“The Spine Holding The Book Together”: Bain Is Just Chapter One In The “Book Of Romney”
The real Mitt Romney is finally running for president — but not in his own first television spot, a superficial checklist of issues which provides no insight into who he is or what makes him tick. It’s the Obama commercial on Bain and the destruction of GST Steel that starkly reveals the real Romney as a vulture capitalist. And this is just the beginning of what we will hear about Bain, and of a narrative arc that will position Romney as the candidate of the few, by the few, and for the few.
The Obama ad is so powerful because, like the Ted Kennedy ads in Romney’s losing 1994 Senate race, the story is told not by a smoothly modulated professional narrator, but by working people whose jobs and lives were shredded so Mitt and his men could amass their millions. One of the workers voted for John McCain in 2008 and for George W. Bush before that. Now these authentic blue-collar voices, these Reagan Democrats, are talking directly to swing voters — to folks who could be brothers or sisters, friends or cousins — in the battleground industrial states. It’s a different kind of political media — gritty, unslick, and therefore quite convincing.
My then-partner Tad Devine and I conceived and produced the Kennedy spots in 1994. They hit the Massachusetts airwaves with devastating force. In that landmark Republican year, Romney had a slight lead in September, but he swiftly fell in the polls and then melted down in a televised debate that outdrew the statewide audience for most Super Bowls. On Election Day, the boy from Bain lost in a landslide — by 18 points.
It was fascinating to watch how Romney responded as his campaign unravelled. In fact, he mostly didn’t. He seemed paralyzed — a guilty guy caught in the act. In a token push-back, his spokesman alleged that we had “put words in people’s mouths.” The Boston Globe checked and slapped down the story. The workers were spontaneous and unscripted. No political consultant could ghostwrite the rebuke of a packer laid off after 29 years, who looked into the camera and addressed Romney directly: “If you think you’d make such a good senator, come out here to Marion, Indiana, and see what your company has done to these people.”
The workers boarded a bus for Massachusetts and demanded a meeting with Romney. For days, he refused — which kept the episode in the headlines. When he finally sat down with them, he coldly said he’d consider their comments.
He wasn’t ready then, but that was 18 years ago — and he had to know this was coming at him again in 2012. Newt Gingrich stumbled onto the issue in South Carolina, where Romney was routed. But it was never going to be as devastating in Republican primaries as in the contest with Barack Obama. And the presumptive GOP nominee once again appears unready or unwilling to answer beyond offering up ritualistic bromides about “free enterprise”.
This is the false banner under which he campaigns — the claim that he is a job-creating businessman. The total has oscillated from 10,000 jobs to 100,000, to maybe not exactly that. But the abstract number, unsubstantiated and as soulless as Mitt himself often seems, is no match for a steel worker named Jack Cobb, discarded in Romney’s profiteering deal, but sad and defiant now: “To get up on national TV and brag about making jobs… he has destroyed thousands of people’s careers, lifetimes, just destroying people.”
The ads shatter the candidate’s fundamental rationale — that with his business experience in creating jobs, he’s Mr. Fix-It for the economy. It’s a thin rationale, but voters might have believed it. Now disbelief will deepen as the Obama campaign rolls out a dishonor roll of Bain’s depredations. The campaign already has a website that state by state — just coincidentally the battleground states, of course — pinpoints other companies exploited and extinguished by Bain.
I suspect that Romney will eventually have to abandon his strategy of treating the election as a referendum and not a choice — and attempt to defend his business record in paid media. The 1994 outcome suggests that any other course is a road to defeat.
I doubt he will make an ad repeating his disingenuous and dangerous claim that Obama also cut jobs while saving the auto industry. It’s disingenuous because the president saved GM and Chrysler — and Romney frequently did precisely the opposite to other companies. It’s dangerous because if he hopes to compete at all in Michigan and Ohio, he shouldn’t mention the auto bailout outside a confessional. His approach would have doomed the industry.
More likely, Romney will trot out workers — say, from Staples — to highlight jobs he claims to have created. The problem here is that during his tenure, Bain had two businesses. One was venture capital investing in start-ups. The other, which Romney drove, consisted of buying out a firm, hollowing it out, loading it up with debt, cutting wages — and making millions before the firm went belly-up. The one endeavor doesn’t redeem the other: What’s at issue here is not an accounting question, some mere matter of addition and subtraction, but the crass calculation of pillaging jobs and oppressing workers as a conscious business plan while occasionally grabbing a government bailout along the way.
Moreover, the response irresistibly invites a challenge: Romney should release the records of all Bain transactions from which he profited. He probably can’t afford to because the picture could be pretty grim. Presumably, he’s about as likely to risk this kind of full disclosure as he is to release tax returns for years when he may have paid little or no taxes.
There’s a (literally) rich vein to mine in Romney’s record at Bain. But it’s just the beginning of the narrative arc because the Obama campaign will move from the vulture capitalism of his private endeavors to his failures as a public official and the unfairness of his far-right agenda.
Thus the financial manipulator who decimated jobs in the private sector was a governor whose policies left his state 47th in job creation.
The takeover artist who slashed health benefits for workers would end Medicare as we know it, subject seniors to the harsh mercies of insurance companies, and raise their costs by approximately $6,500 a year.
The mega-millionaire with his offshore bank accounts would slash taxes for the very wealthy, and everything from education to food safety for the middle class.
The rapacious Romney, who in business took a government bailout and then would have let the auto industry collapse, now rails against bailouts and calls for rolling back financial regulation for the Wall Street firms that benefited from them.
The list goes on. The narrative is compelling. We haven’t heard the end of Bain — and we won’t until the end of the campaign — despite the inexplicable comments of Newark’s “Democratic” Mayor Cory Booker, who must be spending too much time cozying up to Republican Gov. (and potential running mate) Chris Christie. On Meet the Press, Booker equated the race-baiting, anti-Obama ads about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that were recently proposed to billionaire clown Joe Ricketts with Obama’s Bain attack: “It’s nauseating.”
Well, Ricketts and his now-renounced smear job certainly was nauseating. But with Romney, what’s nauseating is what happened at his hands to ordinary hardworking Americans thrown out of work so he could rake in the bucks. And what’s worrying is Romney’s austerity agenda that would drive the U.S. into a double-dip recession, which is what such policies have already done to Great Britain.
Within hours, Booker retracted his comments and conceded the point: It is Romney who has made his business experience the centerpiece of his campaign. Bain is the spine that holds the whole Book of Romney together. As one of the workers in that Obama commercial put it, “If he’s going to run the country like the way he ran our business, I wouldn’t want him there. He would be so out of touch… How could [he] care?”
By: Robert Shrum, The Week, May 21, 2012
“Failing The Test Of Courage, Integrity And Loyalty”: Romney Messes Up And Tells The Truth About Austerity
Romney has periodic breakdowns when asked questions about the economy because he sometimes forgets the need to lie. He forgets that he is supposed to treat austerity as the epitome of economic wisdom. When he responds quickly to questions about austerity he slips into default mode and speaks the truth – adopting austerity during the recovery from a Great Recession would (as in Europe) throw the nation back into recession or depression. The latest example is his May 23, 2012 interview with Mark Halperin in Time magazine.
“Halperin: Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.”
Romney explains that austerity, during the recovery from a Great Recession, would cause catastrophic damage to our nation. The problem, of course, is that the Republican congressional leadership is committed to imposing austerity on the nation and Speaker Boehner has just threatened that Republicans will block the renewal of the debt ceiling in order to extort Democrats to agree to austerity – severe cuts to social programs. Romney knows this could “throw us into recession or depression” and says he would never follow such a policy.
Romney, however, has not opposed Boehner’s threat to use extortion to force austerity on the nation. Romney has the nomination sown up, but I predict that he will stand by and let Boehner try to throw us into a Great Depression rather than upset the Tea Party-wing of the Republican Party. Indeed, Romney will attack Democrats who have the political courage to defend our nation against his Party’s demands for austerity that would throw the nation into recession or depression. What does one call a politician who, solely to advance his personal political ambition, supports his Party’s efforts to coerce austerity even though he knows that the austerity would cause a national economic catastrophe and states that he, “of course,” would never adopt such self-destructive austerity if he were president? Romney is failing the tests of courage, integrity, and loyalty to our nation and people.
Later in the interview, Romney claims that federal budgetary deficits are “immoral.” But he has just explained that using austerity for the purported purpose of ending a deficit would cause a recession or depression. A recession or depression would make the deficit far larger. That means that Romney should be denouncing austerity as “immoral” (as well as suicidal) because it will not simply increase the deficit (which he claims to find “immoral” because of its impact on children) but also dramatically increase unemployment, poverty, child poverty and hunger, and harm their education by causing more teachers to lose their jobs and more school programs to be cut. Fewer children will be able to get college degrees. Austerity is the great enemy of children – it is the epitome of a self-destructive, immoral economic policy.
Listen for the sounds of silence from Romney in coming months. I predict that he will not act to protect our children or our economy from the suicidal and “immoral” austerity his Republican allies are trying to coerce the Democrats to inflict on our economy and our children.
By: William K. Black, New Economic Perspectives, May 25, 2012
“Confronting Health Care Reform”: What Romney Won’t Do On Health Care
He has awful plans that he’ll probably never implement.
Despite what the average voter probably thinks, presidential candidates keep the overwhelming majority of the promises they make. And most of the ones they don’t keep aren’t because they were just lying, but because circumstances changed or they tried to keep the promise and failed. But that’s in the big, broad strokes, while the details are another matter. It’s easy to put out a plan for, say, tax reform, but even if you achieve tax reform, it’s Congress that has to pass it, and they will inevitably shape it to their own ends. This happened to a degree with President Obama’s health care reform: it largely resembles what he proposed during the 2008 campaign, but not entirely. He had said he wanted a public option, for instance, but eventually jettisoned that, and had rejected an individual mandate, but eventually embraced it as unavoidable.
Which brings us to Mitt Romney’s health care plan. In its details, it’s quite horrifying. Jonathan Cohn has done us the service of giving it a close read, and explains: “He wants to scale back health insurance, so that it reaches less people and provides less protection from medical bills. In theory, this transformation will unleash market forces that restrain the cost of medical care. In practice, it will cause serious hardship, by exposing tens of millions of Americans to crushing medical bills or forcing some of them to go without necessary, even life-saving care.” Estimates are that under Romney’s plan—which repeals the Affordable Care Act, makes Medicaid a block grant (leading almost inevitably to fewer people getting covered), eliminates the tax advantage for employer-sponsored coverage (leading to more employers dropping coverage) and turns Medicare into a voucher, as many as 58 million fewer Americans could have health insurance than will once the ACA fully takes effect. Wow.
So the question is, is Mitt Romney really going to do this? I’m guessing the answer is no, and here’s why. If he becomes president, he’ll confront health care under one of two scenarios. The first is one in which the Supreme Court has upheld the ACA. In that case, conservatives are still mad, and will want to repeal it. But as long as there are more than 40 Democrats in the Senate to mount a filibuster, they won’t let repeal happen. So faced with the inability to achieve great big things on health care, Romney will probably settle for some smaller bills, probably including malpractice reform. One year into his presidency, the ACA will take full effect, and at that point, implementing his plan would mean not just preventing people who don’t have insurance from getting it, but actually tossing people who have insurance off their plans. Which just isn’t going to happen.
The second scenario is that the Supreme Court overturns the ACA, in which case they will have largely done Romney’s job for him. The elements of his plan that don’t relate to the ACA—block granting Medicaid, ending the tax exemption for employer benefits—will still run into unified opposition from Democrats, and as far as congressional Republicans will be concerned, the battle over health care will be over, and they’ll move on to other things.
In any discussion of health care, it’s important to remember that Republicans don’t really care about the issue, except insofar as it’s a bludgeon they can use to beat Democrats with. They just don’t. They care about taxes, and regulation, and defense, and many other things, but they’re happy not to worry about health care unless they have to. So chances are that whatever the Supreme Court decides, big, dramatic changes to the health care system during a Romney presidency are going to be talked about briefly, then put on the back burner permanently.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 24, 2012
“Blood Money Brothers”: Why Mitt Romney Is Embracing Birther Donald Trump
So Mitt Romney’s newest fundraising effort involves not only appearing with the world’s most famous birther, Donald Trump, but also dining with him and a lucky, raffle-winning supporter. OK, I give up: What exactly is Romney thinking?
My own snarky first reaction is that Donald Trump is the kind of rich guy that Mitt Romney imagines the common people can relate to. Romney, remember, has a habit of saying things like he doesn’t follow NASCAR “as closely as some of the most ardent fans, but I have some friends who are NASCAR team owners.” Maybe he thinks Trump—known far and wide for a decorating style that gives new meaning to the word vulgar—has the common touch in a way that stolid Romney doesn’t? That can’t be it, right?
Thinking I must be missing something here, I checked with a couple of top GOP operatives. “I got nothin’,” one says. Another offers the Godfather theory for dealing with Trump: “Yes, it reinforces the ‘I have wealthy friends’ stereotype,” the Republican strategist says. “And whenever Trump says something stupid it’s magnified 10-fold, so there are serious downsides to it. But in the end you would rather embrace it—like the Godfather line about keeping your enemies close.” It’s better to have Trump running amok inside the tent than causing trouble outside of it, in other words. Trump, remember, has floated the idea of a third-party candidacy, which could only serve to divide the anti-Obama vote (a December Public Policy Polling survey had Trump pulling 19 percent in a three-way race with Obama and Romney, with 7 in 10 of his supporters coming from Romney’s column). “We’d rather have Donald Trump saying ‘you’re hired’ than ‘you’re fired,” the strategist says.
Maybe so. But Trump has become inextricably linked to the birther movement, and he won’t shut up about it. Just this week, he spoke to the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove and after getting the preliminaries out of the way (saying he’s “honored” that Team Romney wants him and his Las Vegas hotel to help fundraise), then Trump “launched into a furious disquisition concerning Obama’s place of birth.” To be clear: Trump wasn’t unwillingly goaded into spouting his Obama-was-born-in-Kenya theories. He practically lead with them.
From the Beast:
“Look, it’s very simple,” said Trump, who has spent the past 13 months questioning Obama’s constitutional eligibility to occupy the White House (and only doubled down with his stubborn skepticism after Obama produced a long-form birth certificate, certifying he was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Hawaii[)], … “A book publisher came out three days ago and said that in his written synopsis of his book,” Trump went on, “he said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. His mother never spent a day in the hospital.”
Actually, Obama’s literary agency at the time, two decades ago, published a recently discovered catalogue of clients and their projects that included erroneous information about Obama and a prospective book about race that he ended up not writing. An agency assistant back then, Miriam Goderich, said last week that she was mistaken when she wrote that Obama was born in Kenya.
But Trump isn’t buying it.
At what point does Romney throw up his hands and run screaming from this guy? Trump isn’t simply off-message, talking about something other than the economy, he’s dangerously off-message, reminding anyone who will listen that a nontrivial portion of the GOP has been taken over by conspiracy theorist weirdos.
Maybe Romney thinks Trump can help shore up his support with the conservative base? That seems dubious. The most recent poll numbers for Trump I could find were a year old, but after briefly leading the GOP field last year, the Apprentice host had cratered in opinion surveys. As of May 2011, 34 percent of GOPers viewed Trump favorably while 53 percent viewed him unfavorably. This was mere weeks after he was leading the field.
Nevertheless, the Romney campaign has invited supporters to contribute $3 for the chance to win dinner with the Mittster and the Donald. This is a copy of the Obama campaign’s $3 low dollar fundraising efforts where dinner with the president has been raffled off (such a small amount not only adds up, but also gives people buy-in, making them more likely to support the campaign financially and in other ways down the line).
While the GOP offers dinner with Trump and Romney, the Democrats are asking for $3 for a chance to dine with Obama and Bill Clinton. Honestly, while dinner with the current and former president would no doubt be more interesting and intellectually stimulating, there is a certain freak show appeal to watching Romney and Trump interact. And freak show does sell.
Maybe Trump really is Romney’s idea of a rich guy with the common touch.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, May 25, 2012