“Redefining Compromise”: The Radicalization Of The GOP
Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), a member of the House Republican leadership and the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, was recently asked about lawmakers’ capacity to compromise. As Robert Schlesinger noted, his response was illustrative.
“Compromising is one thing as long as you’re compromising and moving in the direction of your principles,” the right-wing lawmaker said. “If you’re compromising and moving away from the direction of your principles, I’m not sure it’s a compromise.”
And I’m not sure if Price has access to a dictionary. “Compromise” involves give and take, with concessions on both sides. To reach a resolution, compromise necessarily involves rivals accepting something less than their original goal.
I thought of Price’s recent comments again this morning after hearing the latest from Richard Mourdock, the Republicans’ U.S. Senate nominee in Indiana. He told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd this morning, among other things, “I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Mourdock also told CNN that bipartisanship means “Democrats joining Republicans to roll back the size of government,” and he told Fox News, “I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
In this guy’s mind, the only acceptable “compromise” is the one in which he gets what he wants.
Remember, Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein, centrist political scientists with enormous establishment credibility, have explained that American governance is broken because the Republican Party is “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
As Mourdock helps demonstrate, the radicalization of the GOP isn’t over. The costs for the nation will likely continue to be severe.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 9, 2012
“Crimes Against Accuracy”: Mitt Romney’s Truth-Free Campaign
The former Massachusetts governor has no use for honesty in his campaign.
If you haven’t already, you should read Ed Kilgore and Greg Sargent on Mitt Romney’s speech yesterday in Michigan, where he tried to clarify and contrast his approach on the economy. The message was typical of Romney’s rhetoric; an attempt to flip an attack and direct it at his opponent. In this case, Romney decried Obama as the purveyor of failed policies, and presented himself as a reform conservative in the mold of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats.
As Kilgore argues, the argument is laughable on its face. The Obama administration is staffed with Clintonites. It’s core policies—on health care, especially—were variations on policies pushed during the Clinton years, and Obama’s foreign policy falls well within the approach of the Clinton administration. What’s more, as Greg Sargent points out, there is no way in which Romney is running as a departure from the previous Republican administration. An RNC spokesperson summed this up well—the Romney agenda is the Bush platform, “just updated.”
But if there’s anything that truly stands out about Romney’s speech in Michigan, it’s the extent to which its stuffed with falsehoods, misrepresentations, and outright lies. Romney claims that Obama has brought “big government” “back with a vengeance”—the truth is that government spending has fallen sharply after a decade increase under President Bush (note: this isn’t a good thing). Romney attacks Obama’s plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts on the rich as a “throwback to discredited policies”, but doesn’t tell his audience that those are Clinton-era rates. He attacks the Affordable Care Act as a takeover of American health care (false), blames Obama for the accumulation of debt (false), and warns—apocalyptically—that Obama will “substitute government for individuality, for choice, for freedom.”
For political reporters with time and space constraints, there is no way to counter all of this, even if you had the inclination. On a regular basis, the Romney campaign issues so many distortions—so many lies—that it’s nearly impossible to keep up. New York Times editorial editor David Firestone is as frustrated as I am on the relentless march of Romney’s dishonesty:
[F]or months he and his campaign have pushed the boundaries of veracity on a huge range of subjects, from the number of jobs created during the Obama administration to the economy’s effect on women to the phony “apology tour” he claims the president has taken. For these crimes against accuracy he is chided by newspaper fact checkers and denounced by editorialists. […]
Otherwise, the Romney campaign hasn’t paid much of a price for its untruths. Mr. Obama has done his share of exaggerating, too, and voters may figure that all politicians do it. That’s a false equivalency: unlike Mr. Romney’s campaign, the president’s is grounded in reality.
Constant mendacity is the norm for Romney and his campaign, and odds are good that he won’t suffer for it. Campaign reporters don’t have a strong incentive to challenge him on his misrepresentations, and interested parties have a hard time dealing with the deluge. In other words, we should strap ourselves in and prepare for five more months of Romney’s truth-free operation.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, May 9, 2012
“Brilliant”: Joe Biden’s Gay Marriage Comment Was No Gaffe
From the press drubbing of White House press secretary Jay Carney this week, you’d think that the Obama administration had made some sort of huge faux pas, had displayed some devastating lack of discipline that exposed a divergence of opinion at the top and an inability to control it.
Please.
Here’s what happened: Vice President Joe Biden went on TV on Sunday and said he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage. This is a notable, but not all that interesting, difference of opinion from that of President Obama, who has backed the idea of civil unions but has balked at the idea of full-on gay marriage. Shock! Score! Big story!
It would be easy to believe that Biden, who (unfortunately but also endearingly) tends to say what’s in his head at the moment without first screening it for public consumption, had made a mistake by revealing his personal feelings on the matter. It’s why Biden is referred to, by people who don’t know him, as “gaffe-prone.” It’s why reporters who covered him as a U.S. senator always found him refreshing and frank and real (even if he did, on occasion, say he just had three seconds to talk and then 15 minutes later, you were kindly explaining you had a deadline and had to go). And it’s also why people could believe the highly improbable theory that Biden screwed up, said something that contradicted the president, and forced Carney to try to clean it up.
Again—please.
Obama’s well-positioned for re-election, but that means rallying a lot of supporters who really liked the idea of a transformational candidate in 2008, and now aren’t so sure much has been transformed. Mitt Romney will surely have to do better than saying, “I’m not that guy,” to win the White House. But Obama can’t get his base to the polls by saying, yeah, I know I didn’t do everything I promised or hoped, but think how much worse it would be if you elected the other guy. He needs to get the base to the polls.
Gays and lesbians are part of that equation. They’re not a huge part of the equation, but in a race where battleground states could be decided by a couple of percentage points, Obama can’t risk losing them. And yet, he can’t freak out the independents who might not be so comfortable with gay marriage. And perhaps even more, he can’t so anger evangelicals (who are unhappy with Romney and might stay home) that they actually enthusiastically go out and vote for Romney.
What to do, what to do.
Well you could have your vice president saying he’s OK with gay marriage (becoming the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to make such a statement), making gay and lesbian activists (and their straight supporters) happy. Then, you could have the White House officially saying Obama’s opinion on the matter is still “evolving,” appeasing independents and yet giving gay activists hope that Obama might “evolve” toward the direction of his veep. And you could also give a little comfort to those who like to believe that Obama picks people who are true advisers, and not just sycophants.
And just to be sure, your Department of Education secretary, Arne Duncan, by happenstance mentions on a national broadcast that he, too, supports gay marriage. Look at those high-ranking Obama administration officials, coming out for gay marriage! And look at the president, not just giving in to people he outranks!
The “mixed message” the White House issued on gay and lesbian rights wasn’t a mistake. It was brilliant.
By: Susan Milligan, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, May 8, 2012
“Rewriting History, Again”: No, Mitt Romney Didn’t Save The Auto Industry
One might think that presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney would be a little more careful on two fronts: thinking about how his comments will come across before he says them, and being sensitive to concerns about him changing his views on things. So what would lead a smiling Romney to take credit for the resurgence of the automobile industry?
Somewhat incredibly, Romney, campaigning recently in auto industry-reliant Ohio, told a Cleveland radio station:
I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back. My own view is that the auto companies needed to go through bankruptcy before government help. And frankly, that’s finally what the president did. He finally took them through bankruptcy.
Forget about the auto industry turnaround; Romney’s remarkable statements represent a turnaround in either policy or memory that makes the stunning new success of GM pale in comparison. This is a candidate who, in 2008, penned a New York Times op-ed entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” And while the headline (which Romney did not write) was a tad provocative, Romney was very clear in the piece in saying that if the auto bailout went ahead, “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”
It’s hard to imagine Romney forgot about that op-ed, which has been resurrected many times in the media. It’s a weakness for Romney in the industrial Midwest. But purporting to be the source of Obama’s strategy (as if the president was taking advice from Romney) is a metaphorical shaking of the Etch A Sketch that requires a bodybuilder to achieve.
A lot of conservatives are unhappy with Romney, and it’s not just because they don’t think he’s conservative enough, it’s because they aren’t confident he means what he says about conservative issues. The man who promised to be more pro gay rights than late Sen. Ted Kennedy has a hard time convincing social conservatives he will be the opposite. The man who once supported abortion rights has a tough task in convincing the GOP base that he feels differently now. It’s one of the reasons primary foe Rick Santorum took so long to endorse Romney, and then did so in a long E-mail to Santorum supporters—an E-mail in which he delivered the most tepid of endorsements to Romney. So attempting to rewrite history for voters in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania doesn’t help with his image.
Romney’s argument in 2008 would look smarter if Obama’s strategy didn’t work. But it did, and even if Romney has a sincere free-market opposition to industry bailouts, he could acknowledge that happy development without endorsing government ownership of private industry. He could say, Gosh, I’m glad things are looking up. But we’re going down a dangerous road if we let the federal government tinker with private companies that way. It undermines the principles of the free market and entrepreneurship, and it exposes the government to private-sector losses if the companies don’t rebound. That’s a less powerful argument to make now that the auto industry is coming back, but at least it’s sincere and consistent.
It’s also possible that this is all about Obama, and the refusal by some of his opponents to give him credit for anything, even if there’s a clear success. Obama gave the order to kill Osama bin Laden, and it worked—the most hated man in America is dead, and not a single Navy SEAL died in the mission. But many Republicans first blasted Obama for not crediting Bush’s work on the effort, and now are mad because Obama is touting the major success as some proof that, well, he’s done some good things in office. No one can credibly argue that it’s bad that bin Laden is dead, so Obama critics—who still can’t seem to accept the fact that he’s actually the president—want to argue that Obama had little to do with it.
That makes Romney’s “I take a lot of credit” comment especially jarring. If it’s “spiking the ball” for Obama to take credit for killing bin Laden, how do we characterize the words of a candidate who takes credit for something he opposed, but which turned out to be successful? The campaign, like most campaigns, will erase some of the past with a symbolic Etch A Sketch. But you can’t Etch A Sketch away history.
By: Susan Milligan, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, May 9, 2012
“No Core, No Backbone”: Far Right Would Lead Romney Around By A Ring In His Nose
Believe that, as President, Mitt Romney would revert to his days as a “Massachusetts Moderate?” Think again.
Every bit of evidence indicates that if he were President, the Far Right would lead Romney around by a ring in his nose.
Just last week, we saw it clearly on display. It didn’t take but two weeks for the Far Right to force the Romney campaign to sever its ties with openly gay Richard Grinnell, who it had hired as its foreign policy spokesman. The campaign itself argued that it had begged Grinnell to stay. But right wing talk show host Brian Fischer of the American Family Association, who had led the drive to force Grinnell’s resignation, declared it a major victory.
On his radio show, Fischer bragged that Romney had learned his lesson and would never again hire a gay or lesbian in a major campaign role. And you certainly didn’t see Romney contesting that assessment.
Instead we’ve seen Romney lined up shoulder to shoulder on TV with Tea Party icon Michele Bachmann, and Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell — a potential Romney VP pick and a champion of “trans-vaginal ultrasounds.”
The reason why there is not a chance that Romney will ever reinvent himself once again as a “moderate” is that he wasn’t really a “moderate” in the first place. He’s always practiced one version or the other of ultra right wing, “let Wall Street run wild” Romney economics. And he’s never given one thought to firing workers, cutting pensions, loading companies with debt and bleeding them dry of millions of dollars.
But you can’t really say that he is a committed believer in any economic principle or political value. Mitt Romney is committed to one thing and one thing alone — his own success. He has shown he has no core values whatsoever.
That’s why it wasn’t hard at all for Romney to shed his “moderate” past positions on issues like abortion rights, contraception, gay rights and immigration and to become what he himself calls a “severe conservative.”
Why will he remain a “severe conservative” if he is elected President? Because people who have no core values have no backbone. You won’t find Mitt Romney taking a stand against the dyed-in-the-wool ideologues that dominate the Republican caucus in Congress.
Those Republican ideologues may be way out of the mainstream, but they definitely have core values. Some of them were so committed to those values that they were willing to take our country to the brink of bankruptcy last year due to their unwillingness to give an inch of compromise.
The plain fact is that people with no core values never stand up to people who have core values. The fact is that Mitt Romney has the backbone of a jelly fish and that is precisely why the first time the ultra right wing pulls his chain and demands that he heel, he will fall right into line.
Even if he decided he wanted to challenge the right wing agenda propounded by the committed minions of the Tea Party, in a confrontation he would fold in an instant. When you have no core values, it’s always much easier to go along with the demands of passionate, committed true-believers than it is to stand your ground.
And the Far Right knows this is true. Last week, right wing icon Grover Norquist was very clear. He said he was not looking for presidential leadership from Romney. He believes that the leadership of the Republican Party will continue to come from right wing Republicans in Congress. All he asked of a president, he added, was enough digits on his hand to hold a pen to sign the bills embodying Congress’ right wing agenda.
Watch how Romney behaves when he delivers the commencement speech at far right Liberty University on May 12. Liberty University was founded by the late Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell. Now it’s run by his son, Jerry Falwell Jr.
After the 9/11 attacks, Falwell Sr. said that “abortionists,” “feminists,” and “the gays and the lesbians” helped cause the 9/11 attacks. According to CNN:
On the broadcast of the Christian television program ‘The 700 Club,’ Falwell made the following statement: ‘I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’
Until recently, Liberty University banned inter-racial marriages between its students. Today it requires parental permission.
As recently as 2010, Liberty University Law School withdrew as a co-sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference in protest after the conference allowed the homosexual group GOProud to co-sponsor the event.
When Romney speaks at Liberty University will he speak out against that kind of intolerance? Or, true to form, will he instead worship at the altar of ultra-right wing ideology and say just what the leadership of Liberty University wants to hear? I might be wrong, but I’ll bet that not one critical word escapes his lips.
Romney’s unwillingness to challenge the far right does not pertain solely to the social conservative right. It also goes for economic right wingers like Grover Norquist, who want to return America to the bad old days of more Bush-like tax cuts for the wealthy, and the deregulation of Wall Street that did such damage to the middle class and led to the Great Recession that cost 8 million jobs.
And it also goes for the Neo-Con foreign policy right. Seventy percent of the 40 individuals identified by the Romney campaign as its foreign policy advisers served in the Bush administration and were responsible for the catastrophic Neo-Con foreign policy.
No, in exchange for the Republican nomination, Romney has sold his soul to the extreme right. He has willingly walked into the right wing inner sanctum, and even if he wanted to, he doesn’t have the backbone to escape.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post, May 6, 2012
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