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Ted Cruz’s Ride On The Obamacare Train Wreck

Ted Cruz’s Ride On The Obamacare Train Wreck

By Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

When Senator Ted Cruz, the conservative firebrand from Texas, launched his presidential campaign last week at the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, he earned grudgingly glowing reviews from otherwise skeptical pundits. The very next day he drove straight into a pothole on his already-narrow road to the Republican nomination: Obamacare.

Obamacare was supposed to be one of Cruz’s selling points. When it comes to denouncing the evils of the president’s health insurance plan, Cruz takes second place to no one. Obamacare is “unconstitutional,” he says. It’s “a train wreck.” And, of course, it “puts a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor.”

So, last week, when Cruz said he intended to sign his family up for health insurance coverage through Obamacare, the media had a field day.

“We’ll be getting new health insurance, and we’ll presumably do it through my job in the Senate, and so we’ll be on the federal exchange like millions of others on the federal exchange,” he told Dana Bash of CNN.

“I believe we should follow the law, even laws I disagree with,” he explained.

Liberals charged Cruz with hypocrisy. But that’s not quite right. To quote ethics scholar Rush Limbaugh: “There’s no hypocrisy in Cruz using Obamacare, just like there’s no hypocrisy in people opposing Social Security using it.”

If you’re more comfortable with a left-wing example, when a billionaire like Warren Buffett calls for higher taxes on the rich, that doesn’t obligate him to send voluntary contributions to the U.S. Treasury.

Had Cruz acted on his initial statement, he might have been fine. The real trouble started when his aides said the senator had not, in fact, decided what to do about his health insurance. Thus began a week-long controversy.

“He had a superb announcement,” said a GOP strategist who’s backing former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. “But then his message got thrown off by this Obamacare distraction.”

Cruz’s selling point to GOP voters is that he’s a principled conservative who will never compromise and never back down. His hesitation muddied that otherwise crystal-clear image.

It was also ill-advised for Cruz to suggest that he had no choice other than to sign up for Obamacare through his job at the U.S. Senate — when, in fact, he does.

The reason Cruz suddenly needs health insurance is that, until now, his family was covered by a policy provided by his wife’s employer, Goldman Sachs. Heidi Cruz has decided to go on unpaid leave during her husband’s presidential campaign; the couple have two young daughters.

What are Cruz’s alternatives to buying a policy through the government-run exchange? His wife could ask Goldman Sachs to continue their coverage under the firm’s generous unpaid leave programs, but that might look like a sweetheart deal. She could apply for continued coverage under the federal COBRA law — but since she didn’t lose her job, but is departing voluntarily, she might not qualify.

Or Cruz could buy a policy directly from an insurance company. Blue Cross of Texas, for example, offers policies for a family headed by a 44-year-old beginning at $623 a month, although that comes with a hefty $12,700 deductible.

Finally, Cruz could refuse to buy health insurance at all and pay a penalty to the Treasury on top of his taxes.

He hasn’t done any of those things.

When I asked Cruz’s spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, about his deliberations, she responded with a version of hemming and hawing. “The senator is looking at the options,” she said.

In Cruz’s view, she said, every health insurance plan on the market now counts as Obamacare, because the Affordable Care Act regulates them all.

“Every plan, no matter what provider, is required to comply with the Obamacare law,” she said. “Obamacare isn’t a plan in and of itself; it dictates what plans have to provide. All plans operate under Obamacare.”

“Any American that wants a healthcare plan, including Senator Cruz, has no choice but to utilize Obamacare — either the Obamacare exchange or much more expensive private coverage that must be Obamacare-compliant,” she said.

That all sounds awfully lawyerly — fittingly, perhaps, since Cruz prides himself on his chops as a constitutional lawyer. If that kind of statement came from anyone named Clinton, conservatives would call it slick.

This kerfuffle is likely to be forgotten by next year’s Iowa caucuses — assuming, of course, that Cruz has settled on an insurance carrier by then.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Readers may send him email at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Photo: Texas Senator Ted Cruz during the Ag Summit in Des Moines. 3/7/2015 (John Pemble, iprimages/Flickr)

Joe Biden Is Democrats’ 2016 Understudy, In The Wings In Case Hillary Clinton Falters

Joe Biden Is Democrats’ 2016 Understudy, In The Wings In Case Hillary Clinton Falters

By Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Joe Biden still wants to run for president. At least, his friends tell me, a big part of him does. He talks about the prospect readily, whenever reporters or voters ask. He doesn’t sound as if the ambition that fired him to run when he was 44 or 64 has diminished at 72.

“What would drive me to do it would be if I thought that I could do it better than anybody else,” he said in December.

“I think this thing is wide open on both sides,” he said in January.

“That’s a family, personal decision that I’m going to make sometime at the end of the summer,” he told reporters in Iowa last month.

After 46 years in politics, Biden’s earned the right to be taken seriously. Despite his gaffes — some of which fall into the “Kinsley gaffe” category of revealing politically unpalatable truths — he’s turned in a solid performance as vice president. He’s negotiated fiscal compromises with balky Republican leaders in Congress. He’s massaged the egos (and, who knows, perhaps the shoulders) of foreign leaders from Iraq to Japan. A CNN poll last week found that 71 percent of Democratic voters think highly of him.

But Biden has one obvious problem: Hillary Rodham Clinton. The same CNN poll found that Clinton was the first choice of 62 percent of Democratic voters, against only 15 percent for Biden and 10 percent for Senator Elizabeth Warren (who says she isn’t running).

The vice president doesn’t want to be seen as a mere understudy in his party’s presidential race. He’s cast his not-quite-impending decision as a matter of his own future, not a choice contingent on Clinton’s fortunes.

“It’s about whether he has a contribution to make,” said Ted Kaufman, one of Biden’s oldest friends and advisers. Not a question of whether Clinton falters? “No,” Kaufman told me.

But it’s too late; whether he likes it or not, Biden is already Clinton’s understudy — the backup player, there to step in only if the first string falters. Biden’s own timetable — his stipulation that he doesn’t need to make a decision before Labor Day — makes that all the more certain.

Clinton is expected to announce her candidacy formally next month. But she’s been building a campaign apparatus — a staff, a strategy, a super PAC, potential donors — for months. She’s already been endorsed by more than half of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate. With every month that goes by, she has added to that juggernaut. That means fewer potential supporters remain on the fence to be wooed by any rival candidate, including Biden.

At this point, the main cheerleader for a Biden presidency is a voluble former South Carolina Democratic Party chairman, Dick Harpootlian, who laid out the rationale for a run to the Washington Post this way: “He ain’t got no email problems. He ain’t got no foundation problems. What you see with Joe is what you get.”

There’s also an amateur Draft Joe Biden website, launched last week by a former Obama volunteer named William Pierce. As of Tuesday afternoon, its Draft Biden petition had collected 4,004 signatures and 62 Facebook likes — hardly a tidal wave. Its pitch for the vice president touts “his passion, joy and knowledge.”

All of which Biden undeniably possesses — and none of which adds up to a serious chance against Clinton. He flamed out as a presidential candidate in the 1988 campaign, when he faced charges that his speeches were plagiarized, and 2008, when he didn’t make it past the Iowa caucuses. And, yes, in much of the country — certainly among late-night comics — he’s thought of as an aging liberal goofball, not an imposing statesman. That kind of image isn’t easy to erase.

Once she announces, Clinton plans to launch a series of speeches to build a rationale for her candidacy. Biden will still be confined in the role of the Obama administration’s energetic salesman, an honorable job but one that won’t establish his claim to the nomination.

But if Clinton runs into trouble — if she has health problems, or legal problems, or any other kind of problems — her party is going to need another candidate, and fast. Biden is his party’s natural fallback.

A Quinnipiac poll this month found that with Clinton out of the race, Biden would be the front-runner with 35 percent; Warren polled 25 percent. No other Democrat has attracted significant interest or support, even among political insiders.

Biden’s flirtation with candidacy isn’t delusional. It isn’t just the self-flattery of a politician who long thought he ought to be president. Undeniably, however, he’s the second choice — and there’s nothing wrong with that. By taking on that thankless role, he’s doing his party a big service.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Readers may send him email at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Photo: In Des Moines, Vice President Joe Biden is greeted by Drake University students as he enters a stage with blue curtains at Sheslow Auditorium. 2/12/2015 (John Pemble/Flickr)

Republicans Haven’t Quite Worked Out A Foreign Policy Beyond ‘Not Obama’

Republicans Haven’t Quite Worked Out A Foreign Policy Beyond ‘Not Obama’

By Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Most presidential campaigns focus mostly on domestic issues such as the economy, taxes and health care, not foreign policy. But the 2016 presidential campaign is already shaping up to be an exception to that rule.

For one thing, the world is a mess. The United States is at war in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, even if we don’t have combat troops on the ground, and opportunities for new wars keep cropping up. President Obama hasn’t convinced most voters that his policies are working; in a Fox News poll released last week, a whopping 73 percent of respondents said they didn’t think Obama had a clear strategy in the fight against the terrorist Islamic State.

The likely Democratic candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, will need to show how she would do better than the president she served as secretary of State. Her Republican challengers will want to reassert their party’s traditional advantage on national security, a phenomenon political scientists call “issue ownership.”

But Republicans haven’t quite worked out what their foreign policy ought to be, beyond “not Obama.”

That’s partly because it’s still early in the campaign and the GOP boasts a bumper crop of potential candidates, some of them governors who never needed a foreign policy until now.

It’s also because one probable GOP candidate, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), has already broken from the pack and argued for a minimalist foreign policy with lower defense spending and fewer military commitments. Some of Paul’s opponents have charged that his views add up to isolationism; the senator prefers “conservative realism.”

But the debate isn’t only about Paul. Ever since President George W. Bush’s long misadventure in Iraq, his Republican successors have been struggling to refashion conservative foreign policy in a way most voters would embrace.

“I don’t think the debate exists because Rand Paul is there; Rand Paul is there because the debate exists,” said Danielle Pletka, a foreign policy scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “He represents people who are uncomfortable with American global engagement.”

Divisions have emerged over many issues (sanctions in Iran, arms for Ukraine, trade with Cuba) but the crucial question in the campaign will probably be military intervention in the Middle East, the terrain on which the last Republican administration came to grief. If airstrikes alone aren’t enough to defeat Islamic State, should ground troops be deployed? And should the United States do more to dislodge the government of President Bashar Assad in Syria, including aid to Syrian rebels, airstrikes, and ground troops?

Three rough camps among potential Republican candidates can be discerned. There are interventionists, who want the United States to do more. There’s the lone anti-interventionist, Paul. And, in between, there’s a big group of straddlers who say they would be tougher than Obama but, when pressed, don’t offer much in the way of specifics.

The interventionists include Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who has called for more U.S. aid to Syrian rebels. Last week, he dismissed Obama’s request for authorization to fight Islamic State as too limited and suggested he would delete Obama’s proposed prohibition on long-term ground combat. “I think we ought to authorize the president to destroy ISIL, period,” he said, using an acronym for Islamic State.

They may also include Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who told ABC News, “We have to go beyond just aggressive air strikes. … We have to be prepared to put boots on the ground, if that’s what it takes.”

The straddlers include Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who has demanded that the Obama administration fight its wars more aggressively but has also said he sees no need for U.S. ground troops. Last week, when Obama requested authorization for the air war in Iraq and Syria, Cruz sidestepped the question of limits and said the main defect of Obama’s request was that it failed to identify the adversary as “Islamic terrorists.”

Paul ducked questions last week about Obama’s request — perhaps because it came uncomfortably close to a proposal he made last year that prohibited using U.S. troops in ground combat and carried a 12-month expiration date.

Democrats were divided over the authorization request, too — perhaps even more deeply than Republicans. But their nomination seems all but settled, and Clinton declined to comment on the issue.

It’s not unusual for a political party to divide over foreign policy — not even Republicans.

“This debate has been going on for a century,” Richard Norton Smith, a noted historian of the GOP, told me. “It isn’t snide to suggest that modern libertarians are the heirs of the old isolationists.” The last time isolationists battled internationalists for the soul of the GOP, it was a very different era — around 1950, at the end of the 20-year-long, five-term Democratic presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.

This time, the debate isn’t over how to handle a world transformed by a war the United States and its allies won; it’s about the legacy of the last Republican president, George W. Bush, and a war most people think we lost. So the potential candidate in the most intriguing position is his brother Jeb, the former governor of Florida. He hasn’t spelled out his foreign policy yet, but he’s scheduled to give a speech on the subject this week in Chicago. On national security, Jeb Bush is the candidate to watch.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Readers may send him email at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Mitch McConnell Sings ‘Kumbaya’

Mitch McConnell Sings ‘Kumbaya’

By Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

The triumphant Republican class of 2014 formally took control of both halves of Congress last week, and here’s what it has changed so far: not much.

The new GOP majority didn’t vote to repeal President Obama’s healthcare law. It didn’t undo Obama’s decision to allow millions of undocumented immigrants to stay in the country. (House Republicans proposed a sweeping repeal measure, but it’s unlikely to pass even a GOP-run Senate.) It didn’t try to block the president’s negotiations with Cuba or hold up his nominees for attorney general and secretary of Defense.

Instead, as its first major action, the 114th Congress moved toward approving the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that won’t create many jobs and, with the price of oil plummeting, may no longer be worth building. And even that measure appears likely to die, because the president has already announced he will veto the bill.

What happened to the boundless hopes of all those conservative candidates, tea party and otherwise, who vowed they’d come to Washington and, in the words of former hog castrator Joni Ernst (R-IA), “make ’em squeal?”

So far, the GOP is playing what baseball fans call “small ball” — and not just because new members haven’t had time to settle into their offices yet.

Instead, the 54-46 majority in the Senate has run into three speed bumps: the chamber’s rules, the president’s veto power, and the innate caution of the new majority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

The Senate rules still require 60 votes to move major legislation past a filibuster; that means Republicans need to find six Democrats or independents to help them act. The Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to overcome a presidential veto; that requires even more Democratic help.

As for McConnell, 72, he’s spent more than 30 years preparing for this job — and while his mission as minority leader was to frustrate Democrats (and, as he bluntly declared, try to make Obama a one-term president), he now sees himself in a very different role.

“When you’re in the majority, you have more responsibility,” he has said. “We have to be realistic.”

“I don’t want the American people to think that if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that’s going to be a scary outcome,” he told The Washington Post this month.

That kind of reassurance — that the GOP isn’t really run by the Tea Party firebrands you see on Fox News — was the main point of McConnell’s inaugural speech on the floor of the Senate last week.

Yes, it took a swipe at Obama: “Bipartisan compromise may not come easily for the president,” he said. “The president’s supporters are pressing for militancy these days, not compromise.”

And yes, it included a silly suggestion that the economy’s recovery should be credited to private-sector elation at the mere thought of a Republican-run Senate.

So to many Democratic ears, it sounded disappointingly like the partisan, polarizing Mitch McConnell of old. But the core of the speech was a decidedly modest assessment of what voters were saying last November, followed by a lengthy appeal for bipartisan cooperation.

“The American people didn’t ask for a government that tries to do everything, and fails; and they didn’t demand a government that aims to do nothing, and succeeds,” McConnell said. “They asked for a government that works.”

“We’re going to have to work together,” he said. “We’re only going to pass meaningful legislation if members from both parties are given a stake in the outcome.”

That, his lieutenants explained, is what McConnell sounds like when he’s trying to be warm and fuzzy.

“We are trying to strike a new tone,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH). “There’s a healthy list of issues on which people from both sides can work together.”

As evidence, Portman and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) pointed to McConnell’s decision to allow open amendments and debate on the Keystone XL bill next week — something the last majority leader, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), rarely did.

McConnell allies have listed a decidedly non-revolutionary agenda of possible bipartisan legislation: corporate tax reform, infrastructure spending, trade agreements and tweaks to Obama’s healthcare law (not a repeal, which a veto puts out of reach).

They face serious challenges not only in winning support from Democrats, but also from their own right wing. But McConnell, who was once described as having all the charisma of an oyster, may be just the man to thread that legislative needle.

As Alec MacGillis points out in a fiercely critical biography (entitled, tellingly, The Cynic), McConnell isn’t a conservative ideologue; he’s a cold-blooded pragmatist. He began his political career as a liberal Republican who opposed the Vietnam War, sought support from organized labor and even cooperated with abortion rights groups. But as the GOP turned right, McConnell turned with it.

Now he says he wants to prove that despite the rancor and polarization of the last two decades — a process to which McConnell contributed — he can make divided government work again.

OK, Senator, go for it. If you’re serious, that would be a real legacy.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Readers may send him email at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr