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“Mitt vs Stubborn Facts”: A Difficult Relationship For The Romney Campaign

John Adams once said, “facts are stubborn things.” These days, another Massachusetts politician has found that saying to ring especially true.

While it’s still unclear how Mitt Romney can be the CEO, chairman, president and sole shareholder of Bain Capital, a company that he claims no responsibility for, it’s become increasingly evident that candidate Romney simply doesn’t want to talk about the facts of his business record.

In an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, Romney suggested that to question his experiences is to “attack success.” If this is the case, and if we’re also not supposed to talk above a whisper about Mitt’s record as governor, including his signature accomplishment in health care reform, then which parts of his biography remain on the table?

Romney clearly prefers his largely undisclosed experiences in the private sector over his publicly poor record in Boston. At every turn, Romney and his campaign have attempted to steer the discussion toward business matters for just this reason.

But when the Washington Post took him up on it last month and published an article headlined “Romney’s Bain Capital invested in companies that moved jobs overseas,” the Romney campaign was caught flatfooted. The Post found that Bain Capital, the firm Romney spent much of his professional life building up, had invested in companies that had not only shipped jobs overseas — a practice of some concern to working- and middle-class Americans — but had pioneered the practice.

Romney’s campaign pushed back hard, claiming that the Post had its facts wrong. The campaign met with the Post’s editors and demanded a retraction, claiming that Romney had left Bain in 1999, supposedly before the outsourcing investment began. The Washington Post listened to the Romney side of the story but stood its ground.

Now we know why. The Boston Globe reported two weeks ago that Romney had signed official documents claiming to be the president and CEO of Bain Capital as late as 2002, when the company was actively building up firms that outsourced American jobs. He didn’t just say this casually at some dinner party; he swore it was the truth on Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

What did the Romney campaign do this time? It hit the “repeat” button and demanded a retraction from the Globe. Who are you going to believe, the campaign asked its hometown paper, me or your lying eyes? Once again, the investigative journalists stood by their reporting.

Since the Globe story, the hits have kept coming. The AP reported this week that Romney stayed in “regular contact” with Bain during his so-called absence, “personally signing or approving a series of corporate and legal documents through the spring of 2001.” Several sources are now saying that Romney made repeated trips to Boston to meet with Bain executives during this period, even though he recently told CBS’s Jan Crawford that he doesn’t “recall even coming back once to go to a Bain or a management meeting” during the period in question.

So despite what the Romney campaign claims, media interest in this story has nothing to do with attacking personal success in the private sector. It has nothing to do with avoiding the real issues of the campaign.

It has everything to do with attempting to get to the bottom of a situation in which what a candidate is saying seems to have come unglued from the stubborn facts.

Americans know that a level playing field empowers a successful economy. You want to talk about soaking the rich? Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney, paid an effective tax rate of nearly 37% in 1967. The elder Romney didn’t complain and released his tax returns to prove his compliance with the law of the land he wanted to lead. In 2010, Mitt Romney’s tax rate bobbed and weaved its way below 15% — and we know that only because the public had to pry his return (he has released only a full one) out of his clenched hands.

Even more fascinating than the fact that Romney’s father released 12 years’ worth when he ran for president in 1968 is the reason why. “One year could be a fluke,” the elder Romney said, “perhaps done for show.”

This country has a noble habit of withholding elected office from people who have trouble with the facts. Romney could end these discussions overnight by releasing his tax returns, as he has been called on to do by Republicans like Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.

Until he makes peace with the facts, Romney will be stuck at the intersection of what is both a character issue and a policy issue. If Romney won’t stand by his record at Bain, just like he won’t stand by his record as governor of Massachusetts, how exactly is the American public supposed to evaluate the candidate? And if he won’t disclose his own relationship with tax loopholes and offshore tax havens, leaving voters more questions than answers, how can the American people trust him to reform our tax code in a way that closes loopholes, eliminates free-riding and ensures that everyone is playing by the same rules?

Facts and the Romney campaign have a difficult relationship these days. But they do share one thing in common: They’re both stubborn.

 

By: Donna Brazile, CNN Contributor, CNN Opinion, July 27, 2012

July 30, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Mitt’s Olympic Meddle”: Romney Just Can’t Run Away From Fate

So the Republican presidential contender, eager to show off more than gubernatorial experience, travels overseas to bolster his foreign policy credentials. Then, in a TV interview, he blurts out a shockingly ill-considered, if undeniably true, observation that snowballs until the poor guy collapses into an international punch line.

It was a vertiginous fall for George Romney, who, while running for president in 1967, asserted that generals and diplomats had given him “the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get” when he toured Vietnam two years earlier.

And it was painful for Mitt, who had to watch his father’s epic gaffe from afar, while he was over in France struggling to drum up a few Mormon converts.

In their book “The Real Romney,” Michael Kranish and Scott Helman quoted Mitt’s sister Jane as saying the episode deeply affected Mitt: “He’s not going to put himself out on a limb. He’s more cautious, more scripted.”

That’s when Mitt began to build his own sterile biosphere, shaping his temperament and political career to make sure he never stumbled into such a costly moment of candor.

Even though the Mormon doesn’t drink coffee, he has measured out his life in coffee spoons, limiting access to reporters, giving interviews mostly to Fox News, hiding personal data, resisting putting out concrete policy proposals, refusing to release tax returns, trimming his conscience to match the moment, avoiding spontaneity. But somehow he ended up making the same unforced error that his dad did.

It’s like the epigraph in John O’Hara’s “Appointment at Samarra.” You can run from fate, but fate will be waiting in the next town, at the next marketplace.

Even as he angled to appear Anglo-Saxon and obsequiously vowed to restore the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office, Mitt condescended to the nation that invented condescension. The Brits swiftly boxed his ears for his insolence and foul calumny.

Conservatives in London oozed scorn. Mayor Boris Johnson mocked “a guy called Mitt Romney,” and Prime Minister David Cameron suggested it was easier to run an Olympics “in the middle of nowhere.” Fleet Street spanked “Nowhere Man” and “Mitt the Twit.”

Conservatives on Fox News were dumbfounded. “You have to shake your head,” Karl Rove said. Charles Krauthammer pronounced the faux pas “unbelievable, it’s beyond human understanding, it’s incomprehensible. I’m out of adjectives.”

The alarming thing about Romney is that he has been running for president for years, but he still doesn’t know how to read a room. He doesn’t take anything in, he just puts it out. He doesn’t hear himself the way the rest of us hear him.

In the Mitt-sphere, populated by his shiny white family, the Mormon Church and a narrow, homogenous inner circle, Romney’s image of himself as wise, caring, smart and capable is relentlessly reinforced. That leaves him constantly surprised that other people don’t love what he is saying.

We may wince when the blithering toff, or want-wit, as Shakespeare would say, arrives at the Brits’ home and throws his Cherry Coke Zero can in the prize rose bushes. But what drives his gaffes is his desire to preen over accomplishments.

As a candidate, he’s expected to stoop to conquer, to play a man of the people. But he really wants voters to know that he earned $250 million, and not even in the same business where his dad made a name for himself.

So he keeps blurting out hoity-toity stuff to make sure we know he’s not hoi polloi — about his friends who are Nascar owners, his wife’s Cadillacs, how he likes to fire people and how he, too, is unemployed. And he builds a car elevator in the middle of an economic slough.

In his interview with Brian Williams in London, Romney couldn’t resist giving himself the laurels for saving the Salt Lake City Games by analyzing whether the British ones were off by a hair, or a hire.

Then he tried to scamper back to the obligatory common-man script and ended up looking clumsy and the one thing he most certainly is not: unuxorious.

After going all the way to London to see the Olympics, he decides he won’t watch his wife’s mare, Rafalca, compete in horse ballet? He tries to win the political horse race by going to the Games, which are literally a race in which he has a horse, and then feigns disengagement?

“This is Ann’s sport,” Romney told Williams dismissively. “I’m not even sure which day the sport goes on. She will get the chance to see it. I will not be watching the event.”

He came across like a wazzock, as The Daily Telegraph called him, using a British insult for a daft know-it-all.

Romney programmed himself into a robot, so he wouldn’t boil over with opinions and convictions, like his more genuine dad.

But if we’re going to have someone who’s removed, always struggling to connect and emote, why not stick with the president we already have?

Better the android you know than the android you don’t know.

 

By: Maureen Dowd, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 28, 2012

July 30, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Speaking In Secret Code”: Romney’s Love Letter To The Israeli Right Wing

Usually Mitt Romney’s problem, as we saw in London, is that he says something obnoxious. But on Friday, to the right-wing Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, owned by Las Vegas mogul Sheldon Adelson, he said something that simply made no sense, about George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and the Arab Spring. Check that: it made no sense unless you keep up with the tergiversations and vanishing-commissar new versions of history propounded by the neocons and duly followed by Romney. Once again, Herr Mittens proves that there are times when he emphatically does not misspeak—when he’s sucking up to the right.

Israel Hayom asked Romney: “How do you view the Arab Spring and the way in which the U.S. responded to the uprisings in those Arab states?” Romney’s reply has to be reprinted in full to be savored properly: “Clearly we’re disappointed in seeing Tunisia and Morocco elect Islamist governments. We’re very concerned in seeing the new leader in Egypt as an Islamist leader. It is our hope to move these nations toward a more modern view of the world and to not present a threat to their neighbors and to the other nations of the world.

“The Arab Spring is not appropriately named. It has become a development of more concern and it occurred in part because of the reluctance on the part of various dictators to provide more freedom to their citizens. President [George W.] Bush urged [deposed Egyptian President] Hosni Mubarak to move toward a more democratic posture, but President Obama abandoned the freedom agenda and we are seeing today a whirlwind of tumult in the Middle East in part because these nations did not embrace the reforms that could have changed the course of their history, in a more peaceful manner.”

What does this even mean? If this reads to you like some kind of sign language or secret code, you aren’t far off the mark. Romney is speaking a kind of code. As Daniel Larison points out in The American Conservative, what Romney is trying to do is finesse his way around the two phases of the Arab Spring.

There was a time, see, when the Arab Spring was a good thing to the neocons. That it was happening at all was solely a reflection of Bush’s courageous “freedom agenda” and had nothing to do with anything done by Obama, even though it was all happening on Obama’s watch. That was in the early phase, the hopeful, Tahrir Square-centered, throwing-off-the-yoke-of-oppression phase.

But then the Arab Spring mutated into phase two, the democracy phase, when people started voting and, damn them, started voting fundamentalists into office. Suddenly, the Arab Spring wasn’t a glorious manifestation of the freedom agenda. Now it was a dark turn toward a pan-Muslim hegemony that was to be pinned, naturally, on the Muslim in chief in the White House.

So that explains part of Romney’s answer. The other part requires a leap of faith across some vast Grand Canyon of statecraft. So let’s get this straight: if Obama had continued Bush’s agenda, Romney’s saying, then Mubarak would have felt pressured to give more freedom to his citizens—so we’d have a freer Egypt, but with Mubarak still in charge. Um…sure. Just like he did when Bush was pressuring him, and he did almost nothing, a few fig-leaf local elections that meant little.

In its way, it’s kind of elegant. Romney manages to speak highly and sorrowfully of the freedom agenda, and thus to praise Bush. He disparages Obama. And—and here’s the real key to this puzzle—he signals to right-wing readers of this interview in Israel that we’d all be better off if the whole thing had never happened and Mubarak were still in power, closing off those tunnels in Gaza, never mind how full his jails were of his own people. That was his narrow intent—to speak to a conservative Israeli readership, and, who knows, perhaps Adelson himself.

More broadly, Romney’s remarks betray an odd attitude toward history. First of all, it is worth remembering that Bush’s freedom agenda involved, you know, a war in which tens of thousands of people were killed and tens of thousands more turned into refugees. But second, would Romney really rather the Arab Spring never happened? Yes, we’ll go through a period in which fundamentalist parties will prevail, but those parties will have to improve the lot of the citizens or they will, we hope, be held accountable. It’s a regrettable but inevitable phase of the process, and the region has to pass through it, no matter who the American president is and what kind of speeches about freedom he gives.

In other words, democracy for Arab people is OK, maybe, provided American liberals and Democrats don’t get any credit for helping the cause along, and most of all provided the democratization process causes the Israeli right wing no discomfort. Both conditions, especially the second, render the whole project a nullity.

It certainly and quite directly raises the question of how a President Romney would have positioned the United States during the Tahrir Square uprising. With the batphone to his great pal Bibi beeping and blinking nonstop, would Romney in essence have backed Mubarak? Would he have placed the United States against those striving people in the street because however many months later, they were likely to vote the wrong way?

Romney may not know what he’s saying when the topic is Britons’ collective will or “varmint” hunting or the quality of cookies served by working-class Pennsylvanians. But he knew exactly what he was saying in that interview, and the results are sadder to contemplate than his famous errors.

 

By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 28, 2012

July 30, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Super Rich Playboy”: The Politics Of Mitt Romney’s Dancing Horse Ballet

The animal kingdom has been inhospitable to Mitt Romney in this election cycle.

First there was the damaging story of Seamus, the Irish setter he strapped to the roof of the Romneys’ car on a family trip.

Now it seems that, when it comes to Romney’s political aspirations, Seamus may not be the most dangerous animal in the family menagerie. This past week belonged to Rafalca, the dancing horse.

Rafalca, a 15-year-old Oldenburg mare owned in part by the Romneys, qualified as a member of the U.S. Olympic team and will compete in London in the dressage competition — a form of ballet for horses and their riders in which the animals do pirouettes and serpentines. They also do piaffes, which, according to the International Equestrian Federation, is a “highly collected, cadenced, elevated diagonal movement” in which “the haunches with active hocks are well engaged.” Rafalca, after qualifying, flew across the Atlantic on a FedEx jet (no, they didn’t strap her to the roof) and reportedly dined on an in-flight meal of watermelon.

Understandably, Romney was wary about discussing dressage when NBC’s Brian Williams asked him in London on Wednesday about his equine Olympian. “You actually have a horse in the race. What’s that gonna be like?”

“Well,” Romney replied. “It’s — a big — exciting experience for my wife and — and for the person that she’s worked with, the trainer of the horse who’s riding the horse. And — obviously, it’s fun to be part of the Olympics in any way you can be part of them.”

Williams followed up: “When is the event, and for those of us who don’t follow the sport, what happens? Are there rounds that — of competition? Is there just one chance? What happens?”

Romney pleaded ignorance. “I have to tell you, this is Ann’s sport. I’m not even sure which day the sport goes on. She will get the chance to see it, I will not — be — watching — the event. I hope — her horse does well.”

It was arguably Romney’s worst interview since Chris Wallace asked him about Seamus. The flustered candidate went on to disparage the British preparation for the Olympics, setting off an international incident.

It’s understandable that Romney would be reluctant to discuss dressage. Seamus may have made him look odd, or insensitive. Rafalca makes him look like a super-rich playboy.

John Kerry was made to look effete in 2004 by Republican mockery of his windsurfing, his Turnbull & Asser shirts and his French fluency. Now Democrats have a chance to do something similar to Romney, with his Swiss bank account, his Grand Cayman and Bermuda tax havens, his multiple homes, his $10,000 bet, his friends who own NASCAR teams, and now the six-figure horses his wife imports from Europe. Nothing says “man of the people” quite like horse ballet.

Ann Romney takes umbrage at the criticism, saying that dressage has helped with her multiple sclerosis. That was enough to get the Democratic National Committee to back away from a video campaign showing Rafalca spliced with Mitt Romney “dancing around” questions about his tax returns.

While it’s heartening that Ann Romney has been helped by the horses, most MS sufferers don’t have the luxury of importing $100,000 horses from Europe. And the candidate’s disavowal of dressage as “Ann’s sport” isn’t quite right.

In an interview with the Web site Chronicle of the Horse, Rafalca’s trainer, Jan Ebeling, said Mitt Romney selected the music for the horse’s routine at an international competition; Ebeling, in another interview, said the former Massachusetts governor, inspired by his wife, “really enjoys the horses.” Romney joined his wife at an Olympic qualifying dressage event in April 2008, and the couple declared a $77,731 loss on their 2010 tax returns for their share of Rafalca’s care.

That’s a lot of hay (and another possible reason for the candidate’s disinclination to release more tax returns), but consider what the Romneys get for their money: a horse that can do not only a Reinback, a Shoulder-in and a Travers, but a Flying Change of Leg, a Renvers and a Half-Pass.

“The object of Dressage is the development of the Horse into a happy Athlete through harmonious education,” the equestrian federation explains. “As a result, it makes the Horse calm, supple, loose and flexible, but also confident, attentive and keen.”

Sounds as if this is worth seeing. For the record, the dressage events begin Aug. 2 at Greenwich Park. You can bet Mitt Romney won’t be there.

 

By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 27, 2012

July 30, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The GOP Has Reached A New Height”: Have Republicans Ever Hated A President More Than Barack Obama?

It’s getting harder to deny.

The widespread belief on the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim is one of the stranger features of this period in history. There are some of them who know that Obama says he’s a Christian but are sure that’s all an act designed to fool people, while he secretly prays to Allah. But there are probably a greater number who haven’t given it all that much thought; they just heard somewhere that he’s a Muslim, and it made perfect sense to them—after all, he’s kinda foreign, if you know what I mean. Rather remarkably, that belief has grown over time; as the latest poll from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows, fully 30 percent of Republicans, and 34 percent of conservative Republicans, now believe Obama is Muslim. These numbers are about double what they were four years ago.

You can bet there aren’t too many who think there’s nothing wrong with it if he were. For many of them, it’s just a shorthand for Obama being alien and threatening. So it leads me to ask: Can we say, finally, that no Democratic president has ever been hated by Republicans quite as much as Barack Obama?

In the past when this question has been asked, the sensible reply is to not forget history. After all, when Bill Clinton was president, one of the Republican Party’s most respected figures distributed videotapes of a documentary alleging that Clinton was the head of a drug ring and had murdered dozens of people. And they did impeach him the first chance they got. Republicans had a visceral hatred for Franklin Roosevelt, too.

But I really think we’ve reached a new height. What makes this different isn’t just the kind of venom you see among the party’s true-believing supporters but that the hate goes so far up, all the way to the top. The party’s candidate for president literally claims that Obama hates capitalism and is not really American (Mitt Romney recently said, and not for the first time, that Obama has a “very strange, and in some respects foreign to the American experience type of philosophy”). Liberals look at conservatives claiming that Obama is a socialist or that he doesn’t really love America and think, “Those people are nuts.” But there is practically consensus in the GOP that these things are true. If a Republican candidate came out today and said, “Barack Obama is a good person who loves his country, but I just think he’s wrong about policy,” that candidate would probably get kicked out of the party.

This antipathy has multiple sources interacting together, so it’s overly simplistic to say that it’s just because of Obama’s race, or it’s just because of heightened partisanship. But it’s getting harder and harder to claim that there’s ever been a Democrat Republicans hated more.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 27, 2012

July 29, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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