“A Half Hearted Attempt”: Mitt Romney Pretends To Court Hispanic Voters
Before 2008, there was a story I used to tell about how presidential campaigns have been waged over the last few decades. It goes like this: The Democrat comes before the voters and says, “If you examine my ten-point plan, I believe you will agree that my ten-point plan is superior to my opponent’s ten-point plan.” Then the Republican comes before the voters, points to the Democrat, and says, “That guy hates you and everything you stand for.” It may not have applied to every election in our lifetimes (Bill Clinton was pretty good at running for president, you may remember), but it rang true enough that when I said it, liberals tended to chuckle and nod their heads.
That changed in 2008, when Barack Obama ran a campaign in both the primaries and general election that reflected a profound understanding that politics is much more about identity than issues. His opponent understood it too, but the statement of identity that a vote for McCain represented just couldn’t garner a majority of the public at that moment in history.
So what kind of a statement of identity does a vote for Mitt Romney represent? That’s a complex question, and it’s one to which I’ll return in the coming months. But I just wanted to highlight one thing, the way the Romney campaign is making a half-hearted attempt to reach out to Latino voters. According to the 2008 exit polls, Obama beat McCain by 36 points among Latinos, which is right about where polls show the current race between Obama and Romney. So what kind of advice is he getting from people in his party? Here’s an article today in POLITICO:
“If you’re looking at an electoral strategy, my sense is that we have got to be able to talk to women and minorities in ways they identify,” [Eric] Cantor told POLITICO on Monday. “When you’re looking at the independent voter, it is, in very kitchen table terms, … about jobs and the economy. It’s about whether there is going to be health care there, whether they’re going to be able to make it through the month, in terms of their limited income in a very practical, results-oriented way.”
He said Romney – and Republicans broadly – need to talk more about the opportunity that their party can give immigrants and minorities. “It is the message of opportunity, of actually chasing the American dream that appeals to everybody across demographic lines,” Cantor said. “Because it’s about the classic entrepreneurship of the country.”
Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho), a Mormon and conservative Hispanic lawmaker, said Romney needs to confront the issue of how he’ll improve the economy head-on.
“What Romney needs to do is start talking about the economy and how it’s affecting all Americans, including Hispanic Americans, African Americans and other ethnic minorities. Under Obama, more people are in poverty, more people are taking food stamps, more people are losing their jobs, more women are unemployed. If you look at every ethnic and gender group, people are suffering more than they did in other times in recent history. What Romney needs to do is go out there and make the case that Republican conservative policies are more fair for individuals, regardless of ethnicity or gender.”
Mitt Romney and his Republican primary opponents just spent a year arguing over which one of them would crack down the hardest on undocumented immigrants, sending a clear message of antagonism to Latino voters everywhere, but now he should just tell them that Republican ideas will help the economy? In other words, the way to counteract those clearly hostile messages that were sent about identity is to just talk about issues. The Romney campaign itself is taking the same approach: http://youtu.be/3VC8McJTdTs
This isn’t going to work. It’s not that the message itself is problematic, but it’s the same message Romney sends to everyone else: elect me because the economy is bad. Saying “the economy is bad for Hispanics” isn’t anything different from saying the economy is bad for everybody. In fairness, I’m not sure what kind of identity message Romney could send at this point that would overcome the last few years of him and his party sending such relentless messages of hostility. But it’s like they’re barely trying. Which leads me to think that this is more about being able to say they’re reaching out to Latino voters than about actually winning Latino votes.
Maybe they should have gone with the animated sombrero-wearing parrot.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, June 5, 2012
“Voter Purging”: There’s A Lot Of Darkness In The Sunshine State
Florida ought to know better. And must do better, particularly on the issue of voting and discrimination.
But, then again, we are talking about Florida, the state of Bush v. Gore infamy and the one that will celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy, with a statewide holiday on Sunday.
What am I getting at? This: Few states in the union have done more in recent years to restrict and suppress voting — particularly by groups who lean Democratic, such as young people, the poor and minorities — than Florida.
In May 2011, the state’s Republican-led Legislature passed and the Republican governor, Rick Scott, signed a sweeping election law that cut early voting short and imposed onerous burdens on voter registration groups by requiring them to turn in registration applications within 48 hours of the time they are signed or face fines.
The threat of fines has meant that many groups that traditionally registered voters in the state have abandoned the effort, and it appears to be contributing to fewer new registrations. According to a March analysis of registration data by The Times, “in the months since its new law took effect in May, 81,471 fewer Floridians have registered to vote than during the same period before the 2008 presidential election.”
But there is good news. On Thursday, a federal judge overturned the 48-hour deadline as unconstitutional, writing, in part, that “if the goal is to discourage voter-registration drives and thus also to make it harder for new voters to register, the 48-hour deadline may succeed.”
Recently, the state announced that it would begin another round of voter purging to ensure that no ineligible voters were mistakenly on the voter rolls. Seems noble enough. But the problem is that Florida is notoriously bad at purging.
As the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice pointed out last week: “In 2000, Florida’s efforts to purge persons with criminal convictions from the rolls led to, by conservative estimates, close to 12,000 eligible voters being removed” from the rolls. As most of us remember, George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the state of Florida that year, after the recounts and the Supreme Court stepped in, by 537 votes.
And as The Miami Herald reported on Thursday:
“So far, Florida has flagged 2,700 potential noncitizen voters and sent the list to county elections supervisors, who have found the data and methodology to be flawed and problematic. The list of potential noncitizen voters — many of whom have turned out to be lawful citizens and voters — disproportionately hits minorities, especially Hispanics.”
More good news: In his keynote address at the inaugural Faith Leaders Summit on Voting Rights, a joint effort by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Conference of National Black Churches, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. told the group:
“Congressman John Lewis may have described the reason for these concerns best, in a speech on the House floor last summer, when pointing out that the voting rights he worked throughout his life — and nearly gave his life — to ensure are, ‘under attack … [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.’ Not only was he referring to the all-too-common deceptive practices we’ve been fighting for years. He was echoing more recent fears and frustrations about some of the state-level voting law changes we’ve seen this legislative season.”
He didn’t mention Florida by name, but, on Thursday, the Department of Justice sent a letter to the Florida secretary of state demanding that they cease the purge.
Florida has more electoral votes than any other swing state, and the battle to win it — or steal it — will be epic because the election is likely to be another nail-biter, both nationally and in the state.
In an NBC-Marist poll of battleground states released last week, President Obama was leading Mitt Romney in the state 48 percent to 44 percent. But as NBC News pointed out, the president’s share was “below the 50 percent threshold usually considered safe haven for an incumbent president,” and Romney has narrowed the races in Florida and other battleground states since earlier in the year.
A Quinnipiac University Poll also released last week had Romney leading Obama by 6 points in Florida, although there has been some debate about the methodology of that poll.
We can’t predict a winner, but we must insist on a fair fight. Voter suppression can’t be allowed to overshadow democracy in the Sunshine State.
By: Charles Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 1, 2012
“Letting The Right People Vote”: Control And Power Through Voter Suppression
For some years, the Republican party has tried to convince Americans that they have put their ugly legacy on issues of race behind them, that Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and Willie Horton have no relationship to the GOP of today. They call themselves the “party of Lincoln,” hoping people will forget that the Republican and Democratic parties were very different in 1864 than they are today. (Consider: If the likes of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the leading lights of the GOP had been alive 150 years ago, which side would they have been on? The answer seems pretty obvious.) Sometimes, they may even go as far as the National Review did recently, publishing an unintentionally hilarious cover article claiming that Republicans are the real civil-rights heroes, because the Democratic party was once home to white Southern segregationists, so there! Never mind that those folks, like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, eventually found their rightful home in the Republican party, as part of the realignment process that gave us the parties of today.
The protestations would be a little more convincing if every election—every election, without fail—didn’t see Republicans searching for new ways to exploit white racial animus and, more importantly, keep minorities from voting. This year’s election will be no different; Republicans are working harder than ever to make sure that if you’re not their kind of person, you will find voting as difficult as possible. That doesn’t mean that deep in their hearts Republicans are racists. It isn’t about hate. It’s about power.
This isn’t anything new. The history of voting in America is one of vicious battles over who would be able to cast ballots, battles that go well beyond the passage of the 15th and 19th Amendments, which extended voting rights to blacks and women, respectively. For decades, dozens of states had “pauper exclusions” on their books preventing poor people from voting. In some cases that meant that only property owners were allowed to vote; in other cases, going on any form of public assistance meant giving up your franchise. Incredibly, these laws were not finally repealed in most places until the 1960s. As Alexander Keyssar detailed in The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, classes of people with power have always sought to restrict the ability of those without power to vote:
They did so both to defend their own interests and because their beliefs and prejudices led them to view others as something less than responsible or worthy citizens. Most men did not want to enfranchise women until the twentieth century; most whites did not want to enfranchise blacks or other racial minorities in their own states; the native-born often were resistant to granting suffrage to immigrants; the wealthy at times sought to deny political citizenship to the poor; established community residents preferred to fence out new arrivals. There is nothing peculiarly American or particularly surprising about these patterns; those who possess political power commonly are reluctant to share it, and they have easily developed or embraced ideas that justify and legitimize that reluctance.
At various times in their histories, both political parties have sought partisan advantage in keeping certain people from the polls. But it has been some time since the Democratic party had a means by which to exclude whole classes of people from voting. The most reliable Republican voters today are groups like older white men. Even the most creative legislator would have a tough time coming up with some way to take away their voting rights.
But the reliably Democratic groups—blacks, Hispanics, poor people, young people—are easier to go after. You don’t have to stop all of them from voting, just enough to make a difference. And few things work better than voter ID laws, since those who don’t have such an ID are so much more likely to be the kind of people who vote Democratic. The fact that people impersonating other people at the polls is so rare as to be almost non-existent matters not at all. Write a voter ID law, and the cruder methods of keeping minorities from voting become less necessary. You don’t have to spend as much time distributing flyers in black neighborhoods threatening people with prosecution if they go to the wrong polling place, or mailing notices to voters claiming that if they have any unpaid parking tickets they won’t be allowed to vote, or posting signs around the neighborhood saying that the election has been moved to Wednesday.
All those things have happened may times before. But after their success in taking control of state legislatures in 2010, Republicans decided that kind of thing was for amateurs. You don’t need election day shenanigans if you’ve passed a law disenfranchising the right people. Minorities may be at the core of these efforts, but it isn’t just about them. Young people, college students, ex-felons, anyone who might be more likely to vote Democratic has been targeted by eager Republican legislators elected in the 2010 sweep. A dozen states with Republican legislatures have erected new barriers to voting since 2010. These barriers include voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting and same-day registration, and laws barring all ex-felons from voting. And no state’s Republicans have moved as aggressively as Florida, which has a bit of a history with this sort of thing.
You may have forgotten it by now, but the razor-thin margin of the 2000 presidential race there had its roots well before election day, when governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris assembled a list of people who were allegedly ex-felons and should therefore lose their voting rights. It turned out that thousands of them weren’t ex-felons at all, but just had names that resembled someone who had committed a felony. But too bad – they lost the right to vote anyway. In the last few years, Florida has passed an ID law, and passed a law imposing absurdly onerous requirements on those who register voters (voter registration is always a part of liberal and Democratic organizing campaigns). They also restricted early voting, most importantly by eliminating early voting on the Sunday before the election. Why that Sunday? Well, many black churches were organizing “Souls to the Polls” voting drives after church on that day. The Republicans solved that problem. And most recently, the government of Republican governor Rick Scott told local boards of elections to purge tens of thousands of people from the voter rolls, on the grounds that they might not be citizens. Many Florida citizens have already gotten threatening letters from the government, telling them they had 30 days to prove their citizenship or lose the right to vote.
Many of these plainly partisan moves are under legal challenge, but our system unfortunately allows much of what Republicans are trying to do. For instance, when the 2000 election controversy revealed the miasma of corruption and incompetence that was the Florida election system, many people were amazed that the Secretary of State, the person in charge of running the election, could be allowed to serve as state co-chair of one of the competing presidential campaigns. The idea that Bush co-chair Katherine Harris was an objective arbiter of election rules and processes was beyond absurd; it was like going to a Yankees-Red Sox game and learning that the home-plate umpire was also the Yankees’ batting coach. But that’s perfectly fine in America; you might remember that four years later, the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell (the state co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign) responded to a successful Democratic registration campaign by issuing a decree that any registration form not printed on heavy card stock would be declared invalid (his order was overturned by a court). And just recently the Arizona Secretary of State, Ken Bennett, declared that he might not allow Barack Obama on the state’s ballot, since he wasn’t convinced Obama was actually born in the United States. Bennett, who eventually backed off his birtherism, is–you guessed it–the state co-chair of the Romney campaign.
Few things are more absurd than to hear Republicans claim that in enacting restrictive voting laws, they are motivated not a whit by partisanship, but only by their deep and abiding concern for the integrity of the ballot. The Republicans who swept into office at all levels in 2010 had a policy agenda, to do things like restrict reproductive rights, roll back environmental and consumer regulations, and cut taxes. But their political agenda, designed to increase the chances that they will retain power, got nearly as much of their attention. And few things can more effectively ensure that you’ll retain power than making it harder for the wrong kind of people to vote.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 4, 2012
“Mitt Romney Enjoys Your Pain”: Normal People Don’t Smile About Unemployment
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s reaction to high unemployment is creepy.
During an interview with CBS reporter Jan Crawford last week, Romney smirked as he mentioned that unemployment has remained above 8 percent for 39 months. Then, as the interview ended, he smirked again after saying President Obama had hoped the Recovery Act would reduce joblessness to 6 percent by now.
Romney is loving high unemployment. Just like the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives that has repeatedly blocked President Obama’s proposals to increase hiring, Romney believes high joblessness is good for the GOP. It’s one thing for a politician to know in his heart of hearts that a calamity for the country may help him achieve his ambitions. It’s another to be so callous as to beam about it on TV.
The nation’s sustained high unemployment disheartens any normal human being. Friday’s report that only 69,000 jobs were created in May was troubling — that is, to anyone who has ever been laid off or had a friend or relative or neighbor who lost a job. They know the feelings of fear, depression and guilt that accompany job loss. They’ve experienced the suffering as job applications are rejected, bills pile up and foreclosure is threatened. Normal people don’t smile about high unemployment; they cringe.
Romney contends he’s the fella to fix those unemployment numbers. But his record as CEO of Bain Capital and governor of Massachusetts provides little evidence of that. The focus of Bain was never job creation. It was money making. And if making money meant destroying jobs, that’s what Bain did.
An analysis by the Wall Street Journal of the companies Bain bought in the 15 years Romney ran it found that 22 percent went bankrupt or closed within eight years. That’s untold thousands of workers who lost their jobs and untold thousands of Bain creditors who endured losses because of bad Bain business practices.
Romney has frequently contended Bain created 100,000 jobs while he led it. The Washington Post fact checker awarded that claim three Pinocchios. After Republican rivals Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry chanted, “show us the jobs,” Romney lowered the number. Kinda significantly. Down to tens of thousands of jobs. Finally, Romney cut the figure even further, releasing a campaign video saying he’d created “thousands of jobs.”
If “thousands” is true, that’s good. But, frankly, “thousands” over 15 years is hardly a bragging point for a candidate who contends his private sector experience will enable him to create the millions of jobs the nation needs.
Romney’s job generation as governor of Massachusetts doesn’t instill much confidence in his ability to perform on the national level either. Massachusetts added 45,800 jobs in the four years he was governor. While that’s positive, it occurred during a time of economic expansion nationally, not during the grave recession President Obama inherited.
In addition, Massachusetts’ net jobs growth declined to 1.4 percent during Romney’s governorship, significantly lower than the 5.8 percent growth in the rest of the nation. In fact, Massachusetts dropped to 47th for job growth during Romney’s reign, far lower than during his predecessor’s time.
Romney claimed at one point during the campaign that he was unemployed, and laughed about it. But this quarter billionaire doesn’t have a clue what it’s like to really be jobless or desperate. This is the silver-spoon son of a car company executive, a man who attended exclusive private schools, a man who handed his own son $10 million to help start his business, a man who has a car elevator in his $9 million California beach house.
This is a candidate who mocked NASCAR fans for wearing cheap rain slickers while his wife wears $1,000 silk t-shirts. This is an owner of three homes valued at a total of $20 million who opposed helping underwater homeowners, saying the foreclosure crisis should “run its course and hit bottom.”
This is a man who actually said he likes to fire people. Not hire people. Fire people. Here’s what he said:
“I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”
The slow jobs growth in May is not surprising, frankly, considering the economic contraction occurring in Europe and even in China. In the 17-nation Eurozone, unemployment now has risen to a record 11 percent, far higher than in the United States where Obama’s Recovery Act prevented the country from falling off the cliff into another Great Depression.
Unlike the United States and China, both of which invested in stimulus, Europe chose austerity. Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland and Great Britain now are suffering economic contraction and distress caused by austerity.
That’s what Romney and the Republicans propose for America. Austerity. Job contraction. Recession. Suffering.
It’s not true what Romney says about Americans. They aren’t jealous of his wealth. They don’t care that he and his wife ride $100,000 horses. They just want to be able to afford a rocking horse for their kid. They don’t care about the Romneys’ vacations in France. They just want to be able to save enough to get the kids a season pass to the municipal pool.
They don’t, however, want their country run by a guy who can’t conceive what it’s like to be unemployed and has made no effort to find out. They don’t want to be led by a guy who likes firing people. They don’t want a president who finds enjoyment in high unemployment.
BY: Leo W. Gerard, The Huffington Post, June 4, 2012
“We’ve Heard it All Before”: Hey Mitt, You Can’t Cry For Teacher When You Started The Fight
The latest attack from the Obama campaign takes aim on Romney’s rhetoric and record in Massachusetts.
The latest Obama campaign ad—which will air mainly in swing states—continues the attack on Mitt Romney’s record in Massachusetts: http://youtu.be/oWdZEJW1vWY
This attack goes directly to the heart of Romney’s presidential campaign. The Republican nominee has based his entire on argument on the claim that—by dint of his business experience—he is uniquely qualified to lead the country into a more robust recovery. Indeed, private sector experience has totemic properties in Romney’s narrative; Obama is a failure because he’s “never met a payroll” and “doesn’t understand the economy,” while Romney sees business as the most important qualification a president can have.
But, with a quote from Romney’s gubernatorial campaign—“I know how jobs are created”—the Obama campaign raises a basic question: When Romney ran for governor of Massachusetts he used his business experience as proof he could create jobs for Massachusetts, instead, he led the state to the bottom of the pack for job creation. Now, running for president, he’s using the same arguments. Why should we expect different results this time? This is a play on the familiar trope of the businessperson who talks more than they deliver, and it could be an effective assault on Romney’s perceived competence, especially if paired with continued attacks on Bain Capital.
The Romney campaign has had an interesting and familiar response to this attack. As Pema Levy points out at Talking Points Memo, the Romney team correctly hits Obama for neglecting the extent to which the former governor inherited a bad situation. Here’s Ed Gillespie, a surrogate for the Romney campaign:
“This is what they’re doing, Chris,” Gillespie said. “You take the first year, which is a low base year when the governor came in and took office, because it was 50th in job creation out of all of the states, dead last … and they’re averaging out over the four years. So, they are bringing down the gains of his fourth year in office, which shows the real impact of his policies and diluting it with the first year in office.”
This is exactly what the Romney campaign is doing with regards to Obama’s economic record. By blaming Obama for job losses that occurred before his policies passed or took effect, the Romney team is able to say that the United States lost jobs under his tenure. But if you count from when Obama’s policies took effect, then you end up with more than two years of private sector job growth.
This situation is similar to the one that developed last year, when the Romney team hammered Obama with a deeply misleading ad that took the president’s words out of context. When Democrats responded with their own set of context-free attacks, the Romney campaign cried foul. In other words, if the Romney campaign insists on using misleading attacks, then it has to expect that the same treatment in response. You can’t cry for teacher when you’re the one who started the fight.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, June 4, 2012
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