Tag: compassionate conservatism
It Took Marco Rubio Just 24 Hours To Blow His Pivot To Poverty

It Took Marco Rubio Just 24 Hours To Blow His Pivot To Poverty

Having tried and failed to reinvent himself as a GOP leader on foreign policy, the federal budget, and immigration reform, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is now attempting a pivot to another new identity: Anti-poverty warrior.

The freshman senator will deliver a major speech to the American Enterprise Institute on Friday, marking the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of the “War on Poverty.” Based on a video released on Monday, Rubio is (unsurprisingly) not a big fan of the Great Society.

“After 50 years, isn’t it time to declare big government’s war on poverty a failure?” Rubio asks. (Actually, as Michael Tomasky points out at The Daily Beast, the answer is pretty clearly “no.”)

Rubio goes on to lay out his vision for combating the scourge of poverty (sort of):

What our nation needs is a real agenda that helps people acquire the skills they need to lift themselves out of poverty and to pursue the American dream. This agenda would create an economy with more good-paying middle class jobs, and a government with less debt. It would repeal Obamacare and it would replace it with more affordable health care options. It would save and strengthen our retirement programs for future generations. It would be an agenda to create a new opportunity society in America, so that all of our citizens can have the real opportunity to achieve the American dream.

The problem, of course, is that — aside from repealing the Affordable Care Act, and replacing it with a still-undefined alternative — Rubio does not lay out a single actual policy recommendation (he instead promises to detail “many” of his ideas in the coming months).

As a sitting senator, however, Rubio can’t completely avoid interacting with policy. His recent work shows just how committed to fighting poverty he really is — and may have ended his latest pivot before it even began in earnest.

On Tuesday morning, Rubio joined 36 of his Republican colleagues in voting against even opening debate on extending Emergency Unemployment Compensation. Although the Republican minority in the Senate was unsuccessful in its attempt to block the legislation, it will get another chance when the bill faces final passage. And even if the bill does survive the Senate, it is almost certainly dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

Considering that unemployment insurance kept 2.5 million people — including 600,000 children — out of poverty in 2012, Rubio’s vote doesn’t exactly line up with his new image.

It does line up well with the rest of his record, though. Rubio has also voted against the farm bill, joining Republicans who insisted on deep cuts to food stamps — aid that kept 4.9 million Americans above the poverty line — and strongly opposes raising the minimum wage, which could lift nearly 5 million out of poverty. If a policy involves the dreaded “big government,” Rubio opposes it — no matter how many struggling Americans it will help.

Much like his fellow “compassionate conservative” and 2016 contender, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), Rubio appears to recognize the need to confront inequality issues head-on, but is unwilling to divert from Republican orthodoxy that exacerbates the problem. But unlike the politically nimble Ryan, Rubio has struggled to convince Republican voters (or a skeptical media) that his motives are genuine. There’s no reason to believe that this latest pivot will be any different.

It’s possible that Rubio will shock the world on Wednesday and propose a serious plan to combat poverty in America. But it’s far more likely that his highly anticipated speech will serve as another chapter in the story of his rapid transformation from GOP savior to Tea Party troll.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Republicans Reject Bush Legacy As Too Liberal

George W. Bush commanded total support from the Congressional GOP when in office, failing to pass legislation only when the American people roared in disapproval, as they did when he tried to privatize Social Security in 2005. So it’s telling that they now reject his domestic policies as too progressive and his foreign policy as too interventionist:

Bush’s attempt to re-position the GOP to the center-right has been rejected in favor of an unmodified brand of conservatism that would rather leave people alone than lift them up with any “armies of compassion.” Many of Bush’s distinctive policy ideas have fallen by the wayside, replaced by a nearly single-minded focus on reducing the size of government.

Twelve years after the then-Texas governor chastised his party’s congressional leaders for attempting to “balance their budget on the backs of the poor,” it’s unthinkable that any serious Republican presidential hopeful would attempt to get to the left of the congressional GOP.

As Bush’s successor in Austin illustrated in a jeremiad at a Republican conference here this weekend, potential White House hopefuls now are competing to prove their conservative bona fides—and any criticism of their own party is for its purported drift away from principle.

And in last week’s New Hampshire presidential debate, the Republican field even edged away from the Bush administration’s activist foreign policy, condemning the intervention in Libya and calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan.

It adds up to a comprehensive and unmistakable rejection of the Bush legacy – and above all, of Bush’s platform of “compassionate conservatism” that was supposed to give the GOP a permanent electoral majority.

The problem here for the GOP is not their shift on foreign policy–Americans seem to agree that U.S. troops are overextended. But on domestic issues, the 2008 election was essentially a rejection of supply-side economics and a hands-off policy when it came to regulating banks and the financial industry–and moving further to the right hardly seems a recipe for success when the voting universe is sure to be larger than the one composed primarily of older, white Tea Party types that turned out last fall. [Politico]