PHONY GOP MODERATES GET THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT MORE THAN REAL DEMOCRATIC MODERATES

We're being told that moderate Republicans are wary of the Senate health care bill:

A key moderate Senate Republican says she's uncomfortable with the emerging Senate health care plan, which is likely to cap Medicaid spending and shift it to a lower growth rate in 2025. "I think that's a problem. I think that sort of defeats the purpose of keeping people on, and at a level at which the program can be sustained," Sen. Shelley Moore Capito told me this morning. "I don't look favorably on it, that's for sure."

... If Republicans lose the votes of moderates like Capito, it's hard to see how the bill can pass.

Josh Marshall is not buying it:

... the Iron Law of Republican Politics is that the GOP moderates always cave. But the cave is never without a stage managed drama. And that appears to be the part of the story we’re now entering.

Axios just reported that Sen. Shelley Moore Capito is expressing concern over Medicaid cuts in the Senate Trumpcare bill....

Please.

... It is not only that the ‘GOP moderates always cave.’ It is that we are asked to (and almost always do) indulge this fainting couch routine or a furious bout of chin stroking that comes as a prelude to the cave.

... This isn’t negotiating or putting a foot down. It’s play acting.... on the off chance Sen Capito is serious, she should do something to make that clear. Otherwise, it’s just a yarn, just more nonsense to hide the ball and pave the way for the preordained outcome.

Greg Sargent wrote something similar last week:

Republican senators are now making a great show of expressing their disapproval with the scandalously opaque and secretive process that the GOP Senate leadership is employing in the quest to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act....

But it’s very likely that all of this will end up amounting to just another ruse....

If a handful of GOP senators said they can’t vote for the bill under these conditions, McConnell might have to relent, because he can afford to lose only a few.

In fairness, that is a lot to expect from a GOP senator. But there is something else any individual GOP senator — or a small group of them — could do to try to improve the process: They could go to McConnell and privately say that a slower and more transparent process is actually very important to them.

... until we learn otherwise, we should assume that the only thing individual senators are accomplishing with their complaints is getting good quotes for themselves in the media without creating any meaningful discomfort for GOP leaders that might induce them to change any of this.

And yet when all this is over and the president signs the McConnellcare bill into law after it's rubber-stamped by the House, the phony Republican moderates who always cave will continue to be regarded as moderates. The press will still call them that. They'll accept the label and run future races with that reputation intact.

By contrast, when Democrats operate from a left-centrist point of view, they're still baited by the GOP as if they're the love children of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxembourg. That how New Democrat Bill Clinton was described throughout his presidency. No attempts at moderation or compromise ever changed that portrait of Clinton, and compromise fan Barack Obama was treated similarly. And now this is happening to Jon Ossoff in his congressional race against Karen Handel.

Ossoff's no flaming radical:

Bucking the left, Mr. Ossoff said in an interview that he would not support raising income taxes, even for the wealthy, and opposed “any move” toward a single-payer health care system. Attacked by Republicans for his ties to national liberals, Mr. Ossoff said he had not yet given “an ounce of thought” to whether he would vote for Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, in a future ballot for speaker.

His own race, Mr. Ossoff told supporters, was about “sending a message to Washington.” But that message, he said, was about “decency and respect and unity, rather than division.”

His reward for that is this:



And this:

Handel said: “I can only tell you what I have observed in this race. The anger has been from the left with groups of trackers showing up and literally adopting a gang-like posture and virtually stalking individuals.”

... Her campaign repeatedly attacked Ossoff over his support from the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, and his “San Francisco values”.

Even moderate Democrats are described in terms suggesting they're fist-shaking progressives. Phony-moderate Republicans? Always portrayed as the real thing.