“Making A Difference”: Scott Prouty Is No Samuel Wurzelbacher
So I kept thinking as I watched Ed Schultz’s interview last night with Scott Prouty—as we now know, the man who made and leaked the 47 percent video—I kept trying to check my impulses by asking myself: Now, suppose this were Fox, and suppose Scott Prouty had secretly taped Barack Obama saying that corporate leaders were heartless mercenaries who cared nothing about their employees or America, and suppose that that had helped cost Obama the election. What would I be thinking about him?
I admit easily and breezily that I would have disliked him and would have spent the hour probing for weaknesses and points of possible attack. That’s how it goes in this business.
However, I also say this: I don’t think I would have found many. Prouty was intelligent, judicious, and thoughtful. He seemed completely sincere (I say seemed since I don’t know the man). He knew exactly what he was doing. Weaknesses were few to nonexistent.
Let me put it this way. In my post yesterday, I fretted about the onslaught he was about to experience from the right. But as I Google his name this morning, I see nothing from the right-wing media. If you’ve ever done such a search on a topic that the right-wing press has jumped on, you know that the first page and sometimes the first two pages return you nothing but conservative media. So they aren’t piling on the guy, so far at least. Long experience teaches me: When they go dark is when they know they can’t win.
So here’s how it happened. Prouty had worked for a while for this high-end caterer. He brought his camera to the event because he thought there might be opportunity afterwards for picture-taking sessions with the candidate (which never materialized, and which made him think Romney was sort of a jerk). He started recording the speech just to capture it. Obviously, he had no idea Romney was going to say the things he said. And then Prouty started listening.
Interestingly, the thing that bothered Prouty wasn’t so much the 47 percent remarks, although he had enough news sense in him to know they were dynamite. What bothered him were Romney’s remarks about a factory in China Bain had bought, a factory whose grounds were surrounded by fencing and barbed wire to keep the young female workers in. Romney spoke about it in a way that struck Prouty as disingenuous and unfeeling, and he got mad.
He went home and did some Googling. He learned that Romney had profited from outsourcing. He saw an article on the factory by David Corn. He spent two weeks pondering whether to take it public, thinking through the moral and legal consequences, whatever they were. He finally looked himself in the mirror and said fuck it. Here we go. He got in touch with Corn.
He said last night he’s a registered independent, but he’s clearly a liberal-minded person. He said he was proud Obama is the president. He decided to give the interview to Schultz because Schultz is uniquely devoted in the TV universe to class issues. So whatever his registration, he’s on a side. Fine. He decided to help that side—or more accurately, to stop the other side.
It was Romney’s appearance on Fox on March 3 that made him go public now. Romney’s self-serving interview clearly infuriated him. The greatest thing he said during the whole hour went something like (I can’t find a transcript yet): You know, Romney could still be making positive contributions. He could go to one of those communities where Bain closed a factory, that town in Illinois say, and say he’s sorry about what happened, start a fund or a foundation to help people there. Yes, he is right. But yeah, sure. Can anyone picture Romney doing that? It would be an admission that his life’s work was something less than wholly admirable, which is an admission he shows no signs of being able to make.
I kept thinking while I was watching the left’s accidental hero of 2012 of the right’s accidental hero of 2008, Joe the Plumber. The Republicans and the right used Samuel Wurzelbacher, who was neither named Joe nor was a (licensed) plumber, as a convenient cudgel against Obama, and Wurzelbacher was delighted to play along, reveling in the fame that came his way as a result of his frequent Fox appearances during the 2008 campaign.
Prouty, by contrast, never sought notoriety during the campaign, and even now, well, he’s being hailed today, and properly so, but I’d be very disappointed and frankly quite surprised if he becomes some kind of slatternly MSNBC fixture who shows up to mouth half-coherent DNC talking points as Wurzelbacher has on Fox, and run a crappy and stupid race for Congress. Prouty sounded last night as if he wants to seize on this opportunity to do the kind of work he cares about and help working people or union people in some way. Wurzelbacher was a show horse and a blowhard, playing to a movement that loves show horses and blowhards provided they’re blowing the approved notes. He changed nothing.
Prouty is a serious and earnest person who is actually trying to help working people and who did make an enormous difference. Their notoriety and how they gained it and the purpose to which they used it tells us not only something about them, but about the two sides as well.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 14, 2013
“Poetic Justice”: How A Bartender Helped Decide The 2012 Election
If Mitt Romney had taken a moment to thank the wait staff at a Boca Raton fundraiser last year, he may now be president, or at least could have removed one of his biggest obstacles to the White House: the so-called 47 percent tape that clouded the last two months of the race.
The anonymous person who filmed the tape turns out to be a bartender with a local catering company who is coming forward now that the election is over. He’ll reveal his identity tomorrow in an hour-long interview on “The Ed Show” on MSNBC, but in an interview with the Huffington Post Tuesday night, he suggested that he was disappointed that Romney never thanked the wait staff, as Bill Clinton had years before at a different event the same bartender happened to staff. Ryan Grim and Jason Cherkis report:
Romney, of course, did not speak to any of the staff, bussers or waiters. He was late to the event, and rushed out. He told his dinner guests that the event was off the record, but never bothered to repeat the admonition to the people working there.
One of them had brought along a Canon camera. He set it on the bar and hit the record button. The bartender said he never planned to distribute the video. But after Romney spoke, the man said he felt he had no choice.
The tape came to define Romney and was the fodder for several ads, giving the candidate a noticeable dip in the polls. Even when he recovered after Obama’s disastrous debate performance in Denver, the tape remained a weight around his neck.
Romney probably still would have lost without the tape, and maybe the bartender would still have revealed the video if Romney came back and shook his hand, but there’s some poetic justice in the idea of an hourly worker bringing down a presidential candidate for dismissing the importance of his vote.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, March 13, 2013
“What Might Have Been”: Republicans Continue To Ignore Results Of 2012 Elections
Greg Sargent had a good post this morning positing this counterfactual: Suppose Mitt Romney and his tax- and spending-cut agenda had won a decisive victory over President Obama last November and in reaction Senate Democrats (still controlling their chamber) had doubled down on a progressive agenda with calls for social safety net expansion, tax-hike-only deficit reduction, stimulus spending, and then had crowned that agenda with admonishments that President Romney had “failed to sincerely try to find common ground with them.”
This is, of course, the track Republicans have followed in the wake of their side’s 2012 loss: Steady on, refuse to adjust their policy course, and claim the other guy is being unreasonable and won’t compromise. But given the howls of outrage from the right at President Obama’s pursuing a liberal course after campaigning on it and winning, it’s not hard to imagine the what-might-have-been reaction to unabashed progressivism in the face of a Romney-Ryan administration. I don’t think that it’s a stretch to say that Obama’s victory was the main difference between the right declaring 2012 a clarion mandate election and a … uh … well, whatever they think the 2012 election was.
The fact is that if the old adage goes that “elections have consequences,” it might have to be rewritten thusly to take into account the modern GOP: “Primary elections have consequences.” For House Republicans (the group that is currently driving the party and its agenda) the past and future national elections hold less import than their 2012 and 2014 primary elections; the broad will of the voters—who by a solid margin re-elected a progressive president who campaigned on securing the safety net and increasing taxes—is less important than the desires of the GOP voters and activists in their carefully drawn congressional districts.
That’s why so many conservatives talk about responding to the 2012 elections with a more pronounced version of the same.
And, as I argued last week, to the extent that they acknowledge the 2012 elections, they seem to view it as an illegitimate expression of the national will: Too many city voters cast ballots, so it can be discounted.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, March 11, 2013
“Rig The Vote”: Deep Inside The Evil Lair Of The Republican Party
If you can’t win by playing fair, cheat.
That seems to be the plan of Republican lawmakers in several battleground states that stubbornly keep going for Democrats during presidential elections. Thanks in part to gerrymandering, many states already have — and will continue to have in the near future — Republican-controlled legislatures.
Republican lawmakers in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin are considering whether to abandon the winner-take-all approach to awarding Electoral College votes and replace it with a proportional allocation.
That change would heavily favor Republican presidential candidates — tilting the voting power away from cities and toward rural areas — and make it more likely that the candidate with the fewest votes over all would win a larger share of electoral votes.
One day I will have to visit the evil lair where they come up with these schemes. They pump them out like a factory. Voter suppression didn’t work in November, and it may even have backfired in some states, so they just devised another devilish plan.
Pete Lund, a Republican state representative in Michigan, “plans to reintroduce legislation that would award all but two of Michigan’s 16 Electoral College votes according to congressional district results,” said an article Friday in The Detroit News.
The paper continued, “The remaining two would go to the candidate winning the statewide majority.”
Lund, who proposed a similar bill in 2012, made Republicans’ intentions completely clear, saying, according to the article: “It got no traction last year. There were people convinced Romney was going to win and this might take (electoral) votes from him.”
These bills are a brazen attempt to alter electoral outcomes and chip away at the very idea of democracy, to the benefit of Republican candidates.
The Detroit News also reported that, according to an analysis by Mark Brewer, the state Democratic Party chairman: “Romney would have gotten nine of Michigan’s electoral votes and Obama would have received seven in 2012 under Lund’s proposal. Instead, Obama garnered all 16 Michigan electoral votes en route to his national tally of 332.”
Meanwhile, Obama beat Romney in the state by a margin of nearly 450,000 votes.
Virginia’s bill is further along than Michigan’s. It’s already being debated.
For reference, although Obama won the state of Virginia and all of its electoral votes last year, as he did in 2008, according to The Roanoke Times on Friday, “If the system had been in effect for the 2012 election, Republican Mitt Romney would have won nine of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes, and President Barack Obama would have won four.” Keep in mind that in November, Obama won the state by almost 150,000 votes.
Republicans in Virginia are just as forthright about their intention to tilt the electoral playing field in their favor.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that the sponsor of Virginia bill’s, Charles W. Carrico Sr., a Republican, “said he wants to give smaller communities a bigger voice.” Carrico told The Post, “The last election, constituents were concerned that it didn’t matter what they did, that more densely populated areas were going to outvote them.”
Yes, you read that right: he wants to make the votes cast for the candidate receiving the fewest votes matter more than those cast for the candidate receiving the most. In Republican Bizarro World, where the “integrity of the vote” is a phrase used to diminish urban votes and in which democracy is only sacrosanct if Republicans are winning, this statement actually makes sense.
David Weigel of Slate explained the point of the Virginia plan this way: “Make the rural vote matter more and make the metro vote count less.”
Luckily, as the Roanoke paper noted Friday, Ralph Smith, the powerful Republican Virginia state senator, isn’t on board:
“Smith said this morning that he opposes the legislation, calling it ‘a bad idea.’ Smith sits on the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee, which will hear the bill next week. Without Smith’s support, it’s unlikely the bill could get to the Senate floor.”
Paul Bibeau, who writes “a blog of dark humor” from Virginia, points out a numerical oddity about the effects of the Virginia law that turns out, upon reflection, to be more stinging than funny: “This bill counts an Obama voter as 3/5 of a person.”
That is because, as Talking Points Memo says, “Obama voters would have received almost exactly 3/5 of the electoral vote compared to their actual population — 30.7 percent of the electoral vote over 51 percent of the popular vote.”
This is not where we should be in 2013, debating whether to pass bills to reduce urban voters to a fraction of the value of other voters and hoping that someone with the power to stop it thinks it’s a “bad idea.”
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 25, 2013
“Not Even Close”: Conservatives Can’t Win At The Negotiating Table What They Lost At The Ballot Box
The final, final results from the 2012 presidential election are now in. While we already knew President Obama won (and the House certified that result today when it tallied the electoral votes), it’s worth revisiting the final totals and reminding ourselves of one important fact: It wasn’t particularly close.
Sure the election was widely expected to be a nail-biter, but it wasn’t. But in the days and weeks afterward you still heard the occasional GOPer insist that it was—see Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling last month saying it was a tight, 51-49 race, for example.
Here are some final stats about Obama’s victory, courtesy of Bloomberg’s Greg Giroux:
Obama got 51.1 percent of the popular vote to Mitt Romney’s 47.2 percent, a four point margin. (Let’s all pause for a moment and savor the fact that history will show that Romney won … 47 percent.) That’s a wider margin than George W. Bush won by in 2004 (51-48), when pundits on the right like Charles Krauthammer declared that he had earned a mandate.
That makes Obama the first president to crack 51 percent since Dwight Eisenhower more than a half-century ago. (Sorry, conservatives, Ronald Reagan only reached 50.75 percent in 1980.)
Obama won 26 states and the District of Columbia, piling up 332 electoral votes. You can think of it another way: There is no state in Obama’s column which would have swung the election to Romney had he won it. In other words, if Romney had pulled a stunning upset and won California’s 55 electoral votes … he’d still have lost.
There were only four especially close states in the 2012 election. Only Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia were decided by less than 5 percentage points. (Note: Romney won one of them, North Carolina; had he swept those four states … he’d have still lost the election as Obama totaled 272 electoral votes in the rest of the country.) Four is the smallest number of close states in a presidential election since Reagan trounced Walter Mondale nearly 30 years ago.
So no matter how you slice or dice the election results, this was not a close race. It wasn’t a landslide, but it wasn’t a coin flip. The voters selected Obama and his vision over Romney and his, and they did it decisively.
And you can layer onto that the fact that, against all expectations, Democrats picked up seats in the U.S. Senate and also in the U.S. House. And while the GOP did retain control of the House, nearly 1.4 million more people voted for Democratic House candidates than for Republicans. 1.4 million—remember that figure the next time someone says Americans voted for divided government last year.
All of which brings me to a great point that the Maddow Blog’s Steve Benen made yesterday. He noted that South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham vowed that the upcoming fiscal fights, over raising the debt ceiling at the end of February and over funding the government a few weeks later, would be “one hell of a contest about the direction and vision of this country.”
Benen writes:
…what Graham and too many of his allies seem to forget is that we already had “one hell of a contest about the direction and the vision of this country.”
It was a little something called “the 2012 election cycle,” and though Graham may not have liked the results, his side lost.
Memories can be short in DC, but for at least a year, voters were told the 2012 election would be the most spectacularly important, history-changing, life-setting election any of us have ever seen…
Election Day 2012, in other words, was for all the marbles. It was the big one. The whole enchilada was on the line. The results would set the direction of the country for a generation, so it was time to pull out all the stops and fight like there’s no tomorrow—because for the losers, there probably wouldn’t be one.
Obama won. Republicans lost. And, again, it wasn’t especially close.
So it is not only tiresome but more than a little undemocratic for conservatives to suggest that, having lost at the ballot box, they should be able to dictate the direction and vision of the country at the negotiating table.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, January 4, 2013
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