With social program fights, some Republicans fear being seen as the party of the 1 percent

[DonViejo]

By Robert Costa and
Mike DeBonis March 29 at 5:37 PM

President Trump boasted this week that the Republican Party will soon be known as “the party of great health care.” But a growing number of Republicans fear that it risks being tagged as the party of the 1 percent instead — handing Democrats a potent political message as the GOP pushes to gut former president Barack Obama’s health-care law and other popular federal programs, including those that help the poor and people with disabilities.

A spate of policy moves in recent weeks by Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials has driven the party’s agenda hard to the right, giving new fodder to Democratic presidential candidates eager to shift the national debate to such issues as health care and jobs ahead of the 2020 election.

The administration’s budget released this month, for example, includes massive rollbacks of programs including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security Disability Insurance, as well as cuts to the Special Olympics, Meals on Wheels, and programs related to autism and other developmental disabilities.

Trump signaled his misgivings about some of those cuts in recent days — rescinding a proposal to zero out Special Olympics funding, which had sparked a bipartisan backlash, and promising to protect a cleanup program for the Great Lakes in states that could be crucial to his reelection.

Democrats said the broad efforts by Trump and Republicans to attack programs that aid lower-income and working-class Americans could help blunt the president’s populist appeal and provide voters with more reasons to consider supporting Democratic candidates. The debate bears echoes of Obama’s successful reelection effort in 2012, when Democrats attacked now-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as an out-of-touch GOP nominee beholden to the wealthiest Americans.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/with-social-program-fights-some-republicans-fear-being-seen-as-the-party-of-the-1-percent/2019/03/29/9cfc3232-516b-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html

[Girard442]

1. More like the party of the 0.01%

And if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's hard to sell the idea that it's something other than a duck.