Why, Yes, Mitt Romney Does Lie A Great Deal
I’ve always had a soft spot for Mitt Romney, who strikes me, in a way I can’t completely define, as a good guy. The fact that he is an audacious liar does not strike me as a definitive judgment on his character, but primarily a reflection of the circumstances he finds himself in – having to transition from winning a majority of a fairly liberal electorate to winning a majority of a rabidly conservative one, one that cannot be placated without indulging in all sorts of fantasies.
So I do understand David Frum’s sympathy for Romney. What I don’t quite get is Frum’s claim that Romney is not an audacious liar. He made this claim in a joint interview we gave on Canadian television, and again the other day in the Daily Beast:
Mitt Romney cares a great deal about speaking accurately and truthfully. He uses statistics carefully in his speeches and debates, unlike former leading rival Rick Perry.
He eschews the audacious somersaulting of reality we often hear from current rival Newt Gingrich …
So long as we are in the world of facts and specifics, Romney has shown himself scrupulous not to overstate or misrepresent. Even where he has changed his mind, on abortion for example, you’ll see no equivalent of the glaring disregard for the factual record of a Ron Paul
Really? It seems to me that Romney makes factual, specific claims that are false all the time. Some of them are minor, daily stories, such as his denials, when convenient, that he knows anything about the ads he is running against Newt Gingrich. Others are obvious attempts to mislead the public about his own history:
When first asked as a 1994 US Senate candidate about records showing him voting in the 1992 Democratic primary, Romney said he couldn’t recall for whom he voted.
Then Romney told the Globe he voted for Tsongas because he preferred his ideas to his then-opponent for the nomination, Bill Clinton. Later, he added that it was proof he was not a partisan politician.
Yet in 2007, while making his first run for president, Romney offered a new explanation: He said he voted for Tsongas as a tactical maneuver, aiming to present the “weakest opponent” possible for Bush.
Or important components of the claims that undergird his policy arguments:
At last night’s debate, for instance, Romney claimed that Obama “went before the United Nations” and “said nothing about thousands of rockets being rained in on Israel from the Gaza Strip.”
This is flat out false. Obama talked about the rockets hitting Israel in two speeches before the U.N.: One in 2009, and the other in 2011.
These are just a couple of examples plucked from the last day of campaigning. There is an endless supply, large and small. Romney’s whole line of attack against Obama rests upon facts that are verifiably false. His main foreign policy indictment is a lie that Obama went around the world apologizing for the United States – this is the basis for his slogan that he “believes in America,” as well as the title of his campaign book, No Apology. His domestic indictment of Obama rests upon his ludicrous claims that Obama “has no jobs plan” and his repeated, specific assertion that Obama wants to create full equality of outcome.
Even by the standards of politicians, Romney seems unusually prone to dishonesty. Again, you can ascribe this to circumstance rather than character. I see him as a patrician pol, like George H.W. Bush, who believes deeply in public service but regards elections as a cynical process of pandering to rubes. I think you can plausibly make other interpretations, and you can separate Romney the man or even Romney the president from Romney the candidate. But I don’t see how you can paint Romney the candidate as in any way scrupulous about the truth in any form.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, January 27, 2012
Wisconsin Recall More Popular Than Republican Primaries
America is almost four weeks into the voting stage of the Republican presidential race. The candidates are debating. The media is covering the competition 24/7, and in such minute detail that Rick Perry’s quitting of the contest was treated as news. And Republicans in three states have caucused and voted in numbers that party leaders, pundits and the talk-radio amen corner tell us are significant.
Yet at the same time, those same party leaders, pundits and radio talkers continue to dismiss the movement to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as a false construct with little real hope of prevailing.
Fair enough, let’s compare.
Since January 3, Republican caucuses have been held in Iowa (with an electorate of 2,231,589), and Republican primaries have been held in New Hampshire (electorate of 998,799) and South Carolina (electorate of 3,385,224).
That adds up to a total electorate of 6,615,612 in the trio of first- (and second- and third-) in-the-nation states.
Turnout for the Iowa caucuses is now pegged at 121,479. Turnout in the New Hampshire primary was 248,448. Turnout in the South Carolina primary was 601,166.
That adds up to a total turnout of 971,093, or about 14.5 percent of the possible voters in the three states.
And what of Wisconsin?
The state has an electorate of 4,170,501.
The United Wisconsin petition drive to recall anti-labor Governor Scott Walker collected significantly more than 1 million signatures.
Rounding to a million, that’s about 23.9 percent of the possible voters in the state.
So here’s what we know:
1. If you add up all the caucus and primary votes that have been cast so far for Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, the former Rick Perry, the former Jon Huntsman, the former Michele Bachmann and the eternal Buddy Roemer, they still have not attracted as much support as has the drive to recall Scott Walker.
2. If you compare the percentage of the electorate in the three caucus and primary states that has expressed support for all the Republicans who would be president, it is dramatically lower than the percentage of the Wisconsin electorate that wants to recall Scott Walker.
3. If you add the total number of names on petitions filed January 17 to recall other Republicans in Wisconsin—Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, state Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald and three of Fitzgerald’s colleagues—the total number of signatures filed in support of the recall of Walker and his cronies is close to 1,940,000. That figure is just about double the number of votes cast in all the Republican presidential contests for all the Republican presidential candidates so far this year.
Conclusion: if the Republican presidential race is a serious endeavor, the Wisconsin drive to recall Scott Walker, Rebecca Kleefisch, Scott Fitzgerald and their compatriots is doubly serious. And far, far more popular with the available electorate.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 28, 2012
Newt’s Real Legacy
Do you think that after all is said and done, Newt Gingrich will just go down in history as the politician who conclusively proved that voters don’t care about a candidate’s sexual misbehavior?
Imagine the history students of 2112, reading about the early 21st century on their vaporphones, or whatever they have by then. They would get to this presidential campaign and there would be a little footnote saying that despite a totally outrageous marital history, Newt Gingrich won the presidential primary in one of the most socially conservative states in the country. Maybe there would be a clip of him making the how-dare-you-sir speech to CNN’s John King.
Probably not exactly what Newt has in mind.
Perhaps things will go differently. Maybe, despite his blah debate performances in Florida, Newt will do well in this week’s primary, and go on to win the nomination, become president and build lots of moon colonies while saving America from Shariah law and the corrosive effects of the writing of Saul Alinsky.
But if not, he’ll still be the guy who managed to become a credible presidential candidate despite the three wives, the serial adultery, etc. etc. etc. He had a lot of help from the voters. In South Carolina, only 31 percent of the people interviewed by Public Policy Polling said they believed the second Mrs. Gingrich when she told ABC that her husband had asked her to share his sexual favors with his longtime mistress, who is now the third Mrs. G.
Presumably they believed Newt, who said that he had “witnesses” who were eager to go to ABC and denounce the story. Although the Gingrich campaign now says the proffered witnesses didn’t really exist. Except for his daughters by his first marriage. Who truly would not seem to be the best possible experts on whether Newt wanted to have whoopee rights to both their stepmothers.
If Gingrich loses the Florida primary, I hope it is for the crime of middle-aged-child abuse.
But about that open-marriage poll question: I believe that what the voters were actually saying was that they didn’t want to hear about it. The American public has a long history of ignoring the private lives of elected officials whenever possible. They gave up on politicians as role models somewhere around Richard Nixon.
Perhaps the critical moment came when voters decided to elect Bill Clinton president despite what were very clear storm warnings about his tendency to wander off, sexually speaking. Which was followed by the public’s very clear decision to keep Bill Clinton even after he was caught in behavior that, really, even the head of Hedonists Inc. could not possibly have thought was a good idea.
And it all worked out! Now Clinton is Beloved Ex-President Clinton, and everybody keeps sighing over how great things were when the prince of bad behavior was in charge.
That goes for the social right, too. They are going to go for the guy who they think will carry out their agenda. Even if he is, say, an anti-abortion crusader whose ex-wife swore that he took her to get an abortion. (See: former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr.)
The far right seems to be particularly indifferent to bad-behavior issues. Maybe this is because their supporters know that sinning social conservatives operate at a disadvantage. It is way easier to avoid the hypocrisy label if you’re a straying civil libertarian whose family values speeches mainly involve encouraging kids to donate money to feed impoverished people in Africa. You’re not going to be charged with speaking out of both sides of your mouth when the first side is talking about supporting Doctors Without Borders.
Conservative voters also like expressions of remorse and promises to reform. When all else fails, they have even been known to argue that everybody does it. “I’m just saying, they all have stinky feet,” former Congressman J. C. Watts, a Baptist preacher, said while he was campaigning for Newt in South Carolina.
Although actually, when you’re talking about 1) Committing adultery, 2) Divorcing your wife while she’s sick to marry your mistress, 3) Committing adultery, 4) Allegedly asking your wife to let you keep the mistress on the side and 5) Divorcing your wife while she’s sick to marry your mistress … it’s pretty clear everybody doesn’t do it.
But in a way, Watts is right. (And we do like that stinky feet line.) Everybody has something. Rick Santorum lusted in his heart for earmarks. Mitt Romney drove to Canada with the family Irish setter strapped on the car roof.
And Newt argues his checkered past is actually an advantage. He suggested to the Christian Broadcasting Network that “it may make me more normal than somebody who wanders around seeming perfect and maybe not understanding the human condition, and the challenges of life for normal people.”
Take that, Mitt.
I once wrote a book on how gossip about politicians’ private lives impacts their careers, and it was a very interesting experience, as a result of which I know way more about Grover Cleveland’s sex life than most people would find reasonable. Until the 1970s, voters found it very easy to ignore things they would rather not know about prominent politicians, since the mainstream media didn’t report it. That rule began to crack about the time one of the nation’s most powerful politicians, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman Wilbur Mills, was caught trying to drunkenly fish a striptease dancer out of the Washington Tidal Basin.
Ever since then, we have been writing about the ways politicians misbehave in private, usually after an ex-lover or angry wife blows the whistle. And the voters frequently yawn. However, the people a misbehaving politician really has to worry about are not his constituents, but his peers. These days, a congressman’s colleagues will throw him overboard in a second. We all remember that Anthony Weiner was driven out of Congress after he got caught tweeting pictures of his underwear. While he was inhabiting it. I am going to go out on a limb and say that his constituents in Brooklyn and Queens were not charmed by this behavior, but you did not see any widespread calls within his district for him to resign. No, the people who forced Weiner to go away were the Democratic leaders, particularly Nancy Pelosi, who thought he was hurting the party in general.
Over the last few days, there has been a big-name Republican uprising against Gingrich, featuring everybody from Bob Dole to Ann Coulter. They aren’t personally offended by Newt’s marital history — or if they are, they can certainly live with it. But they’re totally afraid that if he actually got the nomination and people had to take a long, serious look at the whole Newt picture, the Republicans would be destroyed in November.
We’ll see what happens. But here’s the good news: Newt has always dreamed of being a figure in American history books, and I think he’s got that nailed.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 27, 2012
Rick Santorum’s Cynicism: A Fine Day To Discuss The Value Of The Affordable Care Act
This morning brings some sad news, that Rick Santorum’s daughter, Bella, has been hospitalized in Philadelphia. The child has Trisomy 18, a particularly heartbreaking genetic condition.
I do not share the opinion that it is distasteful to discuss the political issues surrounding a tragedy, that there should be some kind of grace period. If you want to argue for or against gun control in the wake of a school shooting, have at it. Why should the very day an issue gets maximum media saturation be the one day we can’t discuss its political contours?
Point being, I think it’s okay to point out that under the Affordable Care Act, insurers can’t deny coverage to children with a preexisting condition or disability.
[T]he law actually prevents insurance carriers from denying coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions (and disabilities), prohibits health plans from putting a lifetime dollar limit on benefits and offers new options for long-term care. This is why groups like the American Association of People with Disabilities, National Organization For Rare Disorders, and The Arc of the United States not only support the law, but have filed an amicus brief in its defense.
And it’s equally okay to remind voters that Santorum, in an act of startling cynicism, continues to equate the ACA with socialism, even suggesting that it would lead to the death of his daughter. His claim that he’s “fighting for Bella and other children like her” — and, by extension, proponents of the ACA are not — is spurious.
By all accounts, Santorum’s daughter has beaten the odds. She’s gotten marvelous healthcare. I have yet to encounter a decent justification from either Santorum or his fellow candidates for denying the nation’s children the same opportunity.
By: Elon Green, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 29, 2012
“Bait And Switch Cynic’s”: Obama Angers GOP By Standing Up For Middle Class
Republicans are furious with Barack Obama for waging a “divisive” populist campaign against Wall Street and America’s “elites” – because Republicans think that is supposed to be their job.
Together with the more confrontational tone he’s taken with Republicans since they rebuffed him on his middle class jobs package last summer, President Obama’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday is further proof he’s finally learned his lesson from the previous three years: That while he was off chasing independent “swing” voters said to prize compromise and moderation above all things, scheming Republicans had picked his pocket of those pitchfork-wielding populists who should have been Obama’s all along.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In both the physical world and in politics the law of gravity decrees that when things fall apart they are supposed to fall down. So, by all rights a second Great Depression that incinerated $16 trillion in household wealth and was brought about by the same kind of financial shenanigans and Wall Street recklessness that caused that first big depression back in the 1930s, should have provoked the very same kind of anti-business popular backlash that brought FDR to power then and should have created a Second New Deal now.
Yet, as populist historian Thomas Frank writes in his new book, Pity the Billionaire: the Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, so far the most visible response to the recent economic catastrophe has been a right wing campaign to “roll back regulation, to strip government employees of the right to collectively bargain and to clamp down on federal spending.”
The resurgence of the Republican Party so soon after the debacle of George W. Bush and the collapse of the financial markets in 2008 is a testament to human adaptability.
Rather than allow themselves to be crushed underneath a tide of middle class anger directed against the plutocrats and tycoons who stole their dreams away — as happened to Republicans in the 1930s — conservatives were determined this time around to lead the populist, anti-Wall Street revolt instead of be swallowed by it – even if it was a crusade cynically designed to serve the interests of the very same Wall Street that was responsible for the crisis in the first place.
Congressman Paul Ryan, for example, was both the author of the “kill Medicare as we know it” budget as well as an article in Forbes titled “Down with Big Business” in which Ryan argued that giant corporations could not be counted on to defend capitalism in its hour of need and so it was up to “the American people – innovators and entrepreneurs and small business owners — to take a stand.”
Conservative infatuation with “entrepreneurs” and “small business owners” was no accident. Like those prairie farmers who fed the Populist Movement of the 19th century, mom-and-pop hardware store owners are just as outraged by “crony capitalism” on Wall Street as they are by “European-style socialism” in Washington.
And so by passing the torch of free market capitalism from the international conglomerate to the local chamber of commerce conservatives knew they could give populist cover to a free market agenda that meant lower taxes for the rich and fewer regulations for Wall Street.
But the perfect expression of the Republican Party’s bait-and-switch cynicism came when Republicans tried to beat back Obama’s Wall Street reforms by pretending to be against Wall Street itself. Since “public outrage about the bailout of banks and Wall Street is a simmering time bomb set to go off,” wrote GOP pollster Frank Luntz in an infamous February 2010 memo to his Republican clients, the single best way for Republicans to kill Wall Street reform was to link it to favoritism of Wall Street — like “the Big Bank Bailout” instead.
And that is exactly what Republicans did, piously intoning how the Democrat’s reforms were really giveaways to the rich that sought to “punish” middle class taxpayers while rewarding “big banks and credit card companies.”
Add it all up and everywhere you looked the GOP defenders of the Top 1% were warning of “a colossal struggle between average people and the elites who would strip away the people’s freedoms,” said Frank.
Corrupt and cynical though all of this might be, Republican efforts to portray themselves as champions of little guy standing tall against “the interests” was not wholly implausible, as leaders of the revivified Right found the soil for their misdirection to be uncommonly fertile.
Hoodwinking the Tea Party Right that the “elites”who brought down the economy lived in Washington rather on Wall Street was never going to be a heavy lift.
In their year-long study of the Tea Party movement, The Tea Party and the Remaking of the Republican Conservatism, authors Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson found that while Tea Party members might be impresarios of political organization they were largely ignorant when it came to “what government does, how it is financed and what is actually included (or not) in key pieces of legislation and regulation.”
The blame, they say, lies squarely with “the content of right wing programming,” especially Fox News, which, the authors contend, propagates falsehoods “often as a matter of deliberate editorial policy.” Thus, millions of frightened Americans were uniquely vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation by a corporate-sponsored “‘populist” movement that served the interests of the plutocrats.
But making matters worse, the Democrats have not exactly covered themselves in glory when it comes to making clear whose side they are on. The bank bailouts begun under George Bush are easily blamed on Democrats who both inherited them when they won the White House and voted for them when they controlled Congress. Corporate control of Washington is also a problem that undermines public faith in Democrats who are supposed to govern Washington. And when “Clintonism” is a word that means the “People’s Party” is catering to the interests of the rich and powerful — or when neo-liberalism” defines an economic system indistinguishable from conservative laissez faire — you can forgive the average voter for having trouble separating Wall Street elites from Washington ones.
With a powerful media network like Fox News at its disposal, able to “make viewers both more conservative and less informed,” it’s not difficult to understand how Republicans have been able to lead a mass revolt against “elites” that largely serves the interests of those very same elites.
But with his more recent moves to the left President Obama has begun to turn this around and win back a middle class that should have been with him from the beginning.
“After flirting with the role of the reasonable centrist after his party’s defeat in 2010, President Obama has decided to run for re-election as a full-throated liberal populist,” writes New York Times conservative Ross Douthat with a tone of resignation and disappointment more than agreement.
Peter Beinart of the Daily Beast agrees: “From Mitt Romney to Newt Gingrich to Glenn Beck, the conservative assault on Barack Obama comes down to this: unfettered capitalism is true Americanism.”
Among right wing conservatives, Obama’s efforts to use government to make American capitalism more stable and just isn’t the sort of rescue mission that both Democratic and Republican administrations have been waging since the New Deal. Conventional stimulus spending and jobs programs are instead “an alien imposition, hatched in foreign lands, and designed to make us less free,” says Beinart. And so Obama will either effectively answer that charge “or he will lose the 2012 election.”
My money is on Obama who’s recent course correction may turn out to be his own “Southern Strategy.” The original got its name back in 1968 after Richard Nixon had a Eureka! Moment when he realized there was no way Southern whites who voted with Barry Goldwater in 1964 and were now standing with George Wallace at the schoolhouse door belonged in the Democratic Party of Civil Rights and the Great Society. And today, they don’t.
Nearly 50 years later, Barack Obama seems to have had his own epiphany when he looked around at those who were shaking their fists at “Big Government” but who’d also been put out on the street by Big Banks and Big Business, and the President wondered: How can these people possibly be Republicans?
Proof that President Obama is onto something with his new, more populist approach is the fact that the unerring homing missile of popular resentments and discontents — Newt Gingrich — is going after plutocrat Mitt Romney as a “malefactor of great wealth,” while dancing on Romney’s grave with a victory speech in South Carolina that spit out the word “elite” 27 times.
The contortions that Republicans have had to go through to recast themselves as the Party of the People in order to advance an agenda lop-sided in its favoritism for the wealthy few exposes the structural deformities that have always bedeviled American conservatives.
Like lizards who camouflage themselves from predators, there has always been something chameleon-like about right wing conservatives compelled to adopt protective coloration to survive in a hostile liberal environment.
That is why right wing conservatives have had to learn to speak the language of liberalism — borrowing words like freedom, liberty and democracy in order to superficially appear to embrace ideas and ideals forbidden to them by their reactionary belief system.
That is why members of the Religious Right and Conservative Movement are more familiar with the liberal community organizer Saul Alinsky than Alinsky’s intended liberal audience seems to be, taking to heart his advice in Rules for Radicals that the way for political movements to get things done is to “go home, organize, build power.”
And immediately after the economy collapsed in 2008 and 2009, conservatism positioned itself as a popular protest movement for economic hard times, jettisoning “aspects of conservative tradition that were either haughty or aristocratic,” says Frank “while symbols that seemed noble or democratic or popular, even if they were the traditional property of the other side, were snapped up and claimed by the Right itself.”
Right wing conservatives knew a popular uprising by angry and distressed Americans against the Powers That Be was in the offing. But this time, unlike the 1930s, Republicans intended to lead that revolt instead of be victims of it.
No wonder, then, that Republicans are calling the President “divisive” when he tries to take back from them the backing of The People that rightfully belongs to him.
By: Ted Frier, Open salon, January 29, 2012
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