Did the Republicans succeed in punking Obama again with their pre-debate attacks? The Young Turks discuss that in Obama 'Angry Black Man' Attack 10/04/2012:
This is a plausible speculation to me. Although as Cenk Uygur indicates, that's not likely the main reason for his lackluster performance in Wednesday's debate.
Krugman raises a point that other have been raising as well about the evolution of the Republicans' antitax position in Notes on the Political Economy of Redistribution 09/21/2012. The phrase "lucky duckies" is taken from a notorious Wall Street Journal editorial that characterized people with income too low to be liable for federal tax by that term. It was one of the formative moments in the "47%" meme:
In particular, imagine yourself as a hired gun for the right tail of the income distribution. What would you do in an effort to stop the median voter from realizing that she would benefit from a more European-style system? Well, you’d do everything you can to exaggerate the disincentive effects of higher taxes, while trying to convince middle-income voters that the benefits of government programs go to other people. And at the same time, you’d do everything you can to disenfranchise lower-income citizens, so that the median voter has a higher income than the median citizen.
So far, efforts along these lines have been remarkably successful. But operatives on the right are clearly worried that their three-decade run of success may be coming to an end. Indeed, the whole panic about the lucky duckies and all that can be seen as reflecting a great fear on the part of the right that any day now the median voter will realize where his true interests lie, and start supporting much more redistributionist policies.
So now you know what was bugging Romney at Boca, and why there’s such a desperate attempt to paint Obama as a radical.
This is an important observation that gets to the fact that the Republican pitch to convince voters that measures targeted to increase the already vast wealth of the very wealthiest, who thanks to the Occupy movement we have lately come to call the One Percent.
Ronald Reagan's original 1981 tax cut was heavily tilted toward the upper brackets. But there were also tax cuts for middle income people added into the mix to make the measure more widely acceptable and possible.
Peter Coy touches on the evolution of Republican thinking on this matter in Ronald Reagan And the 47 PercentBloomberg Businessweek 09/19/2012:
"The reason the Earned Income Tax Credit [EITC] has been so successful politically over time is that it melds values that liberals and conservatives emphasize," [Chuck] Marr says. It does, however, shrink the tax rolls. And to a new generation of Republicans, that appears to be anathema. [my emphasis]
Coy gives some history of the EITC:
Reagan strongly supported the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which sends checks to Americans who work but earn less than around $46,000 a year, depending on family size. Recipients of the credit are among those who don’t pay income tax, but Reagan never regarded that as a problem. His administration estimated that the 1986 reform of the tax code would remove 6 million working poor from the tax rolls. Reagan called the reform a "sweeping victory for fairness" and "perhaps the biggest antipoverty program in our history.”
This doesn't mean that Reagan was one of those fabled "compassionate conservatives." Not at all. His conservatism was as mean as Paul Ryan's, but he was a much sunnier salesman. That's not to say there are no benefits to the EITC. But it was one of those tax cuts for lower-income earners that was part of the Republican package to make low taxes for the rich the most important economic policy. Coy also writes:
If Romney wanted to get more Americans paying taxes without discouraging them from working, a simple trick would be to turn the EITC into a grant. Nothing would change except the accounting. That might set a difficult precedent, says Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Imagine if the mortgage interest deduction were replaced with an annual check from the government to help people pay for their mortgages. Suddenly a prized middle-class perk would look less defensible.
Raising taxes on lower- and middle-income workers would actually discourage some people from working because the costs of having a job and especially of child care could make going to work cost more for some significant portion of workers than the benefit they would get from it. "Romney is sensitive to disincentives that face the rich," he writes, though many of those "disincentives" are in their own imaginations or just cynical ideology. But, Coy rightly adds, "those [disincentives] that face the poorest Americans are far bigger."
... what happened on Wednesday night — and, more to the point, what the president allowed to happen on Wednesday night — has changed this entire election. It has given the Beltway press the horse race of their dreams, which is going to matter a lot over the next couple of weeks. Moreover, it may have buried progressive government forever by demonstrating how tight the boundaries really are around what is considered acceptable economic solutions to a battered national economy. That will remain the case, clearly, even if this president gets re-elected. If that's this president's final legacy, he has only himself to blame. [my emphasis]
And he's right that the political and intellectual corruption of neoliberalism was all too evident on Wendnesday evening. The Democratic President refuses to make a full-throated defense of Social Security and Medicare. Because he isn't seriously supportive of either program.
Pierce memorably characterizes Obama's performance this way, "The only way that the wonkish, garbled, and distracted performance by the president makes any kind of sense is if the White House has internal polls that indicate that a majority of Americans believe that Willard Romney eats live chickens in praise of Satan."
Sadly, he's right about this:
What you saw, I think, anyway, was the end product of the president's consuming naivete as regards the American political process, as well as the end product of thirty years of a Democratic Party that has slid so far to the center-right that a Democratic president found himself arguing with a "severely conservative" Republican candidate over the issues of how much the Democratic president had cut out of the budget, how many regulations he'd trimmed, how much more devoted to the middle-class-kick-in-the-balls Simpson-Bowles "plan" he is, and how he would "reform" Social Security and Medicare — and, frankly, a Democratic president losing some of those arguments to his left. A Democratic president got through an entire debate and didn't mention unions at all, even though the fact that our teachers are unionized here in Massachusetts is a big part of the reason why Romney got to brag on how good our education system is. [emphasis in original]
Every time Obama mentions the word "deficit" in a speech he damages his re-election prospects. Nobody but our Pod Pundits actually give a flying flip about The Deficit right now. Nor should they.
Obama had a terrible response on Social Security. He said he would make cuts ("tweaks") like during Reagan's Presidency. Those "tweaks" included raising the Social Security retirement age from 65 to 67, phased in over time. Obama came off as more of a defender of Medicare.
But his own hope for a Grand Bargain means that Obama can't do what would be the right policy and the best politics: straight-out defense of current benefit levels for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Obama is not ready to defend benefits on those three programs.
Obama also just had to haul out his neoliberal line about people borrowing money to buy houses they couldn't afford. It let Romney make the favorite and false Republican point that that was the root of the financial crisis. Obama's postpartisan egotism leads him to pepper-spray his own message. He did that on Saturday in his weekly address. The White House website description of it is, "In this week's address, President Obama explains his administration’s steps to help the housing market, including giving responsible homeowners a chance to save thousands of dollars every year by refinancing their mortgages, but says we need Congress’s help to do more." (my emphasis) It would again be good policy and good politics to get a lot of help to homeowners facing foreclosure instead of worrying so much about not aiding slackers that he barely helps homeowners. Here is the third paragraph from the transcript:
Millions of Americans who did the right and responsible thing – who shopped for a home, secured a mortgage they could afford, and made their payments on time – were badly hurt by the irresponsible actions of others. By lenders who sold loans to families who couldn’t afford them – and buyers who knew they couldn’t afford them. By speculators who were looking to make a quick buck. And by banks that packaged and sold those risky mortgages for phony profits. [my emphasis]
On the positive side for Obama in the debate, Romney probably did help himself by talking about small business all the time. Plus Romney smirked through the whole thing, which is not very attractive.
Obama clearly and rightly sees "Obamacare" as a key part of his legacy. It showed in his good defense of the program. But it's also clear that the complicated structure of the program does open it up to nit-picking by Republicans. But I doubt Romney's jabs at Obamacare were that effective.
Just after 1:09:00 in the video, Obama declares, "The first role of the American government is to keep the American people safe." Glenn Greenwald is right when he criticizes that very common statement. It's national-security-state thinking. The first role of the federal govennment is to protect the Constitution. American people would have been safer from violence and death in 1861-65 if Lincoln and the Union had simply surrendered to the Confederacy. Instead, they fought to save democracy and the Constitution. It isn't just a rhetorical point. It's real corruption of the idea of democracy and Constitutional government to frame keeping "the American people safe" as the first role of government the way Obama commonly does and did in this debate. And I'm sad to say that Romney's answer was actually slightly better, though I'm very confident he would put the greed of billionaires ahead of the Constitution every opportunity he got as President.
Obama's point on how he is making financial aid more accessible is surely an appealing one.
This is an interesting interview with Josh Barro on Bloomberg TV. Barro's opinion piece after Mitt Romney's now infamous "47%" comments became public attracted a lot of attention. What's particularly interesting to me is that the interviewers ask some probing questions. But that seems to be less because they were prepared than because they were pretty poorly informed about how income taxes work.
The really disastrous thing is the clip about "victims," and the combination of contempt and pity that Romney shows for anyone who isn't going to vote for him.
Romney is the most opaque presidential nominee since Nixon, and people have been reduced to guessing what his true feelings are. This video provides an answer: He feels that you're a loser. It's not an answer that wins elections.
Great executives often say that early failure is essential to their eventual success. Aside from not winning a Senate seat in 1994, your record seems almost unblemished. Have you ever massively, embarrassingly failed at anything?
Well, I can say that the investments we made at Bain Capital did not all succeed. There were occasions when after long study and analysis, we concluded that the idea was good, that the management team was the right team. We invested in the business with hopes that it would grow and be successful, and despite our best preparation, we were disappointed with the result. And those results being typically: You lose your money and people can lose jobs. That’s always devastating. And I learned that not every business will be successful, even those that have been carefully selected and thoroughly evaluated.
But that's the thing about Bain's leveraged buyout (private equity) business: the acquirer can arrange to make money even when the acquired business goes under. Which is why LBO deals are often more financial shenanigans than constructive investment.
Cenk Uygur explains how this works and how the tax system is rigged to encourage it in How you can stop paying so much in taxes -- just like Mitt Romney 08/10/12. The segment begins with a fraudulent tax-avoidance scheme that an Obama commercial had accurately connected Romney with:
Here's another segment from The Young Turks online show that also deals with the tax-avoidance scheme raised by the Obama ad, Mitt Romney 'Son Of Boss' Ad 08/10/2012:
Tyrangiel says in one question, "you’ve promised not to cut defense or Social Security." Is Romney really committed to opposing cuts in Social Security benefits? That would have been a question worth pursuing. Romney doesn't mention Social Security in the interview.
The last segment of interview is intriguing. It sounds to me like the magazine wanted to communicate that Romney was being an arrogant twit by not wanting to even stay for the full interview time to which he had agreed. And Tyrangiel does ask him about those annoying tax returns, letting Romney once again make clear that the mob doesn't need to know about them:
Speaking of small business ...
I’ve got to leave and go to work here ...
[Romney adviser informs the governor that the campaign had agreed to a longer interview.]
Ask one question. But I’m holding up traffic in Chicago trying to—I’ve got the Secret Service and all the press and we’re stopped in front of a place of business. So shoot.
Let’s frame the issue around your tax returns in a slightly different way. If you’re an investor and you’re looking at a company, and that company says that its great strength is wise management and fiscal know-how, wouldn’t you want to see the previous, say, five years’ worth of its financials?
I'm not a business. We have a process in this country, which was established by law, which provides for the transparency which candidates are required to meet. I have met with that requirement with full financial disclosure of all my investments, but in addition have provided and will provide a full two years of tax returns. This happens to be exactly the same as with John McCain when he ran for office four years ago. And the Obama team had no difficulty with that circumstance. The difference between then and now is that President Obama has a failed economic record and is trying to find any issue he can to deflect from the failure of his record. Thanks, guys. Goodbye.
Willard Romney was in Israel as part of his foreign tour meant to give him some foreign policy cred for the election. But the picture he's giving us of what his foreign policy might be as President isn't any cause for encouragement.
Joe Conason in Worse Than London: Romney's Reckless Remarks In JerusalemNational Memo 07/30/2012 and Ali Gharib in Romney Lowers Threshold For Military Involvement In Iran, Says He’d Back Israeli Strike LobeLog Foreign Policy 07/29/2012 describe the implications of the public statements he made in Israel.
Presidential candidate Romney endorsed the notion of the US recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a long-disputed and highly controversial notion. And, through his advisor Dan Senor, neoconservative stalwart and former adviser of the Iraqi Coalition Authority, he encouraged Israel to go to war with Iran. (Dan Senor is married to Campbell Brown, who hosted her own CNN show until 2010, in one of those Washington power marriages.)
Senor's statements on war with Iran included the notion of lowering the official "red line" for war: "If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing the capability, the governor would respect that decision." Gharib explains the implications of the wording:
While Obama has said an Iranian nuclear weapon is "unacceptable," declaring a nuclear "capability" an American “red line” that would trigger war sets a lower threshold for U.S. military involvement. The CIA has laid out a specific definition, but the “nuclear capability” language is a complex issue. The word "capability" has a special meaning in the non-proliferation context, but it’s not always clear exactly what. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), one of the Senate’s most vociferous Iran hawks, said this year, “I guess everybody will determine for themselves what that means.” Hawks in Congress pushed a bill this year to shift the official U.S. "red line" to a nuclear "capability."
It's a real sign of how corrupted the American practice of going to war has become that both the Democratic President and the Republican candidate accept the idea that it's perfectly acceptable in theory for the US to go to war or encourage Israel to go to war against Iran without an act of war on Iran's part.
And, as we know from the Iraq experience, we (the US) can just make up some act of war if one doesn't actually occur. And while it's not clearly established in the public record who was behind it, we know that Iran has been attacked by the Stuxnet virus, the kind of cyberattack that US policy considers to be an act of war. And a number of civilian nuclear scientists have been assassinated. It's generally assumed that Israel and/or the US are behind these attacks, but we don't know for sure and, given the Obama Administration's unprecedented obsession with government secrecy, it may be a while before we have more definite information on that.
Willard himself said he wanted to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem and recognize it, rather than Tel Aviv, as Israel's capital, a sensitive diplomatic issue, to put it mildly. Here's CNN's report, Romney would recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. YouTube date 07/29/2012, in which even the increasingly feckless Wolf Blitzer manages to ask some probing questions:
He even sounded like he was saying that a Romney Administration would never even publicly disagree with the Israeli government in public: "Diplomatic distance in public between our nations emboldens Israel’s adversaries."
Conason writes:
Leaving aside the question of whether most Americans want to encourage yet another war in the Mideast – at the behest of the same figures that sank us into the Iraq quicksand – how does it serve American interests, including our interest in a secure Israel and a settlement of the Palestinian conflict, to subordinate US policy regarding Jerusalem or any other policy matter, to a foreign government?
Until now, no serious candidate of either party has adopted such an absurd position – and certainly no American president has ever done so. No president has regarded the traditional commitment to Israel's survival as incompatible with criticism of Israel's conduct toward the Palestinians, encouragement of illegal settlements on the West Bank, or promotion of any other obstacle to a final agreement. Quite the reverse, since American presidents and diplomats of all stripes have often judged that the behavior of Israeli governments discouraged progress toward peace, to put it mildly — including Romney’s fellow Republicans.
Romney also had another foot-in-mouth moment at a big ticket fundraiser he held while in Israel, commenting that "culture" had a lot to do with the disparity of income between Israel and the territory of the Palestinian authority. Laura Rozen reports (Romney comments irk PalestiniansBack Channel 07/30/2012): "The remarks 'not only offend Palestinians,' but are reminiscent of the stereotype that Jews are good with money, veteran US Middle East trouble shooter Aaron David Miller told Al Monitor Monday, adding: 'Mitt Romney is no anti-Semite, he’s just not thinking before he talks'."
He obviously shares President Obama's notion that the President also needs to act as national Pastor-in-Chief.
I would say Willard out-pastors the President there. He even gets in some King James English, "blessed by God who comforteth us in all our tribulations," and "heavy laden". Willard used to be a Mormon bishop, so he's had a bit more practice at the pastoral gig than Obama has.
Willard also calls it "unspeakable tragedy". But it's neither unspeakable nor a tragedy in the direct sense of the word. It was a crime, a mass murder, and there is going to be a lot than can be said about it. It's just that neither Willard nor Obama is going to want to say much of what can be said about it.
And if it should turn out that a Muslim, an Arab or a Persian (Iranian) should be involved somehow, Willard and his supporters will have no end of things to speak about it.
Romney has claimed to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain and says that providing work for Americans was a primary company goal.
He cites Domino's, Sports Authority, and Staples, companies that added jobs after Bain bought in.
But Bain bought Domino's just months before Romney left to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, meaning someone else created those jobs. And he didn't manage Staples or Sports Authority; Bain was a minority investor.
By Romney's logic, any large investor - say, the Texas teachers' pension fund - also creates hundreds of thousands of jobs. The boast is so foolish that his campaign has since backed away from it.
Pete Kotz' article looks at how Bain Capital worked in the years when Willard ran it. He co-founded the firm in 1984 and ran it until 1999. Bain bought companies using a financial device that in 1984 was still commonly called the leveraged buyout (LBO). "LBO" got such a bad reputation that its practitioners and the business press pretty much stopped using it, though the LBOs themselves continued. Essentially, an LBO allowed one company to buy another and load the purchased company up on debt, effectively making the purchased company finance the buyer's purchase.
Like any financial technique, an LBO can be used for constructive or destructive purposes. But when the laws allow the purchasing firm to essentially loot the purchased company legally, and gives the income so derived a lower tax rate than ordinary earned income, it creates a huge incentive to use it for destructive purposes. The argument in defense of operations like Bain's is that it increases economic efficiency. And given the near-theological faith that many economists place in their supply-and-demand graphs, there will always be economists ready to defend anything that happens as a result of operations like Bain's as the optimal outcome and the most beneficial. (Not even counting the ones directly hired to make the argument.) Kotz gives a good, accessible explanation of how it worked with Bain:
[Romney's] specialty was flipping companies—or what he often calls "creative destruction." It's the age-old theory that the new must constantly attack the old to bring efficiency to the economy, even if some companies are destroyed along the way. In other words, people like Romney are the wolves, culling the herd of the weak and infirm.
His formula was simple: Bain would purchase a firm with little money down, then begin extracting huge management fees and paying Romney and his investors enormous dividends.
The result was that previously profitable companies were now burdened with debt. But much like the Enron boys, Romney's battery of MBAs fancied themselves the smartest guys in the room. It didn't matter if a company manufactured bicycles or contact lenses; they were certain they could run it better than anyone else.
Bain would slash costs, jettison workers, reposition product lines, and merge its new companies with other firms. With luck, they'd be able to dump the firm in a few years for millions more than they'd paid for it.
But the beauty of Romney's thesis was that it really didn't matter if the company succeeded. Because he was yanking out cash early and often, he would profit even if his targets collapsed.
Kotz cites a couple of defenders of Bain's approach. If a private-equity firm actually provides additional funds and management expertise to help a company grow by enhancing their ability to borrow or just giving them better management, then that's an example of making money by investing in a business and developing it. Kotz cites one of what seems to be a genuine Bain success story:
In what was perhaps his crowning achievement, he bought the money-losing Wesley Jessen VisionCare for $6 million in 1994. Seven years later, it was sold for a dazzling $300 million. ...
But if critics are quick to disregard Romney's triumphs, defenders are equally swift to rationalize his catastrophes. They'll note that for all of Romney's bankruptcies, most were rescued by new companies and survive today. It's the final dollar tally that matters.
Yet they seem strangely incurious about the ruin he has delivered across the country.
Kotz cites studies of numerous Bain acquisitions and looks at some individual cases, like Bain's purchase of medical-equipment firm American Pad & Paper in Indiana, Armco steel mill in Missouri, Dade International of Illinois and Georgetown Steel in South Carolina.
Kotz also cites cases in which Bain persuaded local governments to provide public funds to support investments Bain wanted to make after purchasing a firm, like building a new factory, in which the governments got little for their money. Localities and states compete among themselves to provide local incentives for businesses to locate there, often involving using public funds for construction and infrastructure improvements to benefit a particular plant. And often the deals are structured so that the private company benefiting from it bears little of the risk if the company fails to deliver the jobs or other benefits that were assumed as part of the deal. (This is not to diss the importance of governmental infrastructure; I'm referring here to deals made with specific businesses over specific facilities.)
One of Kotz' examples:
Even a company Romney cites as one of his greatest achievements—Steel Dynamics, where he was a minority investor—was practically launched by corporate welfare. Indiana taxpayers gave the firm $77 million to open a plant. Residents of DeKalb County actually had their income taxes raised solely to help Romney and his friends.
Tad DeHaven calls it "theft and redistribution."
He's no yammering Trotskyite; DeHaven is a former budget adviser to Republican U.S. senators Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Yet he notes that firms like Bain often get governments to subsidize their raiding parties.
Kotz makes an important point that I hadn't thought of before about Bain Capital:
On the campaign trail, Romney describes his work at Bain as resurrecting distressed companies. In this version, he's the white knight lifting troubled firms from the precipice of failure.
Not true.
Private equity companies like Bain rarely buy anything but profitable firms for one compelling reason: The patient must be healthy enough to be force-fed all that debt. So it's something of a misnomer for Republican opponents to slur him as a "vulture capitalist."
"Romney is not a vulture capitalist, as Rick Perry says, since vultures eat dead carcasses," notes Josh Kosman, who has written about the private equity business for 15 years. He's "more of a parasitic capitalist, since he destroys profitable businesses." [my emphasis]
Pete Kotz has done a really good piece of business journalism here. It's unusual in that it expresses some complex concepts in generally-accessible ways with oversimplifying. That's not easy to do.
On Romney's career at Bain Capital and at the consulting firm Bain & Associates, see also, Robert Gavin and Sacha Pfeiffer, Plenty of 'pitting' preceded Romney's profitsBoston Globe/Deseret News 07/03/2007.
John Courtney Murray, one of the most important theorists of religious freedom that you may never have heard of
Garry Wills has a good article in the New York Review of Books, Romney and JFK: The Difference 12/19/07 (01/17/08 issue; publicly available as of this writing). He reminds us that liberal Democrats, then and now, have very valid concerns about the relations of the people's government to the churches. He writes:
The objections some have to Mitt Romney's religion are twofold, theological and cultural. Those against John F. Kennedy when he gave his 1960 speech in Houston about his Catholicism were more solidly political. The theological problems with Romney come from evangelicals, who know that his Jesus is not a member of the divine Trinity. ...
But theology is not what bothers most of those who feel uneasy about Mormonism. They object to its unfamiliarity. ...
The only objection to Mormons on political grounds would be their record of polygamy and racism, both of which have been officially abjured. But Kennedy's problem was precisely political. Catholics were familiar enough to Americans - there was no weirdo factor. (People wearing white hoods over their heads had little right to call others weird.) And Kennedy's opponents were not interested in theological questions like transubstantiation. But there were solid grounds for political doubts about Catholics. The Vatican had not, in 1960, formally renounced its condemnation of American pluralism and democracy. In fact, one of Kennedy's advisers on his Houston speech, the Jesuit John Courtney Murray, had recently been silenced by the Vatican for defending religious pluralism.
I hadn't realized, or at least I'd forgotten, that Murray was an adviser to Kennedy on that speech. Murray is an important figure in Catholic Christianity. He was officially silenced by the hierarchy for proposing that the Catholic Church adopt a position consistent with democratic governance on the separation of Church and State. At that time, the Church wanted to be the official state church in, well, as many countries as they could get. The ideal Cathlic model for governance of that time came closest to realization in the Austrian Standestaat (corporate state) dictatorhip of 1933-1938 under Englebert Dollfuss and Kurt von Schuschnigg. As Wills writes:
There was a cogently argued case against papal politics. Paul Blanshard had maintained, in the best-selling American Freedom and Catholic Power (1948), that Catholics were just pretending to be democrats till they could get into power and imitate such Vatican - approved regimes as that of Francisco Franco in Spain. A strong lobby, Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, had continued to argue the Blanshard position. It had successfully blocked the sending of a full ambassador to the Vatican. The Protestant ministers who organized against Kennedy's campaign, under Norman Vincent Peale, feared the Pope's power more than his doctrines — just as they had when Al Smith ran for president in 1928. (my emphasis in bold)
Murray's story on that issue had a happy ending when his position was adopted by the Second Vatican Council. For more on Murray, see John Courtney Murray, S.J., and Religious PluralismWoodstock Report Mar 1993(Woodstock Theological Center). The Time story from the issue imaged above is also available online, City of God & Man 12/12/1960.
But Vatican II came after Kennedy's death. Wills describes the essential difference between Romney's religion speech and Kennedy's famous one in 1960:
Kennedy had to convince people that he would not let the Vatican push him around. Romney has let evangelicals know that he would let them push him around. He not only has given them a theological formula on Jesus which he hopes they will accept - he implicitly has attacked Kennedy's absolute separation of church and state using the evangelicals' own slogan: those who think (like Kennedy) that "religion is seen merely as a private affair" are, Romney said, "intent on establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism. They are wrong." That phrase has not been much noticed in public comments on Romney's speech, but it is a key statement for the evangelicals. Like George Bush's speechwriters, Romney has learned the code of Rightspeak - just as he learned Leftspeak when running for governor in Massachusetts.
That secularism is a religion is a position fiercely held by some on the right. They use it to say that separating church and state breaches the First Amendment, which forbids the establishment of a religion. In their topsy-turvy arguments, the First Amendment thus forbids the separation of church and state. Romney was speaking in that code. In his speech he made many other appeals to the religious right, as when he put "the breakdown of the family" in his list of most pressing national problems (another hit at Giuliani). He praised the use of religious symbols "in our public places." Though he did not specifically mention the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, he implied approval of their presence there. (He should be questioned on this matter.) The Bush administration and its lackeying Republican Congress would do anything for the religious right. When the right said "Jump!" on the Terri Schiavo case, the President and Congress said "How high?" Romney signals that he would act in the same way. (my emphasis in bold)
Alan Wolfe also wrote about liberals' concerns over the pre-Vatican II Catholic position on Church and State in Liberalism and CatholicismThe American Prospect 11/30/02:
Despite conservative aspects of Church doctrine, American Catholics were an important component of liberal success in the years after World War II. Many union members were Catholic, and they offered an effective liberal counterbalance to southern conservatives, nearly all of whom were Protestant, in the Democratic Party. A disproportionate share of union leaders were Catholic, too, not only in the AFL-CIO, but even in more radical unions, such as the Transport Workers Union, that had close ties to the communists. Father Coughlin's foil during the 1930s was Monsignor John A. Ryan, the "Right Reverend New Dealer," as his opponents called him, whose arguments in favor of economic justice Americanized and brought up to date the social teachings embodied in papal encyclicals. Dorothy Day kept alive a Catholic pacifist tradition that would bloom in the 1960s among activists like Michael Harrington, the Berrigan brothers, and (from time to time) Tom Hayden. Still, postwar liberal intellectuals often wrote as if there were no such thing as a Catholic left wing - or even a Catholic center. They knew the Church from its spokesmen, and that was all they needed to know.
No American liberal symbolized this hostility toward the Church more than Paul Blanshard, whose American Freedom and Catholic Power became a best-seller in 1949. Blanshard defined what he called "the Catholic problem" this way: "What is to be done with a hierarchy that operates in twentiethcentury America under medieval European controls?" To drive his point home, he asked his readers to imagine what might happen if and when Catholics became a majority in the United States--a real possibility, he believed, since Catholics were "outbreeding the non-Catholic elements in our population." Blanshard envisioned the passage of a constitutional amendment declaring America a Catholic republic, the "capture" of public schools by the hierarchy, and the subjection of the entire American people to Catholic strictures on marriage and divorce. Was his picture fanciful?, Blanshard asked his readers. Anything but, he answered, for the Catholic Church did not even require a majority of Catholics to impose its plan. "In our individualistic nation," he wrote, the Catholic Church "may operate on the balance-of-power principle, which has been so useful in giving Catholic political parties in Europe a dominating position." The attitudes of such liberals constituted one of the sorrier chapters in the history of American liberalism, revealing strains of intolerance and misunderstanding despite liberalism's language of openness. At various points, such liberals as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lewis Mumford, McGeorge Bundy, and Reinhold Niebuhr all expressed concerns about the absolutist, hierarchical, or corporatist aspects of Catholicism as a threat to American liberalism. (my emphasis)
This is a video of 08/05/07 in which Romney talks more specifics about the Mormon faith than he included in his much-discussed speech this week (for another segment from this interview, see the end of this post)
Some of the concepts in Mitt Romney's speech on religion, whose main point was that religious people should unite against vile, evil atheists and agnostics, had some really kooky ideas. The invaluable Joe Conason weighs in on the speech in Romney and Huckabee's religious intoleranceSalon 12/07/07.
My own choice for particular bizarreness was his notion, "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. ... Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."
What can you even say about something like that? Do this man or his speechwriters have even the most superficial knowledge of the history of religion? The Christian religion, to take just one, managed to survive from the first century to the Enlightenment without much of anything like what we now think of as freedom of religion. And doesn't that contradict everything about the Republicans' new dogma that the "Islamofascists" are the greatest menace to freedom in the history of the universe? I mean, Victor Davis Hanson and other conservative columnists and pundits remind us regularly how Muslim nations violate freedom of religion and how Islam supposedly is hostile to freedom. If Romney's little formula is correct, and what the anti-"Islamofascists" say is true, shouldn't Islam have died out as a religion centuries ago? That little aphorism of Romney's is just so vapid it blows my mind.
And as far as the terrible menace of secularism: Look, if God exists, why would he or she or whatever be worried about people saying she doesn't exist? I mean, if you believe God is the Creator of the universe, do you really think he's so thin-skinned he's bothered by village atheists nitpicking favorite fundamentalist truisms?
It reminds me of the story about how, in 1954, on the 100th anniversary of Sigmund Freud's birth, an event was arranged in a major Anglican church in London to commemorate his life and work. Some people grumbled that maybe it wasn't appropriate for a church to host such an event honoring a man who, in his entire adult life until his death (by assisted suicide) in 1940, was an outspoken atheist.
The sponsors of the event put out a press release that said (quoting from memory), "We are quite sure that Mr. Freud is no longer an atheist."
Speaking of Freud, even though he was an atheist he had enormous respect for religion and studied religious matters closely. In his own education, his family had a Jewish edition of the Christian Bible at home when he was growing up, which included Jewish commentary on the Scriptures. Freud was very familiar with both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. And that Bible edition's discussions of Biblical symbolism apparently was a major inspiration for his own analyses of symbolism in dreams and art.
Christians should pray for their fellow believers to take religion as seriously as the incorrigible atheist Freud did.
This is a long-time fundamentalist concept, defining absence of religion as a religion in itself. There's a certain authoritarian logic to the argument, as weird as it is in substance. One of the best descriptions I've seen of the thought process behind it is in Chris Hedges' (unfortunately titled) 2007 book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America.
Hedges talks about how fundamentalist subcultures in America often redefine words so that a commonly-understood word takes on a whole different meaning for them. Political fundamentalist leaders - the term "Christianist" seems to be coming into brader use to describe them - define "religious freedom" as having Protestant Christianity imposed in various ways by the government. They get to this Orwellian usage through the concept that true freedom or liberty is in being "saved" and living in a right relationship to God through Jesus Christ, as understood in their religious circles. So being free means being Christian, so religious freedom is a condition which allows maximum latitude for Christian proseltyzing.
It's related to a concept that even the Federalist Society doesn't seem to buy as a legal notion, but still serves as a useful rhetorical device for Christianists. Christianists argue that everyone has some kind of religion, even atheists and agnostics. Though nonbelievers claim to have no religion, nonbelievers actually practice the religion of "secular humanism". Taking Christian prayer out of schools or other measures by which government takes a non-sectarian stand is actually imposing the religion of secular humanism, in this argument. Therefore enforcing separation of church and state as we know it in the US and other democratic countries is actually a violation of Christians' freedom of religion because it subjects them to a government-imposed religion of secular humanism.
Yes, the notion is cracked. That strange swimming feeling in your head after you try to follow that line of argumentation is one that you start to recognize after digging through it and others like it for a while. But that is the conceptual framework for the Republican fundis to whom Romney is trying to appeal.
It's bad religion and bad politics that make for bad policy. The Christian religion has done exceptionally well in the American competitive free market of religious ideas. And Christian and other religious institutions receive massive government financial subsidies in the form of tax exemptions on contributions to religious institutions.
Intermingling church and state goes both ways, a reality that many fundis today foolishly ignore. It should be a warning to them that it's no longer possible to understand US Middle East policy without knowing the basic outlines of Protestant "premillenial dispensationalist" apocalyptic thinking. Romney mentions apocalyptic beliefs of the Mormon Church in the YouTube video at the beginning of this post that certainly seem to share common elements with the Protestant fundamentalist version, although Protestants don't normally assume that Jesus will rule the world from Independence, Missouri. Having their "eschatological" (end-times) ideas discussed in "the public square", as they like to call it, is not going to enhance public respect for their theology, their judgment or their broader moral sense.
Are they really sure they want fundamentalist theology to be a daily topic of political debate? Mainstream Christians have nothing to fear from such discussions. God presumably doesn't, either. But white fundamentalists might want to think this thing out a little better than they have recently.
Joe Conason's piece linked above includes the useful advice:
Distasteful as all the Bible thumping and ostentatious piety of the Republican presidential aspirants certainly are, the time may have come to address their religious pretensions directly, instead of turning away in mild disgust. For the truth is that no matter how often candidates like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee promise to uphold the Constitution and protect religious freedom, they are clearly seeking to impose the restrictive tests of faith that the nation's founders abhorred. ...
Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals -- including agnostics and atheists -- have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader -- which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid's religion. (my emphasis)
This is an additional segment from the Romney interview in the YouTube video linked above. This is an earlier portion of the interview. It includes Romney stating his determination to have the courts overturn Roe v. Wade.
Torture defender Mitt Romney has scheduled a speech on Thursday to reassure Christian conservatives in his Republican Party that his Mormon faith isn't so hopelessly alien that they shouldn't trust him to continue the Cheney-Bush torture policy, keep American troops in Iraq for eight more years and wage war against Iran.
The speech is being compared to a famous speech that John Kennedy gave in 1960 to reassure dubious Protestants that just becaues he was a Catholic didn't mean he was going to be taking political orders from the Pope in Rome. (John XXIII was Pope at the time, so taking directions from him wouldn't have been the worst thing imaginable.)
George Packer at his Interesting Times blog explains why Romney's speech is unlikely to bear much actual resemblance to Kennedy's speech, which was a "full-throated, unambiguous defense of secularism" in government (Romney's Religious Test 12/03/07):
Romney’s intention is the exact opposite of Kennedy’s. He’s caught in a trap of his own and his party’s making. Romney can’t raise the shield of secularism, as Kennedy did, because he is seeking the nomination of a sectarian party that’s built on a religious test. He can’t stand on any principle at all, secular or religious; instead, he has to win over the Christianists, who make up a large part of the Republican base, even though he belongs to a faith that most of them consider un-Christian. His eternal truth will be: “Hey, we’re not that different.” He parades his large and perfect family, he reminds us of his spotless personal life, he is dismissive of the possibility of appointing a Muslim Cabinet member, all to immunize himself against the religious bigotry of the voters he’s wooing. He’s going to do the same thing on Thursday. So no more comparisons with Kennedy, please. (my emphasis)
If George Packer is using the term "Christianist" at his New Yorker blog, I think we can safely say that the word is now a part of the American English vocabulary.
