“Mitt Romney Is Still Mitt Romney”: Mitt Romney’s Problem Isn’t Obama—It’s Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney has a problem. And it isn’t his campaign strategy or strategists. It isn’t President Obama’s campaign strategy or strategists. Mitt Romney’s problem is Mitt Romney.
The current rash of polls clearly show that with more exposure, more time on the campaign trail, more time traveling abroad to “highlight” his foreign policy credentials, and the more he hides his tax returns, the worse Romney does with voters.
While President Barack Obama’s blackboard is pretty much completely written on, Romney’s blackboard is getting filled with information about the former Massachusetts governor that is hurting him, especially among independents. Sure, some of it is due to Obama ads and the national dialogue, but most of it is due to Romney himself.
This is all about who Mitt Romney really is; this is about his background, his judgment.
Both the new CNN and Fox polls show the public is beginning to get Romney’s number. Over the summer, his favorable rating dropped six points to 48 percent; his negative has risen five points. It is worse with independents, with favorable ratings dropping eight points. These numbers are according to Fox, which has Obama leading Romney by 49-40 percent.
CNN has Obama leading by 52-45 percent, with similar drops in Romney’s favorable and increases in his unfavorable ratings. With the crucial swing voters who identify themselves as independents, Romney has seen his unfavorable go from 40 percent to 52 percent.
The key question asked by CNN was whether or not Romney favors the rich over the middle class. Basically, two thirds of all Americans see Romney as a creature of the super wealthy who fights for the super wealthy. Now, 64 percent of all Americans believe Romney favors the rich over the middle class and 68 percent of independents have that belief. Even 67 percent of independents say he should release more tax returns.
Bottom line: Voters are not comfortable with who Mitt Romney is. They weren’t comfortable during the primaries and they aren’t comfortable now. The more they learn about Mitt Romney, the less they like him.
Do they believe he changes his positions on key issues on a dime to get elected? Sure. Do they believe he has a tin ear and can’t seem to get it right, as with his foreign travels or liking to “fire people?” Sure. Do they feel nervous about his time at Bain Capital, his foreign bank accounts, and shell corporations? Absolutely.
Fundamentally, this is personal. They know that Romney has worked the system to his advantage, paid little or no taxes, hidden his operations behind a phalanx of accountants and lawyers. He might even get away with being a “master of the universe” if he supported policies that helped the middle class. He might be able to convince voters that he cared about them if he denounced loopholes like Swiss bank accounts, Bermuda dummy corporations, even something as fundamental to his wealth as the carried interest deduction. “Yes, I took advantage of things that were legal, but I am going to close these loopholes when I am president.”
But Mitt Romney stays with his fundamental belief system—stays with policies that give even more tax breaks to the super wealthy and leave the middle class paying the bill. This may be his Bain background, it may be what he really believes, but it is not what the American people believe or need right now when they are hurting. This is back to the future economics and it shows a lack of sensitivity to middle class families.
After all the ads, after all the polls, after all the back and forth, Mitt Romney is still Mitt Romney. And that dog won’t hunt.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, August 10, 2012
“Romney Throws A Hail Mary Pass”: Mitt’s Final Capitulation To The Right Wing
In a move somewhat reminiscent of Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, Governor Mitt Romney has put up his own Hail Mary pass in the effort to turn around a presidential campaign in decline and in need of a new storyline.
Romney has found that fresh storyline by confounding the experts and choosing Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan to be the Republican nominee for Vice President —a choice that is causing both liberal and conservative pundits, along with partisans on both sides of the political divide, to awaken to a very happy Saturday morning.
Reports had been circulating for days that conservative groups were pushing hard for the Wisconsin Congressman to be added to the ticket, despite concerns that Ryan’s views on such key issues as Medicare could cause the GOP to hemorrhage voters in some important, swing states.
Certainly, states like Florida and Pennsylvania, with their large population of senior citizens, will now become more difficult for the GOP nominees.
For committed conservatives, Ryan represents the best expression of their beliefs, values and the direction in which they would like to see the country go.
The choice also reveals Governor Romney’s final capitulation to the right-wing of his party and erases any hope that the GOP presidential candidate will attempt to move towards the center in the final days of the campaign. It’s an ‘all-in’ bet on the part of the Romney campaign—an effort to re-define their top-of-the-ticket candidate by hitching to the star of a number two with credentials far better defined than the boss.
History shows that such an approach is a risky gambit, rarely resulting in capturing the ultimate prize.
While conservatives will widely applaud the selection, Democrats have also expressed glee over the possible nomination of Paul Ryan, believing that he would put a right-wing, extremist face on the GOP ticket—thereby handing the Obama campaign an opportunity to paint the GOP as dangerous to the American middle-class and the poor.
While Ryan’s selection is reminiscent of McCain’s decision to do something dramatic as he saw his own prospects dimming, Paul Ryan is, to be sure, no Sarah Palin. There is little chance that Katie Couric is going to trip up the knowledgeable and intellectual Ryan with questions about the Congressman’s reading habits as you will likely find no better informed candidate than Mr. Ryan when it comes to matters of domestic policy.
The controversy that will likely arise from Ryan’s literary choices will come not from whether he is sufficiently well read but rather the choices he makes in reading material.
Paul Ryan is a known—and until recently—an avowed devotee of author Ayn Rand, the Russian-American moral philosopher and confirmed atheist who viewed government compassion and assistance for the poor as evil and destructive. Indeed, Ms. Rand is considered by the Cato Institute as one of the founders of American Libertarianism.
Ryan’s devotion to Rand’s perspective on government has been expressed in the Congressman’s own political philosophy—a philosophy that has made him a hero with American conservatives and libertarians. His commitment to Rand’s ‘greed is good’ outlook on life played a starring role in Ryan’s “Road Map For America”—a budget that converts Medicare into a voucher system that would result in senior citizens taking on a much larger portion of their health care costs and takes a hatchet to the social safety-net system upon which our poorest citizens rely so that taxes for the wealthy can be cut on the way to Ryan’s promise of getting our financial affairs in order in the year 2035 (a generation away).
Speaking at an event honoring the author in 2005, Ryan said, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” Ryan would also use that occasion to call Social Security a “collectivist system” that fails to allow the laborer in America to become a capitalist.
Adding spice to what is sure to be a liberal onslaught on the issue of Ryan’s philosophical underpinnings is the fact that, earlier this year, Ryan was forced to flip-flop on his commitment to the Rand view of what America should look like when the Catholic Church took issue with the impact Ryan’s budgetary plans would have on the poor.
This past April, despite Ryan’s long held practice of giving away Ayn Rand’s books as Christmas presents and strongly suggested that incoming staffers in his employ read “Atlas Shrugged” and despite his remarks in 2005, Ryan announced:
I reject her philosophy. It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas, who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.
Governor Romney’s decision to put Ryan on the ticket reveals his campaign’s deep concern that the election may be slipping away. Polls this week show Romney losing ground to President Obama, placing his campaign in a position where they had to do something and do it quickly.
Not unlike the dynamic that ensued following the choice of Sarah Palin, the anointing of Paul Ryan likely means that that Governor Romney will be forced to take a step back in prominence as Congressman Ryan—a rock star in his party—steps up to take on the substantive issues that will now become the focus of the battle.
And we all know how that worked out.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, The Policy Page, Forbes, August 11, 2012
“Romney Proves Me Wrong”: Instead Of A Boring White Guy, He Chose A Far-Right White Guy
So here’s what I wrote last Monday: “It is still probably going to be Rob Portman.” Here’s what I wrote about Ryan:
Hey, Paul Ryan! People love that Paul Ryan! The only downside, with Paul Ryan, is everything he believes. The Obama administration cackles with glee imagining the opportunity to explain the contents of the Ryan budget to moderate voters. Ayn Rand starts showing up in Democratic attack ads if Paul Ryan is the running mate.
And then I concluded with, “please enjoy watching every pundit who confidently made a bullshit prediction pretend it never happened.”
I was wrong! (Though I think I’m right about the cackling, still.) I thought Romney was too smart and too risk-averse to go with an even slightly polarizing figure, but Romney made the “surprise” pick. Though, let’s be honest, Ryan is still a boring white guy, he’s just a boring white guy with excitingly far-right economic and budget policy preferences.
What I also couldn’t have predicted is that Romney would make his decision a Friday night news dump, leaking it too late for the evening news and announcing it on a Saturday morning when no one is paying attention to politics. He probably did this because he hates the press and he wanted to ruin everyone’s weekend. He seems to have given advance notice, though, to a few commentators, including his biggest media booster, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin. Rubin, as we all remember, is unable to, say, correct malicious mistakes in her posts while she is observing the Sabbath, but she was able, thank god, to write and schedule a post on the Ryan pick that went up at nearly 2 a.m.. She thinks the Ryan pick is a brilliant, canny decision, obviously. And it totally is, as long as no one successfully explains to voters what Ryan actually believes.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, August 11, 2012
“Let The Policy Back-Tracking Begin”: Paul Ryan Says Romneycare Is an Unsustainable “Fatal Conceit”
As I noted earlier, Mitt Romney’s new vice presidential pick is “not a fan,” to use Paul Ryan’s words, of the former Massachusetts governor’s signature legislative accomplishment.
Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski dug up last week a 2010 Ryan appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal where he blasted the Massachusetts healthcare overhaul, which Romney oversaw as governor, as “a fatal conceit.”
Asked if he thought Romneycare (upon which Obamacare was based) works, Ryan responded:
Not well, no. Actually, I’m not a fan of the system. … I’ve got some relatives up there in Massachusetts. My uncle’s a cardiologist in Boston and I’ve talked to a lot of healthcare folks up there. What’s happening now is because costs are getting out of control, premiums are increasing in Massachusetts and now you have a bureaucracy that is having to put all these cost controls and now rationing on the system. So people in Massachusetts are saying ‘yes we have virtually universal healthcare’—I think it’s 96 or 98 percent insured. But they see the system bursting by the seams. They see premium increases, rationing and benefit cuts, and so they’re frustrated with this system. … They see how this idea of having the government be the sole, you know, single regulator of health insurance, defining what kind of health insurance you can have, and then an individual mandate—it is fatal conceit. These kinds of systems, as we’re now seeing in Massachusetts are unsustainable.
Of course it’s standard operating procedure that vice presidential picks have policy differences with the top of the ticket. See George H.W. Bush and “voodoo economics,” for example. But this disagreement is more pronounced because to date Romney has run a campaign light on policy details (the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein memorably described Romney’s agenda as being less actual policy proposals and “more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. … But read closely, they are not policy proposals. They do not include the details necessary to judge Romney’s policy ideas. In many cases, they don’t contain any details at all.”) In a stroke Mitt Romney made Paul Ryan the functional policy director of his campaign, making sharp policy disagreements like this one more than ordinarily salient. By the same token, it will be interesting to watch the conservative reaction as Ryan is forced to correct himself on this and any other areas of disagreement with the top of the ticket. Given the extent to which his nomination is meant to pacify a querulous base a muzzled or repentant Ryan could prove problematic.
(On the other hand, Romneycare’s broad unpopularity with his party—see the uproar this week when a Romney spokeswoman spoke positively of it—has left him largely quiet on the law’s virtues so maybe “fatal conceit” will become the campaign’s official policy position on the law.)
One other point worth mentioning on Ryan and healthcare costs: It’s interesting that he criticized cost controls since they are notably absent from his Medicare overhaul scheme. While his plan would lower spending it does so not by controlling costs but by shifting the cost from the government to senior citizens. What it does do, however, is keep the Obamacare Medicare cuts … which Romney grimly denounced in introducing Ryan. I guess that’s another area where we can look forward to a little policy back-tracking.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, August 11, 2012
“Weakness In Romney’s Boldness”: Confident Candidates Don’t Go For Boldness, They Make A Choice For Balance
By making Rep. Paul Ryan his running mate, Mitt Romney guaranteed that this will be a big election. The Ryan budget plan will be front and center. Romney now owns its every number, policy and semicolon — unless he specifically says otherwise.
For that reason, the choice was bold. The 2012 election is now about whether the country believes that cuts in Medicare, deep reductions in programs for the poor and steep cuts in taxes for the wealthy are necessary for growth and prosperity. President Obama’s campaign is already running a sober advertisement framing the election as a referendum on this formula. For all the negative ads we will see, a great deal of substance — indeed, a fundamental choice — will underlie the rest of the campaign.
But Romney’s need to make such a bold choice is also a sign of weakness. Candidates confident in their position don’t go for boldness. They make a choice for balance, or to carry a state, or that reinforces their own persona.
Thus did Ronald Reagan pick George H.W. Bush in 1980 to appeal to GOP moderates. In 1992, Bill Clinton picked Al Gore to reinforce his own strengths: young, Southern, New Democrat.
But Romney picked Ryan because he was under intense pressure from right-wing elements of the Republican Party to prove, yet again, that he is truly a conservative. Romney has been trying to prove this ever since he announced his candidacy. Because he has been lagging in the polls, the right felt free to pressure him some more. Now, the right will back the ticket with enthusiasm. This really is the go-for-broke choice that conservatives were looking for. But the cost is that Romney will be unable to make a new appeal to the political center. And by passing on Sen. Rob Portman, Romney gives up an opportunity to strengthen himself in Ohio, a state that he absolutely needs to win and where he has been running behind.
The outcome of this election is now hugely consequential. If the Romney-Ryan ticket wins, conservatives will claim a mandate for Ryan’s radical budget ideas. But if Obama wins, conservatives will no longer be able to argue that the public was given a tepid choice by a philosophically inconstant Romney. A rejection of Romney-Ryan would be a huge blow to the conservative agenda. It will settle the argument over the role of government that we have been having since Barack Obama took the oath of office. This election really and truly matters.
UPDATE, 1:40 p.m.
The Romney campaign is clearly very sensitive about the argument that I made above — and that others, of course, are also making: that Romney now owns the Ryan budget. Here, courtesy of CNN, is a Q-and-A being distributed as part of the campaign’s talking points:
1.) Does this mean Mitt Romney is adopting the Paul Ryan plan?
Gov. Romney applauds Paul Ryan for going in the right direction with his budget, and as president he will be putting together his own plan for cutting the deficit and putting the budget on a path to balance.
Romney’s administration will go through the budget line by line and ask two questions: Can we afford it? And, if not, should we borrow money from China to pay for it?
Note that the campaign doesn’t actually give a direct answer to the question it asked itself.
And then there was this:
2) Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have different views on some policy areas — like Medicare spending, entitlement reform, labor, etc. — do you think those differences are going to hurt or help?
Of course they aren’t going to have the same view on every issue. But they both share the view that this election is a choice about two fundamentally different paths for this country. President Obama has taken America down a path of debt and decline. Romney and Ryan believe in a path for America that leads to more jobs, less debt and smaller government. So, while you might find an issue or two where they might not agree, they are in complete agreement on the direction that they want to lead America.
Again, the Romney camp does not specify in its answer exactly where Romney disagrees with Ryan. It just mentions general areas of disagreement in its question.
If Romney really wants to separate himself from Ryan’s views and his budget, he will have to get a lot more specific than this. And journalists, one would expect, will be pressing Romney hard to offer specifics on the very questions the campaign itself posed.
And thanks to my colleague Greg Sargent for pointing out the existence of these talking points in his own thoughtful take on the Ryan pick.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 11, 2012
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