Mitt Romney: The Front-Runner Who Leaves The GOP Cold
Okay, now it’s settled, right? I mean, it must be settled by now. Mitt Romney is going to be the nominee. Eat your peas, Republicans, and then fall in line, because Romney’s the guy. Right?
Probably.
Even at this point, after Romney trounced Newt Gingrich in the Florida primary and the Nevada caucuses, there are some fairly compelling reasons for Republicans to pause before bowing to the party establishment’s decision that Mitt must be It.
First is the fact that so many GOP voters still can’t summon much enthusiasm for their likely standard-bearer. In a poll released last week, the Pew Research Center found that an incredible 52 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents consider the field of candidates only fair or poor. Just 46 percent assessed the field as good or excellent — compared to 68 percent who were satisfied with the contenders at the same point in the battle for the nomination four years ago.
In Florida, exit polls confirmed Pew’s findings: Nearly four in 10 GOP voters said they were unhappy with their choices. It is reasonable to assume that many Republicans who didn’t bother to vote — and thus were not sampled in exit polls — are probably even less enthusiastic.
Last May, as the roster of candidates was shaping up, just 43 percent of Republicans thought the field was fair or poor, according to Pew. In other words, the better Republican voters come to know these candidates, including Romney, the less they like them.
Still, somebody is going to get nominated. At this point, Romney has shown he can beat Gingrich almost everywhere. But that “almost” is important.
Gingrich won big in South Carolina. And while Romney rolled up huge margins in the southern and central parts of Florida, Gingrich beat him in the panhandle counties that border Alabama and Georgia — a part of the state, demographically and culturally, that isn’t South Beach but, rather, just plain South.
This is significant because the South is the Republican Party’s heartland. Romney has shown in other contests that he can put a check mark in every ideological box — that despite Gingrich’s taunt of “Massachusetts moderate,” he can still win the support of voters who call themselves “very conservative” or who say they are Tea Party members. But maybe the relevant pejorative is the “Massachusetts” part.
So far, Romney has not shown that he can connect with and excite voters in the South the way Gingrich does. If the bruised, battered, underfunded Gingrich campaign can survive long enough — and if Gingrich can rediscover the in-your-face mojo that gave him such a lift in the South Carolina debates — he could potentially beat Romney in Georgia and Tennessee on Super Tuesday, March 6, and in Alabama and Mississippi a week later.
At that point, if I were a GOP pooh-bah, I’d have to worry about going into the November elections with a candidate at the top of the ticket who had received so little love from the party’s most loyal supporters.
Maybe the Gingrich insurgency will prove to be nothing more than a sad, divisive ego trip. Maybe Romney will show that he can win — or at least compete — in the South. Realistically, chances are that his superior resources, organization and discipline will prevail in the end.
Then what? Well, if you believe the polls, Romney probably loses to President Obama in the fall.
A new Washington Post poll, released Monday, shows that Obama leads Romney, 51 percent to 45 percent, among registered voters. The poll also showed that Obama’s approval rating is at 50 percent, the first time it has reached that benchmark since May, right after Osama bin Laden was killed. On protecting the middle class and dealing with taxes, international affairs and terrorism, voters believe Obama would do a better job than Romney.
But perhaps the most important figure — found not in the poll but in Labor Department statistics released Friday — is 8.3 percent. That’s the unemployment rate for January, and it is the lowest since February 2009, right after Obama took office.
Romney’s central argument for the presidency is that he will do a better job of managing the economy. Despite their overall preference for Obama, many voters buy that premise. But if the unemployment rate continues to fall, it won’t matter whether Republicans go with the safe bet or the mercurial firebrand. Economic recovery almost surely equals four more years.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 6, 2012
Super PAC “Unilateral Disarmament”?: Using The System To Fight The System
The phrase “unilateral disarmament” has been used, in a negative sense, to justify a lot of unjustifiable behavior. But President Obama’s argument against unilateral disarmament in the super PAC war seems totally persuasive. The Republican party gained a large advantage in the 2010 elections, and appears poised to seize an even more dramatic edge during this campaign, by channeling vast sums of their campaign donations into third-party organizations, which can raise unlimited sums from undisclosed donors.
The problem with Obama’s decision, as I have been reading from numerous reporters, is that it’s “hypocritical.” MSNBC’s First Read insists that blessing super PACs “looks hypocritical no matter how you try and rationalize it.” Making the charge as a matter of appearance rather than substance – it looks hypocritical — allows you to throw out an accusation without justifying it. But how is it hypocritical? I haven’t seen anybody attempt to actually explain it.
To me, the ethics are pretty simple. Obama opposes the current campaign-finance system. His position is that the Citizens United ruling is wrong on the legal merits, it’s bad policy to allow unregulated independent election spending, Congress should pass legislation (previously blocked by Republicans) requiring greater disclosure from such groups, and that he favors a constitutional amendment to allow greater campaign-finance restrictions.
I fail to see what about these positions implies that Obama should also hold the following position: Given that the campaign-finance system is going to allow unlimited election spending by individual donors to technically independent groups, it is better to have a system where Republican donors exert these high levels of political influence but Democratic donors do not. Isn’t it perfectly reasonable to believe that the best outcome is a system where millionaires can’t spend unlimited sums on electioneering, and a system in which both parties have millionaires counterbalancing each other is better than a system in which only one party has millionaires spending unlimited sums?
Obama, after all, isn’t arguing that a millionaire cutting a $10 million check to buy a slew of political ads is an inherently immoral act, like driving a car through a crowd of pedestrians. He’s arguing that it’s a bad system, like allowing Warren Buffett to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. He wants to change the system. But that wouldn’t make it hypocritical for Buffett to operate within the system that exists, as opposed to the alternate system he advocates.
Indeed, if you want to change the system, unilateral disarmament seems like a pretty bad way to go about it. Republicans are already pretty strongly opposed to campaign-finance reform. If keeping the current system means preserving a system in which their side gets unlimited outside spending and Democrats abstain, then the GOP is never going to agree to change it. Not that matching their money will force them to agree to reform, but eliminating the GOP’s partisan self-interest in the status quo seems like, at minimum, a necessary step toward reform.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 7, 2012
“Can’t-Win Cul-de-Sac”: Mitt Romney’s Clumsy Economic Centrism
There are times when I feel a twinge of sympathy for former Gov. Mitt Romney. Really and truly. The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Mitt in the current ideological climate—with its highly-charged suspicions of both “socialism” and conspicuous wealth—forces him to tack left and right in ways that leave him pitifully exposed.
His calculated moves toward the right sometime in the mid-2000s, on key issues like abortion, gay rights, and immigration, are well-known and justly scrutinized.
Less noticed—but no less calculated—have been his efforts to hew to the center.
I’m thinking, first, of Romney’s proposal to eliminate capital gains taxes only for married couples making under $200,000 and singles making less than $100,000. The cap at those income levels is head-scratchingly pointless, as the vast majority who benefit from low capital gains tax rates make well over $200,000.
Romney’s official rationale for limited capital gains tax relief is that “We need to spend our precious tax dollars on the middle class.”
That sounds nice and centrist-y, but the more likely reason became clear when Romney finally released his tax returns: If he proposed eliminating taxes on capital gains altogether—as former Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Ron Paul and Gov. Rick Perry have proposed—then Romney would be forced to defend the prospect of paying even less than his already low rate of 13.9 percent.
“Under that plan”—meaning Gingrich’s—”I’d have paid no taxes in the last two years,” Romney said, in one of his sharpest lines in the debate in Tampa last month.
Romney is similarly lukewarm, from the libertarian economic perspective, on the issue of the minimum wage. As in 2008, Romney favors automatic increases to keep pace with inflation. The right uniformly hates this idea—they think it will actually eliminate entry-level jobs and hurt the very people it’s trying to help.
As with his suspicious-seeming lurches toward the right to appease the social conservative base, Romney trims toward the center on sensitive economic issues to limit the appearance of rank plutocracy.
Steve Forbes tells Yahoo News: “It goes to show he’s still very defensive about his own wealth. All it does is give the base another reason to be unenthusiastic about him.”
At National Review Online, Andrew C. McCarthy likewise asserted that Romney was “doubling down on stupid to overcompensate for any hint of a compassion deficit.”
Hence my (momentary) twinge of sympathy for Romney. His ideological contortions, whichever direction they take him, land him in the same can’t-win cul-de-sac.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, February 7, 2012
“Keep Your Fingers Crossed, Mitt!”: Romney’s Truth That Tells A Lie
So, no surprise, Mitt wins big last night in Nevada. He carries 91% of the 26% of the caucus goers who are Mormons, so that helps him carry overlapping categories like “extremely conservative” and “strong tea party supporter” too. But he also carries Evangelicals, so its pretty much a clean sweep for him of the extreme right of an extremely right wing Nevada Republican electorate.
More interesting were his victory remarks. You see him trying out Pavlovian culture war phrases for the Revanchist base, e.g. references to Obama’s “colleagues in the faculty lounge.” He’s not good at that—he doesn’t have the sheer ferocity required for it.
They key move he made in the speech, however, as Jonathan Chait predicted the other day, is a doubling down on hyping bad economic news and hoping that it stays bad. Last night—knowing that a decline to 8.3% unemployment was, while not good, clearly an improvement—he shifted his gaze to what economists call the u6 employment rate. The u6 is the measure, not only of the unemployed, but of those who have stopped looking for work, and those who want full time work, but who are working part time hours. It’s certainly an important metric, and, by definition, it’s always substantially higher than the unemployment rate proper.
So Romney correctly told the crowd that the “real” unemployment rate is “over 15%.” And he’s right. It’s 15.1% which is very high. Over 15% obviously sounds a lot worse than 8.3%, and suddenly introducing it into a discussion with regular voters enables Romney to play the unlikely role of “truth teller.” And talking about a “real” anything is always a nice touch for Republicans when referencing Obama because it implies that somehow Obama and the Democrats have been giving the country cooked figures or something. “Real? The guy faked his own birth certificate—he’s going to tell the country what the “real” unemployment numbers are??!”
But, as you can see in this chart, the u6 almost always perfectly tracks the conventional (u3) unemployment measure. It’s dropped from a high of 17.4%, at the height of the recession in 2009, and, like the u3, it also declined this month from last month’s 15.2%. So, as you would expect during a slow, sluggish, but continued recovery, it just keeps going down, just like the typical unemployment rate.
And that’s shows the limits of the “hype the bad news” Romney strategy. Now that he’s told the country about the u6 and started his baseline at “over 15%”, any decline below that number is going to look, by comparison, like a hoped for improvement. Than what does he do?
Nope, even the most clever rhetoric won’t work. What Romney really needs is the the unlikely duo of Merkel and Netanyahu to really wreck the world’s economy. Keep your fingers crossed, Mitt!
By: Rich Yeselson, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 4, 2012
Newt Gingrich: Romney Is The “George Soros-Approved” Candidate
While Romney spent his victory speech in Nevada last night doubling down on his ”
Obama is bad for the economy” message, Gingrich opted for a more low-key press conference where he dispelled any rumors of an imminent withdrawal and vowed: “We will go to Tampa.” The rest of his remarks, however, made it clear who his real opponent is, not Obama but Obamney. Not only has his campaign resurrected “Obamneycare” (which has got to have Romney seeing red and Tim Pawlenty kicking himself), but last night he debuted another attack-label for Mitt “the Massachusetts moderate” Romney: he is now also the “George Soros-approved candidate,” a reference to the liberal financier loathed by the right.
Gingrich was talking about an interview in Davos where George Soros made the following remarks:
If it’s between Obama and Romney there isn’t all that much different, except for the crowd that they bring with them. Romney would have to take Gingrich or Santorum as a vice president and probably have some pretty extreme candidates on the Supreme Court. So that’s the downside.
Imagine the hysterical glee when Gingrich (or one of his staffers) heard that gem coming out of George Soros’ mouth. Now he can really go all out on the I’m-the-only-true-conservative-up-against-the-mean-old-Establishment-and-all-that-money, which is exactly what he did last night.
So we stopped and said, alright, the entire Establishment will be against us, the scale of Wall Street money starting with Goldman Sachs will be amazing, and the campaign will be based on things that aren’t true, then how do you define the campaign for the average American so they get to choose do they want two George Soros-approved candidates in the general election or would they like a conservative versus one George Soros-approved candidate.
Looks like Gingrich is settling in for the long fight after all. He made clear at the press conference that he plans to wrest as many delegates out of Romney’s balled-up fists as he can (with special attention, it seems, being paid to Ohio and Arizona). And along the way, you can be sure he’ll trot out the “George Soros-approved candidate” line at least another 4,000 times.
By: Andre Tartar, Daily Intel, February 5, 2012
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