“He’ll Do What He’s Told”: Conservatives Prepare to Boss Mitt Romney Around
Alexis Levinson of The Daily Caller has a short item up where she interviews some of the executive officers of FreedomWorks about a possible Mitt Romney presidency. They are remarkably sanguine about the possibility:
In a sit down with The Daily Caller, FreedomWorks Chief Operating Office and Treasurer Ryan Hecker, and Executive Director Russ Walker, explained that they were focused on their “Senate strategy” — getting strong conservatives into the Senate who can work with the House conservatives to drive an agenda, regardless of who is in office.
Most Americans assume that leadership in the country comes from the Presidency downwards. Freedomworks thinks it can come from the Congress and that Romney’s actual political opinions are irrelevant:
“The smaller-government movement has always looked for the man or the woman on the white horse to come in, take the presidency and move good policy. And the truth is, you can’t do it without a caucus within the Senate and the House that’s willing to move that same policy,” Walker said. “And our perspective is that if we build that caucus … that they will push good policy to the president regardless of who’s [in the White House].”
The most stunning part has to be when Freedomworks explains what they think will make Romney a historic president:
“My hope is that fifty years from now, someone is going to write a biography and it’s going to be known that Romney was one of the most conservative presidents in American history, and a conservative hero,” Hecker echoed. “And it’s going to be because a conservative Senate put bills in front of him that he signed.”
He joked that fifty years from now, Romney, who is currently being slammed for his political flip-flops, would have “a monument in D.C. or something because of his conservative bona fides.”
What would a monument to political obsequiousness look like?
This sentiment coming from Freedomworks may have first been expressed by Grover Norquist at CPAC. Clearly, the mood is spreading. Expect more conservative organizations and pundits to get the memo as it becomes obvious that Romney is going to be the nominee.
It will be a pretty interesting pitch: “Vote for Romney: He’ll Do What He’s Told.”
By: Noah Kristula-Green, The Daily Beast, March 22, 2012
“But For The Rest Of The Story”: Romney “Etches” Out History Of The Bush Wall Street Bailout
Answering critics who are gleefully calling him the the Etch A Sketch candidate, Mitt Romney stood fast on one of his long-held positions Wednesday, defending George W. Bush’s financial bailout of Wall Street in 2008. That might be considered a rather gutsy stand, considering that Bush has been persona non grata among Republicans in this campaign, the conservative base despises the policy and Romney’s chief rival for the presidential nomination, Rick Santorum, has condemned the bailout as unnecessary and “injurious to capitalism.”
And what Romney said is at least partly true: almost every mainstream economist agrees that had there not been a bailout, the entire U.S. financial system would have collapsed and the nation would very likely be in the middle of a second Great Depression right now.
But in his remarks in Maryland, Romney also ignored–or etched out–much of the financial history that led to the bailout. “I keep hearing the president say that he’s responsible for keeping America from going into a Great Depression,” Romney said. “No, no, no. That was President George W. Bush and [then Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson that stepped in and kept that from happening.”
Umm, yeah, they did, but only after Paulson, as head of Goldman Sachs, lobbied to raise leverage limits that fueled Wall Street’s untrammeled risk-taking machine and after Bush, for eight years, sponsored low-income housing and deregulatory policies that promoted the illusory idea of a self-stabilizing Wall Street, gutted the financial regulatory system and set the stage for the disaster.
It is little remembered today that President Bush was so completely flummoxed by the financial collapse that, according to his own former speechwriter, Matt Latimer, he didn’t seem to comprehend at first what had happened, nor that the Treasury was planning to pay more for Wall Street’s toxic securities than they were really worth in order to sustain the reckless banks. “Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” he told Latimer plaintively. Just before the crash, Bush had hoped to deliver a series of “legacy speeches” touting his accomplishments, including a robust economy.
Romney, in his remarks, may have been just sketching out how he plans to run in the fall–as well as conveniently reminding voters of the story he hoped would dominate the news yesterday, that George W. Bush’s prominent brother, Jeb, had just endorsed him. But that’s no excuse for etching out the real story of what happened.
By: Michael Hirsh, National Journal, March 22, 2012
Mitt Romney’s “Freedom To Dream”: That Is, If You Just Forget About Reality
At this point, it appears that Mitt Romney delivers a “major” speech on the economy about once a month, apparently working under the assumption that, eventually, someone will take one of these speeches seriously. The last such effort, delivered to an empty football stadium in Detroit, didn’t go well, so the former governor gave it yet another try yesterday at the University of Chicago.
The event was largely overlooked — apparently, once-a-month economic speeches read from teleprompters on a weekday afternoon have started to bore political reporters — but the remarks were actually worth paying attention to. Jamelle Bouie described the speech as “a remarkable work of staggering dishonesty,” which struck me as more than fair.
I believe speechwriters tend to call remarks like Romney’s yesterday as “big picture speeches.” The former governor presented no specifics and offered no details about any aspect of his economic vision, but he used the word “freedom” 29 times, and the word “free” an additional 10 times — all while standing in front of six American flags — all of which apparently was supposed to distract the audience from the fact that Romney’s vision lacked all meaningful substance.
But there was something to be learned from the speech anyway. For one thing, Romney presented an economic vision that’s very conservative.
“[O]ne feature of our culture that propels the American economy stands out: freedom. The American economy is fueled by freedom. Free people and their free enterprises are what drive our economic vitality. […]
“Today, however, our status and our standing are in peril because the source of our economic strength is threatened. Over the last several decades, and particularly over the last three years, Washington has increasingly encroached upon our freedom…. If we don’t change course now, this assault on freedom could damage our economy and the well-being of American families for decades to come.
“We see this attack on our freedom in every corner of the economy.”
Just get the government out of the way and wait for “freedom” to solve all of our problems. Once we get pesky safeguards and regulations out of the way, we’ll be free to breathe dirty air and drink dirty water; we’ll be free of the burdens of affordable medical care; we’ll be free to watch Wall Street excesses rob the country blind; we’ll be free to slip into poverty into an inadequate safety net full of holes; we’ll be free of the homework assigned to college students; and we’ll be free to remain dependent on oil indefinitely.
It’s the kind of freedom that Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) will find inspiring, and working families will find crushing.
What’s more, yesterday offered a reminder as to just how dishonest Romney is prepared to be to advance his ambitions. To listen to this speech, you’d think that President Obama raised taxes instead of having cut them repeatedly. You’d think the stock market has been crushed by “restricted freedom,” instead of having soared under Obama’s watch. You’d think oil production has been sharply reduced, instead of having gone up each of the past three years.
And you’d think Obama vastly increased government spending and hired legions of new bureaucrats, none of which happened in reality.
“The reality is that, under President Obama’s administration, these pioneers would have found it much more difficult, if not impossible, to innovate, invent, and create.
“Under Dodd-Frank, they would have struggled to get loans from their community banks.
“A regulator would have shut down the Wright Brothers for their “dust pollution.”
“And the government would have banned Thomas Edison’s light bulb. Oh yeah, Obama’s regulators actually did just that.”
When Mitt Romney says “the reality is,” you can probably assume you’re not going to hear anything about reality. In this case, Romney is completely wrong about Wall Street reform; the Wright Brothers line doesn’t make sense; and the light bulb line refers to a Bush-era, bipartisan energy measure that doesn’t ban light bulbs at all.
“A remarkable work of staggering dishonesty,” indeed.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 20, 2012
“You Don’t Need To Know Anything Else”: It’s Okay If You’re Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney, blaming Rick Santorum for the passage of Obamacare because Santorum endorsed Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey (Feb. 22, 2012):
The reason we have Obama Care — the reason we have Obama Care is because the Senator you supported over Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter, the pro- choice Senator of Pennsylvania that you supported and endorsed in a race over Pat Toomey, he voted for Obama Care. If you had not supported him, if we had said, no to Arlen Specter, we would not have Obama Care. So don’t look at me. Take a look in the mirror.
Despite the ridiculousness of that argument (and it is especially ludicrous given Romney’s own failure to support Toomey), the next day Mitt Romney kept up the attack, this time slamming Santorum for having supported Specter’s 1996 presidential bid:
“There was also in 1996 when he supported Arlen Specter . . . He supported the pro-choice candidate, Arlen Specter,” Romney said, against a pro-life candidate, Bob Dole. “This taking one for the team, that’s business as usual in Washington.”
And on Monday, Romney’s campaign once again leveled the same attack on Rick Santorum, questioning his conservative credentials for having supported the moderate Specter.
Santorum says he endorsed Specter out of friendship because Specter was a colleague from Pennsylvania. And as HuffPost’s Sam Stein reminds us, that’s the same defense offered by Mitt Romney for his own support of Democrats:
“I don’t think they’re mortal sins for Republicans to make contributions to good people and to their friends, irrespective of their party,” he told reporters upon announcing his Senate bid, according to a February 3, 1994 Boston Herald article.”I place my friendship above politics. I have not been intent on plotting a political resume,” he declared elsewhere, according to a Boston Globe report from the day before.
The difference between what Romney was doing and what Santorum was doing is that Santorum was supporting a Republican while Romney was supporting a Democrat. Which brings us to a new acronym: IOKIYAMR. It’s okay if you are Mitt Romney, the concept that no matter what you do, it’s wrong … unless you are Mitt Romney.
So if you support a guy who later becomes a Democrat, it’s terrible, but if you support a Democrat, it’s okay, because IOKIYAMR.
If your name is Barack Obama and you sign into law health care reform plan that includes health care exchanges and an individual mandate, you’re an America-hating socialist, but if you do the exact same thing in Massachusetts and then support it at the federal level, it’s okay, because IOKIYAMR.
It’s the same reason that President Obama’s Iran policy is wrong (even though Mitt Romney shares the key substantive points) and it’s the same reason President Obama’s stimulus plan was bad (even though Mitt Romney called for a similar one). It’s the same reason it was wrong to vote for Rick Santorum in Michigan if you were a Democrat to screw with Republicans even though Mitt Romney voted across party lines in Massachusetts to screw with Democrats. If you’re Mitt Romney’s opponent, whatever you did was wrong, and whatever he did was right. IOKIYAMR. You don’t need to know anything else.
By: Jed Lewison, Daily Kos, March 20, 2012
“The Collapse Of Civilization”: GOP Releases Plan To Save America From The Poor
The House Republicans unveiled their new budget today, complete with a spooky video pressing home the point that only the House Republicans and their leader Paul Ryan stand between us and CIVILIZATIONAL COLLAPSE. Yes, the peril of rising debt is that bad. No, it’s not so bad that it’s worth restoring Clinton-era tax rates to prevent. But so bad that it’s worth throwing tens of millions of people off health insurance? Oh, yeah.
The first place to begin with the House budget is taxes. The plan is to slash tax rates, with the top rate dropping to 25 percent. The budget asserts that it will make up for most of the lost revenue by eliminating tax deductions, but it does not say which ones. This would require them to produce about $6 trillion worth of tax deductions. It would also ensure that, if they succeeded, taxes on the rich would fall, a lot, and taxes on many non-rich people would rise. This probably explains why they are not providing any details, which also explains why this promise would be tricky to fulfill. In any case, the upshot is that they have delineated $6 trillion worth of deficit-expansion, offset by unspecified promises to make it up.
On the spending side, things get somewhat more specific. Medicare would be partially privatized. The basic functions of government, like:
Over the next decade, Ryan would spend 30 percent less than the White House on “income security” programs for the poor — that’s everything from food stamps to housing assistance to the earned-income tax credit. (Ryan’s budget would spend $4.8 trillion over this timeframe; the White House’s would spend $6.8 trillion.) Compared with Obama, Ryan would spend 38 percent less on transportation and 24 percent less on veterans. He’d cut “General science, space, and basic technology” by 20 percent. And, compared with the White House, he’d slash “Education, training, employment, and social services” by a full 44 percent.
Do House Republicans really think the federal government is vastly overinvesting in things like roads and scientific research, or is this merely a gimmick to make their tax cuts appear affordable? It is hard to say.
They do genuinely seem to believe that the federal government spends way too much on the poor and sick, and move to correct that. Poor people, or people who have a family member with a serious medical condition, come in for special abuse here. The Republican budget would repeal the Affordable Care Act, which provides health insurance coverage to 30 million people, and replace it with nothing. On top of that, it would absolutely slash Medicaid and the childrens’ health insurance plan, eliminating coverage from 14-27 million more people (the wide variation reflects the fact that the outcome heavily depends on how states respond to the huge cuts, and the elimination of rules that force states to cover poor people.)
All in all, we have a standard mix of specific benefits for the rich, specific pain for the poor, and a lot of vague promises that would entail pain for the middle class, without committing themselves in a way that could hurt politically.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, March 20, 2012
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