Why The Tea Party Is Responsible For Newt Gingrich
We may not be attributing Newt Gingrich’s rise to the tea party. But maybe we should.
Even as the movement’s influence in the GOP appears to have waned over the past year, there remains one major remnant of what happened in 2010: anti-establishment fervor.
The tea party spurred momentum and turnout for the GOP two years ago, but it also caused it some headaches in the primaries, turning aside candidates who were clearly favored by the party establishment in favor of conservative wild cards that went on to mixed results in November.
Sound familiar?
That very same anti-establishment mentality has spurred any number of anti-Mitt Romney candidates to frontrunner status in the 2012 GOP presidential race. And when it finally looked like Romney was the presumptive nominee before South Carolina, the base recoiled in much the same way it did in a series of 2010 Senate races, delivering a huge win for Gingrich.
And in doing so, the tea party movement served notice that it’s still very much alive, albeit not as cohesive or well-branded.
In recent days, some smart political analysts have begun to question the theory that the major party elites have overwhelming influence when it comes to picking their nominees.
The New York Times’s Nate Silver wrote about this at length on Sunday, referring to political scientist Marty Cohen’s book “The Party Decides.”
Cohen’s theory states that, while candidates and voter preferences matter, nominees are almost always chosen in a sort of long-running negotiation among party elites, who effectively pave the way for voters to make the most logical choice and/or pick the most electable candidate. In other words, voters have a choice, but it’s heavily influenced by party bigwigs.
That theory, according to some, simply doesn’t apply to the 2012 GOP presidential race.
“The competing paradigm might be called ‘This Time Is Different,’” Silver writes. “Under this interpretation, elite support and the ground game do not matter as much as usual. Instead, success is more idiosyncratic: personalities matter a lot, and nominations are determined based primarily on momentum and news media coverage.”
This makes a lot of sense — particularly when it comes to Gingrich — but there seems to be more to it.
Namely, the tea party.
After all, exit polls from Saturday’s South Carolina primary showed 64 percent of voters identified as tea party supporters, and Gingrich won nearly half of their votes — almost twice as many as Romney. Indeed, the fact that nearly two-thirds of voters in any primary say they support a certain political movement shows what kind of influence it has.
But even if you look beyond the exit poll, it’s pretty clear that the tea party mentality is very much a part of what Gingrich has been able to accomplish. The same tea party mentality that was responsible for Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul is now helping Gingrich.
In most of those cases, there was another GOP candidate who was favored by the GOP establishment but didn’t light any fires among the conservative base. So the base chose somebody else.
That’s not to say that Gingrich hasn’t been a capable candidate who was able to swing a state by 25 points in a week’s time. In fact, it’s just saying that his stealth maneuvering has more impact today, because voters are acting more independently of party leaders.
For some reason, political observers have stopped attributing this to the tea party. But it’s very much a lingering effect of what the tea party did in 2010 or, at the very least, is a result of the same set of circumstances that gave rise to the tea party.
The question now is whether it’s enough, as it was in 2010 Senate races, to push a supposedly less-electable wild card candidate to a major party’s presidential nomination.
As we have written before, that is a much steeper hill to climb, and we remain skeptical that the tea party will actually pick the GOP nominee.
But the influence of the tea party lives on in today’s Republican Party.
By: Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, January 24, 2012
“A Club Of Coddled Millionaires”: Newt Gingrich Is Obama’s Best Surrogate
The most important figure in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address wasn’t on the House floor. In fact, he hasn’t taken a seat in front of the chamber in 13 years.
But as he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination in Florida, former House speaker Newt Gingrich was doing more to boost President Obama’s reelection prospects than anything Obama himself could do.
Obama’s address, which marked the unofficial start of his campaign, aimed to take the economic misery that threatens to doom his reelection and turn it into class resentment: the privileged wealthy against ordinary Americans. “We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by,” he said, in remarks prepared for delivery. “Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”
Gingrich assisted in making this case by helpfully arranging for Republicans to serve as fat-cat foils. The former speaker, whose allies had already branded Mitt Romney a job-destroying “predatory capitalist,” successfully goaded the former Massachusetts governor into releasing tax returns that reveal him to be making millions of dollars per year from investments and paying paltry tax rates — while tucking money in the Cayman Islands, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock and a Swiss bank account. Gingrich exulted Tuesday that the already rich Romney is “getting richer off Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”
Romney, suddenly faltering in his bid for the nomination, found himself declaring in Florida on Tuesday that “banks aren’t bad people” — a version of his earlier claim that “corporations are people.” He continued to characterize Gingrich as an “influence peddler,” a tool of K Street and an exorbitantly compensated Freddie Mac lobbyist. Gingrich’s campaign, in turn, answered with the implausible claim that it “can’t find” all of the lucrative contracts the candidate had with Freddie. (Did they look under the sofa cushions?)
Obama strategist David Axelrod couldn’t have arranged it better: On the very day the president tried to turn the campaign into a contest between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, the Republicans launched an all-out war between the Gingrich haves and the Romney have-mores.
A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows the damage done. Two weeks ago, Romney was viewed favorably by 39 percent of Americans and unfavorably by 34 percent. Incredibly, he is now viewed favorably by only 31 percent and unfavorably by 49 percent. Among independents, who will decide the outcome in November, Romney is viewed unfavorably by a margin of 2-to-1.
By no coincidence Obama has grown in public esteem over that time. His favorable rating is up to 53 percent from 48 percent in December, and his unfavorable rating has dropped to 43 percent from 49 percent.
Gingrich himself remains so unpopular that his own chances of beating Obama seem dim: His 29 percent favorability rating is about where it was before he was dumped as speaker by his House colleagues in 1998. But by making Romney as unpopular as he is, he has made Obama look good by comparison.
Gingrich has long regarded himself as a “transformational figure” in world history, and now he’s about to prove it: For the second time in his career, he is about to reelect a Democratic president.
After he led Republicans to victory in 1994 and became House speaker, his ill-advised standoff with President Bill Clinton led to a government shutdown and allowed Clinton to rebound to an easy reelection in 1996. Now, just two years after Republicans swept to power in the House, Gingrich is again providing a Democratic president with an unexpected path to victory.
To press his Gingrich-given advantage Obama made plans to highlight the “Buffett Rule” and invited to the speech Warren Buffett’s secretary, who supposedly pays a higher tax rate than Buffett does. “Let’s never forget,” Obama said in his prepared text, “millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules every day deserve a government and a financial system that do the same. It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts, and no cop-outs.”
But it was hardly necessary for Obama to make the case. Gingrich had already turned the Republican candidates into a club of coddled millionaires.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 24, 2012
Six Facts About Mitt Romney’s Tax Returns
After weeks of refusals and equivocation, Mitt Romney finally released his tax returns last night to a handful of media outlets, showing that he made $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million last year. He only actually released one year of returns, 2010, and his estimated return for 2011, even though many have called on him to follow the precedent set by his father and release many more years of returns.
Nonetheless, there is much to learn from the astonishing 550 pages of returns Romney released:
1. Romney paid a lower tax rate than many middle-class Americans: Romney’s returns reveal that he paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent, lower even than the low rate of 15 percent he estimated he paid last week. While this is far less than what many middle-class Americans pay, it’s also well below what wealthy people pay. The average effective tax rate for someone in Romney’s income bracket is 25 percent.
2. Romney makes more in a day than the average American makes in a year, and becomes a 1 percenter every week: As Bloomberg News notes, “In 2008, according to the IRS, the median adjusted gross income was $33,048, which Romney made in less than a day. Reaching the top 1 percent of taxpayers required $380,354 in adjusted gross income, about Romney’s earnings in a week.”
3. Romney paid almost nothing in payroll taxes: Romney contributed just .1 percent of his income to Social Security and Medicare in 2010 via the payroll tax because the tax is only assessed on earned wages, but all of Romney’s income came from investments. Most working Americans pay 7.65 percent.
4. Romney has accounts in countries notorious for tax dodging: By now, it’s well known by now that Romney invests in funds based in the Cayman Islands, but Romney’s returns were “crammed with information about foreign holdings” and reveal that he held accounts in Switzerland and Luxembourg, countries famous for hiding money thanks their low taxes and strict banking secrecy laws. Aides said he closed his Swiss account in 2010 because it might have been “politically embarrassing.”
5. Romney and Gingrich’s tax plans would slash Romney’s taxes: Romney already pays less than many middle class Americans, but under his proposed tax plan, his rates would be slashed in half. Meanwhile, under challenger Newt Gingrich’s plan, Romney would pay almost nothing, since Gingrich has proposed cutting the capital gains tax rate to zero and Romney earns almost all of his money from investments.
6. Romney needs four lawyers, including the former IRS commissioner to defend his tax plan: Romney’s campaign held a conference call with reporters this morning to defend and explain his tax returns, and apparently felt the need to have former IRS Commissioner Fred Goldberg, along with three other top lawyers and his campaign communications director to explain the returns. At one point, the call had to be interrupted so officials could confer with mega accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Another small revelation from Romney’s returns is that while Romney said his speaking fees amounted to “not very much” in terms of income, he actually made $111,000 in speaking fees in 2011 and $529,000 in 2010, as Politico’s Ken Vogel points out.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Think Progress, January 24, 2012
“Self Deportation”: Attrition Through Enforcement Is A Real Thing, And It Isn’t Pretty
Mitt Romney unveiled a novel solution for illegal immigration during Tuesday night’s GOP debate, saying that he’d rely on “self-deportation” to reduce the number of unauthorized immigrants in the US.
Or at least it sounded novel. As my colleague Clara Jeffery notes, while “self-deportation” might sound like something you don’t want your parents to catch you doing, it’s actually an old euphemism for an immigration strategy of “attrition through enforcement.” What “self-deportation”—the favored approach to immigration of the GOP’s right-wing—actually means is making life so miserable for unauthorized immigrants that they “voluntarily” leave. Here’s Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies (the anti-immigrant think tank that tried to mainstream the “terror baby” conspiracy theory) explaining the concept in 2005:
Among the other measures that would facilitate enforcement: hiring more U.S. Attorneys and judges in border areas, to allow for more prosecutions; passage of the CLEAR Act, which would enhance cooperation between federal immigration authorities and state and local police; and seizing the assets, however modest, of apprehended illegal aliens.
These and other enforcement measures would enable the government to detain more illegal aliens; additional measures would be needed to promote self-deportation. Unlike at the visa office or the border crossing, once aliens are inside the United States, there’s no physical site to exercise control, no choke point at which to examine whether someone should be admitted. The solution is to create “virtual choke points”—events that are necessary for life in a modern society but are infrequent enough not to bog down everyone’s daily business. Another analogy for this concept to firewalls in computer systems, that people could pass through only if their legal status is verified. The objective is not mainly to identify illegal aliens for arrest (though that will always be a possibility) but rather to make it as difficult as possible for illegal aliens to live a normal life here.
This is the right-wing’s answer to the question of how you deport 11 million unauthorized immigrants: You don’t. You force them to “deport themselves.” Although immigration reform advocates would prefer a solution that involves a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants already here, Romney and his top immigration advisers believe they can remove millions of people through heavy-handed enforcement that makes life for unauthorized immigrants intolerable. This approach is notable for its complete lack of discretion and flexibility. Unauthorized immigrant parents with citizen children who need to go to school? Americans who are married to an undocumented immigrant who needs medical treatment? “Self-deportation” hits them all with the same mailed fist.
We can see how this concept has been applied in states like Arizona and Alabama, where local authorities have been empowered to act as enforcers of immigration law. Alabama takes the choke point theory even more seriously than Arizona—everything from enrolling in school to seeking health treatment has been turned into a so-called choke point. The moral, social, and economic consequences of the strategy are secondary to inflicting enough suffering on unauthorized immigrants in order to force them out of the country.
Kris Kobach, the Kansas Attorney General secretary of state who helped write both restrictive immigration laws and recently endorsed Romney, bragged about the impact of the Alabama law after it passed last year:
“There haven’t been mass arrests. There aren’t a bunch of court proceedings. People are simply removing themselves. It’s self-deportation at no cost to the taxpayer. I’d say that’s a win.”
Alabama’s immigration law has actually been such a disaster that the state is trying to figure out a way to repeal parts of the law. But make no mistake, when Romney is discussing “self-deportation,” he’s talking about creating a United States where parents are afraid to register their kids for school or get them immunized because they might be asked for proof of citizenship. He’s talking about the type of country where local police can demand your immigration status based on mere suspicion that you don’t belong around here. “Self-deportation” is just a cleaner, less cruel-sounding way of endorsing harsh, coercive government polices in order to make life for unauthorized immigrants so unbearable that they have no choice but to find some way to leave. The human cost of such an approach, let alone what it might do to American society, is viewed as a price worth paying.
By: Adam Serwer, Mother Jones, January 23, 2012
“The Larger Debate Is Just Beginning”: What We’ve Learned From Romney’s Returns
Mitt Romney’s campaign, as promised, released the former governor’s 2010 tax returns, as well as an estimate for his 2011 returns, and we’re starting to get a sense of why the Republican candidate wasn’t eager to share these details.
Mitt Romney offered a partial snapshot of his vast personal fortune late Monday, disclosing income of $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million last year — virtually all of it profits, dividends or interest from investments.
None came from wages, the primary source of income for most Americans. Instead, Romney and his wife, Ann, collected millions in capital gains from a profusion of investments, as well as stock dividends and interest payments.
By any fair estimate, over $42 million in income over two years isn’t bad for a guy who jokes about being “unemployed.” Indeed, Romney would be in the top 1% based solely on the income he makes in one week.
Romney said last week that his rate was “closer to 15%,” but as it turns out, despite his vast wealth, he actually only paid a 13.9% rate last year — lower than his political rivals who aren’t nearly as wealthy, and lower than most middle-class American workers.
And what about those overseas investments?
His 2010 return also showed that he had a financial account in Switzerland that was closed in 2010 and that he generated income from overseas investments. He also reported financial accounts in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.
A Reuters report added that Romney’s Swiss bank account was closed in 2010 “after an investment adviser decided it could be politically embarrassing to Romney.”
I suspect those with far more expertise in this area will subject these materials to considerable scrutiny, but at first blush, the disclosure appears to raise at least as many questions as it answers.
Why did Romney set up $100 million trust funds for his sons without paying any gift taxes? Were his accounts in the Caymans and in Switzerland created to avoid paying taxes? Was the closing of the Swiss account related to this IRS investigation? And given all of the questions surrounding Romney’s Bain-era work, why does the Republican candidate continue to insist he won’t disclose returns from previous years?
What’s more, following up on a point from last week, even if Romney argues that he’s simply playing by the rules — taking advantage of existing tax loopholes to pay lower rates than much of the middle class — this doesn’t explain why Romney is eager to exacerbate issues on tax fairness with his tax plan that makes the problem worse.
In a debate over tax fairness and income inequality, Romney is practically a case study for What’s Gone Wrong, but he can at least plausibly argue that this is a mess he benefits from, but didn’t create. Romney, however, prefers to believe the problem doesn’t exist.
Greg Sargent did a nice job capturing the larger political context:
I’m not sure the Obama campaign could have scripted this more perfectly. In a remarkable bit of good timing, President Obama is set to deliver a State of the Union speech focused on income inequality and tax unfairness on exactly the same day that Mitt Romney will reveal that he made over $40 million in the last two years — all of it taxed at a lower rate than that paid by middle class taxpayers. […]
Romney doesn’t just disagree with Obama on these fundamental issues; he personally symbolizes virtually the entire 2012 Democratic message. He is the walking embodiment of everything Dems allege is wrong with our system and the ways it’s rigged in favor of the wealthy and against the middle class. Yet this is the standard bearer the GOP seems set to pick.
Romney and his aides believe these materials should end the discussion. That’s backwards — the larger debate is just beginning.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, Janueary 24, 2012
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