“Aiding And Abetting”: Romney Joined Bush-Cheney Smear Campaign On John Kerry’s National Security Record In 2004
Mitt Romney doesn’t like it that President Obama’s re-election campaign in a new video decided to tout the president’s decision to order the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and to question — based on his comments from 2007 — whether Romney would have done the same thing. Here’s Romney complainingabout the video ad on CBS this morning:
ROMNEY: And the idea to try to politicize this, and to say, “oh, I, President Obama would have done it one way and Mitt Romney would have done it another,” is really disappointing. Let’s not make the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden a politically divisive event. There are plenty of differences between President Obama and myself. But let’s not make up ones based on, “Well he might not have done this.” It’s disappointing and it’s unfortunate and it’s taking an event that really brought America together.
Back in 2004, President Bush ran a smear campaign against challenger Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) which undermined his service in Vietnam and questioned Kerry’s ability and determination to protect the United States — just three years removed from the 9/11 attacks — from another terror strike. “If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again,” then Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.
And while Romney complains about Obama’s alleged “politicization” now, he willfully participated in the Bush-Cheney smear campaign on Kerry in 2004. During an August 9, 2004 (accessed via Lexis/Nexis) interview on Fox News, Romney suggested that Kerry would “twiddle his thumbs” when dealing with terrorism and in September 2004, also on Fox News, Romney said Kerry is too much of a flip-flopper to protect the country:
ROMNEY: [M]ost has already been said about John Kerry. I think people know pretty well that he’s a guy who has a hard time finding which side of a position to come down on. But I’m going to focus on the fact that our nation needs strong leadership. We’re under attack, militarily, economically. Our very way of life is under attack. And we need to have the kind of steady, strong leadership, which is represented by Dick Cheney, and by of course, President George W. Bush.
In his speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City, Romney said “America is under attack from almost every direction,” later adding, “On the just war our brave soldiers are fighting to protect free people everywhere, there is no question: George W. Bush is right, and the ‘Blame America First’ crowd is wrong.”
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent also notes that during his speech at the 2008 RNC, Romney “blasted Obama as untrustworthy when it comes to combating ‘the threat from radical, violent jihad,’ which he contrasted with John McCain, who, apparently unlike Obama, understands that ‘radical, violent Islam is evil,’ and will do everything he can to defeat it.”
“Republicans are — forgive the cliché — shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is ‘politicizing’ an important national event,” Jon Meacham writes today, noting that Obama’s alleged “politicizing” might be a bit different from what the GOP knows. “In this sense,” Meacham writes, “‘politicizing’ might be best translated as ‘beating us up and we don’t have anything much to say to stop it.”
By: Ben Armbruster and Igor Volsky, May 1, 2012
“Foul Subterfuge”: A GOP Witch Hunt For The Zombie Voter
Republicans are waging the most concerted campaign to prevent or discourage citizens from exercising their legitimate voting rights since the Jim Crow days of poll taxes and literacy tests.
Four years ago, Democrats expanded American democracy by registering millions of new voters — mostly young people and minorities — and persuading them to show up at the polls. Apparently, the GOP is determined not to let any such thing happen again.
According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which keeps track of changes in voting laws, 22 statutes and two executive actions aimed at restricting the franchise have been approved in 17 states since the beginning of 2011. By the center’s count, an additional 74 such bills are pending.
The most popular means of discouraging those young and minority voters — who, coincidentally, tend to vote for Democrats — is legislation requiring citizens to show government-issued photo identification before they are allowed to cast a ballot. Photo ID bills have been approved by Republican-controlled legislatures in Alabama, Kansas, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, and by referendum in Mississippi. Only one state with a Democratic-controlled legislature — Rhode Island — passed a law requiring voters to produce identification, and it does not mandate a government ID with a photo. In Virginia, Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell has not decided whether to sign a voter ID bill the legislature sent to his desk.
In theory, what could be wrong with demanding proof of identity? In the real world, plenty.
As Republican strategists are fully aware, minorities are overrepresented among the estimated 11 percent of citizens who do not have a government-issued photo ID. They are also painfully aware that, in 2008, President Obama won 95 percent of the African American vote and 67 percent of the Hispanic vote. It doesn’t take a genius to do the math: If you can reduce the number of black and Latino voters, you improve the Republican candidate’s chances.
If photo ID laws were going to be the solution, though, Republicans had to invent a problem. The best they could come up with was The Menace of Widespread Voter Fraud.
It’s a stretch. Actually, it’s a lie. There is no Widespread Voter Fraud. All available evidence indicates that fraudulent voting of the kind that photo ID laws would presumably prevent — someone shows up at the polls and votes in someone else’s name — just doesn’t happen.
For a while, the GOP pointed to South Carolina, where Republican Gov. Nikki Haley said that “dead people” had somehow cast ballots in recent elections. But then the state’s election commission investigated claims of 953 zombie voters and, um, well, never mind.
The number of voters came from a crude comparison of records done by the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. The elections commission actually found 207 contested votes. Of that total, 106 reflected clerical errors by poll workers, 56 reflected errors by the motor vehicles department, 32 involved people who were mistakenly listed as having voted, and three involved people who had cast absentee ballots and then died before Election Day.
That left 10 contested votes — count ’em, 10 — that could not be immediately resolved. However, the commission found no evidence of fraud. Or of zombies.
Of course, there are other potential kinds of electoral fraud; crooked poll workers, for example, could record votes in the names of citizens who actually stayed home. Election officials could design ballots in a way that worked to a specific candidate’s advantage or disadvantage (see Florida, 2000). But none of this would be prevented by photo ID, which still hasn’t found a problem to solve — except, perhaps, an excess of Democratic voters.
Even more sinister are new laws, such as in Florida, that make it much more difficult for campaigns — or anyone else — to conduct voter-registration drives. If you thought Republicans and Democrats agreed that more Americans should register to vote, you were sadly mistaken.
Florida requires that groups conducting registration drives be vetted and that registration forms be submitted within 48 hours of when they are signed — an onerous and unnecessary burden that only serves to hamper anyone seeking to expand the electorate. Let’s see, who might try to do such a thing? The Democratic Party, maybe? The Obama campaign?
In the name of safeguarding the sanctity of the ballot, Republicans are trying to exclude citizens they consider likely to vote for Democrats — the young, the poor, the black and brown. Those who love democracy cannot allow this foul subterfuge to succeed.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 30, 2012
“Trying To Rewrite History”: Mitt Romney’s Views On The Detroit Bailout
Over the weekend, a top GOP aide said President Obama got the idea from Romney. A look at his past positions shows that’s not true.
Over the weekend, top Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom made an audacious claim:
“[Romney’s] position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed. I know it infuriates them to hear that…. The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice.”
As Fehrnstrom predicted, liberals are reacting with irritation and incredulity. They point out — not for the first time — that Romney published a New York Times op-ed in November 2008, even before Obama had taken office, headlined, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”
The case is actually a little more complex than that, although Fehnstrom’s claim is still hard to take seriously. To understand how we got here, here’s a brief history of Romney’s statements on the car industry.
During the 2008 primary campaign, Romney won Michigan, a victory that was in part attributed to his promises to save the Motor City’s main industry. “If I am president, I will not rest until Michigan is back,” he said. “Michigan can once again lead the world’s automotive industry.” His campaign contrasted that with John McCain, who said, “I’ve gotta look you in the eye and tell you that some of those jobs aren’t coming back.” Romney’s main policy prescription was a series of federal spending for retraining and green tech, to be doled out in $20 billion chunks over five years. The McCain campaign derided thisas a “$100 billion bailout of the auto industry.”
By November 2008, shortly after Obama’s election, the economy was in free-fall. Here’s an excerpt from Romney’s now-infamous column:
If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed. Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself …. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
Romney called for a “managed bankruptcy,” in which company’s executives would be replaced and union contracts would be renegotiated with more favorable terms. Reversing his position during the Republican primary, he said shedding excess workers was now essential. He wanted the government to oversee the bankruptcy but for it be paid for with private-sector funding. But as former Obama administration “car czar” Steven Rattner and others have pointed out, there did not appear to be any private money on the sidelines. Markets were in disarray and credit was drying up fast — and so, they argue, the federal government’s coffers were the only thing standing between GM and the company’s total demise.
In May 2009, Romney appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, who pressed him on the issue:
WALLACE: Wouldn’t that, at a time when we were in the depths of the recession, when we were really right in the midst of what looked like a financial crisis — wouldn’t that have been disastrous for the economy?
ROMNEY: It’d have been precisely the right thing to do for the economy. To help General Motors at that point, before it had received tens of billions of dollars from the government, go through a structured process either in court or out of court to rid itself of its excessive union contract obligations, would have been the right course, and at that point the government could have helped with warranty guarantees and so forth, with debtor possession financing …. We wouldn’t have closed the business down or liquidated it, we instead would have helped it restructure. It was the right course to take, it’s being taken now, too late unfortunately, and as a result the government ends up with more than 70 percent of GM.
Already, we can see Romney struggling with the issue. But the gist of his main answer is already in place: The government funding was wrong, but the restructuring was right.
In June 2011, he reprised this point on the CBS Early Show: “When I wrote that the auto industry was asking for a bailout, we are unwise to send billions of dollars [to companies], instead — finally — the president recognized I was right, and finally took the company, in the case at General Motors, the company finally went through bankruptcy and went through a managed bankruptcy, came out of bankruptcy and is now recovering.”
With the Michigan primary looming in late February 2012, and his numbers sagging as Rick Santorum surged, Romney was again on the defensive. On February 14, he wrote an op-ed in the Detroit News (now paywalled online), writing, “The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.” He appeared with Wallace a few days later, and the host again pressed him. Romney once again insisted that GM could have gone through a managed bankruptcy without federal bailout funds.
That brings us to the present day, and Fehrnstrom’s comments. There have been two important shifts in Romney’s position. The first is from pre-recession, 2008 campaign Romney, who supported a $100 billion government investment in maintaining Detroit jobs, to recession-era Romney, who adopted the idea that the automakers needed pain — including potentially significant job loss — to survive. The major questions here are (1) whether it was feasible for the companies to find private financing to restructure and (2) whether the associated job loss and economic ripple effects would have been acceptable. While Romney is correct that the restructuring was what he suggested, his idea at the time was hardly unique; there was a consensus that the companies needed to be significantly reshaped. The question was how to do it, and he said the answer was without federal funds.
The second shift is from the the stance Romney has taken since his op-ed to Fehrstrom’s comments on Sunday. Fehrnstrom is overreaching in claiming that Obama adopted “exactly” what Romney recommended, given his longstanding opposition to the bailouts. It’s understandable that Romney would want to align himself with the successful rescue of the auto industry: While the bailouts are still unpopular with Americans overall, a plurality agree that they helped the economy. Moreover, the move is comparatively popular in Rust Belt states and among working-class white voters with whom Obama is otherwise weak.
Romney’s position on how to handle the carmakers may not have been realistic, but it was far less cartoonish than his liberal critics have suggested. Trying to rewrite history, however, won’t answer their attack.
By: David A. Graham, Associate Editor, The Atlantic, April 30, 2012
“Even Jimmy Carter”: From The Wimpy Guy Standing On The Sidelines
Mitt Romney informs us that the raid that took out Osama bin Laden one year ago was no big deal, because “even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.”
Grrrrr.
Necessary disclosure: I worked for Jimmy Carter and admire his intentions, his character, and many of his achievements, although I am not usually considered an uncritical booster of his record as president.
But let’s remember:
1) Jimmy Carter is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who spent ten years in the uniformed service of his country. As far as I can tell, this is ten years more than the cumulative service of members of the Romney clan. Obviously you don’t have to be a veteran to have judgments about military policy or criticisms of others’ views. But when it comes to casual slurs about someone else’s strength or resolve, you want to be careful, as a guy on the sidelines, sounding this way about people who have served.
2) Jimmy Carter did indeed make a gutsy go/no-go call. It turned out to be a tactical, strategic, and political disaster. You can read the blow-by-blow in Mark Bowden’s retrospective of “The Desert One Debacle.” With another helicopter, the mission to rescue U.S. diplomats then captive in Teheran might well have succeeded — and Carter is known still to believe that if the raid had succeeded, he would probably have been re-elected. Full discussion another time, but I think he’s right. (Even with the fiasco, and a miserable “stagflation” economy, the 1980 presidential race was very close until the very end.)
But here’s the main point about Carter. Deciding to go ahead with that raid was a close call. Carter’s own Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, had opposed the raid and handed in his resignation even before the results were known. And it was a daring call — a choice in favor of a risky possible solution to a festering problem, knowing that if it went wrong there would be bad consequences all around, including for Carter himself. So if you say “even Jimmy Carter” to mean “even a wimp,” as Romney clearly did, you’re showing that you don’t know the first thing about the choice he really made.
3) Precisely because of the consequences of Carter’s failure, Obama was the more daring in making his go/no-go decision. That’s the case I argued last year, and nothing I’ve learned since then changes my view. As a college student, Obama had seen a marginally popular Democratic president come to ruin because he approved a helicopter-based secret mission into hostile Middle Eastern terrain. Obama went ahead with a helicopter-based secret mission into nominally “allied” territory, also with huge potential for trouble if things had gone wrong.
4) And while the Osama killing reflected a decade’s worth of intelligence and effort from people of both parties, and of no party, it happened on Obama’s watch. Is there any doubt that if it had happened on Bush’s, or on a President John McCain’s, it would have been the centerpiece of every political speech and commercial? Was there a single speech in the Republicans’ 2004 convention — in New York — that did not begin and end with a reference to 9/11, or the removal of Saddam Hussein?
So: obviously the Administration will want to remind voters that Osama bin Laden is gone, and obviously the Republicans will want to minimize the political significance of that fact. All fine. But not “even Jimmy Carter.” I hope that the crack was a scripted attack line, rather than being yet another spontaneous glimpse of the way Mitt Romney feels and thinks. “Even” Jimmy Carter made a daring choice, and paid the price.
By: James Fallows, The Atlantic, April 30, 2012
“I Could Have Done That”: All Good Ideas Belong To Mitt Romney
So says a campaign advisor, who pinned the auto bailout success on the former Massachusetts governor.
Back in 2009, when the newly elected President Barack Obama was contemplating a bailout of the auto-industry, Mitt Romney emerged from his temporary hiatus to push policymakers in the other direction. “Let Detroit go bankrupt,” he urged in an op-ed for New York Times. For Romney, a managed bankrupcy of the kind he had pioneered at Bain Capital was the only way to “save” the American auto industry. As for Obama’s approach, Romney warned that “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.” A few months later, Romney repeated his warning: If Obama continued on his path, “it would make GM the living dead.”
Three years later, Romney’s prediction hasn’t come to pass. The American auto industry is thriving even as conservatives run with the idea that government is categorically ineffective. In February, during the Republican primary in Michigan, Romney further disparaged the auto bailout, granting its success, but accusing Obama of kowtowing to “union bosses.” This message didn’t play well, and only gave Obama and Democrats an opportunity to tout the success of the bailouts, and contrast them with Romney’s position.
Now that Romney is in the general election, he has begun to shake the Etch A Sketch on a number of issues. One of those, if this comment from Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom is any indication, is the bailout:
“[Romney’s] position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed,” Fehrnstrom said. “He said, ‘If you want to save the auto industry, just don’t write them a check. That will seal their doom. What they need to do is go through a managed bankruptcy process.’”
“Consider that the crown jewel,” Fehrnstrom said. “The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice.”
Writing at Talking Points Memo, Pema Levy points out that Romney’s position on the bailout has been hazy; he was vehemently against the administration, but in a way that gave him a way to claim credit, as Fehrnstrom does. Of course, the fact that Romney has rhetorical space to take credit for the bailout doesn’t mean that’s any less ridiculous; it’s the political equivalent of twelve-year-old boasting—“I could have done that too! If you’d picked me first.”
One last observation—this continues an odd pattern by the Romney campaign, which inhabits a frame established by the Obama campaign rather than creating something for themselves. First, there was the “War on Women,” where Romney advisors argued that it was Democrats who were fighting the real war on women, while conceding that the existence of an actual war. Then, in Romney’s speech last Tuesday, there was “fairness,” when the former Massachusetts governor argued that government was the real purveyor of unfairness in the country. And now we have the auto industry bailout, where Romney claims to have been the real mastermind behind the policy.
I’m not sure what the campaign hopes to get out of this approach. By continuously talking about Obama on Obama’s terms, they do nothing but put themselves on the defensive. It’s a bad strategy, and the only saving grace is that we’re still early in the election.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, April 30, 2012
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