Romney, FEMA and anti-government dogma

Joe Conason writes about Mtt Romney's sad attempts to navigate the politics of Frankenstorm Sandy in Hurricane Sandy Blows Away Political Pretense and Ideological Nonsense National Memo 11/02/2012:

As he played his role in this flummery, Romney repeatedly refused to answer questions from reporters about his vow to dismantle FEMA as a cost-cutting measure. It would be “immoral” to spend money on federal disaster relief, as he told a debate audience in 2011, when the government is running a substantial deficit. And it is true that the budget and tax policies promoted by Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, would require such significant cuts in domestic spending as to decimate disaster relief.

Disbanding FEMA and discarding its skilled personnel apparently would be fine with Romney, who said “absolutely” when asked by CNN’s John King whether he would consign disaster relief to the states rather than the federal government. For that matter he would go still further, said the former Massachusetts governor; best of all would be to let the private sector assume FEMA’s responsibilities.

Nobody asked Romney how a privatized FEMA would function, but it is interesting to imagine the private-equity version of disaster management—and how that entity might squeeze profit from tragedy. Under present circumstances, the Romney campaign denies any plan to abolish FEMA, but who really knows?

Tags: 2012 election, hurricane sandy, mitt romney

Presidential debate 2, wherein Obama actually shows up this time

I know from the Biden-Ryan debate that I'd better check with Charlie Pierce before I blog about Tuesday's debate. And, sure enough, he had some great things to say, America Has Now Met the Many Romneys, and America Knows They Can Get Their Asses Kicked: At the Debate Esquire Politics Blog 10/17/2012:

Those of us who lived under the barely distinguishable leadership of Willard Romney in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!) know very well that the emotional membrane separating Lofty Willard from Snippy Willard is thin indeed, and that the membrane separating Snippy Willard from Dickhead Willard is well-nigh translucent. Both of those membranes were tested fully here on Tuesday night by the president, by Candy Crowley ... and by the simple fact that certain members of The Help tested the challenger's ideas and found them wanting and, my dear young man, that simply is not done. And both of those membranes failed like rotting levees in a storm. ...

But not even I expected Romney to let his entitled, Lord-of-the-Manor freak flag fly as proudly as he did on Tuesday night. He got in the president's face. He got in Crowley's face. That moment when he was hectoring the president about the president's pension made him look like someone to whom the valet has brought the wrong Mercedes.

"You'll get your chance in a moment. I'm still speaking."

Wow. To me, this was a revelatory, epochal moment. It was a look at the real Willard Romney, the Bain cutthroat who could get rich ruining lives and not lose a moment's sleep. But those people are merely the anonymous Help. The guy he was speaking to on Tuesday night is a man of considerable international influence. Outside of street protestors [sic], and that Iraqi guy who threw a shoe at George W. Bush, I have never seen a more lucid example of manifest public disrespect for a sitting president than the hair-curling contempt with which Romney invested those words. (I've certainly never seen one from another candidate.) He's lucky Barack Obama prizes cool over everything else. LBJ would have taken out his heart with a pair of salad tongs and Harry Truman would have bitten off his nose.

The Bush question was one that Pierce liked Obama's response, as did Bob Kuttner (Game, Set, Obama American Prospect 10/17/2012), Karoli at C&L (Obama Paints Romney as 'Me-Too Mitt', More Extreme Than Bush 10/17/2012) and Ari Melber (How Obama got even in the debate rematch MSNBC 10/17/2012). I actually thought this was one of his weaker moments. Because given the opportunity to remind the whole country why Bush and Cheney left office with approval ratings not much higher than sour milk, Obama instead talked about areas where he supposedly is more like Bush than Romney is. His point to make Romney sound more extreme on social issues than Bush was okay as far as it went, but pointing to previous Presidents of the other party and making them sound more enlightened than the current standard-bearer is a pretty routine tactic. In this case, Obama displayed one of the political failings of his Administration, which is that he didn't maintain a narrative framework about how the Bush-Cheney Administration and their bad policies were responsible for so many problems. Look Forward Not Backward for Obama extends even to politicking. It's one way his essentially centrist, center-right perspective has limited him as the head of the Democratic Party.

But Obama's success in that debate was in getting in lots of good points that reinforce his campaign themes, like his references to Romney's tax breaks for the rich and the break he gets on his own taxes on his $20 million annual income.

I make fun of the punditocracy for practicing theater criticism on these debates, because they are often very superficial or even focused on trivial or foolish points, Al Gore's supposed excessive sighing in 2000 being the all-time classic example so far.

But in a debate, it can be hard to separate substance on the one hand from style and technique on the other. Obama's technique involved jamming Romney on weak points and hoping to create forced errors on Romney's part, and that worked. But that technique was effective because Obama used his jabs at Romney not just as isolated gotcha moments but to build his campaign narrative on the issues addressed. By bringing up Romney's multi-million-dollar annual income and low tax rate and connecting that to Romney's policy proposals, he made it much easier for the audience to connect Mitt's stage demeanor when he let "let his entitled, Lord-of-the-Manor freak flag fly." By talking specifically about Bain and the outsourcing of jobs to China, he suggested to the audience a framework for processing Mitt's scowling and peevishness as the cynical, soulless corporate boss who lays off 30,000 people per year and gets bonuses for doing it, rather than as Mitt being, say, the "experienced job-creator" who sometimes has "to make tough choices."

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, mitt romney

Biden-Ryan debate tonight

After last week's Obama-Romney debate, we all got to be theater critics for a few days. This week I've been seeing a lot of analysis and criticism of the theater criticism. This is how we news junkies entertain ourselves.

I'll give my own pre-theater criticism of tonight's debate and say that I would expect Joe Biden to come across better than Paul Ryan to most people, unless he has a stroke or something just beforehand and walks out on the stage buck nekkid and babbling incoherently. Biden's old-fashioned political glad-handing style is kind of enduring, though it does produce the occasional hyperbole that our star pundits gleefully treat as one of the "gaffes" they love to chatter about. But he also conveys a seriousness about public service and a sense that he actually enjoys the process of democratic politics.

Paul Ryan, on the other hand, is a pompous stiff. Charlie Pierce's epithet for him, "zombie-eyed granny-starver", catches his general style pretty well.

As I was writing this, I went to the Esquire Politics Blog to pick up the link to a clip of Ryan that Pierce recently used, and I see he already did the same pre-theater criticism I did in the above paragraphs in just the headline alone, The Zombie-Eyed Granny-Starver Takes on the One Man Who Relishes This Mess: Your 2012 VP Debate Preview 10/11/2012. But I'll go ahead and post mine anyway, though any thin claim to originality is clearly shot already. As Exhibit 1 from his post shows:

Joe Biden is not riven with self-doubt. Joe Biden is not exhausted by the hurly-burly of politics. Joe Biden is not burdened by the weight of events and laid low by the constant battle against know-nothing obstructionism. Joe Biden is not going to take the stage tonight and find himself wishing he were anywhere else. I mean, god be good to him, as my gran' used to say, but Joe Biden actually likes all these silly performance pieces in which we insist he be engaged in order to stay vice-president. He revels in them. He would do ten of them a day, if he could. When I consider Joe Biden, and I look at the enthusiasm with which he throws himself into the various cataracts and torrents of hogwash that constitute our politics these days, I find myself looking at him the way I look at people who sky-dive or drive in demolition derbies. I have no idea why they do what they do, and I have absolutely no intention of doing it myself, ever, but, goddamn, do those people look like they're having fun.

I'll go ahead and add to Pierce's observation that Ryan "is as ambitious as Satan," that Ryan is likely to look better to a lot of people after this because it will be the first major exposure a lot of people have to him. At least partisan Republicans are likely to be jazzed by his presentation. Shoot, partisan Republicans were jazzed by Sarah Palin's performance against Biden in 2008. Some audience segements are easy to please.

Here's the BuzzFeed video of Ryan being a prickly jerk, Paul Ryan Gets Testy And Ends Interview 10/08/2012:

Aside from his testiness, it also seems to me in that clip Ryan is struggling to string together several favorite conservative cliches into a coherent whole. He probably wished he hadn't said that not even Obama was proposing new gun laws, because his base believes that Obama is part of a massive UN conspiracy to take away everyone's guns so the federal gubment can force us all into homosexual marriages and unisex bathrooms. Or something like that.

And he also seemed to slip when he blurted out that the answer to crime was to create opportunity in the inner cities, which sounded in the context like he was suggesting that social conditions and economic situations might actually have some meaningful effect on causing crime! It was as if Ramsey Clark had taken over his mouth for a few seconds. But then he proceeded to the Christian-Right-ly Correct position that all those black people in the ghetto inner-city dwellers need to learn Discipline. Culture-of-poverty and all that, you know.

While I'm on the topic of debates, the discussion about whether debates matter in Presidential elections has taken on metaphysical overtones, or at least the after-work-drinks version of metaphysics at the local pub. Political scientists and sociologists and (gulp!) economists can come up with analyses and even models showing that debates have no effect on Presidential elections at all. Because their models need data that can be quantified and correlated, and it's hard if not impossible to isolate quantifiable measures that would isolate perceived debate performance to its effect on the final vote.

Of course the debates matter, because they are in this and the last several Presidential elections, major focuses of the Presidential campaign and voters ultimately make a choice based on a variety of factors. Voting matters, so turnout matters, so get-out-the-vote operations are important. TV is the single most important communication channel for the elections, so ads and ad buys matter.

And what candidates say matters. Even if we have to read their lips very carefully. William Saletan offered a good analysis of Willard Romney's weasel-words on abortion in Romney’s Abortion “Agenda” Slate 10/10/2012. It's worth paying attention to what major Presidential candidates say and how they say it.

Tags: 2012 election, joe biden, mitt romney, paul ryan

The "47%" meme

The "47%" meme is kind of a desublimation of the real meaning of the main Republican low-tax mantra since around 1978. The whole idea was to cut taxes for the wealthy. But to make it acceptable and even appealing to a wider public, they had to include some kind of tax cuts for the lower brackets, as well. As Andrew Hacker writes in Can Romney Get a Majority? New York Review of Books 09/27/2012 (accessed 07/21/2012):

Since the close of Reconstruction, the GOP has been seen as the party of the top bosses — there’s really no other way to put it. Theirs is a long lineage of the one percent. So its candidates try to amass majorities by diversions ranging from race and firearms, to abortion and immigration. The party also makes a place for persons below the median in income who seek to enhance their status by allying with the well-to-do. This is no small pool, as can be seen from the following of Rush Limbaugh listeners on his six hundred stations.

But the "47%" complaint brings the argument full circle: it good for the wealthiest to pay low taxes and even have them lowered more; for everyone else, paying low taxes is bad. Even if the reason is because you're poor. Or old. Or disabled. Or a student.

The "47%" meme is Republican ideology, and facts won't stop true believers from believing it. But there has been some good reality-based commentary around it for those of us who care about such things. Paul Krugman looks at the age component in Taxes Over The Life Cycle 09/18/2012: "even aside from the fact that there are other taxes besides the income tax, even aside from the larger point that lower-income working Americans are hardly grifters, the fact is that the vast majority of Americans do pay income taxes at some point in their life."

Claude Fischer looks at the unwholesome background of this way of thinking in The 47% Charge in U.S. History Made In America 09/18/2012: "Whatever the facts may be, the charge that huge numbers of shiftless moochers live off hard-working taxpayers feels true to many Americans – and has felt true to many Americans for centuries. It is a sentiment rooted in Americans’ exceptional emphasis on individual self-reliance and insistence on conditioning help upon virtue." Because it's not all about facts. He concludes, "Whatever the economic, sociological, or political logic of Mitt Romney’s statements, they resonate emotionally and morally with many Americans, even with many in that very 47 percent." But the crassness and obvious contempt in Romney's comments surely resonate negatively with some significant portion of the independent voters to whom Romney needs to appeal in key swing states. Because it's basically an ugly sentiment.

The history of how this particular "47%" position evolved is interesting and revealing is recounted by Mike Konczal in Four Histories of the Right's 47 Percent Theory Rortybomb 09/20/2012. The four items he discusses are a 2002 Wall Street Journal editorial about "lucky duckies" who don't pay income taxes - and they didn't mean moochers like Mitt Romney; carefully nurtured "culture war" fears that a third or so of the population are quasi-Bolsheviks (that famous ghost which the Communist Manifesto of 1848 spoke of still haunts right-wing think-tanks whose entrepreneurial income is provided by conservative billionaires); a Randian 2001 Paul Ryan speech at the Heritage Foundation complaining how the laxy masses were resting in hammocks; and the rightwing producerist notion that hard-working people are being sucked dry by poor people and immigrants, though Konczal doesn't call it "producerism" in his piece.

Tags: 2012 election, mitt romney, us economy

Mitt Romney's taxes and the common good

Joe Stiglitz in Mitt Romney's tax avoidance weakens bonds of American society Guardian 09/03/2012 looks at how tax avoidance by prominent wealthy people like Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney serves to undermine the basic social contract in the United States:

Conservative politicians in the US underestimate the importance of publicly provided education, technology, and infrastructure. Economies in which government provides these public goods perform far better than those in which it does not.

But public goods must be paid for, and it is imperative that everyone pays their fair share. While there may be disagreement about what that entails, those at the top of the income distribution who pay 15% of their reported income (money accruing in tax shelters in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens may not be reported to US authorities) clearly are not paying their fair share. ...

Democracies rely on a spirit of trust and co-operation in paying taxes. If every individual devoted as much energy and resources as the rich do to avoiding their fair share of taxes, the tax system either would collapse, or would have to be replaced by a far more intrusive and coercive scheme. Both alternatives are unacceptable.

More broadly, a market economy could not work if every contract had to be enforced through legal action. But trust and co-operation can survive only if there is a belief that the system is fair. Recent research has shown that a belief that the economic system is unfair undermines both co-operation and effort. Yet, increasingly, Americans are coming to believe that their economic system is unfair; and the tax system is emblematic of that sense of injustice. [my emphasis]

Democracy can't survive the extremes of wealth that our tax policies are creating. It isn't just about budgets or deficits, it's about the nature of our political system and political commonwealth.

Tags: joseph stiglitz, mitt romney

Krugman on the tax-cuts-for-small-business meme

If you're wondering why the Republican National Convention this year had so much talk about small business, Paul Krugman gives a succinct description of the main reason in Five Points To Nowhere 09/17/2012: "Tax cuts for small businesses actually means tax cuts for rich people; there's a small subset of rich people who own small businesses. But Romney has to cloak the real policy in mom-and-pop rhetoric."

Tags: mitt romney, paul krugman

If Romney's lost Bobo ...

Years ago before we had viral video, there was a bumpersticker campaign that went viral that said "I Found It". I think it was some kind of religious message, but I'm not even sure about that. I've always thought of it as a failed marketing campaign, because lots of people saw the slogan but almost nobody knew what the product was.

It sparked some satire though, just as viral videos do today. Lucinda did a song: "I think I lost it/Let me know if you come across it". There was also a bumpersticker that said "I lost it". I saw another that said, "I stepped in it."

Someone should give Mitt Romney one of those stickers after the major foot-in-mouth event he experienced Monday when Mother Jones' David Corn published video of Romney letting his attitudes toward the other half hang out while speaking to a group of his fellow plutocrats at a fundraiser this year, SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters 09/17/2012. And they're publishing more:

SECRET VIDEO: On Israel, Romney Trashes Two-State Solution 09/18/2012

Romney "47 Percent" Fundraiser Host: Hedge Fund Manager Who Likes Sex Parties 09/17/2012

Dave Gilson, Who Was at Romney's "47 Percent" Fundraiser? 09/18/2012

Maybe Romney should have gone to one of the sex parties instead. The fundis would find a way to ignore it, and it would make him seems less of a stiff to other voters. [groan, bad pun]

Back in the 1960s, when TV news regularly contained actual journalism, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite showed up in polls as the most trustworthy man in the country. When Cronkite raised major questions on the air about the course of the Vietnam War and the reliability of the Johnson Administration's version of it, Lyndon Johnson commented that if he had lost Cronkite, he'd lost America.

Now, the possibility of David "Bobo" Brooks achieving Cronkite's level of credibility is so small that the probability would qualify such a thing as a "black swan" event. But I wonder if Romney and his handlers might not be thinking today, "If we've lost Bobo..." Because Bobo does specialize in trying to make even the most reckless and irresponsible Republican ideas sound sensible and reasonable and nothing to get worked up about. So it's notable that even Bobo is distancing himself from Romney's indiscreet plutocratic self-revelations published by Corn, as he does in Thurston Howell Romney New York Times 09/17/2012. Naturally, it comes in typical dicey Bobo-speak:

This comment suggests a few things. First, it suggests that he really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare?

It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America. Yes, the entitlement state has expanded, but America remains one of the hardest-working nations on earth. Americans work longer hours than just about anyone else. Americans believe in work more than almost any other people. Ninety-two percent say that hard work is the key to success, according to a 2009 Pew Research Survey.

It says that Romney doesn’t know much about the political culture. Americans haven’t become childlike worshipers of big government. On the contrary, trust in government has declined. The number of people who think government spending promotes social mobility has fallen.

"Americans believe in work more than almost any other people." Say what? He probably means that Americans take less vacation time than western Europeans, which is true. But then, you never know from what corner of the Republican alternative reality Bobo may be pulling stuff.

Bobo has a scoop here, though. He's discovered that there are hardcore rightwingers in the Republican Party! Who knew that such a thing was going on? Lawdy, Miss Mellie, brang me the smellin' salts, ah thank ah'm gonna just faint daid away!

Or, as Bobo puts it, "The Republican Party, and apparently Mitt Romney, too, has shifted over toward a much more hyperindividualistic and atomistic social view - from the Reaganesque language of common citizenship to the libertarian language of makers and takers." Reagan, of course, drew the same kine of lines. He just wasn't enough of a fool to blurt out his sympathy for plutocratic values in as crass a way as Romney does.

The best bobo can do to defend his candidate in this column is, "Personally, I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of cartoonish government-hater." Or maybe he says those stupid things because that really the way he thinks. And even Bobo continues directly, "But it scarcely matters." Because voters have to assume that the Romney they see and hear is the President Romney they would be getting if he's elected.

Tags: 2012 election, david brooks, mitt romney

Romney, Mormons and Protestant fundamentalists

A blog post from Frederick Clarkson has got me thinking from a different perspective about the religious factional differences within the Republican Party, particularly those between Mormon fundamentalists and Protestant fundamentalists: Mormonism & Schism on the Christian Right Talk to Action 09/06/2012. I think of Pentecostal fundamentalists as their own distinct faction, but their attitudes toward Mormonism will probably track those of non-Pentecostal Protestants.

This video from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS), The Mormon Moment? Religious Conviction and the 2012 Election 09/11/2012, features the SBTS president Albert Mohler, his dean Russell Moore and two others describing a conservative (in both the political and religious sense) perspective on having a Mormon as the Republican Party's Presidential candidate. In case you're wondering, no, there are no Mormon participants in the discussion.

Clarkson also writes about the issue in Papering over the Differences: The political alliance between evangelicals and the Catholic right Conscience 2/2012. While conservative white Protestant Republicans aren't likely to vote for the President many of them consider to be a Kenyan Muslim socialist atheist, their distaste for Mormonism could affect their turnout, and might influence some swing voters:

Another feature of this political season is the awkward effort to reconcile the existing anti-Mormonism among conservative evangelicals with the presidential candidacy of Republican Mitt Romney. Mainstream polling and conventional wisdom indicate that conservative evangelicals, when faced with the decision, will ultimately choose Romney over President Barack Obama. Maybe so. But such views may underappreciate how widespread is the view that Mormons are not Christians, and how many have been schooled that Mormonism is a dangerous heresy and may, as a result, be unable to bring themselves to vote for a Mormon.

Researcher Rachel Tabachnick, who was raised as a conservative Southern Baptist but converted to Judaism, believes that many Southern Baptists will not be able to vote for Romney. She points to books and articles, currently available on the SBC’s website for its LifeWay publishing empire and bookstore chain, suggesting that this mistrust of Mormonism remains unchanged for many. Indeed, a LifeWay Research poll of 1,000 American Protestant pastors last fall found that 75 percent of respondents did not consider Mormons to be Christians. Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research, explained, “A person can respect a religious group and even appreciate their commitment to traditional moral values without equating their beliefs with Christian orthodoxy.” They can, but whether they will is another question.

Tags: 2012 election, al mohler, mitt romney, mormonism

The zombie notion that running a private company teaches someone how to be a public executive

Michael Lind lays out the straightforward reason that a successful career in business doesn't in itself mean a person is particularly qualified to govern, especially in a major executive position, in Do we need a businessman in the White House? Salon 06/19/2012.

At first glance, it might seem plausible that successful private sector leaders understand the modern national and global economies. But doing well in one part of the economy is quite different from understanding what is good for the economy as a whole.

Making a fortune running a widget company does not make you an expert on quantitative easing, or nontariff barriers used by Asian mercantilist countries, or the impact of productivity growth and population estimates on the future of Social Security. Unless you have been spending your nights and weekends studying these arcane subjects while selling widgets by day, your opinion on these subjects is of no more value than that of any random bystander in the street.

The politics of Congress or a state legislature or even the city council of a major city is often very different that dealing with a corporate board of directors.

Addressing constituents is also a very different thing. When eMeg Whitman ran for California Governor against Jerry Brown in 2010, her deficiencies as a candidate weren't able to outweigh her substantial advantage in funding, largely from her own personal fortune. CEO's get accustomed to making speeches to admiring and friendly audiences, most of whom are more interested in kissing up to them than in challenging what they say. eMeg compounded that weakness by seeking out friendly interviewers like FOX News.

When she found herself facing more challenging questioning and audiences during the general election campaign - and going head-to-head with Jerry Brown, a brilliant and experienced debater - she wound up making rookie mistakes.

And elected officials not only have to deal with voters who feel entitled to their attention and service, but to party officials and legislators who may not see their own interest as being as identical with following the wishes of the executive to the extent a CEO normally experiences. In other words, organization politics in a typical business corporation are more structured and follow more regular lines of authority than politics does. Stakeholders in the political sphere operate in different ways. Or, as Lind puts it, "a private sector CEO possesses the kind of despotic authority that presidents in our system can only fantasize about."

None of this is to say that a capable private businessperson can't successfully make the transition. But it is a transition to a different environment. Success in the one is not necessarily a qualification for success in the other.

In Romney's case, he actually does have more political experience than he likes to pretend. Not only did he grow up in a political family, becoming part of a political dynasty we could say. He served a term as Governor of Massachusetts, ran for Senate against a very formidable opponent, Ted Kennedy, and has basically spent the last eight years running for President. So you can't say he would be coming into it cold. But as Lind observes:

The fact that Mitt Romney was a Republican governor of Massachusetts, a generally liberal Democratic state, would have worked in his favor, in any other time. But the capture of the Republican party base by Tea Party conservatives forces Romney to downplay his accomplishments as a governor — including Romneycare, the state health care planned that served as one of the models for Obamacare. And so Romney has emphasized his private sector past, which, whatever you think about Bain Capital in particular or private equity in general, is much less relevant to the challenges he would face as president than his public career as a governor.

Tags: jerry brown, mitt romney

Yes, white conservative evangelical Christians will support Willard Romney for President

It's news, because it means the year is moving on and the Republican base is lining up loyally behind the Party nominee-to-be, Willard Romney. As David Lightman report in Mitt Romney, evangelicals seek marriage of convenience McClatchy Newspapers 04/30/2012:

Romney will speak May 12 at Liberty University, the influential Virginia school that bills itself as the "largest Christian university in the world."

Experts think Romney will be able to rally conservative Christians with ease.

"They’re going to vote for him," said Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. ...

In 2008, 23 percent of voters identified themselves as white Protestant evangelicals. Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, got 73 percent of their support, and Obama got 26 percent, according to exit polls. In April, a Pew Research Center survey found that 73 percent of them supported Romney and 20 percent Obama.

The reason for evangelicals’ rally-round-Romney effect: their disdain for Obama and respect for Romney’s moral values.

"They hate Obamacare, and see the debt as a moral issue," Land said. They view the 2010 federal health care law, which will require nearly everyone to obtain coverage by 2014 or pay a fine, as more big government. Their suspicions were compounded earlier this year when the White House sought to require most employers to offer contraception coverage – a violation, many said, of this country’s tradition of religious liberty.

Bill Berkowitz in Will They or Won't They? Romney and the Evangelicals Buzzflash 04/25/2012 treated the question of his title as a foregone conclusion:

According to recent polling by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press (conducted April 4-15, 2012), Romney holds a 53-point lead over Obama among white evangelicals (favoring him by a 73 to 20 percent margin) and a 20-point lead among white Catholics, who favor Romney by 57 to 37 percent.

So while there may have been some mega-hand wringing during the primaries, a fair amount of Mormon-bashing, and threats from some Christian Right leaders to sit this one out, there really hasn't been a scintilla of doubt that in the end conservative Christian evangelicals would vote overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney.

"It's pretty obvious that the Religious Right wanted Rick Santorum to be the GOP's candidate, but now that it's clear he won't be, I expect most of them to fall in line and back Romney," Rob Boston, Senior Policy Analyst for Americans United, told BuzzFlash. "Romney can count on the Religious Right's overarching hatred of Obama to drive them to the polls. There may be a tiny faction who won't vote for a Mormon, but I don't believe they will amount to much."

Tags: 2012 election, christian right, mitt romney

Awesome headline: "Billionaire Mitt Backer: Rich Have 'Insufficient Influence' on Politics"

From the Huffington Post homepage 03/11/2012:

The article is from Alana Horowitz, Ken Griffin, Billionaire Romney Backer, Says Super Rich Have 'An Insufficient Influence' On Politics

Tags: 2012 election, mitt romney

Dana Milbank on Willard Romney's Dana Milbank problem

Dana Milbank is one of our leading Pod Pundits. So it was interesting to see back that he was developing a pundit "script" for Willard Romney that we'll probably see more. He has an authenticity problem! Just like Al Gore!

Milbank explains in Mitt Romney’s Al Gore problem Washington Post 01/13/2012:

Romney, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg argued this week, has an "authentic inauthenticity problem."

And that is precisely why his struggle is so familiar. He is the political reincarnation of Al Gore, whose campaign I covered with an equal amount of cringing a dozen years ago.

To see Romney, in his Gap jeans, laughing awkwardly at his own jokes and making patently disingenuous claims, brings back all those bad memories of 2000: "Love Story." Inventing the Internet. Earth tones. Three-button suits. The alpha male in cowboy boots. The iced-tea defense. The Buddhist temple. The sighing during the debate.

Good grief! It seems that, like old soldiers and Herbert Hoover economics, zombie press scripts never die. Willard makes Dana Milbank think of the fun times making up nonsense about Al Gore week after happy week.

We won't see Willard get the kind of savaging from the mainstream press that Al Gore or Bill and Hillary Clinton did.

But it does seem that Milbank likes the "authenticity problem" meme for Willard. "Authenticity" is one of the dumb obsession of the Beltway Village press corps. It's the sort of high school popularity contest element that fits so well with their emotional and intellectual level of processing politics. It's also vague enough that you can stick all sorts of nonsense into it.

And focusing on some theatrical quality like "authenticity" saves the Village press the painful effort of digging for relevant facts about their history that might indicate something meaningful about what kind of President they would be. Trying to analyze their consistencies or inconsistencies or trying to understand their leadership and management approaches at more than a superficial level would be soooo boring compared to seeing which pundit can cite some variation of the conventional wisdom of the moment.

Willard's retail marketing problem in the election is not that he risks sounding theatrically sincere when he talks about his concern for working families and struggling homeowners. It's that he will be too "authentic" in displaying what he is: a wealthy vulture capitalist who identifies heart and soul with the narrow obsessions of the billionaires and who made big bucks by buying companies, loading them up with crippling debt and walking away with a lot of money as a result.

He actually looks very true to his own history when he gives us that smile that looks for all the world like a lord of the manor enjoying watching a servant being flogged.

Tags: 2012 election, mitt romney

Newt and the protest against the 1%

Joe Conason made an important point a few weeks ago about Newt Gingrich that reminds us of the surprising ways in which popular movement like Occupy Wall Street can affect mainstream politics, The True Importance Of Being Newt National Memo 01/21/2012.

Whether Newt Gingrich ever wins another primary after South Carolina or not, he has performed an important service to American voters in this election. Not in the self-important way that he imagines, of course. But Gingrich's mocking assault on Mitt Romney, his career at Bain Capital and reluctance to disclose his tax returns has driven a national discussion of economic unfairness, tax avoidance, and abuse of financial power that might never have occurred without the Gingrich intervention. The angry intensity of the former Speaker has overcome the usual timidity of the mainstream media - which hesitate to address such matters forthrightly or to offend Republican sensibilities -- forcing the salient questions about Romney into the spotlight.

Newt's campaign even made "vulture capitalist" as momentarily familiar term.

Newt is as staunch a defender of the 1% at the expense of everyone else. He certainly wasn't the one that made inequality and predatory capitalism and current issue in the Presidential campaign. But in the current climate, Willard Romney's has a vulnerable spot in his lord-of-the-manor mentality. And I'm glad that the Republican primary has exposed it early.

Tags: 2012 election, joe conason, mitt romney, newt gingrich

Willard Romney and the Iraq War

Hans Blix. Yes, there were UN weapons inspectors in Iraq in 2003 before the war (whether Willard Romney know it or not)

Since Willard is the current favorite to oppose President Obama in November for the Republicans, this is an interesting look back at Willard's last Presidential campaign. It still tells us something about Willard's approach to foreign policy. And it's a reminder about one of the dishonest justifications for war that Willard and other war supporters used: Romney's Iraq Gaffe Ignored: GOP contender's bizarre pre-war history FAIR 6/8/07. The piece refers back to something Willard said in the June 5, 2007 Republican Presidential debate:

If you're saying let's turn back the clock, and Saddam Hussein had opened up his country to IAEA inspectors, and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein, therefore, not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in. But he didn't do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in.

Some things are interpretations, some things are judgments and some things are verifiable facts. The fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors were admitted to Iraq in response to the 2002 UN Security Council resolution demanding it is just not in doubt. As FAIR puts it:

Romney's suggestion that weapons inspectors were not permitted into Iraq before the war started is, of course, incorrect. Weapons inspectors from UNMOVIC (the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) returned to Iraq on November 18, 2002. Led by Hans Blix, the inspectors spent months in Iraq, issuing reports on Iraqi compliance that were a crucial part of the debate over whether to invade Iraq.

Blix himself provided a great deal of detail on the experience in his 2004 book Disarming Iraq.

Commenting on the nasty, dishonest criticism leveled at him by American war hawks during the inspections in Iraq just prior to the US-British invasion, Blix writes:

[T]he fact that Saddam Hussein's regime was one of the most brutal the world had seen and had long been a danger to the region did not justify any twisting of observations or uncritical attitude to evidence.

Something worth remembering, both in terms of looking at the sad history of the Iraq War and in current controversies like that over the Iranian nuclear program.

It was on March 14, 2003, a Friday, that the negotiations over a follow-up Security Council resolution authorizing military action against Iraq broke down. The Bush administration had agreed to ask for this resolution largely at the request of their faithful ally Tony Blair, who believed he needed the political cover, though the evidence in the public record leaves little doubt that he and Bush had agreed months before to invade Iraq regardless of weapons inspections.

On Sunday, March 16, the Bush administration asked Blix to withdraw the inspectors from Iraq, prior to the initiation of military hostilities. Blix withdrew them on the following day. Blix writes that the Security Council required his inspection team to present a four-month work program on March 19, even though it was clear that efforts to avoid war had failed:

The reason why many members of the Council wanted to have the [proposed work] program on the table was no doubt that they were keen for the world to see that the inspections were going on in the good order set by the Council itself, and that the interruption was not the result of any failure of the inspections regime. It was caused by an unjustified armed action by the U.S. and the UK. [my emphasis]

The bombing began on March 20. And as of today, there's no end of the war in sight.

At least this time around, we seem to be getting a little more notice of Willard's verbal gaffes when it comes to his one-percenter backgrounds and attitudes. But it's worth remembering when we hear Willard talking about the Afghanistan War or the one he wants to start in Iran.

Tags: 2012 election, iraq war, mitt romney

Michael Tomasky on "Willard Mitt Romney"

Michael Tomasky has a long New York Review of Books article on Willard Mitt Romney 01/26/2012 (02/23/2012 issue). He gives a handy description of what a private equity firm like Bain Capital does:

Bain & Company specialized in venture capital, essentially straightforward investing. Private equity—leveraged buyouts; after the LBO scandals of the 1980s, they simply changed the name—is another matter. PE firms scour the landscape for struggling companies, bid to restructure them, load them with debt in the form of borrowed bonds or notes from banks or hedge funds, and acquire them. PE firms invest very little of their own money, and they take advantage of a key tax loophole that permits them to deduct from their taxes the interest they pay on the money they’ve borrowed to finance the purchase. The company might swim or it might sink. It will almost certainly shed resources, which often means laying people off. The harsher the "restructuring," in some cases, the better the PE firm stands to do. And since the profits come in the form of capital gains for the partners, they are taxed at much lower rates than income—just 15 percent as opposed to 35 percent.

Tomasky reminds us that Willard was running from any hint of moderate politics in his previous Presidential run in 2008:

Mitt Romney, as the Massachusetts governor who passed health care legislation, had been a leader, just a few years ago, of the GOP‘s now much-diminished moderate wing. At the 2008 GOP convention in St. Paul, Romney’s party took a number of positions completely at odds with those he had taken as governor, on abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, and other matters, and adopted other extremist rallying cries, like the infamous "Drill, Baby, Drill!" chant, which thundered maniacally (I was there) through the hall when Sarah Palin spoke, as if the assembled were packing decades’ worth of rage at the liberal establishment into those three words.

I've always been tempted to, uh, drill down into that "Drill, Baby, Drill!" chant of which the Reps were so fond in 2008. But it grosses me out every time I think of going there, so I haven't.

It's not entirely the Gingrich campaign's marketing spin that Willard has a particularly pronounced opportunist streak in his approach to politics:

Commentators have spent countless hours speculating whether Romney is “really” moderate or conservative. The answer is that he is neither, and both. The lessons he learned from watching his father fail to make it to the White House are: don’t stick to your guns; be flexible; suit the needs of the moment. And so, in order to complete his father’s unfulfilled destiny, he has decided to become his father’s opposite.

But Willard's inclination to pander shamelessly is coupled with class solidarity. To the 1%, of course:

At other moments, a very different impulse reveals itself, and Romney’s deep and perhaps even unconscious sense of class superiority rises to the surface. He likes “being able to fire people,” he said to an audience recently, expecting a laugh that did not quite materialize. Complaints about his income are nothing more than “the bitter politics of envy.” Income inequality—this is the most incredible one to me—should be discussed only in “quiet rooms.” And his speaking fee income was “not very much” ($374,000 in the year ending in February 2011). Here again, he is his father’s opposite: George Romney was known for refusing bonuses, explaining that no executive needed to make more than his $225,000 a year ($1.4 million in today’s dollars).

And I like the way Tomasky frames the issue of Willard's competence for the Presidency:

Romney would certainly, if elected, prove competent to do the job. Competence isn’t the question. Competence toward what end, however, is. He seems particularly intense when he talks of the need to build up the armed forces and would be competent at that. Asked in the first of two South Carolina debates whether the US should negotiate with the Taliban to end the fighting in Afghanistan, he answered:

Of course not.... Of course you take out our enemies, wherever they are. These people declared war on us.... We go anywhere they are, and we kill them.

We already have too much of this kind militarized, intervention bluster in our foreign policy. We certainly don't need more.

Tags: 2012 election, mitt romney

Willard-steria from the GOP frontrunner

Gene Lyons catches Willard Romney giving a great example of the level to which today's Republican Party has sunk in Obama's "post-partisan" strategy Salon 02/01/2012:

Mitt Romney has this passage in his stump speech where he all but accuses the president of being a communist.

"President Obama," Romney insists, "believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing — the government."

This when the multimillionaire Wall Street investment banker isn't accusing hecklers of envying his wealth — rarely a successful political tactic, in my experience.

This is one reason I have a hard time thinking of "moderate" and "conservative" wings in today's Christian Republican White People's Party. There just isn't any significant presence in Congress or among the Presidential candidates of anyone who the label "moderate" really fits. Willard may be temperamentally less unsuited for the Oval Office than Newt. But he ain't no moderate.

Tags: 2012 election, gene lyons, mitt romney

Debatable Republicans

The most important moment to me in Wednesday's debate among the remaining Republican candidates was the argument between the great Maverick McCain and Mitt Romney over Romney's position on the war. The talking heads on CNN were interested in it only as an exciting conflict clip and talked about it in terms of the "points" one of the other may have "scored".

But what I saw were the two leading Republican candidates arguing over the highly unpopular Iraq War. One of them (the bold Maverick) was attacking the other for possibly having suggested that the President should maybe have a top secret plan for someday withdrawing American troops. The other (Romney) defended himself by declaring his outrage that his opponent would suggest that he ever might have thought about considering getting the US out of the Iraq War.

In partisan terms, I can't really think of anything that's likely to benefit the Democratic candidate in the fall more than for the Reps to go into the general election declaring that it's outrageous to even think about getting out of the Iraq War. But if the Maverick, Romney or Brother Huck get elected President, it will make for a grim, grim policy. I try to be cautious with Vietnam War comparisons. But this "culture war" theme of "never retreat, never surrender, never end the war" that they are operating on comes out of the Vietnam War period. Only Nixon starting in 1969 adopted the political strategy of withdrawing American ground troops and hoped to continue supporting the South Vietnamese government indefinitely with US air power. Arguing as the Maverick and Romney did last night that we should never even think about an exit strategy is a very different thing, both politically and strategically.

I don't like to focus on trivialities in these Presidential debates. But I couldn't help but notice that the Maverick and Mitt Romney often sat there and smirked while Brother Huck and Ron Paul spoke. And Josh Marshall highlights a moment I also noticed, of Romney laughing merrily as the Maverick criticized him for laying off large number of workers in his role at Bain Capital.

Tags: iraq war, mccain, mitt romney

Romney, inspections and the start of the Iraq War

Hans Blix. Yes, Virginia, there were UN weapons inspectors in Iraq in 2003 before the war (no matter how many times leading Republicans lie about it)

Is it really too much after all this time to expect the mainstream media to at least inform their readers when a major Presidential candidate is misstating the most basic, verifiable facts about the Iraq War?

Apparently so: Romney's Iraq Gaffe Ignored: GOP contender's bizarre pre-war history FAIR 6/8/07.

The misstatement in question is this one from Mitt Romney in the June 5 Republican Presidential debate:

If you're saying let's turn back the clock, and Saddam Hussein had opened up his country to IAEA inspectors, and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein, therefore, not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in. But he didn't do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in.

Some things are interpretations, some things are judgments and some things are verifiable facts. The fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors were admitted to Iraq in response to the 2002 UN Security Council resolution demanding it is just not in doubt. As FAIR puts it:

Romney's suggestion that weapons inspectors were not permitted into Iraq before the war started is, of course, incorrect. Weapons inspectors from UNMOVIC (the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) returned to Iraq on November 18, 2002. Led by Hans Blix, the inspectors spent months in Iraq, issuing reports on Iraqi compliance that were a crucial part of the debate over whether to invade Iraq.

Blix himself provided a great deal of detail on the experience in his 2004 book Disarming Iraq.

Commenting on the nasty and dishonest criticism leveled at him by American war hawks during the inspections in Iraq just prior to the US-British invasion, Blix writes:

[T]he fact that Saddam Hussein's regime was one of the most brutal the world had seen and had long been a danger to the region did not justify any twisting of observations or uncritical attitude to evidence.

Something worth remembering, both in terms of looking at the sad history of the Iraq War and in current controversies like that over the Iranian nuclear program.

It was on March 14, 2003, a Friday, that the negotiations over a follow-up Security Council resolution authorizing military action against Iraq broke down. The Bush administration had agreed to ask for this resolution largely at the request of their faithful ally Tony Blair, who believed he needed the political cover, though the evidence in the public record leaves little doubt that he and Bush had agreed months before to invade Iraq regardless of weapons inspections.

On Sunday, March 16, the Bush administration asked Blix to withdraw the inspectors from Iraq, prior to the initiation of military hostilities. Blix withdrew them on the following day. Blix writes that the Security Council required his inspection team to present a four-month work program on March 19, even though it was clear that efforts to avoid war had failed:

The reason why many members of the Council wanted to have the [proposed work] program on the table was no doubt that they were keen for the world to see that the inspections were going on in the good order set by the Council itself, and that the interruption was not the result of any failure of the inspections regime. It was caused by an unjustified armed action by the U.S. and the UK. (my emphasis)

The bombing began on March 20. And as of today, there's no end of the war in sight.

For good measure, here's the "just the facts, ma'am" description of the sequence of events leading up to the war from the Encycopædia Britannica ("Iraq." Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD. [Accessed June 9, 2007]):

By the end of 2002, Iraq had announced that it would cooperate with the inspectors on the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) on weapons of mass destruction (WMD). ... Thereafter, UN inspection teams worked for several weeks in Iraq, but their final report was inconclusive. Meanwhile, the U.S. and the U.K. continued to build up military forces around Iraq (mainly in Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain). They claimed that Iraq was still concealing some WMD and threatened military action if Iraq did not disarm. Other countries, notably France, Germany, and Russia, demanded that UN inspectors be allowed more time to reach conclusive results. The U.S. and the U.K., however, decided to act on the authority of UN Resolution 1441. This resolution, adopted unanimously by the Security Council on Nov. 8, 2002, demanded that Iraq accept rigorous arms inspection.

On March 17, 2003, U.S. Pres. George W. Bush issued an ultimatum demanding that Iraqi Pres. Saddam Hussein (see Biographies) and his cohorts leave the country within 48 hours. The U.S. ultimatum was rejected, and the UN inspection team left Iraq. On March 20 the first air attacks on Baghdad began, and soon afterward U.S. and British ground forces invaded southern Iraq from Kuwait. (my emphasis)

It's pitiful that after all this time, our "press corps" can provide excruciating details about Paris Hilton's drunk driving jail sentence, but still can't be bothered to correct blatant falsehoods from leading Republicans about the Iraq War. But, hey, Al Gore is putting on weight again, isn't he? And do you think he's had some cosmetic surgery around the eyes there?

Tags: iraq war, mitt romney