George H. W. Bush’s Endorsement May Not Help Mitt Romney
It didn’t get a lot of attention when it happened, but former President George H. W. Bush recently tapped former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as his choice for the Republican presidential nomination.
The former president, who has largely been out of the limelight over the last 12 years, told the Houston Chronicle he thought “Romney is the best choice for us” because he was “not a bomb-thrower,” which most reasonable people would understand to be a not-so-veiled shot at former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Bush’s dislike of Gingrich, who was in the room at Andrews Air Force Base when the tax hike was negotiated but who then opposed the deal, is well known. The former president and some of his key aides still regard Gingrich’s behavior during the whole business as a betrayal and an act of disloyalty. But that does not completely explain the former president’s preference for Romney.
The former president’s advisors quickly pointed out that Bush’s comments did not constitute an “official endorsement” but any conservative who thinks Romney is the best man to carry the flag forward into the fall campaign may now want to think twice. Though he is beloved as a former president, there are many on the right who remember how Bush’s failure to keep his promise not to raise taxes s almost destroyed the modern GOP.
Back in 1988, when he was running far behind another former Massachusetts governor, Michael Dukakis, in the race for president, Bush promised that, if elected, he would govern just like Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately, he came up short—not only raising taxes but embarking on a regulatory assault on the U.S. economy that helped to create a downturn late in his first and only term. In short order he proved that he was no conservative, as those who were suspicious of him from the start had long maintained.
Romney too has been the subject of conservative suspicions. His one term as governor of Massachusetts was not exactly a triumph of limited government. His signature accomplishment, the rewriting of the state’s healthcare laws and the imposition of a universal mandate, is seen by many as far too similar to Obamacare for anyone to be comfortable. Getting Bush 41’s approval for his presidential bid will only help reinforce those suspicions, especially as the all-important Iowa caucuses draw near.
By: Peter Roff, U. S. News and World Report, December 27, 2011
Understanding Republican “Suicidal” Political Episodes
It wasn’t a great week for congressional Republicans, who ended up hurting themselves twice — they looked bad fighting to raise middle-class taxes, and then looked worse caving when the heat was on.
Jon Chait argued this week that GOP policymakers were so far around the bend, they looked politically “suicidal.”
The payroll tax debacle is now the third suicidal episode undertaken by the House Republicans since they took control of it at the beginning of the year. The first was when they voted almost unanimously for Paul Ryan’s budget, which was filled with grist for attack ads — huge cuts to Medicare, big tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulating Wall Street — despite it having no chance of passing this term.
The second was when they played chicken with the debt ceiling and turned a once-routine procedure into a white-knuckle game of chicken with the world economy.
And then this week, when they attempted to extract concessions in return for extending the payroll tax holiday, an anti-recessionary measure with strong support from economists, businesses, and voters. These are not just gestures. The right-wingers are really trying to off themselves.
I found all of this quite compelling, but it got me thinking about why Republicans, especially in the House, would be so cavalier about their own electoral futures. Usually, elected politicians want to win re-election, and take some steps while in office that voters will respect and appreciate. As part of the efforts that make it seem as if GOP officials “really trying to off themselves” politically, congressional Republicans appear to be making themselves less popular, almost on purpose.
Why on earth would they do this? I’ve been kicking around a few theories.
1. Republican lawmakers assume voters aren’t paying any attention. Politicians can get away with quite a bit if they think the public won’t know either way.
2. They assume Democrats, when faced with any pressure at all, will invariably surrender and give Republicans whatever they demand. That’s generally not a bad strategy, but it failed miserably in the fight over the payroll tax cut.
3. They assume the media will, under all possible circumstances, continue to tell the public “both sides” are always to blame for everything. This, too, is a pretty safe bet, but when even Republican media outlets turn against the GOP (take the Wall Street Journal editorial page, for example), this starts to fail.
4. They fear primary challengers. Under this model, Republicans know their extremism will offend the American mainstream, but if they’re defeated by even-more-conservative primary opponents, their careers are over anyway.
5. They figure major right-wing money — from the Koch Brothers, Crossroads GPS, assorted Super PACs, etc. — will come in before the election, destroy their Democratic challengers, and keep them in office no matter what they vote for.
6. They’re just nuts.
Why else would congressional Republicans take such breathtaking risks with their own electoral fortunes?
Update: Paul Krugman argues that I missed one: “reliable conservatives are assured of a safe landing even if they are defeated,” thanks to “wingnut welfare.” It’s a good point.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 24, 2011
Mitt Romney Relied On Corporate Welfare: How Bain Capital Leveraged Government Assistance To Boost Profits
During the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney has lashed out at the Obama administration’s taxpayer subsidized grants to clean energy start-up companies. “The U.S. government shouldn’t be playing venture capitalist,” wrote Romney in October. “The very process invites cronyism and outright corruption.” But public records show that Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, repeatedly persuaded the government to play venture capitalist when it came to its own portfolio of companies.
News outlets have recently focused attention on Romney’s history as a businessman at Bain, which he founded in 1984. What hasn’t been reported, or fully explained by the candidate, is how Romney often got ahead in the private sector by using government help.
The likely GOP nominee made much of his estimated $250 million fortune buying companies, reorganizing them, and selling them for a profit. Though Romney, whose only government experience is his one term as Massachusetts governor, is quick to claim that he turned around investments using sound management and data-driven strategies, he does not mention one aspect of his success. Bain Capital owned companies that padded their profits using millions in public subsidies. In other cases, firms owned by Bain employed K Street lobbying firms to pursue lucrative government programs.
Consider two of Romney’s first major investments: office supply company Staples Inc. and photo album manufacturer Holson Co. Both persuaded state officials to subsidize their growth.
Shortly after Bain took control of Holson in 1987, executives pushed for the company to expand in the South. Officials from the firm had negotiated with Gov. Carroll Campbell, a Republican, to extend $200,000 in utility support for a new Holson plant in the city of Gaffney. The local city council also approved a $5 million bond for construction, after meeting with representatives from Holson. Five years after South Carolina’s taxpayers had helped finance the factory, Bain chose to sell Holson’s Gaffney facility for $2.8 million. Romney’s firm reaped the profits on the taxpayers’ expenditure.
The history of Staples, a company that Bain grew from a single store, is a hallmark of the Romney record. Staples’ rapid growth, however, drew on substantial state subsidies.
In 1996, Tom Stemberg, a close Romney business partner leading Staples, met with Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, a Democrat, to negotiate a package of taxpayer sweeteners to build a new distribution center in Hagerstown. The Glendening administration, using a “Sunny Day” fund of discretionary development money, awarded Staples $2.3 million in grants and low interest loans. The following year, as Glendening prepared for his reelection campaign, top Staples executives maxed out in donations. Stemberg and his colleagues gave a total of $16,000.
A similar story played out in Connecticut, where Staples landed a deal in which taxpayers subsidized over $6 million in low-interest loans for the company to construct a distribution center in Killingly in 1998.
Tapping Washington
The federal government also played a pivotal role in Romney’s ascendant path through corporate America.
GS Industries, a steel company purchased by Bain in the early ’90s, faced fiscal problems as Bain withdrew large dividends and management fees. Under Bain’s leadership, the steelmaker hired the K Street lobbying firm of Wiley Rein to seek government support. In 1998-99 the firm paid $140,000 for a lobbying team that included former Democratic Rep. Jim Slattery. GS Industries eventually won a federal loan guarantee, but before the loan could be delivered, the company fell to bankruptcy in 2001. Bain’s executives still made $50 million from their involvement with the firm.
In 1999, Romney departed Bain to take over as the chief executive officer of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. The experience, turning an organization in disarray and deeply in the red into a popular event that actually earned over $100 million in profits, is portrayed as yet another example of the candidate’s private sector management skills. Yet the turnaround was achieved in part through the use of professional influence peddling. Under Romney’s management, the Olympic organizing committee spent over $3.3 million on Beltway lobbyists to secure federal funding for the 2004 Winter games.
Olympics lobbyists from firms like Patton Boggs and King & Spalding helped secure federal grants for communications equipment, educational money and public transportation. Millions of dollars were procured from federal officials, who wanted to allay safety concerns in the aftermath of 9/11.
As the New York Times reported earlier this week, Romney’s has continued to earn a windfall from Bain. When he left the firm, he signed a severance package that allowed him to share in the company’s profits in perpetuity. The arrangement might come back to haunt the candidate, given Bain’s increased reliance on lobbyists over the last five years.
Starting in 2007, Bain Capital began retaining various lobbying firms to pressure lawmakers to keep open a loophole that allows much of the earnings by private equity managers to be taxed as capital gains rather than the top income bracket of 35 percent. Given Romney’s profit-sharing retirement deal, the campaign to extend the loophole, which still hasn’t been closed, likely boosted the candidate’s fortune. (Romney has refused to release his tax return, leaving questions about his income.)
As Romney pillories Obama for using the government to fix problems in society (health reform, the auto bailout, etc.), he invites a closer examination of his own career. A balanced view of the Romney record shows he has never had any qualms about government help when it came to his own bottom line. Whether through hiring insider lobbyists or funneling taxpayer subsidies to his companies, government assistance has been part and parcel to the rise of Romney.
By: Lee Fang, Salon, December 21, 2011
“Insane”: Mitt Romney Goes Glenn Beck
Mitt Romney has reworked his stump speech and delivered the new version last night. It’s premised on … a total lie:
Just a couple of weeks ago in Kansas, President Obama lectured us about Teddy Roosevelt’s philosophy of government. But he failed to mention the important difference between Teddy Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Roosevelt believed that government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities. President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing—the government. The truth is that everyone may get the same rewards, but virtually everyone will be worse off.
This isn’t just a casual line. In eight sentences, Romney asserts over and over again that Obama wants to create “equal outcomes” and give everybody the “same rewards.” This is nuts, Glenn Beck–level insane. Restoring Clinton-era taxes is not a plan to equalize outcomes, or even close. It’s not even a plan to stop rising inequality. Obama’s America will continue to be the most unequal society in the advanced world — only slightly less so. The alternative proposals accelerate inequality even further.
This is a form of insanity that has become extremely pervasive in the Republican Party since 2009. The response to liberal invocation of rising inequality from the right’s intellectual leaders has been to argue against not liberal policies but against socialism. This wild lie has become so widespread that press accounts don’t even bother to mention it anymore.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, December 21, 2011
After Payroll-Tax Debacle, GOP Goes Into Damage-Control Mode
Atop the House chamber Wednesday morning, the flag fluttered in the breeze. In his office underneath the Capitol dome, House Speaker John Boehner twisted in the wind.
His House Republicans had killed a bipartisan plan to cut taxes for 160 million Americans, earning themselves an avalanche of criticism and condemnation from friend and foe alike. So Boehner assembled nine of his House Republican colleagues in his conference room, invited in the TV cameras, and proclaimed that Republicans really and truly want to enact the payroll-tax break that they just defeated.
“We’re here. We’re ready to go to work,” Boehner announced.
But the only thing he was working on, it turned out, was damage control.
Fox News’s Chad Pergram, noting that Boehner’s talking points were mostly about legislative process, asked: “Do you think that you’ve lost the argument?”
“We’re here. We’re ready to work,” the speaker repeated.
Reuters’s Tom Ferraro asked what Boehner made of the criticism from Senate Republicans “like Scott Brown, who says you’re playing politics.”
“We’re here, ready to go to work,” Boehner answered.
CNN’s Deirdre Walsh further annoyed the speaker by mentioning the savage editorial in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that branded the GOP payroll-tax strategy a “fiasco.” Another reporter asked if there might be some way to back down on his refusal to accept the Senate’s two-month extension of the payroll-tax cut.
“We’re here, ready to work,” Boehner said.
The Associated Press’s Dave Espo asked “if any of the 10 of you intend to go home for Christmas.
“We’re here, ready to do our work,” Boehner said.
At exactly the moment House Republicans were executing the failed photo-op, Democrats were on the House floor, trying to disrupt the day’s “pro forma” session with a stunt designed to further embarrass the majority.
Although most House members had gone home for the holidays, House leaders arranged the perfunctory sessions so that the chamber wouldn’t technically go into recess without passing the payroll-tax cut.
But as the speaker pro tempore, Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), sought to bring the pro forma session to a close, “pursuant to Section 3B of House Resolution 493,” Steny Hoyer, the Democratic whip, interrupted to request that the chamber bring up the Senate bill. Fitzpatrick walked off the dais.
“Mr. Speaker, you’re walking out!” Hoyer called after him. “You’re walking away just as so many Republicans have walked away from middle-class taxpayers.” A few seconds later, the sound system was cut off and the C-SPAN cameras were disabled.
Hoyer, joined by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), took his case to the microphones outside the House chamber, where a statue of the late humorist Will Rogers, hands in pockets, seemed to gaze at the pair with a look of amusement.
“The speaker of the House and the Republican leadership were AWOL,” Van Hollen complained.
That’s because the leaders were conferring nearby with their “conferees” – the people Boehner wants to negotiate a new tax deal with Democrats. But there is a problem with this plan: Senate Democrats already negotiated a compromise with Senate Republicans, and the House Republicans rejected it. And, to the Democrats’ delight, several of the “conferees” Boehner appointed are on the record opposing the payroll-tax cut.
“I’m not in favor of that. I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said one conferee, Dave Camp (Mich.), according to the Hill newspaper.
“From a policy standpoint, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” another conferee, Tom Price (Ga.) told National Public Radio.
The conferees did not address this awkwardness at their photo-op (aides, handing out seating charts to the photographers, didn’t pretend it was anything more than that), instead turning the discussion to non-sequiturs.
Price gave his perspective “as a physician.” Renee Ellmers (N.C.) delivered her remarks “as a nurse” and “as a mom.” Rep. Nan Hayworth (N.Y.) added the information that “I’m a doctor and a daughter of elderly parents” and has “also been a small employer.” Tom Reed (N.Y.) let everybody know “I have an 11- and 13-year-old at home.”
Congratulations, all around. None of these credentials, however, avoided the conclusion that the House Republicans had screwed up badly and now stand to take the blame if payroll taxes rise.
Two minutes after their photo-op, the conferees, abandoning the conceit that they were conferring over anything, left Boehner’s conference room.
“Is the conference over?” I asked Price.
He chuckled. “Legislation is not a game of solitaire,” he said.
But for House Republicans, it’s getting very lonely.
By; Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 21, 2011
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