{"id":12987,"date":"2016-04-05T09:50:34","date_gmt":"2016-04-05T13:50:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/?p=12987"},"modified":"2016-04-05T09:51:41","modified_gmt":"2016-04-05T13:51:41","slug":"pa-gop-builds-brilliant-gotv-plan-for-democrats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/?p=12987","title":{"rendered":"PA GOP builds brilliant GOTV plan \u2014 for Democrats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Attacking ‘Pre-Wal-Mart’ majors and abortion rights could lead Nov. disaster<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

By Mike McGann<\/strong><\/span>, Editor, The Times<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"TimesPoliticsUnusual\"<\/a>There\u2019s dumb and then there\u2019s pour gasoline on yourself and dive into the barbecue dumb.<\/span><\/p>\n

And it seems like Republicans in your beloved state legislature have stocked up on the Kingsford and are wearing loads of Eau de Sunoco in a brilliant attempt to pander to a small minority while angering a much larger segment of the voting population.<\/span><\/p>\n

First, internal GOP house emails on how to battle Gov. Tom Wolf over the budget again leaked \u2014 apparently state house Republicans are way worse at email than Hillary Clinton \u2014 with a number of disjointed proposals, including yet another tax cut to close the $1.5 billion deficit.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the winner was from State Rep. Brad Roae from Crawford County who suggested closing state-owned residential facilities for those with mental disabilities (it\u2019s unclear whether he was talking about the State House, too), reversing the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which would cut folks off from health insurance and ending higher education grants for, as he so artfully put it in the memo, students majoring in \u201cpoetry or some other pre Wal-Mart major.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Aside from playing into the growing narrative that Republicans are both heartless and clueless \u2014 that last bit is likely to further antagonize the media, both largely made up of those \u201cpre-Wal-Mart\u201d majors, although most likely as poorly paid as said Wal-Mart associates, frankly for no good reason. Based on the email string circulated by the Republicans, it appears a number of them majored in underwater basketweaving, as there is grammar in it one generally associates with ransom notes.<\/span><\/p>\n

And while that\u2019s pretty dumb \u2014 it still probably doesn\u2019t make the top position of elephantine recto-cranial inversion syndrome for the week.<\/span><\/p>\n

That prize goes to both State Rep. Kathy Rapp (R-Warren) and the House Health Committee, which sped through approval of legislation that could become arguably the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the nation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Regardless of your stance on abortion \u2014 and yes, it\u2019s obviously not an easy subject for most folks \u2014 this is mind-bogglingly dumb politics.<\/span><\/p>\n

While this panders to a small minority \u2014 which to be honest votes pretty much all of the time \u2014 it angers and activates Democrats and independent women who don\u2019t always show up on election day. Worse, it plays into the ongoing narrative of a \u201cGOP war on women.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Like the recent \u201clet\u2019s discriminate against transgender and gay folks to pander to our base\u201d laws in North Carolina and Mississippi, it highlights a failure to grasp basic math (and, oddly, makes a great argument for Common Core education \u2014 \u201cif Johnny angers 10,000 voters by pandering to 1,000, how soon will he need to find a new job?\u201d). In short, while pandering to a few, it angers and activates many, many more. Increasingly enraged Republicans seem to be working out of this self-destructive playbook nationally.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lets do the math: Pennsylvania has about 990,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. The vast majority of them favor maintaining abortion rights. Republicans win because of A: gerrymandering, and B: Democrats don\u2019t show up on election day with any regularity.<\/span><\/p>\n

While the gerrymandering issue isn\u2019t going to change (although court challenges in other states make it likely to before the next redistricting festival), the folks like Roae and Rapp have done what few Democrats have been able to do: build a winning statewide Get Out The Vote (GOTV) program for the Democrats.<\/span><\/p>\n

Things were tough enough already \u2014 with the looming disaster that is Donald Trump at the top of the ticket \u2014 this sort of stuff has to have U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey wondering what sort of lobbying job he\u2019ll get in 2017, while a number of state representatives in Chester County have to furious at their colleagues for making races that should have been easy a real battle.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the last 20 or so years, one could usually depend upon the state\u2019s Democrats to embrace infighting, power plays and self-destructive behavior (not that they still don\u2019t engage in such things, see McGinty, Katie), but the once stable, calm and well-managed Republican Party seems hell bent on trying to out do Democrats when it comes to chaos and stupidity.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that may be the only place they win this year.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Attacking ‘Pre-Wal-Mart’ majors and abortion rights could lead Nov. disaster By Mike McGann, Editor, The Times There\u2019s dumb and then there\u2019s pour gasoline on yourself and dive into the barbecue dumb. And it seems like Republicans in your beloved state legislature have stocked up on the Kingsford and are wearing loads of Eau de Sunoco […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12986,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,3],"tags":[871,3592,565,754,4942],"class_list":["post-12987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","category-featured","tag-abortion","tag-election-2016","tag-gop","tag-politics","tag-prewal-mart-majors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12987"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12988,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12987\/revisions\/12988"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}