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
“Dishonest Craven Panderer”: Mitt Romney Joins Gas Price Demagoguery
For someone running for office on the strength of his knowledge and experience in the free-market economy, Mitt Romney sure is spouting a lot of ignorant nonsense. Romney has used the same epithet—“doesn’t understand the economy”—against both President Obama and Newt Gingrich.
But Romney is contradicting basic economic facts on the campaign trail this week. He has adopted Gingrich’s demagogic strategy of blaming President Obama for rising gas prices. On Sunday Romney told Fox News there is “no question” Obama’s policies are responsible for prices at the pump. “He said that energy prices would skyrocket under his views, and he selected three people to help him implement that program. The secretary of energy, the secretary of interior and EPA administrator. And this gas hike trio has been doing the job over the last three-and-a-half years, and gas prices are up.” Romney has repeated those comments at campaign events on Sunday and Monday.
Romney, of course, is pulling a bait-and-switch when he claims Obama stated a goal of raising gas prices. Obama did say that his cap-and-trade proposal would raise prices of electricity, which Romney conflates with gasoline by collectively lumping them as energy. But cap-and-trade did not pass. Romney fails to specify which policies Obama has enacted that have raised the price of petroleum, because there aren’t any. The only argument Republicans such as Romney and Gingrich can muster is that Obama has rejected some proposals to drill for oil or build pipelines in environmentally precarious locations.
Aggregate domestic oil drilling has actually risen under Obama. But that doesn’t matter. Suppose it had declined. Oil is a global, fungible commodity. As demand increases in industrializing nations such as China and India, prices are sure to rise eventually. Global supply of oil is finite, so there is no way that global demand can increase indefinitely without prices going up.
You’d think from listening to Romney and Gingrich that they were ideological fellow travelers of Hugo Chávez. After all, their proposal to reduce American gas prices would help only if we nationalized the oil industry. If we continue to operate as a free-market economy, then ExxonMobil will sell the oil they drill here to the highest bidder, not necessarily the American consumer.
Even if we did nationalize the oil industry, increased drilling would have a limited impact on prices. We account for about 25 percent of global annual oil consumption, while we have only 2 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves.
So there are two possibilities: either Romney doesn’t understand how the economy works, or he is just a dishonest craven panderer. Considering that he holds two advanced degrees from Harvard, counts on Harvard professors as economic and foreign policy advisers and cites Harvard professors in his speeches—while bashing Obama for “taking advice from the Harvard faculty lounge”—my guess is that the answer is the latter.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, March 20, 2012
“Mass Amnesia”: Mitt Romney Bets On Forgetfulness Of The American People
I’ve said this before, but in light of Mitt Romney’s economic speech today, it bears repeating: Virtually his entire case against Obama’s economic record rests on the assumption that the American people have developed a case of mass amnesia about the depth and severity of the economic crisis the President inherited.
A few months ago, Romney liked to claim that Obama made the economy “worse.” But the good economic news forced Romney to revise that argument, and he took to claiming that, yes, okay, the economy is getting better, but only in spite of Obama’s policies, which are slowing down the natural recovery.
Today Romney upped the ante yet again, offering still another explanation for why Obama should be denied a second term, even though the economy is recovering: It’s all about freedom! From the prepared remarks:
The Obama administration’s assault on our economic freedom is the principal reason why the recovery has been so tepid — why it couldn’t meet their projections, let alone our expectations. 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…
The proof is in this weak recovery. This administration thinks our economy is struggling because the stimulus was too small. The truth is we’re struggling because our government is too big.
Relatedly, this morning, Romney said: “The economy always comes back after a recession, of course. There’s never been one that we didn’t recover from. The problem is this one has been deeper than it needed to be and a slower recovery than it should have been, by virtue of the policies of this president.”
The common thread here is obvious, and it’s important. The pace of this recovery, according to Romney, is sluggish compared to that of previous ones — proving that Obama’s policies, or his “assault on freedom,” are the reason why. Missing from this telling, of course, is the most important reason this recovery is different from previous ones: It came after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Romney’s argument that the recovery’s pace would otherwise have been normal if not for Obama’s polices rests on a bet that the American people will forget about this, or won’t factor it into their decision this fall. Perhaps some enterprising reporter will ask Romney the obvious follow-up questions: What would you have done as president in early 2009? Is it really your contention that the economy would have recovered at a typical pace from the worst financial crisis since the 1930s if government had done nothing at all?
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, March 19, 2012
“From The Pitiful To The Ludicrous”: The Bad Advice Stage Of The GOP Presidential Primary
The Republican primary has now reached that dread phase where we are required to feign interest in Mitt Romney’s victory in Puerto Rico — amongst voters who will not vote this November unless they catch a plane to Orlando — and to wonder whether Rick Santorum can repeat his Missouri victory in the delegate-awarding reenactment of that state’s nominating contest. Yawn.
But there is one bonus: with Romney struggling to close out the nomination against candidates who are having trouble getting on the ballot even in their home states, we get to see people of all sorts offering him advice that ranges from the pitiful to the ludicrous. First, there was Maggie Haberman’s advice to Romney last week in Politico, urging him to drop his blatant pandering in the South for a more ironic approach:
Change will take some measure of discipline, but it’s something Romney can pull off. For example, instead of a joke about grits, Romney could relate more easily to voters if he joked about being from southern Michigan.
Ba-da-bum. And then in Saturday’s Washington Post, Philip Rucker extracted this gem from religious-right leader Richard Land:
Among those being courted [by Romney] is Richard Land, a longtime leader of the Southern Baptist Convention. As a practice, Land said, he does not endorse political candidates, but he is considered a powerful barometer of the evangelical community.
Land said that after a private dinner with Romney last year at Acadiana, a Washington restaurant, Romney’s advisers have been in regular touch. Land said he recently told them that Romney could win over recalcitrant conservatives by picking Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) as his vice presidential running mate and previewing a few Cabinet selections: Santorum as attorney general, Gingrich as ambassador to the United Nations and John Bolton as secretary of state.
Ah yes. Condom confiscation at CVS stores by federal marshals, and Newt and Bolton tag-teaming our Iran diplomacy. That’ll do the trick, Mitt!
By: Alex MacGillis, The New Republic, March 19, 2012
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