By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 18, 2012
“The Factions And Their Guns”: Don’t Blame Mitt Romney For The GOP’s Problems
Yes, Mitt Romney had a week I wouldn’t wish on … well, Mitt Romney. Yes, his campaign is incompetent, as Peggy Noonan wrote Friday. Yes, there is something really off about the guy personally. But as conservatives like Noonan start in on Romney vilification, I feel the need to stand up and reiterate: Romney’s problems aren’t all Romney’s fault. They’re not even half his fault. They’re chiefly the fault of a movement and political party that has gone off the deep end. Almost every idiotic thing Romney has done, after all, can be traced to the need he feels to placate groups of people who are way out there in their own ideological solar system, with no purchase at all on how normal Americans feel and think about things. This is much the harder question for Noonan and others to confront, and they really ought to ponder it.
Since he started running, Romney has had to cater to four factions in the GOP, each of which contributes in its way to the party’s self-destructiveness: the rich and their apologists, who think Barack Obama has made life in America well-nigh impossible for those earning $1 million a year; the Tea Party populists, the middle-aged and older white people who feel intense resentment against Obama and his America; the foreign-policy neocons, who invented this fable about Obama apologizing for America and so on; and the rabble-rousers—Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, etc., whose megaphones announce all these anxieties and others.
These four groups have each been holding guns to Romney’s temple. He’s a weak man, yes. But in a way—in only this one particular way—I feel a little sorry for him. These groups permit no room to maneuver whatsoever. None. Not an inch. So when something happens that is in their wheelhouse, the expectation immediately arises that Romney will utter every syllable precisely as they want to hear it.
So it was with the neocons after the Cairo and Benghazi riots. Now, I’m sure it’s partly true that Romney and his team are one big overeager floppy-eared dog, galumphing across the lawn anxious to please their masters. But the master sets the dynamic in place. There’s no doubt whatsoever that if the Romney people didn’t feel they had to rush to please that crowd, he wouldn’t have issued that statement at an utterly inappropriate time and then tried absurdly to defend it the next morning.
The same can be said with regard to Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan. We don’t really know that this was forced on him per se by the right, but we have reason to believe that the logic, shall we say, of his naming Ryan was made clear to him. And what good has Ryan done him? Did you notice the poll last week, which deserves more attention than it’s received, showing that Ryan was a less popular vice-presidential choice than Sarah Palin? This is the man the gun-holding factions said was a brilliant, game-changing choice. He’s game changing all right, though not as they intended.
And it’s the same story on the 47 percent. The man who asked that question was speaking very clearly for Faction A above. There can be little doubt that the vast majority of the people in that room, maybe every person, felt his pain, and Romney knew exactly what he had to say. Again, it’s certainly a two-way street; Romney obviously believed every word he said. But he knew the catechism.
And by the way, does anyone think a Republican presidential candidate would have said this, even behind closed doors, in 1992 or 1996 or 2000 or even in 2008? I think there’s no chance. It’s probably the sort of thing a lot of them thought. But it’s something they never, ever would have said. They’d have known better. So the existence of these factions in their precise form is new. The concealed anxieties of all these factions were brought to the surface by the financial crisis and its aftermath, the black guy standing up there representing the America that they don’t know and that scares them, and the former Massachusetts governor who seems squishy and must forever prove his loyalty. And boy is the lid ever off now.
Could Jim Baker fix this campaign, as Noonan asserts or hopes? He’s a knife fighter, there’s no doubt about that. Look at Florida 2000. But remember, he came in during the late innings to help Poppy Bush’s 1992 campaign, and that ended pretty ingloriously. And besides, he’s 82 now. Can he work 14-hour days, make crisp, snap decisions? One could argue that Romney’s gotten all the help he needs this year from 82-year-old men.
Romney deserves everything that is happening to him (I guess I would wish this past week on him after all). But it isn’t happening because of Mitt Romney alone, or even the now-hated Stuart Stevens. It’s happening because of the factions and their guns. It’s happening because of a party and movement that are out of control and out of touch. There is not a prominent Republican in the country who could be doing any better, with the possible lone exception of Jeb Bush, but it’s probably too early yet for another Bush. Face it, Republicans: he was and is your best candidate, and he’s tanking now more because of you than because of him.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 23, 2012
“The Polar Express”: It’s A Wonder Anything Ever Gets Done In Congress
This is the season of Extreme Politics. Everything’s exciting. Mitt Romney paid taxes! Joe Biden just bought a 36-pound pumpkin! Paul Ryan is campaigning with his mom again!
Oh, and Congress is ready to go home to run for re-election. I know you were wondering.
“I haven’t had anybody in West Virginia tell me we should hurry home to campaign,” protested Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat.
This might be because Manchin is approximately 40 points ahead in the polls. He could probably spend the next month in a fallout shelter without anybody noticing. Nevertheless, he is so fearful of alienating conservatives that he refuses to say who has his support for president. There are only about five undecided voters left in this country and one of them is a senator from West Virginia.
The good news is that our lawmakers spent their last pre-election days in Washington working to pass a bill that would keep the government running for the next six months. This is sometimes referred to as a “continuing resolution,” and sometimes as “kicking the can down the road.” Personally, I am pretty relieved to see evidence that this group has the capacity to kick a can.
Let’s look at what else they were up to. This is important, partly because the last things you take up before going back to the voters shows something about your true priorities. Also partly because it will give me a chance to mention legislation involving 41 polar bear carcasses in Canadian freezers.
The Senate had a big agenda for its finale. Kicking the budget can down the road! Passing a resolution on Iran designed to demonstrate total support for whatever it is Israel thinks is a good idea! The Sportsmen’s Act!
O.K., the last one was sort of unexpected. It’s a bunch of hunting-and-fishing proposals, ranging from conservation to “allowing states to issue electronic duck stamps.” Also, allowing “polar bear trophies to be imported from a sport hunt in Canada.” A long while ago, some Americans legally hunted down said bears, happily envisioning the day when they could display a snarling head on the study wall, or perhaps stuff the entire carcass and stick it in the front hallway where it could perpetually rear on its hind legs, frightening away census-takers.
But then the United States prohibited the importation of dead polar bears, and there have been 41 bear carcasses stuck in Canadian freezers ever since.
Free the frozen polar bears! Well, not before November, since the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, dug in his heels, claiming the whole hunting bill was only coming up to help its main sponsor, Jon Tester of Montana, in a tight race. McConnell, who publicly set his own top policy priority as making sure Barack Obama didn’t get re-elected, hates naked partisanship.
The House, meanwhile, declined to take up two major bipartisan bills from the Senate. One was the farm bill, which Speaker John Boehner admitted he just couldn’t get his right wing to vote for despite pleas from endangered rural Republicans.
The other was aimed at reviving the teetering U.S. Postal Service, which is about to default again. “I hear from our Republican colleagues they didn’t want to force their folks to make difficult votes,” said Tom Carper, a lead Senate sponsor.
Really, there’s no excuse on this one. By the time a difficult issue has been turned into a bipartisan Senate bill, it’s no longer all that difficult. People, if you see a member of the House majority campaigning in your neighborhood, demand to know why the Postal Service didn’t get fixed.
Although on the plus side, the House did agree that the space astronauts should be allowed to keep some flight souvenirs.
One thing virtually nobody in the Senate considered a pre-election priority was spending hours and hours arguing about a proposal from Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky to eliminate foreign aid to Libya, Pakistan and Egypt. However, in the grand tradition of the upper chamber, Paul had the power to hold up the crucial kicking-the-can bill hostage by threatening a filibuster if he didn’t get his way.
“He can keep us here for a week and a half if we don’t let him bring it up,” grumbled Senator Charles Schumer.
Rand Paul does this sort of thing all the time. Who among us can forget when he stalled the renewal of federal flood insurance under the theory that the Senate first needed to vote on whether life started at conception?
The majority leader, Harry Reid, pointed out repeatedly that he has had to struggle with 382 filibusters during his six years at the helm. “That’s 381 more filibusters than Lyndon Johnson faced,” he complained. Obviously, Robert Caro is never going to write a series of grand biographies about the life of Harry Reid.
It’s a wonder anything ever gets done. Although, actually, it generally doesn’t.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 21, 2012
“A Choice Bigger Than The Next Four Years”: Progressives Must Work To Retake The Supreme Court
While the election is dominated by talk of the economy and Mitt Romney’s latest foreign policy blunder, don’t lose sight of one important fact: Perhaps nothing will have a bigger impact on the United States’ future than the Supreme Court. And with four justices above the age of 70, the next president of the United States could have enormous power to shape the court for generations to come. Age is not, as Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner has suggested, just a number.
In a government paralyzed by partisan gridlock on the most important matters of the day, the Supreme Court has become what Bill Moyers calls “The Decider.” A majority of the justices has taken a far right turn in its decisions.
This extremism has a history. In 1971, Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to be a Supreme Court justice, wrote a memo at the request of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urging it to push for an activist, pro-business court that would rubber-stamp its agenda. Powell’s memo laid the groundwork for a right-wing rise in all areas of public life, including law firms, think tanks, campus organizations and media outlets. The 1987 failed Supreme Court nomination of right-wing ideologue Robert Bork was, in hindsight, only a setback in the movement to push the court toward the right. Extremists including Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would eventually be confirmed.
For much of the past 40 years, even as the court has contributed to growing inequality and the enrichment of the 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent, public opinion has largely and consistently favored the justices. But today, after a series of 5 to 4 decisions in high-profile cases such as Bush v. Gore, Citizens United and the Affordable Care Act, 75 percent of Americans believe that the justices’ decisions are influenced by their personal or political views.
They’re right. The court headed by right-wing Chief Justice John Roberts has suppressed the ability to organize through labor unions. It has weakened the right to bring class-action lawsuits. It has impeded ordinary people’s access to courts. It has given corporations more power — and personhood — to inflict their will on Americans. It has shielded financial institutions from accountability. It even threatened the Constitution’s commerce clause in its health-care decision, putting a range of social programs and protections at risk.
Unless progressives find a new way forward, the juris-corporatists will only strengthen their grip on our courts. As Alliance for Justice President Nan Aron outlines in this week’s issue of the Nation (which is devoted to the 1 percent court), progressives cannot sit on the sidelines. Indeed, they should take a page from the Powell playbook, adopting “a new way of thinking about the courts, new tactics for shaping the public debate, and a whole lots more energy from the left.”
Progressives should focus on “building the bench for the bench” with a pipeline of progressive legal talent ready to fill judicial appointments — and a Senate that understands the importance of those candidates. And just as conservatives have used the courts to mobilize their supporters, progressives must make this a galvanizing issue. This means educating the public about how Supreme Court decisions impact almost every aspect of their lives. Moreover, progressives must reshape the debate by exposing the hypocrisy of a right wing that criticizes so-called “activist judges” on the left while aggressively pushing justices who legislate from the bench.
In the four decades since the Powell memo, the right has understood and used the power of the courts to shape U.S. politics, U.S. policies and the U.S. economy, while progressives simply haven’t demonstrated the same intensity on this issue.
In this election year, with so much at stake, there is an enormous opportunity to close that intensity gap. Unless the Supreme Court becomes a central issue in this election, progressives are at risk of losing everything they care about, fought for and won.
This is no exaggeration. Let’s not forget that Mitt Romney has resurrected Bork as his chief judicial adviser. This is a man who would overturn Roe v. Wade, who doesn’t think the equal protection clause applies to women, who consistently favors corporations over citizens, who opposes voting rights. He originally opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act! As Sen. Edward Kennedy said before the Senate rejected the nomination, in Bork’s America, “the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are at the heart of our democracy.”
With Mitt Romney in the White House, Bork would be in a position to reverse the progress the United States has made to expand its democracy.
In this election, Americans have a choice that is bigger than the next four years. They will choose between those who would turn the clock back economically, culturally and socially to the days before the New Deal, or those who want to build a more just, fair and diverse 21st-century society.
“Days Late, Dollars Short”: Mitt Romney’s Tax Returns Still Incomplete
After months of withering attacks, Mitt Romney has finally (sort of) lifted the veil of secrecy around his personal finances. At 3 pm, his campaign released his full 2011 tax return and a summary from PriceWaterhouseCooper of his tax filings over twenty years, from 1990–2009.
The bottom line: as everyone suspected, Romney pays a lower tax rate than the typical middle-class family—and he seems to have purposely engineered a higher rate for himself for optical reasons. Moreover, by only summarizing the past twenty years of returns, there’s a lot we don’t know.
Here’s a look at what we learned so far—check back for updates.
2011 returns
The top-line takeaway from the returns isn’t particularly good—his 2011 tax rate was 14.1 percent, below the effective tax rate for most Americans despite Romney’s vast wealth. (The middle 20 percent of households paid a 16 percent federal income tax rate in 2010). Most of Romney’s income is from capital gains, which is taxed at a lower rate than income—and Obama wants to change that and raise the rate, while Romney does not.
The returns are sure to underscore the absurdity of someone who made $13,696,951 last year, as Romney did, paying a lower tax rate than, say, a plumber in Memphis.
Additionally, by the campaign’s own admission, Romney purposely did not deduct all of his charitable giving—claiming only $2.25 million out of about $4 million—to make his rate “conform to the Governor’s statement in August…that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years.” If he did the deductions in full, he would have paid around 9 percent. (By Romney’s own standard, this disqualifies him: he said on the trail that “frankly if I had paid more than are legally due I don’t think I’d be qualified to become president. I’d think people would want me to follow the law and pay only what the tax code requires).
So here’s a guy who made over $13 million last year, paying a lower tax rate than most Americans, and purposely paying more to the IRS so as not to seem too rich. If this is what Romney’s campaign wanted to change the conversation to, they must have been really unhappy with what it was.
The 1990–2009 Summary
Romney’s trustee, Brad Malt, has a summary of the summary on the campaign website. (Note that Malt oversees Romney’s supposedly blind trust, which makes it interesting he’s also serving a campaign function here). It says:
- In each year during the entire 20-year period period, the Romneys owed both state and federal income taxes.
- Over the entire 20-year period period, the average annual effective federal tax rate was 20.20%.
- Over the entire 20-year period period, the lowest annual effective federal personal tax rate was 13.66%.
- Over the entire 20-year period period, the Romneys gave to charity an average of 13.45% of their adjusted gross income.
This is a really sneaky maneuver. The tax rate averages out to a semi-respectable 20.20 percent, but what does that really tell us? It’s still possible that in really high-earning years, Romney paid an absurdly low tax rate. If he paid a normal rate in lower-earning years, it could still produce that average.
And if Romney did pay really low rates during high-income years, what mechanisms did he use? What sort of tax shelters might he have employed? We don’t know that either, and aren’t likely to find out unless Romney releases the actual returns—something he required of all his potential vice-presidental nominees.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, September 21, 2012
“A Political Pickle”: Conservative Media Tries To Save Romney’s Campaign
Mitt Romney sure is lucky that major media outlets exist to serve his interests. After a video came out on Monday afternoon in which Romney denigrates the nearly half the country that did not pay federal income taxes last year as irresponsible and entitled, it seemed he was in quite a political pickle. The comments were unlikely to endear him to swing voters who perceive Romney as an out-of-touch elitist. But since Romney got the idea that 47 percent of the country are lazy Democratic moochers from movement conservatives, he could not repudiate his own remarks.
At first, Fox News had no idea how to respond. They simply ignored the story, even as it dominated coverage on other networks, all through their primetime lineup on Monday. Finally, when Romney gave a press conference after 10 pm, in which he admitted to having made poor word choices but not a substantive error, they showed it. On Tuesday, the Fox Business network hosted Romney for a softball interview with Neil Cavuto. Fox was determined to avoid covering the story except to help Romney burnish his self-defense. Alas, Romney himself did not have much of a defense, other than to say that he had simply been acknowledging that he will not win a landslide victory.
But then, Providence struck. On Tuesday afternoon the Drudge Report released an audio recording from 1998 in which Barack Obama says, “I actually believe in redistribution.” Drudge splashed the phrase in a banner headline across his front page as if it were earth shattering news. Since then, according to Huffington Post media reporter Michael Calderone, Fox has played the audio clip twenty-two times.
The Romney campaign immediately seized on the clip as a way of shifting their defense of Romney’s unappealing rhetoric into more friendly terrain. Speaking to Cavuto, Romney said:
There is a tape that just came out today where the president is saying he likes redistribution. I disagree. I think a society based upon a government-centered nation where government plays a larger and larger role, redistributes money, that’s the wrong course for America…. The right course for America is to create growth, create wealth, not to redistribute wealth.
Romney’s campaign sent out the quote as part of a press release. They followed up shortly with another press release that lists their usual litany of depressing economic indicators as proof that “Obama’s redistribution plan…didn’t work.” What is missing is any proof, besides a fourteen-year-old quote, that Obama actually pursued a redistribution plan once in office.
By Wednesday, the Romney campaign had regained its footing. Reporters were being inundated with statements using the redistribution quote as a hook for all their usual talking points. For example, they released a statement headlined, “Obama’s Redistribution Didn’t Work For Small Businesses.” “Mitt Romney understands that opportunity and free enterprise create jobs and grow our nation’s small businesses—not government redistribution,” said Romney campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul. The campaign also worked the phrase into their stump speeches. Paul Ryan told a Virginia audience that, Obama is “going to try and distract and divide this country to win by default.” Then he asserted:
President Obama said that he believes in redistribution. Mitt Romney and I are not running to redistribute the wealth. Mitt Romney and I are running to help Americans create wealth. Efforts that promote hard work and personal responsibility over government dependency are what have made this economy the envy of the world.
As Slates Dave Weigel points out, it is ridiculous to blame Obama for distracting and dividing the country, and then attack Obama for something he said fourteen years ago.
Conservative pundits, though, are cheering on the Romney/Ryan campaign’s silliness. After Romney’s appearance on Cavuto, Fox panelist and Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes said of the attack on Obama’s quote, “[It’s] good, [he should] make the argument. Going back to 1998 shows the president has believed this for a long time.” That’s a specious argument. If you go back to 1998 and look at anything Mitt Romney said, it may be diametrically opposed to what he believes today. Generally, the older the quote, the less relevant it is. Certainly that’s the standard Hayes would use if it were Romney who long ago said something Hayes considers damaging.
More importantly, Ryan’s statement creates two false dichotomies. Contra Ryan, redistribution can promote hard work instead of government dependency. A great example is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is a wage subsidy for low-earning households. The purpose is to make menial jobs more financially attractive relative to being unemployed and eligible for welfare, food stamps and Medicaid. It was created with bipartisan support, and by all accounts it has worked well. It also happens to be one reason that so many low-income families do not pay any income taxes, the very state of affairs that Romney decried.
It is also wrong to assume that any wealth redistribution is the opposite of creating wealth. Reasonable people can differ on the optimal amount of redistribution to generate economic growth. But a glance at countries such as Denmark and Germany shows that high marginal tax rates, with the revenue going to strong educational and healthcare systems can develop a healthy, educated and therefore globally attractive workforce. That, in turn, can yield strong rates of economic growth.
The underlying complaint against Obama is bogus anyway. Drudge misleadingly cut the quote to create a false impression. As Jonathan Chait explains in New York magazine, if you read the full quote, you see that Obama is actually expressing a very moderate, neoliberal attitude. Obama actually said that some of the backlash against government has been deserved. To revive faith in collective action, Obama argues, government programs must be more efficient. “We do have to be innovative in thinking, what are the delivery systems that are actually effective.… because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody’s got a shot,” said Obama. This is not radical socialism. But then, neither is the Affordable Care Act, even though conservatives have labeled it as such. If Romney’s incompetent campaign did not have the conservative media to invent these myths, they would truly be lost.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, September 19, 2012
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