governor
insists that all new rules designed to curb the deadly emissions
of coal plants or the toxic chemicals used in the fracking of
natural gas should be put on hold.
Other GOP candidates go even further. Bachmann insists that
under her presidency, the EPA will have its "doors locked and
lights turned off." Gingrich blasts the agency – created by
Richard Nixon – as "a tool of ideologues to push an anti-jobs
agenda." Outdoing them all, Cain advocates that the EPA be
overhauled by a commission staffed by "the people closest to the
problem" – the "problem," in his view, being federal curbs on
pollution, and the "people" being big-energy CEOs. "If you've
been abused by the EPA like Shell Oil," Cain said this fall,
"I'm going to ask the CEO of Shell Oil would he like to be on
this commission, and give me some recommendations."
The leading GOP candidates also want to roll back new
regulations introduced by the Obama administration to prevent
industrial boilers, cement plants and coal smokestacks from
pumping poisons into the atmosphere that cause tens of thousands
of premature deaths each year. Even Republican veterans are
appalled by such a blatant rejection of the party's storied
history of conservation, dating back to Teddy Roosevelt. "These
rules are grounded in the best available science," noted William
Reilly, who served as EPA chief under George H.W. Bush. "But for
some of the most prominent leaders of the Republican Party,
science has left the building."
So extreme is the agenda of the GOP candidates, in fact, that it
even trashes the laissez-faire legacy of Goldwater. "While I am
a great believer in the free-enterprise system," the Arizona
senator said in 1970, "I am an even stronger believer in the
right of our people to live in a clean, pollution-free
environment."
UNLEASH WALL STREET
The GOP candidates are not just seeking to roll back regulations
on Big Carbon – they also want to gut a wide range of safeguards
designed to protect consumers and workers. Perry has called for
a "moratorium" on all pending regulations. Bachmann wants an end
to "this red-tape rampage." Romney, in a fit of technocratic
nonsense, is calling for a cap on regulatory costs, whereby the
economic impact of any new regulation must be offset by
repealing an established rule. Under his bizarre plan, a Romney
administration might pay for new rules against contaminated meat
by eliminating the current ban on lead paint in children's toys.
Above all, the GOP candidates are unanimous in their desire to
kill the new post-crash rules crafted to end reckless
speculation by big banks and Wall Street firms. Gingrich has
gone so far as to call for the Democratic authors of the law,
Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, to be jailed for "killing small
banks, crippling small businesses, driving down the value of
housing and creating corrupting Washington controls over the
biggest banks." Repeal of Dodd-Frank would allow Wall Street
firms like Goldman Sachs to return to the days of secretly
trading trillions in derivatives contracts and betting against
their own clients. It would also kill off the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau, the agency set up by Elizabeth Warren to
prevent average Americans from being suckered into subprime
mortgages and credit cards with usurious interest rates.
When the GOP candidates talk about these essential curbs on the
abuses of big banks, it's as though they live in an alternate
universe – one where Wall Street never drove the world's economy
off a cliff. Cain insists that Dodd-Frank "does little to shield
Main Street from the alleged risks of Wall Street," while Perry
adds that the law should be replaced by "market-oriented"
measures – but only if such controls should prove "necessary."
The GOP front-runners are so committed to a Wall Street
free-for-all that they even want to gut Sarbanes-Oxley, the
accounting reforms passed under George W. Bush to bar corporate
America from the kinds of bookkeeping fraud pioneered by Tyco,
WorldCom and Enron.
Such deregulatory radicalism puts the GOP candidates at direct
odds with Paul Volcker, the former chair of the Federal Reserve
who helped steer the nation out of a crippling recession during
the Reagan administration. Volcker, too, is critical of
Dodd-Frank – but he believes the law doesn't go far enough. "I
think Dodd-Frank was close to as good as we could get," Volcker
said this fall. "But it's nowhere near what we need."
DESTROY THE SAFETY NET
The Republican candidates are uniformly committed to repealing
the president's health care reform – what Perry, with
characteristic subtlety, calls a "man-made disaster of epic
proportions." Under the GOP plans, nearly 1 million young adults
would once again be denied coverage, seniors would be forced to
shell out billions more for prescription medicines, and insurers
could return to hiking premiums while denying coverage to
Americans with pre-existing conditions. For these and other
reasons, Romney insists, "Obamacare is bad for America's
families."
Obamacare, however, is only the top entitlement program on the
GOP hit list. Almost all of the Republican candidates want to
privatize Medicare, replacing its guaranteed benefits to
retirees with a fixed voucher insufficient to cover the soaring
costs of private insurance. The GOP front-runners have also
endorsed a radical plan to cap the federal contribution to
Medicaid – a move that would gut insurance for the poor by as
much as 3.5 percent a year and shift $150 billion in annual
costs onto cash-strapped states. According to the Congressional
Budget Office, states unable to pay the added costs would be
forced to either "curtail eligibility" to those in need or
"provide less extensive coverage."
When it comes to Social Security, the Republican candidates have
all advocated that it be privatized for younger workers –
creating a system of personal accounts that would place their
retirement security at the mercy of the stock market. The
undisputed victor of the GOP plans would be Wall Street, which
would profit enormously from collecting management fees over a
worker's lifetime. A study by the University of Chicago that
analyzed a similar privatization scheme proposed by George W.
Bush projected that such fees would hand Wall Street "the
largest windfall gain in American financial history" while
"reducing the ultimate value of individual accounts by 20
percent."
WRECK THE ECONOMY
While threatening to slash the safety net for millions of
Americans, the GOP candidates are also committed to a brutal
austerity program that would tip the nation back into recession
– if not a full-scale depression. The proposal in question is a
constitutional amendment that would require the federal
government to pass a balanced budget each year. According to
Macroeconomic Advisers, a top economic forecaster, balancing the
budget in 2012 alone would throw 15 million Americans out of
work, double unemployment to 18 percent and contract the U.S.
economy by 17 percent. Going forward, the government would be
barred from borrowing money during hard times to provide
unemployment benefits, food stamps and other essential aid to
those in need. As a result, the analysts report, "recessions
would be deeper and longer." Even in times of plenty, a
balanced-budget amendment would "retard economic growth" by
increasing economic uncertainty – which Republicans have
repeatedly blamed as the root of the current lackluster
recovery.
WAGE ENDLESS WAR
One portion of the budget that the GOP's austerity agenda
doesn't touch is the Pentagon, where the Republican candidates
call for the kind of costly investments they refuse to back for
America's poor and middle class. While demanding that federal
spending be capped at 20 percent of GDP, Romney would mandate
that at least one in five federal dollars be spent on defense.
"I will not look to the military as a place to balance the
budget," he says. Neither will Gingrich, who calls on taxpayers
to "recapitalize our military infrastructure," or Perry, who
wants to sink billions into missile defense and "modernized
fleets of ships and aircraft."
To justify such massive defense spending, the GOP candidates
would ensure that America remains entangled in bloody wars in
the Middle East. When Obama announced earlier this fall that he
would complete the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq – on the
timetable negotiated by President Bush – Romney denounced the
move as an "astonishing failure." Bachmann called on "our troops
to remain there to preserve the peace," and Perry insisted that
"we need to finish our mission in Iraq" – which evidently
involves occupying the country indefinitely, regardless of the
wishes of its democratically elected government.
The GOP candidates have been even more hawkish on Iran, with
Perry, Romney, Gingrich and Bachmann all promising to go to war
to prevent the regime from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Of the
top-tier candidates, only Cain expressed reservations about
another war in the Middle East, saying instead that he would
surround the country with a mobile missile-defense network and
tell Ahmadinejad to "make my day."
"This is nonsense – idiocy! – to contemplate another war in that
region right now," says Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to
Colin Powell. Obama's remarkable successes in foreign policy, he
adds – including the demise of both Osama bin Laden and Muammar
Qaddafi – have panicked the GOP field into a reflexive
hawkishness. "For the Republicans, that's their mantra,"
Wilkerson says. "The only thing they know is war, war and more
war."
CUT TAXES ON THE RICH
The leading Republican candidates all back a host of sweetheart
tax cuts for major corporations, whose income is currently taxed
at 35 percent. Romney would reduce the corporate rate to 25
percent, while Perry would drop it to 20 percent and Gingrich
would slash it to 12.5 percent. Worse, the GOP candidates also
favor a "territorial" tax system that would prohibit Uncle Sam
from collecting any revenues on profits stashed overseas. The
move, according to tax experts, would spur U.S. corporations to
shift millions of jobs and billions in profits offshore.
All of the candidates also want to eliminate or drastically curb
taxes on investment income, and allow the children of the rich
to pay no taxes on their inheritances. For Romney, whose net
worth is estimated at $200 million, the issue is personal: With
the estate tax repealed, he could pass on an extra $90 million
to his children, tax-free – including his son Tagg, currently
scraping by as a managing partner at a private equity firm.
All told, the elimination of the estate tax – whose benefits
would accrue solely to the top 0.3 percent of taxpayers – would
spike the deficit by an estimated $1.3 trillion over the next
decade. Yet the GOP candidates continue to insist that the move
would somehow benefit the middle class; Gingrich claims that
"eliminating the death tax will create more jobs and more
revenue for the federal government." Such lunacy enrages the
party's few remaining fiscal conservatives. "Republican thinking
about fiscal policy is fundamentally wrong, and it has been for
quite a while," says Paul O'Neill, who served as Treasury
secretary under George W. Bush. "The whole notion that we can
cut taxes to the vanishing point and keep raising more money is
just crazy. It could even be amusing if it wasn't so dangerous."
ATTACK ABORTION RIGHTS
It's no surprise that the GOP candidates oppose a woman's right
to choose. Every candidate but Romney has signed a pledge vowing
to permanently defund Planned Parenthood and to appoint only
pro-lifers to key federal health positions. But now, rather than
simply pushing to repeal Roe v. Wade, they also want to change
the Constitution to award full citizenship to a woman's egg the
moment it is fertilized. "Personhood begins at conception,"
insists Gingrich, who wants Congress to pass a law defining
embryos as "persons" under the 14th Amendment – a move designed
to make abortion unconstitutional. Even Romney, who was elected
in Massachusetts as a staunchly pro-choice politician, said on
Fox News recently that he "absolutely" would have signed a
"personhood" amendment giving constitutional rights to the
unborn. An identical measure on the ballot last November – which
would have outlawed abortion for victims of rape and incest –
was so radical that even Mississippi voters rejected it.
BASH IMMIGRANTS
The candidates' positions on immigration are so extreme that
they seem to have been dreamed up by the Minutemen militia.
Perry vows to militarize the border with "boots on the ground"
and Predator drones hunting down illegal border crossers from
the skies. Offering few details, Romney says "we gotta have a
fence" along the Mexican border, while Bachmann envisions a
barrier that's 2,000 miles long and "double-walled." Cain has
vowed to erect a "Great Wall... 20 feet high. It's going to have
barbed wire on the top. It's going to be electrified. And
there's going to be a sign on the other side saying, 'It will
kill you – WARNING!'" Gingrich, who touts his "humane" approach
to deportation, has nonetheless trashed even legal immigrants,
once denouncing Spanish itself as "the language of living in a
ghetto."
The GOP's determination to sabotage its appeal among Latinos –
America's fastest-growing voting bloc – has many Democrats
exulting. "We may just run clips of the Republican debates
verbatim," Obama told a gathering of Hispanic journalists in
November. "We won't even comment on them – we'll just run those
in a loop on Univision and Telemundo, and people can make up
their own minds."
Where does this radical new GOP orthodoxy come from? On the
economic and regulatory front, at least, a recent interview with
Tom Donohue, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
offers a clue. Donohue outlined the business group's top policy
prescriptions – and they are virtually identical to those
promoted by the GOP candidates.
Job creation? "The idea with the greatest potential," Donohue
said, "is to do a number of things in energy." Environmental
protection? Stop giving "wildlife the priority over jobs."
Federal regulation? Obama has "exploded the regulatory burden,
particularly through health care, Dodd-Frank and the
Environmental Protection Agency." Corporate tax rates? "We're
the only major country in the world that double-taxes our
companies," Donohue said. "That's just plain stupid."
But slavish devotion to the interests of corporate America is
only part of the equation underlying the GOP's current
extremism. Today, just 28 percent of Americans identify
themselves as Republicans – a drop of five points from the Bush
years. To be the ringleader in a small-tent party requires
adopting positions that are offensive to the broader public –
and even to people who once fit comfortably in the GOP
coalition. "You've got to address everything from abortion to
how many evangelicals can sit on the head of a pin," says
Wilkerson. "It's really a problem."
So far, the GOP has gotten away with its sharp turn to the
right. In the midterm elections last year, in which Republican
hardliners seized control of Congress, conservatives cast 41
percent of all votes. Senior citizens made up a quarter of the
electorate, as did voters making more than $100,000 a year. But
the general election next fall will attract voters who are
younger and less affluent. If Obama can inspire anything
resembling the historic turnout he sparked in 2008, the GOP is
in for a beat-down. The Hispanic vote, for example, is expected
to rise by nearly a quarter next year – and a recent poll found
Latino voters swinging to Obama by nearly three-to-one over both
Romney and Perry.
What's more, the GOP's appeal to the most extreme elements of
its coalition may prompt moderate Republicans to stay home – or
even to vote for Obama. As long as the GOP insists on catering
to the needs of the ultrarich, Republican veterans warn, it
risks alienating the working-class conservatives who ushered in
the Age of Reagan. "The Republican Party is just screwed up in
its head," says David Stockman, who served as budget director
under Reagan. "It's behaving politically in a very irrational
way, and policywise in a nonsensical manner."
Mike Lofgren, until recently a top Republican staffer on the
Senate Budget Committee, has offered an even more dire
assessment of "the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs." This fall,
Lofgren announced he was abandoning his own party – unable to
stomach what he called "the headlong rush of Republicans to
embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's
future." Citing the "broad and ever-widening gulf between the
traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the
quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann," Lofgren summed
up the GOP's capitulation to extremism: "The crackpot outliers
of two decades ago," he concludes, "have become the vital center
today."
This story is from the December 26, 2011 issue of
Rolling
Stone.
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