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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > January > 25
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Martin Gottlieb: Jim Jordan jumps to fore with right-of-right pitch
Meet Jim Jordan.
If you already follow Ohio politics a lot, you already know the name. He’s the congressman from Urbana — north of Springfield — and points north and east. His 4th District extends to Mansfield, and is mainly rural and conservative.
He was a four-time state champion high school wrestler, a two-time national champion for Wisconsin, then an assistant coach at Ohio State.
He got his political start running for the state House of Representatives, then moved up to the state Senate. His basic approach has been to out-conservative everybody, which isn’t easy in Republican primaries in his various districts.
He recently declined to attend a national conservative conference in part because an organization of gay conservatives was going to be there.
He’s been considering a run for the U.S. Senate in 2012 against Democrat Sherrod Brown. But he said in December that he is “leaning heavily” against it.
Looks like he has a pretty good gig in Congress, for a guy who’s only beginning his third term. He has a lock on his district, and he is the chair of Republican Study Committee (RSC), to which two-thirds of his colleagues belong.
Using that spot, he has now made his first big splash on the national scene, winning attention from the media, the White House and others by getting to the right of House Speaker John Boehner and top Republican budget guy, Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin.
The RSC proposed cutting federal spending by about a third for most domestic agencies. During the recent campaign, top Republican leaders talked of getting $100 billion out of the budget this year. But with much of the year past, they have prorated that to about $60 billion. For the RSC, though, there’s no prorating. And this year is just the beginning.
The RSC decided not to ponder the possibility of cuts in defense, homeland security, veterans spending, Social Security and Medicare. And, of course, it excluded all talk of tax increases as a way of addressing the main problem it cites: runaway debt.
The targets are only in “discretionary domestic” spending, about a fifth of the budget.
That makes it sound like the conservatives are simply targeting stuff that conservatives don’t like. But the White House was quick to say the plan would result in a loss of 4,000 FBI agents, 1,500 drug enforcement agents, 900 U.S. marshals and 5,700 correctional officers, as well as 3,000 food inspectors. And almost 400,000 children would lose Head Start spots.
The RSC focused on dollar figures, not impact. According to Congressional Quarterly Today, Jordan said at a news conference that the proposed cuts “were derived by talking to members of the RSC, asking them: Where do you think government has been wasteful, redundant.”
Wouldn’t such dramatic cuts undercut the effort to stimulate the economy to produce some jobs?
Said Jordan, “We actually think, if you reduce federal government spending, you help create jobs.”
That, of course, is a widely held view among conservatives. But typically it’s about the long term, not the short.
The Associated Press asked Jordan what accounted for his optimism about the impact of cuts.
“His office said it’s not aware of studies directly addressing the issue,” AP said.
The Washington Post reported the RSC proposal as the “first sign of a fissure between old-guard Republicans and Tea-Party-backed newcomers.”
Maybe. Almost half the Jordan group are freshmen, many of them with Tea Party ties.
But Boehner is getting a chance to look like a relative moderate, while the newcomers get on the record harmlessly, given that whatever budget is actually enacted seems likely to be a lot more moderate.
Meanwhile, Jordan has laid down a marker with some relevance for Ohio politics.
He said, “I have never seen the American people more ready tor the tough-love solutions. The question today is whether the political class will rise to the level the American people set” in the 2010 election.
Being associated with the marker could make him a bigger player in the House.
But if he really thinks he’s where the people are, one might think he would like the idea of taking on staunch liberal Sherrod Brown in this swing state.
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Editorial: Obama bows to reality that GOP gets say
Few State of the Union speeches live in history.
Our articulate presidents tend to be at their best when addressing their own parties, the nation in a time of celebration or crisis, or even an international audience.
Giving an annual update to a bunch of politicians with highly polarized views on a laundry list of issues is not an assignment that brings out memorable eloquence.
The 2011 SOTU was not one of President Barack Obama’s best efforts. The occasion may be remembered primarily as the one at which the politicians of the two parties started sitting together.
Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and Republican Sen. Rob Portman sat together and invited other Ohio lawmakers to join them.
Maybe 2011 will be an aberration in that regard — or the start of something. Hopefully, partisan animosity will not be replaced by geographical animosity.
Maybe, too, the evening will be remembered as the year when the Republicans offered not one, but two rebuttal speeches — the second coming from the Tea Party — and got substantial attention for both.
But there was also substance: President Barack Obama proposed a five-year freeze on domestic discretionary spending — countering calls for big cuts. He acknowledged that the spending course he and the country have been on since the economic collapse of 2008 cannot be sustained.
He took the largely symbolic step of coming out clearly against earmarks, an easy bow to a political mood.
He made a call to Congress to “move forward,” not try to undo his health care initiative, though he acknowledged that it might be improved.
Symbolism, tone and substance combined, the speech signals a move toward the political center. That was simply in the cards.
The president got a bold, liberal agenda enacted in his first two years, knowing all along that that was the time to do it. His party had strong control of Congress, something which tends not to last. And, boy, did it ever not last.
He spoke of bipartisanship and of bipartisan goals, especially enhancing American competitiveness. Whether he and Congress can actually be a force in that regard is doubtful, given that he also said this country already has the most successful economy.
But the politicians of both parties do like to talk this way.
The president went out of his way to grant the legitimacy of Republican concerns, citing a need to review government regulation with an eye on eliminating rules that are needlessly bad for business, a need for a simpler tax code (with lower rates for corporations, as a trade-off for eliminating various tax breaks).
He spoke of reorganizing government, an obvious effort to find a bipartisan cause.
He couldn’t satisfy the Republicans, of course. But their importance in shaping the speech could not be more clear.
Some on the left in his party will complain. But he is not going to be able to somehow bludgeon the Republicans into accepting their kind of agenda.
He always said he’s a pragmatist. Now he tries to prove it.
The most glaringly unachieved Obama goal is the depolarization of American politics. He became the most prominent advocate for that cause with a 2004 speech that made him famous. But his first two years as president left the country decidedly more polarized.
Now a turn.
Bipartisanship and moderation don’t equal wisdom. They can add up to nothingness or simple faddishness. But the parties do have to work together now.
Nothing the president said seems likely to hinder that effort. But nothing he could possibly have said would make it easy.
No one is under any illusions about what sitting together will lead to.
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