How can Republicans prove they care about the poor?
The sequester has only hardened the GOP's image as a defender of wealthy interests
James Carville, the former aide to Bill Clinton, recently summed up the GOP's problem with the sequester — $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts that took effect last week — this way: "The sequester, many people don't know what it is," he told NBC. "But it sounds stupid and cruel, so they think it's a Republican thing."
Fairly or not, polls bear out Carville's pithy assessment. And the GOP's image has only hardened in recent weeks, with Republicans rejecting President Obama's plea to replace the sequester with a balance of entitlement cuts and taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations. While Democrats have sought to underscore the impact the sequester will have on middle- and lower-income Americans, many Republicans have dismissed such warnings as wildly overblown. But local administrators for federal aid programs say the cuts could do real damage to poor Americans, according to Annie Lowrey at The New York Times:
Seeking to put pressure on the GOP, the Democratic National Committee has already released a web video that juxtaposes Republican leaders dismissing the damage of the sequester with local news reports highlighting the concerns of average voters. The ad ends with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) proclaiming, "I got 98 percent of what I wanted; I'm pretty happy."
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It's not just the sequester. Republican governors, for example, have recently come under fire from their conservative brethren for expanding Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. As Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes, the controversy over the Medicaid expansion, a key component of ObamaCare, bolsters the impression that for Republicans "it's all about comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted, about giving more to those who already have a lot."
Republicans, of course, see the matter quite differently, arguing that their policies would free individuals to lift themselves out of poverty. But a growing chorus of conservatives argues that the Republican Party's focus on spending cuts and taxes are not resonating with middle- and lower-income votes. In a recent manifesto in Commentary titled "How to Save the Republican Party," Bush administration veterans Michael Gerson and Pete Wehner laid out a new economic agenda that stresses social mobility over tax orthodoxy. And Arthur C. Brooks, writing in The Wall Street Journal this week, is even blunter about the GOP's problem:
The problem, however, is that as the party fractures over immigration, the Medicaid expansion, and social issues like gay marriage, a hard line on spending and taxes may be one of the few issues around which Republicans can coalesce. As Richard W. Stevenson writes in The New York Times:
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Ryu Spaeth is deputy editor at TheWeek.com. Follow him on Twitter.
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