“Hating On Ben Bernanke”: Mitt Romney Takes Up Residence In The Right’s Intellectual Fever Swamps
Last week Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, announced a change in his institution’s recession-fighting strategies. In so doing he seemed to be responding to the arguments of critics who have said the Fed can and should be doing more. And Republicans went wild.
Now, many people on the right have long been obsessed with the notion that we’ll be facing runaway inflation any day now. The surprise was how readily Mitt Romney joined in the craziness.
So what did Mr. Bernanke announce, and why?
The Fed normally responds to a weak economy by buying short-term U.S. government debt from banks. This adds to bank reserves; the banks go out and lend more; and the economy perks up.
Unfortunately, the scale of the financial crisis, which left behind a huge overhang of consumer debt, depressed the economy so severely that the usual channels of monetary policy don’t work. The Fed can bulk up bank reserves, but the banks have little incentive to lend the money out, because short-term interest rates are near zero. So the reserves just sit there.
The Fed’s response to this problem has been “quantitative easing,” a confusing term for buying assets other than Treasury bills, such as long-term U.S. debt. The hope has been that such purchases will drive down the cost of borrowing, and boost the economy even though conventional monetary policy has reached its limit.
Sure enough, last week’s Fed announcement included another round of quantitative easing, this time involving mortgage-backed securities. The big news, however, was the Fed’s declaration that “a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy will remain appropriate for a considerable time after the economic recovery strengthens.” In plain English, the Fed is more or less promising that it won’t start raising interest rates as soon as the economy looks better, that it will hold off until the economy is actually booming and (perhaps) until inflation has gone significantly higher.
The idea here is that by indicating its willingness to let the economy rip for a while, the Fed can encourage more private-sector spending right away. Potential home buyers will be encouraged by the prospect of moderately higher inflation that will make their debt easier to repay; corporations will be encouraged by the prospect of higher future sales; stocks will rise, increasing wealth, and the dollar will fall, making U.S. exports more competitive.
This is very much the kind of action Fed critics have advocated — and that Mr. Bernanke himself used to advocate before he became Fed chairman. True, it’s a lot less explicit than the critics would have liked. But it’s still a welcome move, although far from being a panacea for the economy’s troubles (a point Mr. Bernanke himself emphasized).
And Republicans, as I said, have gone wild, with Mr. Romney joining in the craziness. His campaign issued a news release denouncing the Fed’s move as giving the economy an “artificial” boost — he later described it as a “sugar high” — and declaring that “we should be creating wealth, not printing dollars.”
Mr. Romney’s language echoed that of the “liquidationists” of the 1930s, who argued against doing anything to mitigate the Great Depression. Until recently, the verdict on liquidationism seemed clear: it has been rejected and ridiculed not just by liberals and Keynesians but by conservatives too, including none other than Milton Friedman. “Aggressive monetary policy can reduce the depth of a recession,” declared the George W. Bush administration in its 2004 Economic Report of the President. And the author of that report, Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw, has actually advocated a much more aggressive Fed policy than the one announced last week.
Now Mr. Mankiw is allegedly a Romney adviser — but the candidate’s position on economic policy is evidently being dictated by extremists who warn that any effort to fight this slump will turn us into Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe I tell you.
Oh, and what about Mr. Romney’s ideas for “creating wealth”? The Romney economic “plan” offers no specifics about what he would actually do. The thrust of it, however, is that what America needs is less environmental protection and lower taxes on the wealthy. Surprise!
Indeed, as Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute points out, the Romney plan of 2012 is almost identical — and with the same turns of phrase — to John McCain’s plan in 2008, not to mention the plans laid out by George W. Bush in 2004 and 2006. The situation changes, but the song remains the same.
So last week we learned that Ben Bernanke is willing to listen to sensible critics and change course. But we also learned that on economic policy, as on foreign policy, Mitt Romney has abandoned any pose of moderation and taken up residence in the right’s intellectual fever swamps.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, September 16, 2012
“There Is No Real Romney”: Mitt Was Really Saying To Plutocrats, “I’m You”
Whenever we get a glimpse of a candidate speaking in a place where he didn’t know he was being recorded, there’s a powerful temptation to conclude that the “real” person has been revealed. After all, campaigning is almost all artifice, and every other moment at which we see the candidate, he’s acutely aware that he is on stage, with people watching his every expression and listening to his every word. This is how many people are interpreting Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments we learned about yesterday, even though Mitt was certainly on stage, even if he didn’t know he was being recorded. For instance, Jonathan Chait says, “the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party.” McKay Coppins reaches the same conclusion, that “Romney seemed to give the closest thing to a candid description of his worldview,” as evidenced by the fact that “his delivery carried none of the discomfort or scripted nature of his stump speeches, and the tone was markedly different from that of the remarks he delivers at fundraisers open to the press.” Our own Bob Moser agreed yesterday.
I’m not buying it. As I’ve maintained for some time, for all intents and purposes there is no “real” Mitt Romney. His political beliefs are the equivalent of Schrodinger’s cat. They exist in every state at once until you open the box to observe them. If the one opening the box is a Tea Partier, they instantly lock into place as a set of Tea Party beliefs; if it’s a bunch of GOP plutocrats staring down, that’s whose beliefs he’ll mirror. Romney has spent the last five years in an intensive period of study, with his subject the contemporary American conservative mind in all its permutations. He’s well aware that the misleading talking point about 47 percent of Americans not paying taxes gets repeated all the time on the right, in private and public. What he was telling the people in that room is what he tells any group of people he speaks to. His message was, in Christine O’Donnell’s immortal words, “I’m you.”
And it just happens that before this particular group, “I’m you” was absolutely true. But it was necessary for Romney to explain to them not just that he’s like them, but he believes everything they believe. And the Randian idea that society is made up of makers and takers, and all those shiftless mooching takers are voting for their patron Obama, is something those funders believe with every fiber of their beings. Does Romney actually believe, as he says on the tape, that “I have inherited nothing. Everything that Ann and I have, we have earned the old-fashioned way”? Maybe, maybe not. But he knows that the ideas that every rich person got rich on nothing but merit, gumption, and hard work, and your wealth is proof of your virtue as a human being, have become absolute gospel among the kind of people who plunk down $50,000 to have dinner with the Republican nominee for president.
I’m not trying to let him off the hook here; “I was only pandering” is no defense for the repetition of abhorrent views (and subsequently, Mitt has insisted that he wasn’t only pandering, but saying what he really thinks). But show me an instance in which Mitt Romney tells a group of people something they don’t want to hear, and then I’ll believe we’ve gotten some insight into the “real” Romney.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 18, 2012
“The Tin Man With No Heart”: Mitt Romney, A Hollow Man Who Views The Presidency As His Entitlement
Mitt Romney, now we know you after a lost seven days in September which you and Ann will look back on and forever rue by the fireplace in one of your vacation compounds.
As one volunteer at the Democratic convention put it, “He’s the Tin Woodman with no heart, in the Wizard of Oz.” She did the stiff walk that, sure enough, captured the starched style of the man seeking a job that requires some heartfelt encounters with the American people. Starting in frigid Iowa, along a campaign trail that resembled the freakish Wizard quest, there has been precious little show of heart from a hollow man that views the presidency as his entitlement. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the enchanting tale published back in 1900, remains a rich source for American character archetypes.
The volunteer’s name was Brenda Lee Monroe, a 51-year-old African-American Atlanta resident, laid off three weeks earlier from a good job managing medical records. Jobs in her field are being outsourced as far as India. Yet she was upbeat and undefeated that night in the Charlotte arena, which was hopping.
To Romney, this spirited woman of grace would be part of the 47 percent, to be exact, which are not his “job to worry about,” as he callously put it in at a tony May fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. The tape of his talk to wealthy donors was released yesterday by Mother Jones magazine.
But first there was the unforgivable foul on the foreign policy front. To review: Romney didn’t wait for the sun to rise, for the bodies of four countrymen to grow cold, before he started blaming and speaking way out of school on the death of the American ambassador in Libya. The tone-deaf, tin Romney stooped so low he violated the laws of decency, not just politics, with his ugly outburst. Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist, said it was strange. Let’s get more real: It was un-American.
Romney’s rashness added to fears and whispers that if elected, he and his good buddy Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who’s hectoring President Barack Obama on Iran like a spoiled child, might just rush to judgment on bombing Iran. That would be bad, literally igniting the Middle East.
Then came the tape that revealed how Romney would govern on domestic policy, given a chance. The answer is that he’d govern only with the upper-class half in mind, those whom he presumes would vote for him.
As for the rest of us, we are not worth worrying about, he went on, as the other half that lacks a sense of responsibility and depend on the federal government for things like healthcare, housing, and food. “My job is not to worry about those people,” he said with chilling candor. Well, not everyone can take care of themselves all the time. And the president is supposed to represent all of us, we the people, not to divide us from them.
Think about it. Have we heard a single nice word out of Romney since this whole thing began on an Iowa ice floe? No, I don’t think so. The statement that corporations are people doesn’t count. For such a high-stakes candidate, it must be hard to get good wordsmith help these days. But the real problem lies within.
Nine months is too long to hide the truth and we will soon reach that water-mark in the election cycle. Romney has not yet authentically spoken to all the American people, not a word that shows spark, compassion, wit, humanity—or a heartbeat in there. He will pay a price for that, a high price even for a rich man.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, September 18, 2012
“What Romney Left Behind”: He’s Devoted His Life To The Conservative Base
One of the common misconceptions about the presidential candidate version of Mitt Romney is that he disavowed his greatest achievement in public office, health care reform, in an attempt to appeal to his party’s base. The truth is that he never actually disavowed it or said it was a failure or a mistake. What he did was tell primary voters that Romneycare was really nothing at all like Obamacare, and anyway Romneycare shouldn’t be tried in any other state. His comments were utterly unconvincing, but since they were always accompanied by a thunderous denunciation of Obamacare, Republican voters were assuaged enough to let it slide.
Which means that had he wanted to, Romney probably could have entered the general election making a positive case on health care beyond “Repeal Obamacare!” By continuing to maintain that Romneycare was in fact a good thing when he was challenged on it (even if he didn’t want to talk about it all that much), he gave himself enough rhetorical room that he could now be using the issue to show voters that he’s both competent and compassionate, that he successfully tackled a difficult policy problem in a way that improved people’s lives. Instead, his entire case for competence is that he got really rich in private equity, and his entire case for compassion is that his wife seems nice.
As Charles Pierce explains, he could even use the issue to portray himself as someone who can get past Washington partisanship:
Mitt Romney would be well within his rights to assert that he had this idea first, and that he’d managed to get it passed without the kind of political bloodletting occasioned by the president’s efforts. There was no uprising in Massachusetts over the individual mandate, no howling about “death panels.” A popular bipartisan solution was devised to a vexing social problem, and Romney would be justified fully in basing his campaign purely on the fact that, in an era of gridlock and paralysis, he could get something like health-care reform done.
Pierce tells his own story (he has a pre-existing condition that might have made him uninsurable in any state other than Massachusetts) and reminds us of how thousands of people there have been helped, and in many cases literally saved, because of what Mitt Romney did. But Romney won’t talk about it even now, despite the fact that the pivot from what he said during the primaries really wouldn’t have been that hard to make. And here’s a partial clue why:
Mitt Romney’s campaign has concluded that the 2012 election will not be decided by elusive, much-targeted undecided voters — but by the motivated partisans of the Republican base.
This shifting campaign calculus has produced a split in Romney’s message. His talk show interviews and big ad buys continue to offer a straightforward economic focus aimed at traditional undecided voters. But out stumping day to day is a candidate who wants to talk about patriotism and God, and who is increasingly looking to connect with the right’s intense, personal dislike for President Barack Obama.
You can characterize this as a new strategic turn, but it seems to me that the Romney campaign has never been about independent voters, not for a minute. My theory about why is that for five years, nearly every waking moment of Mitt Romney’s life was devoted to the conservative base—massaging them, figuring out what makes them happy and what makes them angry, determining who they wanted to be their candidate, and trying, trying, trying to be that person. After working so hard at it for so long, he just can’t stop, and he and everyone around him are convinced that it’s the only way to win.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 17, 2012
“The Real Awful Mitt Romney”: The Epitome Of Jawdroppingly Stupid Arrogant Privilege
If you thought Mitt Romney had a rotten summer—failing to project a more appealing image of himself and his policies, failing to pin the country’s economic woes on the president, failing to get even the tiniest bounce from his convention—the home stretch is shaping up even worse. Fast on the heels of his aggressively wrong-headed response to the embassy attack in Libya (which gets terrible reviews from most Americans), Mother Jones today released a bombshell video of Romney speaking way too candidly to a small group of well-heeled campaign contributors.
This is must-see footage—and even if you don’t want to see it, you won’t be able to help it over the next few days. These are words that will haunt Romney for the rest of the campaign—and the rest of his political career. He jokes that he’d have a better chance of being elected if he were of Mexican lineage; he insults Obama voters (and 47 percent of the country) in the most stereotypical and racially-tinged terms possible; he brags about sharing campaign consultants with Bibi Netanyahu; and he insists that Americans are, basically, too empty-headed to care about policy specifics. And this is only the first batch of videos to come; God only knows what else he might have let loose with.
We can’t sum it up better than David Corn, who got this “get” for MoJo: “With this crowd of fellow millionaires, he apparently felt free to utter what he really believes and would never dare say out in the open. He displayed a high degree of disgust for nearly half of his fellow citizens, lumping all Obama voters into a mass of shiftless moochers who don’t contribute much, if anything, to society, and he indicated that he viewed the election as a battle between strivers (such as himself and the donors before him) and parasitic free-riders who lack character, fortitude, and initiative. … These were sentiments not to be shared with the voters; it was inside information, available only to the select few who had paid for the privilege of experiencing the real Romney.”
Romney’s comments will inevitably be likened to Barack Obama’s infamous slur (also recorded in a private donor meeting) about white Pennsylvanians clinging to guns and religion. Both expressed the kind of disdain for their fellow Americans that no candidate should allow to escape his or her lips. But in terms of political impact, this is sure to play much worse. For one thing, that was April 2008, and this is mid-September 2012—leaving the candidate little time to recover. Another essential difference: Obama was well-liked and admired by the vast majority of Americans when he had his bigoted slip of the lip; Romney is already overwhelmingly disliked, even by many who plan to vote for him. Obama’s comments surprised people; Romney’s comments confirm what people already suspected about him. He comes across as the epitome of arrogant privilege.
There is no way that this glimpse into the “real Romney” won’t turn off a large majority of the country—including plenty of the same people of privilege he was speaking to in that room. Even if they agree with the candidate secretly, they will have some serious second thoughts: How could anyone running for president, for pete’s sake, be so breathtakingly, jaw-droppingly stupid as to utter such things aloud?
By: Bob Moser, The American Prospect, September 17, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 