The Democrats’ dinosaur problem

Much post-2012 attention has been focused on identifying weaknesses within the Republican Party, with armchair quarterbacks sounding alarms for a party that still controls one house of Congress, 30 governorships, and a majority of state legislatures across the country.
There are obvious issues that the party needs to address to win future national elections, but is the playing field really as uneven as the postgame analysis has made it out to be?  What about some of the looming woes soon to confront Democrats?
With Barack Obama in the White House, it’s easy for Democrats to wear the mantle of “change” and moving “forward,” buoyed by a re-elected president who toppled a giant to become his party’s nominee five years ago. But Barack Obama won’t be on the ballot in 2016.
Three names that might be pose a challenge to the “change” label: Clinton, Biden and Cuomo.
A once-ran for president, twice-ran for president, and son of the Democrat that never ran for president currently dominate 2016 speculation.

Half a decade after the 2008 primaries, it’s easy to buy into Hillary-mania being a force that will unite Democrats together in pursuit of retaining the White House.
Thing is, the last time she was a national candidate Clinton lost to a first-term senator in a brutal campaign that began with near-unanimous conventional wisdom that she would be the nominee. Who’s to say that history won’t repeat itself? The only major political scrutiny she’s endured since defeat at Obama’s hands came in the form of her testimony to the Senate regarding Benghazi, with the actual degree of scrutiny varying depending on who you talk to.
Vice-President, and noted smooth talker, Joe Biden theoretically makes a formidable candidate, but only because of the first two words in this sentence. Incumbency advantage aside, Candidate Biden would be a third-time candidate in his mid-seventies with decades’ worth of Senate votes for opponents to exploit.
The closest to a political newcomer is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. He may be the scion of a powerful political family second only to the Kennedys in representing the entrenched East Coast Democratic establishment, but at least he’s never run for president.
Prior to 2012, Cuomo cultivated a center-left image, with a record tailor-made for a general election and bolstered by his stratospheric approval ratings in the Empire State.
Yet since early 2013, Cuomo’s rise to national prominence has been hamstrung by declining approval, negative headlines and a deer in the headlights response to the hoopla of Hillary Clinton’s departure from the secretary of State’s office.
So a perfectly realistic scenario has three baggage-ridden Democrats from equally baggage-ridden political dynasties duking it out in a primary in a few years time.
Add that to the fact that the candidates will be courting a party base that hasn’t faced ideological and personality-fueled infighting in eight years, and will need to appeal to a liberal primary electorate while gearing up to defend the Obama record without the appeal of Obama himself in the general election – likely to be no easy task as polling data shows that support for Obama’s agenda is inexorably linked to his personality.
In 2016, Democrats will be confronted with a relatability problem of their own: the most oft-mentioned candidates to assume the mantle of ”hope and change” are relics of a bygone era of liberal politics, and in most cases have already been rejected by the Democratic voting base.

Howell is account director at Hynes Communications and a contributor to the Peach State political blog Georgia Tipsheet

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Head Start Teachers Name Obamacare As Biggest Problem

Head Start teachers and administrators told The Daily Caller that their most pressing concern is not budget impacts from sequestration but changes coming from President Barack Obama’s health-care law.

In 2014, the impact of 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act “is probably going to be a 9 percent [cost] increase, and significantly more the next year,” said Nancy Nordyk, director of the Head Start program in southern Oregon.

Rising healthcare costs will likely force Oregon to reduce some Head Start workers’ hours so they’re not eligible for the medical program, said Nordyk, who spoke to TheDC during a national Head Start conference held just outside D.C. in Maryland.

In one conference session on the pending healthcare bill, “some of the [managers for regional Head Start] organizations [said] ‘We don’t know what to do,’” said Elizabeth Steinberg, the CEO of Community Action Partnership in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

The worried managers come from “all over the country,” said Steinberg, whose Head Start program has 387 children.

The growing worry about Obamacare’s impact on Head Start has been obscured by the White House’s periodic efforts to portray the program as the victim of Republicans’ recent approval of sequestration, a slight reduction in the rate of federal spending growth that is erroneously described as a spending cut.

Administration officials announced April 29 that the Head Start funding would face a 5.27 percent budget cut in 2014.

“I know that there hasn’t been a lot of coverage of the [sequester] impacts on real people, on the families who had to be engaged in lotteries to see whether their child, on a Friday, was still going to be in Head Start on Monday,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a press conference in April.

However, in multiple interviews during a reception Thursday at the ritzy Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, Head Start teachers and administrators told TheDC they’re coping with the cuts.

Sandra Deveux, a teacher in Florida’s Brevard County, said her program trimmed $220,000 from its budget by cutting contracts and counseling. So far, she said, there been ”no cuts in employees, no cuts in services.”

“No layoffs yet,” said Shelvy Deskins, a teacher from southern Virginia’s Buchanan county. “Everything for the children, we have to keep,” she said.

Theresa Baker, a parent on a Head Start unit at Jefferson County, Kentucky, said her district may close some classrooms just before the end of the financial year in August. “Everything is under a microscope… we’ve become very very frugal,” she said, adding that her district will likely trim costs by scaling back home-visits to children enrolled in the program.

In Oregon, the Head Start region has scheduled a three-week “summer furlough,” will close one class 12 days early, and will delay opening the 2014 school-year for kids aged four and five, said Nordyk. Her head Start unit has 1,215 students and 300 staff.

However, many attendees at the National Head Start Association’s 40th annual conference said they’re coping with the sequester. “We’re going to make it,” said Weldon Beard, director of the Head Start program in Nacogdoches, Texas.

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Carney: ‘President believes we have a spending problem’

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday that President Obama does believe the country has a spending problem, a day after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said it was “almost a false argument” to say as much.

“Of course, the president believes that we have a spending problem,” Carney said at his daily briefing Monday.

Carney went on to argue that the government’s debt was “specifically driven by” healthcare spending, and argued the Obama administration was attempting to address those issues.

“The fact of the matter is, we need to reduce our healthcare costs. Funnily enough, recognizing that fact, the president took action to do just that through the Affordable Care Act, which has been scored by the CBO to significantly reduce our healthcare costs going forward,” Carney said.

Carney also acknowledged “we need to do more” to rein in deficit spending.

The comments come a day after Republicans roundly criticized Pelosi for her comments in a Fox News interview.

"It is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem,” Pelosi said. “We have a budget deficit problem that we have to address.”

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) said of Pelosi's comments that "this is the attitude that has the U.S. 16 [trillion dollars] in debt." Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) called the remark "unbelievable" on Twitter.

The Minority Leader went on to say the deficit and debt are at "immoral levels" and "must be reduced,” but that she believed in a balanced package that included spending cuts and revenue increases. With an $85 billion sequester set to trigger at the end of the month, Democrats and Republicans are battling over how to replace the across-the-board spending cuts.

Pelosi was responding to an anecdote told by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that Obama told him “we don’t have a spending problem” during one of their fiscal-cliff negotiations.

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