“Saint Joan Of The Tundra”: Mitt’s Troubles Never End
It’s looking like Mitt Romney might name his VP pick pretty soon, which is probably a good idea given that the release of the pick will result in a few days of positive coverage when the news media is consumed with something other than what Bain Capital did when, or what juicy nuggets might be contained within Romney’s hidden tax returns. But there’s a downside: once we do get to the Republican convention, the VP nominee will be old news, so the media can pay much more attention to intra-party squabbling. And nobody likes a good squabble more than Sarah Palin. Remember her?
The Romney camp will not comment on Palin, or on plans for the convention, but one adviser associated with the campaign suggested that Palin would be prohibited from speaking at the Republican convention by her contract with Fox News. “It’s true I’m prohibited from doing some things,” Palin says, “but this is the first I’ve heard anyone suggest that as an excuse, er, reason to stay away from engaging in the presidential race. I’m quite confident Fox’s top brass would never strip anyone of their First Amendment rights in this regard.” (Fox says her contract would not prohibit speaking at the convention if she sought permission.)
Palin is keeping the dates open in late August, just in case. In any event, she says, she plans to be politically active between now and November, starting with a Michigan Tea Party appearance, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity. “No matter the Romney campaign strategy,” she says, “I intend to do all I can to join others in motivating the grassroots made up of independents and constitutional conservatives who can replace Barack Obama at the ballot box.”
So here’s the dilemma. If Romney doesn’t let Palin speak at the convention, we get all kinds of stories about pissed off Tea Partiers denouncing Romney for forsaking their Saint Joan of the Tundra, Fox sends her there anyway so she’s just hanging around, and she steals a not insignificant portion of Romney’s thunder. But if he does let her speak, the American public gets reminded that the Republican party is dominated by a bunch of paranoid extremist know-nothings, and Romney looks weak for giving in to them.
Right now, Romney and his advisors are trying to figure out if they can send her on an urgent four-month diplomatic mission to the Arctic Circle. The trouble with Sarah Palin is that nobody tells her what to do. I can’t wait for her to run for president in four years.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 17, 2012
“No Discernable Vision”: Knowing How The Economy Works Is Not Enough
This week will see the release of The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs, a collection of essays from the George W. Bush Institute with a forward by the former president himself. It’s true that annual GDP growth never actually reached 4 percent during Bush’s two terms in office and averaged only 2.4 percent even if we generously exclude the disastrous year of 2008. But look at it this way: Who knows more about what the president ought to do about the economy than Dubya does? After all, there’s only one living American (Bill Clinton) with as much experience being president, so Bush must have the answers we need.
A ridiculous argument? Of course. That’s because experience only gets you so far. It’s obviously a good thing, all else being equal, for the president to know a lot about the economy, just as it’s a good thing for him to know a lot about foreign affairs or domestic policy. But the truth is that although the government has to solve many practical problems, and it’s important to have smart, knowledgeable people in government to work on them, the presidency is not a technocratic position.
For a long time, Republicans grasped this much better than their opponents. It was the Democrats who seemed to prize experience and knowledge, looking admiringly at candidates who understood how government works and could be counted on to manage the problem-solving efforts that would be required, while Republicans favored candidates like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who argued that vision was more important than skills. Yet this year, Republicans have nominated a candidate with no discernible vision whose candidacy is based almost entirely on the knowledge and management experience he supposedly gained in business.
It’s odd that for someone whose argument is so much about his preparation and experience, Mitt Romney barely ever mentions the one job he held that actually resembles being president—the governorship of Massachusetts. But we’ve had former governors who made excellent presidents and former governors who made terrible ones. And the brevity of Barack Obama’s tenure in the Senate didn’t stop him from amassing what was arguably the most impressive string of legislative victories in half a century during his first two years in office.
Mitt Romney barely bothers to persuade the voters that he will be able to get things done in Congress or that he understands foreign policy. Instead, the phrase he repeats over and over on the campaign trail is “I know how the economy works.” The current arguments over Bain Capital notwithstanding, this has been the basic rationale for Romney’s candidacy, that during his time in business he gained a body of knowledge and a unique insight that will allow him, as president, to make dramatic improvements in the economy. During the primaries he argued that this experience would make him a better president than his Republican opponents, and today he argues that it would make him a better president than Barack Obama.
But if there were a magic key to unlock spectacular growth and widely shared prosperity, you’d think we would have found it by now. There hasn’t been a president in decades, the current one included, who didn’t have lots of businesspeople working in his administration. And Barack Obama talks to corporate leaders all the time. If Romney knows something they don’t, he hasn’t told us what it is. If you read through his economic plan, you’ll find that it contains the same things Republicans always advocate: lower taxes, reduced regulations, free trade, and so on. You’ve certainly heard Romney say that his business experience helps him understand the economy. But have you ever heard him say what exactly he learned that no one else knows?
Perhaps he plans to unveil this remarkable insight once the election is over; if so, one can hope that as a patriotic American he’ll share it with the country even if he loses. Because even if it involved some policies that conservatives like, you can bet that President Obama would be happy to take the bargain if it would deliver something like the sustained 4 percent growth George W. Bush promises. If you really could create a humming economy just by cutting taxes for the wealthy and creating some “Reagan Economic Zones” (yes, that’s something Romney proposes, though he doesn’t say much about what it means), Obama would do it. The reason he doesn’t isn’t that he’s a socialist; it’s that the argument isn’t all that persuasive.
So no, Mitt Romney is not in possession of a secret that can deliver us to economic nirvana. We can try to determine whether anything less than admirable happened at Bain Capital during Romney’s time there, and if so how much responsibility he bears. But even if all those questions are answered in Romney’s favor, it wouldn’t change the fact that the policies he advocates are derived not from his experience but from his politics and his moral perspective, just as Barack Obama’s are.
I’m not sure if Romney actually believes that keeping taxes for the wealthy as low as possible and scaling back regulations really does bring prosperity for all. But if he does, it isn’t because he concluded that after a careful examination of the evidence (if that were the case, the last decade would have been the most prosperous in American history). He favors those policies because that’s what his party believes and because they reflect his values. Romney may “know how the economy works” in certain ways. But that knowledge isn’t enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 17, 2012
“The Patriarchy”: Why We Should Worry About The Soulless, Entitled Mitt Romney
Time to give Mitt Romney the dressage-down he so “richly” deserves. And it’s not just about money. Let me count the whys we should send this smug, vapid, preppie packing: power, sex, and religion. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about the dog issue, Gail Collins.
But if President Obama won’t give ’em hell, then allow me.
The best that can be said about the soulless Mr. Romney is that he was better than the field of fools and rogues running in the Republican primary. At first, I was willing to take him at his word as a sensible clean Republican who meant well and dressed the part.
I thought the 2002 Winter Olympics (which he ran) came off fine except for the part when President George W. Bush opened the games, saying to all the athletes assembled: “Welcome to the greatest country in the world!” How gauche and contrary to the spirit of the moment.
But as we got to know Mitt more and more, I liked him less and less. The cruel private school “prank” that he led on a fellow teen struggling with his sexuality, attacking him and cutting off his long hair, showed a darker side. He was leader of a pack. The presidency is absolutely about character and personality, as much as it is about policy. A handsome apology becomes a man, but his ungenerous words fell flat.
A brief confession. As a liberal, I secretly liked Ronald Reagan as an individual, for he had a certain charm and knew how to tell a story. Though I deplored some of his policies (not all), I detected a heartbeat under the presidential aura he displayed like a performance artist. Romney looks the part of an American president, but he doesn’t really act it. His genial side seems forced. Like the younger Bush, he may just want to be president to one-up his father George—who ran and lost. History’s closet rattles with father-son rivalries that turn out tragically. Not on our time, please.
Searching through news pages, debates, live speeches, and interviews in 2012, Romney has not said a thing—and I mean not one—that shows a whit of wit, compassion, charm, or insight. Since challenging (and losing to) the late great Sen. Ted Kennedy, he’s shifted his ground to antichoice with no good reason why. And how craven is it to deny your own healthcare mandate as governor because your opponent managed to make the model pass Congress to become law?
Have you no shame, sir?
Arguably, Romney has not given the electorate or the press reasons “why” for anything. His stance, when it comes to disclosing his robber baron compensation at Bain and tax returns over the years, is that we don’t need to know. Nor do we have the right to question his actions.
In that sense, Romney is behaving precisely like the patriarch he is. In two other roles, he simply hands down his word as a chieftain in the Mormon Church and as a leader in corporate America. What he says goes. Impervious, he does not brook dissent or even comment. His life has been like that, always in the power position, always in authority—or being prepared at Harvard business and law schools on how to brandish and maximize his power and wealth. Let’s give him this. Nobody in his generation did it better.
In San Francisco among subversive women, we had a phrase for a man like Romney: “the patriarchy.” The whole system wrapped up in one man. Romney, the father of five sons, could hardly be more perfect for this dubious title.
Because of the blatantly male lay leadership structure that dominates the Mormon Church, Romney can be counted on by society’s elders to keep the faith with the power distribution as is, between men and women. He is utterly capable of having a cabinet that looks like him, without missing a beat or calling up any new friends at the NAACP.
Such a sincere, lifelong Mormon in the White House would keep women the weaker sex, frozen or pushed back from workplace gains we’ve managed to make, thanks mostly to President Clinton. The Family and Medical Leave Act was a great thing for the women of Obama’s generation. We should be worried about the retro Romney.
Romney’s not just a man’s man. He’s a privileged white man’s man with an outrageous fortune. Power, secrets, compliant women, and nothing but the best of everything else are all the entitlement.
No, he’s not going to change for you and me—or the American people.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, July 17, 2012
“Unexpanded Medicaid”: Millions Of Women Could Remain Uninsured If States “Opt Out”
It can seem like just a mirage created by the summer heat: only a few weeks ago the Supreme Court actually handed down a decision that progressives could celebrate. It held that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional, including the individual mandate, meaning that implementation can roll on full steam ahead. I was one of the first to celebrate, in particular for all the ways that the law will help women who need healthcare (which is all of us). As Katha Pollitt recently wrote here, women will benefit dramatically from the ACA. The law bars practices like charging women more just for being women, dropping women’s coverage if they become pregnant or sick, and denying coverage due to “pre-existing conditions” like having had breast cancer or being a victim of domestic violence. It adds new benefits like birth control coverage at no cost to the patient, expanded coverage of preventative services like prenatal care, mammograms, pap smears, and bone-density screenings through Medicare, and requiring insurance companies to cover maternity care.
But one aspect of the Supreme Court’s decision could have some very bad results for women: the ruling that states can opt out of the Medicaid expansion. While this could end up harming men and women, women in particular stand to suffer if states refuse to participate in the program.
The Medicaid expansion is a crucial component of the law’s overall goal of extending coverage to over 30 million uninsured Americans by 2019, covering almost half of the total number of people the bill promised to insure. Originally, the law included a provision that the federal government could take away all of a state’s Medicaid funding if it refused to go along with the expansion, which all but ensured participation. But the Court ruled that such a maneuver was unconstitutional. Just a few days after the decision was announced, seven Republican governors said they would flat out reject the money to expand Medicaid rolls, with at least eight more looking to follow suit. More have said no since then.
This could create a no-man’s land for those who earn less than 100 percent of the Federal Poverty Line, making them ineligible for tax subsidies to help them buy insurance, but don’t qualify for their state’s (unexpanded) Medicaid program. These Americans are surely struggling to get by, but not quite enough to get health coverage promised to those above and below them.
And women are likely to fall into this chasm. Remember that unexpanded Medicaid does not cover most childless adults. Currently, a woman must meet both categorical and income criteria to qualify for Medicaid: she must be pregnant, a mother of a child under age 18, a senior citizen, or have a disability, and each category has income criteria, which differ state by state. Given that women are more likely to be pregnant (duh) but also to fall into the other categories, they are already the majority of enrollees in the program. However, given that many women don’t meet categorical criteria, many don’t qualify no matter how poor they are. Over 17 million women lived in poverty last year, compared to 12.6 million men.
By 2016, 13.5 million women were expected to get coverage under the Medicaid expansion. That figure is now in danger. As the Kaiser Family Foundation reported before the Supreme Court decision, “Medicaid will be the foundation of health coverage expansions to very low-income women.” But not if some Republican governors get their way.
Many of the states already rejecting the expansion are home to the greatest number of women who would benefit. Texas and Florida top the list for the most uninsured women in their states: about 2.4 million and 1.5 million, respectively, and both states plan to refuse the expansion. (Some of these women were supposed to get coverage through the Medicaid expansion, but some will still qualify for the subsidies and be able to buy insurance in the state exchanges.)
Using Kaiser’s predictions, I calculate that there are over 4.2 million women who would be eligible for the Medicaid expansion by 2014 in the states either refusing or indicating they will refuse to participate. That’s a huge chunk of the 10 million women that were expected to be covered by that time through Medicaid.
Those are the immediate impacts on low-income, uninsured women. The ruling may have other far-reaching impacts on women’s lives, however. As Jessica Mason Pieklo writes at RH Reality Check, the idea that the federal government can’t withdraw all Medicaid funds from states that don’t follow federal requirements might have other consequences. The first may be states that are trying to prevent Medicaid from contracting with providers that also offer abortions (i.e., in many cases, Planned Parenthood). Such a case is going on in Indiana right now. As Pieklo writes,
Thanks to the majority in NFIB v. Sebelius, conservative states looking to enact state-wide funding bans may have the framing necessary to pin the federal government. That’s because the language of Roberts’ opinion as to the Medicaid expansion is vague enough to argue that the federal government can’t coerce a state into funding Planned Parenthood by threatening to withhold all of that state’s federal Medicaid money, especially, since conservative states argue, they believe cutting Medicaid funds is the only way to guarantee state dollars do not fund abortion services.
Planned Parenthood and its affiliate centers provide services to 3 million people annually, including 4 million tests for sexually transmitted infections, 770,000 Pap tests, and 750,000 breast exams. Banning Medicaid from contracting with Planned Parenthood will hurt the low-income women who need these services—but states may now have a legal leg to stand on if they try to do just that.
Perhaps the worst thing of all? The excuse that Republican governors are using to get out of the Medicaid expansion may not even hold up. They claim to be worried that even though the federal government will pick up the whole tab for the first few years, the portion they’ll have to pay after that (10 percent) is too burdensome on their budgets. Yet there is evidence that expanding Medicaid could actually help their finances. Rejecting the Medicaid expansion may not even make fiscal sense, but no matter what it doesn’t make moral sense. It could leave millions of women exposed, unable to afford health insurance but not able to participate in Medicaid.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, July 17, 2012
“Restoring Economic Mobility”: A Challenge To Conservatives
It’s good that conservatives are finally taking seriously the problems of inequality and declining upward mobility. It’s unfortunate that they often evade the ways in which structural changes in the economy, combined with conservative policies, have made matters worse.
Occupy Wall Street, whatever its future, will always merit praise for placing inequality at the center of our politics. The biggest sign of the Occupiers’ success: Conservatives once stubbornly insisted that inequality wasn’t a problem because the United States was the land of opportunity and upward mobility. Now they are facing the fact that we are by no means the most socially mobile country in the world.
Reports from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and others show that social mobility is greater elsewhere, notably in Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden and Germany.
What do these countries have in common? Not to put too fine a point on it, all have national policies that are, in right-wing parlance, more “socialist” or (to be precise) social democratic than ours. They guarantee their citizens health insurance. They have stronger union movements and more generous welfare states. They tend to keep higher education more affordable. In most cases, especially Germany’s, they have robust apprenticeship and job training programs. They levy higher taxes.
The lesson from this list is not that cutting back government, gutting unions and reducing taxes on the rich will re-create an America of opportunity. On the contrary, we need more active and thoughtful government policies to become again the nation we claim to be.
We also need to be more candid about the large forces that are buffeting the American middle class. Writing in The Nation about Timothy Noah’s excellent new book, “The Great Divergence,” William Julius Wilson, the distinguished Harvard sociologist, nicely summarized the factors Noah sees as explaining rising disparities of wealth and income.
They included “the increasing importance of a college degree due to the shortage of better-educated workers; trade between the United States and low-wage nations; changes in government policy in labor and finance; and the decline of the labor movement. He also considers the extreme changes in the wage structure of corporations and the financial industry, in which American CEOs typically receive three times the salaries earned by their European counterparts.”
Most conservatives accept the importance of education but then choose to ignore all the other forces Noah describes.
Recently, my friends David Brooks and Michael Gerson used their columns to address the decline in mobility. It’s to the credit of these two conservatives that they did so, yet both found ways of downplaying the challenge inequality poses to conservatism itself.
Brooks cited a fine study by Robert Putnam, also a Harvard scholar, noting that the different parenting styles of the upper middle class and the working class are aggravating inequalities. Brooks’s conclusion: “Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before child-rearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.”
Yes, parenting (including the time crunch that two- or three-income working-class families face) is part of the issue, which is why I also admire Putnam’s study. But the balance in Brooks’s call to arms is entirely false. It’s not 1969 anymore. Progressives — including Wilson, Barack Obama and, if I may say so, yours truly — have been talking about the importance of family breakdown for decades. Brooks rightly acknowledges the need for measures to help those skidding down the class structure. The barrier here is not liberal attitudes toward the family but conservative attitudes toward government.
Gerson also said sensible things about promoting a “broad diffusion of skills and social capital” but then closed by accusing liberals of wanting to “soak the rich” and insisting that “economic redistribution is not the answer.”
Actually, liberals are not for “soaking the rich,” unless you consider the Clinton-era tax rates some kind of socialist bath. And as the experience of the more social democratic countries shows, a modest amount of “economic redistribution” — to offset the radical redistribution toward the very rich of recent decades — can begin the process of restoring the kind of mobility we once bragged about.
My challenge to conservatives worried about inequality is to follow the logic of their concern to what may be some uncomfortable conclusions, especially in an election year.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 15, 2012
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