“No Such Thing As Good Luck?: For Mitt Romney, His Entire Life Has Been A String Of Good Luck
Now that we’re having a real debate about the fundamentals of capitalism and success, it’s worth considering another part of the now-infamous “You didn’t build that” speech President Obama recently gave. When he was accused of taking Obama’s words out of context, Mitt Romney’s defense was that “The context is worse than the quote.” As evidence, he cited not the actual context of “You didn’t build that” but what Obama said a paragraph before, about the role of fortune in success. And it’s that idea—that success has to do not only with hard work and talent but also with luck—that really got Mitt Romney steamed. Here’s the passage in question:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there
You might think that this would be hard to argue with, but as David Frum observed, many successful people find the idea that luck played a part in their success to be deeply offensive. And it makes me wonder whether Mitt Romney himself believes that the fact that his father was a wealthy industrialist and governor had nothing to do with his financial success. Does he think that if he been born to a poor single mother in backwoods Appalachia, he would have grown up to be the same private equity titan he turned out to be?
I’m guessing he does, but it would be interesting to hear what he said if someone asked him, “Governor, what role do you think luck played in your success? Do you think you had more of a chance to succeed because of who your parents were?”
Don’t know about you, but I’m happy to admit that luck played a large part in whatever success I’ve had. I was fortunate in my parents; we weren’t rich, but they valued education highly, created an environment with lots of opportunities for learning, and moved us to a town with excellent public schools. Had I been born in more deprived circumstances, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have had anything like the opportunities I did, and I seriously doubt I would have pulled myself up by my bootstraps unless some other piece of luck fell my way. Luck played some part in getting most of the jobs I had, even if it was just knowing someone who knew someone who had an opening. I work hard enough, but I’m not such a jerk that I don’t understand how lucky I am to have a career as a writer, which is absurdly cushy compared to the jobs of people who stand on an assembly line or run around a distribution center or change bedpans. In my youth I had just enough exposure to a series of not-particularly-pleasant jobs like waiting tables and working a cash register in a supermarket to make me never forget how absurdly lucky I am to make a living doing what I do.
Mitt Romney is right about one thing: it’s hard to start and maintain a business. And it’s particularly hard if, unlike someone like Mitt Romney, you can’t live off your stocks when you do it. So I understand why some business owners would get their backs up when Romney tells them that Barack Obama told them they didn’t actually build their business. I’d hope they’d take the time to figure out that Romney is actually lying to them about that, but what can you do. But what I struggle to understand is the rich guy who thinks that luck played absolutely no part in him getting where he is. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t hear that coming from a guy who built up a construction business from the ground up. People like that have usually had exposure to enough bad luck to know good luck when they see it. It’s only the people whose entire lives have been nothing but a string of good luck who so angrily assert that there’s no such thing. It’s the Wall Street tools who got six-figure jobs in their uncle’s firm fresh out of Wharton who insist so vehemently that everything they have is because of their own talents. Only if you think that could you genuinely believe that an increase in your income tax of a few points constitutes some kind of communist attack on success.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 30, 2012
“A Mix Of Paranoia And Arrogance”: Mitt Romney’s 20th-Century Worldview
Like a caveman frozen in a glacier, Mitt Romney is a man trapped in time — from his archaic stance on women’s rights to his belief in Herbert Hoover economics.
And now it appears his foreign policy is stuck in the past, as well.
This week, Romney is on a six-day, three-nation tour. The trip comes days after he promised in a speech on international affairs to usher in another “American century.”
What does Romney’s American century look like? His speech and his itinerary tell us volumes.
Romney’s world is one of special relationships, particularly with Britain, Israel and Poland — the three nations he’s visiting. It’s also a world of special enmities — against Iran — and unending suspicions — about China and Russia. For Romney, there are three types of countries: countries that are with us; countries that are against us; and countries that will be against us, sooner or later.
If this seems like foreign policy out of a 20th-century history book — or the George W. Bush neocon playbook — that’s because it is. A President Romney wouldn’t bring about “another American century.” Rather, he would return us to some of the worst policies of the last century.
His worldview recalls the early Reagan years, before the Gipper and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev found common ground on nuclear disarmament — and long before Secretary of State James Baker steered President George H.W. Bush and the country away from a special relationship with Israel that required the United States to take on all of Israel’s enemies. It was in those reckless first years in which Reagan’s policies brought the world close to a nuclear confrontation and led U.S. forces into the deadly trap of confrontation with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Romney’s foreign policy smacks of the same recklessness — a belief that being strong means throwing your weight around. Will his embrace of the special relationship with Israel and Reagan-era bravado lead to equally dangerous developments?
Romney’s world also reminds us of the early Bush 43 years, with its mix of paranoia, arrogance and belief in U.S. power that gave us the “axis of evil” and the Iraq war. Remember, it was America’s special friends, Britain and Poland, that headed the list of Bush’s “coalition of the willing” and gave a veneer of international support for that catastrophe. For Romney, the villain is Iran. Will we once again be neo-conned into a disastrous war in the Persian Gulf?
Romney may accuse President Obama of carrying out defeatist policies and accepting American decline. But it is the GOP nominee-to-be and his advisers whose perspective and policies are much too small — and far too backwards — for a 21st-century United States.
Romney’s speech and his trip reveal, in fact, that he has no answers to the critical foreign-policy questions — the questions that will shape the world order, and America’s place in it, in the coming decade:
How to prevent a country like Syria from plunging into an even bloodier sectarian war while keeping the hope of democracy and economic development alive?
How can the United States work with the current world powers — and the rising ones such as Russia, China, Brazil and India — to establish a form of international governance that balances respect for human dignity with respect for international order?
How can the United States engage these countries in dealing with the transnational threats — from mass unemployment to global climate change — that are likely to define the next decade?
And how can the president bring together leading nations to stop the slide toward a new Great Depression?
It is not even clear that Romney knows what these questions are.
Obama, for better or worse, does understand these key questions. To be sure, he has made some patently wrong decisions, such as the escalation of drone warfare, his secret counterterrorism programs and his embrace of growing state secrecy. But the fact that the president has ended one war — Iraq — and started to end another — Afghanistan — is an opportunity to move to a new foreign-policy stance, a new internationalism.
This means rejecting the tendency to measure our nation’s strength by our capacity to destroy — in bullets and body counts and payloads. The real test of our nation’s standing lies in our capacity to build — not just schools and hospitals and bridges but also relationships across rivers and among countries. Indeed, a new internationalism calls not for military adventures, bombs and bases but for international, collective efforts on the issues that truly matter today — eliminating nuclear weapons, rolling back climate change and advancing the health, education, prosperity and human rights of all people.
It has taken four years to wind down the costly wars of occupation of the Bush era. It would be a tragedy to let Romney and his neocon advisers take us back to the failed policies of the past.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 31, 2012
“We Don’t Want You To Vote”: The Deep, Dark Mysteries Of Pennsylvania’s Voter ID Law
There is no clear plan to help Pennsylvanians get the ID now required for voting. Does the state want thousands to simply stay home on Election Day?
Sometimes fearing the unknown isn’t such a bad idea. Like, for instance, when they’re serving “mystery meat” in the cafeteria. Or, on a slightly bigger scale, when your state is considering a new law that could disfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.
Pennsylvania legislators had no such healthy sense of fear when it came to passing the nation’s most restrictive voter ID law just a little over four months ago—practically yesterday, considering the ramifications of such a huge change to election procedures. But when the bill was being debated, lawmakers and state officials supporting the bill insisted it would be a breeze to ensure that no one was disenfranchised; everybody who wanted to vote would still be able to vote. “This is going to be an additional responsibility,” said Daryl Metcalf, the Republican state representative who sponsored the bill, but “one that is not burdensome in any way.” Besides, Republican Governor Tom Corbett’s office said that only 1 percent of Pennsylvanians lacked a valid ID. Even for that 1 percent, Corbett said, “This is no barrier to voting. You have to have a photo ID to go anywhere.” For the scant few presumed to be lacking IDs, the state would provide one free of charge. Easy peasy.
But now, with only three months until Election Day, it’s abundantly clear that things are going to be a lot more complicated. The number of voters lacking the required ID is considerably higher than state officials guessed. The plan for giving out free, new IDs is a complete mess. At best, it looks like the way Pennsylvania enforces the law, which deals with a central right of citizenship, will be a rushed affair. At worst, it will leave thousands, if not hundreds of thousands without a chance to cast a ballot.
While the state defends the law in court, officials are simultaneously scrambling to come up with a public education campaign and make new identification cards widely available. Court proceedings started last week in a lawsuit brought by voting rights groups. Testimony on Friday highlighted just how much is left to do to implement the law—and just how much remains unknown. The stakes are high, as Pennsylvania is a swing state in one of the most contentious presidential elections in recent memory.
Despite the implications, there’s a whole lot we don’t really know about Pennsylvania’s plans for implementing its voter ID regulations. Let’s start with what we do know; it’s scary enough.
First of all, the law is way more complicated than its proponents would allow during the debate. “Photo ID” sounds simple enough, but the state’s law has a slew of specific requirements. For starters, acceptable identification must have an expiration date. That requirement knocks out a variety of IDs that you might expect would be accepted, like veteran’s cards issued by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. It also disallows a lot of college ID cards; while the law allows IDs issued from any state university or community college, most of those IDs don’t currently carry an expiration date. Many colleges are trying to issue new ID cards or put stickers on the old cards with expiration dates, but time is short.
The law has a slew of other caveats and wrinkles. For instance, while identification cards must have an expiration date, those issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation can still be used even if they’re expired—so long as they’ve expired less than one year before November 6. All other forms must still be valid, including passports and military IDs. Employee IDs issued by counties and municipalities are allowed (so long as they have an expiration date), but any other form of photo ID issued by counties or municipalities won’t be accepted. (That means if you were planning on using your gun license, you’d better come up with a new plan.)
We also know that a ton of people will need new or alternative identification with a photo. The Secretary of the Commonwealth’s own study—released long after legislators passed the law—shows that as many as 9 percent of registered voters currently lack an ID issued by the state’s Department of Transportation, the most common form of identification. Subsequent studies have found even more alarming numbers. Matt Barreto, a professor at the University of Washington, found that 12.6 percent of Pennsylvanians who voted in 2008 currently lack a valid ID. An analysis by the AFL-CIO showed that, when you factor in those whose IDs will have expired longer than a year by Election Day, as many as 20 percent of Pennsylvania voters—or 1.6 million Pennsylvanians—could be disenfranchised.
The greatest unknown is how the state plans to ensure these massive numbers of voters can get their identification in time. When the law was passed, state officials said it would be no problem to educate voters and distribute IDs. Already, though, the offices that issue IDs are making mistakes. Friday’s testimony showed that voters were being charged for IDs that are supposed to be free. There’s also a serious concern that poll workers won’t know the rules around the new law; they will not be required to attend training sessions on voter ID, and the state has sent out conflicting information to local election officials.
A plan to offer a new photo ID specifically for voters was supposedly concocted in June, after the lawsuit was filed. Several of the plaintiffs in the suit are senior citizens who do not have birth certificates, or other necessary documents they would need to get a standard state-issued ID. The new voter ID cards, according to state officials, would offer such people an option. But as court testimony made clear Friday, the state has already struggled with delays; the IDs were supposed to be ready last week. Now, one state official testified, they will be ready to go by August 26. But as the plaintiffs’ attorney pointed out, there’s no mention of that date in the contract with the vendor that’s supposed to produce these cards. And there is no penalty if the vendor fails to have the cards ready by then.
State officials say that won’t be a problem. But the legislature only provided funding for 85,000 new IDs. That doesn’t even cover the number needed in Philadelphia alone. But Kurt Myers, the deputy secretary for safety administration, told the court that he expected to issue fewer than 10,000 of the new voter ID cards.
Ten thousand IDs? When hundreds of thousands don’t have them? Were we all absent for math class the day they taught “voter ID counting”?
As it happens, this is not a math problem. It’s a problem of cynical politics. As Barreto found, a third of Pennsylvanians don’t even know about the law. Many will show up at the polls and be turned away. The inevitable delays and arguments will almost surely leave others in line longer—and make it more likely that they’ll leave without voting. The number of Pennsylvanians who vote will almost surely decline. There’s no clear state plan for dealing with voters lacking identification, because, it’s clear, the plan is that many of them simply won’t show up.
Which brings us to the last thing we know: This law is about suppressing the votes of poor and nonwhite voters.
Voter fraud, the ostensible reason for all this, is not a problem in Pennsylvania or in anywhere else in the U.S. This law is about partisan advantage for the GOP, pure and simple. The state has already admitted in court documents that there are no known cases of in-person voter fraud, in which one person pretends to be another. (That’s the only kind of fraud this law guards against.) As Talking Points Memo first reported, Pennsylvania has already signed an agreement with the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, acknowledging that there have been no investigations of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania and that there’s not likely to be any such fraud this November. The state isn’t even going to pretend that voter fraud is a problem—though that was the sole justification for passing this law.
The Republican House Majority Leader in the state already bragged that voter ID would result in a win for Mitt Romney. Left unsaid was that the law would make it disproportionately harder for poor and minority voters who tend to vote Democratic.
This is about politics at the cost of civil rights. That’s one thing we know for sure.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, July 30, 2012
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