A Bitter, Self-Pitying Boehner Blames His Republican House Colleagues For "A Very Predictable Disaster"

Boehner told Jay Leno on Thursday that he's learned that "a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk." His problem, an inability to exercise the kind of skills needed to actually be a leader, never dawned on him when he led his caucus over the cliff last year, despite understanding what a disaster it would be. When Leno then brought up the idea of rooting for America to fail for narrow partisan advantage and mentioned his Congress' 8% approval rating (as the audience cheered), Boehner tried deflecting the blame away from himself: "The Congress has been America's favorite whipping boy for 200 years-- the CONGRESS. You know, there are 465 of us; we've always got some Members in some level of trouble. And so, it doesn't look good…" And then he lapsed into discredited right-wing lies, you expect to hear from Limbaugh or Beck or Ann Coulter. Like Obamacare being "a government takeover of our healthcare system."

Leno lost his touch long ago and it wasn't a very good interview. Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow would have had a great deal more to offer and could have engaged Boehner much more productively, especially when he recited tired, false GOP talking points-- like the one about Obamacare not working. Imagine if it was Chris or Rachel talking instead of Jay! Unlike Jay, they would have at least known that so far this month another 800,000 people have signed up and that the total is already around 3 million. "And, if the pattern of people signing up matches the experience of Massachusetts under Romneycare, we can expect a big surge ahead of the March 31 deadline." Is that good? Unless you want mindless platitudes and laughable "FoxFacts," don't ask Boehner or Leno but…

Given that the first two months of the law’s existence were basically lost due to problems with the exchange websites, these latest numbers are interesting because they show that the number of people signing up is beginning to catch up to the projections made before the September 1 rollout-- before all the trouble with the websites.

Back then, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that 3.3 million people would sign up for insurance through the exchanges by the end of last year. That obviously didn’t happen. But after essentially losing two month to technical problems, Obamacare appears to be gaining ground. It’s nearly reached that 3.3 million figure two-thirds of the way through January. It no longer seems inconceivable that 7 million could sign up by March 31st, as the CBO had originally projected.

Imagine Jay Leno ever asking, even indirectly, Boehner about the Republican Party's war on the poor. Not gonna happen. The hottest topic in current political discourse, economic inequality, was never even brought up. In his Washington Post column yesterday, Greg Sargent posited that the Beltway's Conservative Consensus favorite topic of Austerity has now made way for "a discussion of what government should be doing to boost the economy and protect people from economic harm." He synthesized the data from the two most recent polls on the topic, both out this week, one from Pew and one from CBS. "The ideas and assumptions underlying the GOP economic and poverty agenda are far and away more reflective of the preoccupations of Tea Party Republicans. Meanwhile, non-Tea Party Republicans are much more in line with the rest of the public on these matters.

In short, the Tea Party economic worldview, if such a thing exists, is isolated from the rest of the public, and even to some degree from non-Tea Party Republicans-- yet it has an outsized role in shaping the GOP’s overall agenda.

Both the Pew and CBS polls find large majorities believe the income gap is growing, and both find that more Americans want government to do something about it. Both also find solid majority support for raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits, and (in Pew’s case) taxing the rich to help the poor.

Both polls also find that only Republicans don’t think government should act to reduce inequality. This is reflected in the GOP economic agenda. As Jonathan Chait explains, this agenda continues to be premised on the ideas that there is, if anything, too much downward redistribution of wealth, that government shouldn’t interfere in the market by, say, raising the minimum wage, and that safety net programs lull people into dependency (Paul Ryan’s Hammock Theory of Poverty).

…• The CBS poll finds that Republicans believe unemployment benefits make people less motivated to look for a job by 57-40. But Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly believe this by 67-32. By contrast, only a minority of non-tea party Republicans believe this (47-51).

• The Pew poll has a similar finding: Republicans believe government aid to the poor does more harm than good by making people dependent on government, rather than doing more good than harm, by 67-27. But Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly believe this by 84-11, while non-tea party Republicans are somewhat more closely divided, 59-35.

• The Pew poll finds that Republicans favor raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 54-44. But Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly oppose this by 65-33. Non-Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly support it by 65-33. (All the above Pew numbers include Republicans and GOP-leaners).

• The CBS poll is less pronounced, but even here, Tea Party Republicans tilt against a minimum wage hike by 52-47, while non-tea party Republicans favor it by 50-48.