“The Darkest Art Of All”: Mitt Romney’s Character Assassination Game
The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is not, as many liberals believe, that they play no-rules hardball. Instead, it’s their skill at projection—at accusing Democrats of doing what they are doing themselves, or are planning to do, or have done. That’s the real Rosetta stone. And that’s what Mitt Romney did this week when he called Barack Obama’s tough, but hardly extraordinary, ads about Bain Capital “character assassination.” He’s trying to make it so that Bain as a subject becomes off limits, and he’s laying the groundwork for later, when the real character assassination starts—and I hope your memory isn’t so short that you forget that he knows a thing or two about the topic himself.
Republicans have perfected many a dark campaign art over the years, from racial nudging and winking to suggesting that we’ll all be killed by terrorists if voters elect Democrats. But projection is the darkest art of all. And it’s so simple! When Republicans are acting like a mob—down in Dade County, for example—they accuse the Democrats of having a mob mentality. When they’re planning on blowing holes in the budget deficit bigger than the one the iceberg laid on the Titanic, via Paul Ryan’s budget and tax cuts for the rich, they stand up and accuse the Democrats of blowing holes in the budget. It works pretty well, too. All the conservative blogs pick up on it, and Fox and so on. And then, when the mainstream media sit down to write about the subject at hand, stories will note that “The GOP has been saying for months…”
This is what is happening here. Romney is trying to do two things. First, he’s trying to make any criticism of his Bain record out of bounds. Aware of course that he’s been forced by reality to revise downward from “more than 100,000” to “thousands” the number of jobs he helped create at Bain, he knows that he can’t use Bain as a plus to the extent that he wanted to. Think about it—the cornerstone of his career, the thing he spent 15 years of his life doing, the business he built (with Mr. Bain’s blessing and seed money)—pretty much out the window now. So that being the case, he needs to eliminate it as a minus. See if the referee will toss it out, if the judge (the media) will rule it inadmissible.
The obvious way to do that is to call any mention of it character assassination. Are those ads really character assassination? Do they say, for example: “Mitt Romney must be a really terrible and malevolent human being to have thrown those poor steel workers out on the street”? Because that would be an attack on Romney’s character. But no, they do not. They say Mitt Romney did us dirt. They’re emotional, sure. And if you want to say emotionally manipulative, all right by me. And yes, Joe Biden took it all a step or two further with his Ohio speech, saying Romney doesn’t understand the rest of us and so on.
But come on. That’s politics. Those aren’t character attacks. They’re salvos in a debate about what kinds of capitalism are good for regular people and what kinds aren’t. Campaigns Democratic or Republican don’t exactly elevate debates, Lord knows; but if we’re going to have arguments about how our society works, that’s a pretty useful one to have.
But the character-assassination label will come in handy—and this is Romney’s second purpose—when the Republican attacks on Obama really start. Maybe Romney is telling the truth, and his campaign will be all about how Obama promised nice things and seems like a nice young man but failed to deliver on them. His polling tells him he has to campaign like that for now, because Obama is far more likable to more people than he.
Something tells me, though, that the Romney campaign will eventually lower the boom. One might argue that it has already. What’s “apologizing for America,” after all? Aside from being a cheap and contemptible lie, is it not a kind of assault on the character of the president of the United States to accuse him of doing something that he hasn’t done, especially when the accusation is obviously meant to carry treasonous connotations? Romney’s “apologizing for America” line has always told us a great deal about character—Romney’s, not the president’s.
Don’t forget, finally, that Romney is pretty adept at character assassination himself. What do you call it when in those crucial primaries that he barely won against Rick Santorum—Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin—he was outspending Santorum six and nine and 12 to one with incredibly negative ads? Or the “tsunami of sleaze,” as my colleague John Avlon put it at the time that the Romney campaign dumped on Newt Gingrich in Florida, where 92 percent of the aired TV ads were negative? Those gutter attacks, aired over and over and over, are, it is worth remembering, the main reason the guy is the nominee. He was tied or behind in all those states until he emptied the trash. He wasn’t winning them over with his wit.
So it’s a bit rich to hear him saying now that he’s sad to see Obama in the gutter and he’s going to keep it on the up and up. But at some point, he’ll attack. And when he does, he’ll sigh sadly and say that he was forced into this position by that mean Obama, and he’ll count on everyone to forget the primary season, the foulest one by far in the modern history of American politics, for which the man who neither drinks nor swears bears the vast majority of the blame. That, come to think of it, is a “character” issue too.
BY: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 19, 2012
“Precisely Imprecise”: Romney Not Familiar With Questioning Obama’s Faith, But Stands By It
After the political world was consumed by yesterday’s New York Times’ report on the racist strategy memo for a Republican super PAC to “Defeat Barack Hussein Obama,” Mitt Romney was forced to “repudiate” it. But what of his own statement, back in February, invoking the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to Sean Hannity, after Hannity played a clip of President Obama talking about religious diversity in America?
Romney said: “I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said whatever it was.” No, that wasn’t mistranscribed. He said that. If there’s ever been a perfect encapsulation of Romney as a candidate, there it is.
Here’s what Romney was referring to–or not remembering precisely or exactly. As reported by Politico yesterday, in February, during a Romney appearance on his show, Hannity played a clip of an Obama speech in which the president said, “Given the increasing diversity of America’s populations, the dangers of sectarianism are greater than ever. Whatever we once were we are no longer a Christian nation.” Obama was talking about religious pluralism, but Romney took it as a cue to question his patriotism, by invoking Wright. His answer to Hannity:
The other part of his quote is also an unusual thing, where he says that sectarianism (presents) a great threat. Look, he may not be much of a student of history but perhaps he doesn’t recall that from the very beginning, America had many different sects, many different religions, that part of our founding principle was that we would be a nation of religious tolerance. Also, without question, the legal code in this country is based upon Judeo-Christian values and teachings, Biblical teachings, and for the president not to understand that a wide array of religions and a conviction that Judeo-Christian philosophy is an integral part of our foundation is really an extraordinary thing. I think again that the president takes his philosophical leanings in this regard, not from those who are ardent believers in various faiths but instead from those who would like to see America (more secular. And I’m not sure which is worse, him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we … must be a less Christian nation.
That’s an even more florid pander to the Christian right than Romney’s Liberty University commencement speech last weekend. He’s not precisely familiar with it, but he stands by it, for sure.
The Romney camp is working hard at putting distance between the candidate and any race-baiting strategies that might be deployed by its allies. But of course Romney himself–even if he’s not precisely familiar with it now–is not above questioning the president’s patriotism, his commitment to Christianity, and the alleged anti-American-ness of Wright, and therefore Obama.
It’s true, of course, that Romney was feebly acknowledging religious pluralism; he has at one time argued that there is no religious test for the presidency. (I wonder if he’s familiar, precisely, exactly, or otherwise, with that today.) When Romney spoke to Hannity last February, it was on the heels of the presidential debate for which he had hired former Liberty University debate coach Brett O’Donnell, and in which he perfected parroting the religious right’s Christian nation ideology in an answer. Faced with a question from Hannity about Obama’s fealty to this Republican ideology, Romney seized the opportunity to invoke Wright.
In the Washington Post this morning, religion columnist Lisa Miller asserts that Obama and Romney have very different views of God, and that when Americans “pull the lever this November, you will not just be voting for president. You will be saying what you believe about God.” Miller goes on to present an embarrassingly simplistic dichotomy: Romney “stands for the individualistic version of American success; Obama for the collectivist.” One of these views (of God) favors slashing taxes and government; the other shared sacrifice and gay marriage.
These are not, though, two cleanly differentiated views of God that in fact inspire each candidate’s politics. (There aren’t even, of course, two cleanly differentiated views of God in American religious life. But that’s another matter.) The candidate’s politics are informed by party, and by ideology; God is added later to justify them. That’s why Romney, born into a minority faith, can feel perfectly comfortable, when put in a room with Sean Hannity, claiming that America was founded on a religion other than his own, but that the other guy, who actually shares the religion that Romney claims the nation was founded upon, is the one who is undermining the proclaimed official national religion by promoting religious pluralism.
By: Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches, May 18, 2012
“Truth Be Told”: How John Roberts Started This Spending Madness
Related to Joe Ricketts and SuperPACs and all this is of course the Supreme Court decision that made it all possible, Citizens United. It’s worth remembering how we got here.
Jeff Toobin’s piece in this week’s New Yorker is a total revelation. The CU decision, it turns out, didn’t just happen. You know–a case goes through the appellate layers, the Supremes decide there’s an interesting question in it, they grant certiorari, and they hear the case. That’s our assumption, and it’s what usually happens.
Well, it’s not what happened here. It’s technically a bit complicated, but what happened is that the Court heard the case a first time, when the petitioner (Citizens United, represented by Ted Olson) was seeking only a very narrow decision saying that McCain-Feingold spending and disclosure limits should not apply to a political ad/movie that was being offered on a pay-per-view basis. They planned on showing an anti-Hillary ad on that basis, so that’s all they were interested in.
That’s what CU wanted. But through the course of the questioning and the opinion-writing, which Toobin explains in lucid detail (see especially page 5 of his article), it became clear to all involved that the conservative faction–led in this case by Anthony Kennedy–could use the case as a wedge to make a much more sweeping decision. And in stepped John Roberts.
To make a long story short, Roberts held back the decision and rescheduled the case for the next year, This enabled the conservative majority to expand dramatically the scope of the majority opinion. And he sped it up, put it on the calendar for September, not the usual first week of October, in order (Toobin suggests) that the decision would be more likely to have an impact on the 2010 elections.
The important thing to remember here: Roberts is the guy who said at his confirmation hearings that he’d go slow and be highly respectful of precedent. But here, he engineered the Court’s calendar and procedure specifically to turn a narrow case that few people would even have paid attention to into a sweeping decision that changes American politics and undoes a century of jurisprudence.
And that is how we got these SuperPACs. Really an amazing and important story.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 18, 2012
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“The Many Faces Of Evil”: In The GOP, Personality Is Not Policy
As we know, Mitt Romney is not all that likeable. Now Mike Huckabee, there’s a likeable guy. He used to say (and maybe still does) that he’s a conservative, but he’s not angry about it. It was a clever line, positing himself as the happy warrior and other Republicans as needlessly unpleasant. Huckabee has an easy smile and a friendly laugh. He plays bass. He invites liberals on his television and radio shows to have respectful discussions about issues. So how do we interpret it when Huckabee allows fundraising letters to be sent out under his name that say things like this:
“Listen, you’re a person of faith and so am I. In his administration and now on his re-election campaign, President Obama has surrounded himself with morally repugnant political whores with misshapen values and gutter-level ethics.”
Yeesh. Should this lead us to change our opinion of Huckabee? Or can you be a likeable guy and a vicious partisan at the same time? Now maybe Huckabee never saw the letter, but I doubt it. It’s not like he’s running a corporation with 50,000 employees that puts out hundreds of documents every day. And honestly, I always found Huckabee to be a contradiction, someone with a pleasant persona and some decidedly unpleasant views. But this is a good reminder that we shouldn’t substitute our impressions of someone’s manner for a judgment about how they’ll perform in their public duties.
This works in the opposite direction, too. Let’s take Rick Santorum. His views on just about everything are pretty much what Mike Huckabee’s are. He got a lot of attention for his harshly judgmental opinions about gay people, but I can’t remember Huckabee ever saying anything substantively different. The reason Santorum stands out is that he is a deeply unpleasant person. He always looks like he just stepped in dog poop, the dog poop being the moral sewer that is American culture. You can see him tense up when he’s confronted by people who disagrees with him, while Huckabee smiles and laughs, disarming people with his affability. But they both believe the same things. I doubt a Huckabee presidency would have been much different from a Santorum presidency.
It’s easy to get this kind of misleading impression about someone, particularly because figuring out the substance of what someone believes can be a lengthy and tedious process, but we’re all very good at making quick judgments about whether or not we like a person. And the consequences can be serious. You might remember that when John Roberts got nominated to the Supreme Court, he was roundly praised for being so personable and reasonable. He smiled and spoke slowly and carefully. He talked in baseball metaphors. Everything about his manner made him seem moderate and thoughtful. And in the end, he turned out to be the very definition of a radical conservative judicial activist.
BY: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, May 16, 2012
“Flirting With Catastrope”: Nebraska GOP Senate Candidate, “Destroy The Constitution Or I’ll Destroy The Economy”
Yesterday, Nebraska GOP primary voters nominated dark horse candidate and state Sen. Deb Fischer as their candidate for an open U.S. Senate race this November. In choosing Fischer, the Nebraska GOP aligns itself with a candidate who recently called for a very high stakes game of chicken — flirting with economic catastrophe in order to force Congress to permanently enshrine Tea Party fiscal policy into the Constitution.
During last year’s debt ceiling crisis, which Speaker John Boehner has threatened to repeat next year, House and Senate Republicans threatened to force the United States to default on its debt — an outcome that would have caused “a bigger GDP drop than that experienced during the Great Recession of 2008″ — unless President Obama agreed to an increasingly escalating series of demands for austerity. Even after this campaign of extortion forced the White House to make significant concessions, Fischer indicated that she would have simply let the economy blow up because Congress didn’t also agree to a constitutional amendment:
Nebraska’s 2012 Republican Senate candidates turned thumbs down Monday on the compromise debt reduction plan agreed to by the White House and congressional leaders.
“I would vote no on this specific bill because Congress needs to pass a balanced budget (constitutional) amendment first,” said state Sen. Deb Fischer of Valentine.
It’s not clear which version of the balanced budget amendment Fischer is referring to here, but even the mildest forms of such an amendment are terrible ideas because they prevent the United States from responding to economic downturns or unexpected disasters, while simultaneously turning control of the nation’s budget over to unelected judges who are ill-equipped to handle it.
Moreover, at the time that Fischer endorsed blowing up the economy unless Congress votes to change the Constitution, the leading Republican proposal for such an amendment imposed such draconian spending cuts that it would “throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.” The lead sponsor of this plan to trigger a new Great Depression, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), also called for forcing a debt default unless Congress gives him everything he wants.
In other words, while little is known about the obscure state lawmaker who wants to join the United States Senate, her willingness to play chicken with America’s prosperity strongly suggests that she would line up with the most hardline members of the Republican caucus.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, May 16, 2012
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