“Compassion Deficit”: Mitt Romney, His Own Worst Enemy
If Mitt Romney has a big problem in the Republican primary, it’s himself. The former Massachusetts governor can’t seem to keep his foot out of his mouth, and has—through misstatements—portrayed himself as a cold and heartless shill for the 1 percent. Here are some of the greatest hits:
- “Corporations are people, my friend.”
- “I’m running for office for Pete’s sake!”
- “I like being able to fire people.”
- “I should tell my story. I’m also unemployed.”
When heard in their full context, most of these aren’t as bad as they sound. But, as John Kerry learned in 2004, voters aren’t that attuned to the context of politicians, especially when they say things that leave a bad first impression.
On CNN last night, Romney deepened this problem with another tone deaf comment which, fairly or not, will reinforce the image that he is a defender of the wealthy:
“I’m not concerned with the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.” [Emphasis mine]
It’s clear that Romney isn’t dismissing the “very poor” as much as he’s expressing confidence in the existing safety net for those mired in poverty. If that net isn’t strong enough, Romney notes, he’ll fix it as president. But the phrasing is incredibly awkward, and when voters hear this, they’ll latch on to the first sentence to the exclusion of the rest. And of course, Democrats are certain to use this in attack ads throughout the general election. Though, given Romney’s relationship with truth in advertising, that isn’t as unfair as it sounds.
It should be said that, if we go by his proposed policies, Romney doesn’t actually care much about the poor. The former Massachusetts governor has consistently voiced support for the draconian budget cuts of Rep. Paul Ryan, which would cripple the safety net and deprive low-income Americans of valuable assistance. What’s more, he plans deep cuts to taxes on capital gains geared toward the rich, who are most likely to collect income on investment. Like many on the right, his preferred economic policies would redistribute income to the wealthy, and destroy our fiscal future with a massive long-term deficit.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, February 1, 2012
“Moses, Moses”: Behold The Power of Newt
Newt Gingrich has publicly pledged to have the single most productive day in presidential history. Gingrich has taken to listing his first-day proposals during recent stump speeches, but he promised to take it a step further when he spoke last night. He promised to release a new Contract With America during his non-concession speech— “a personal one between me and you”—that would detail his plans once he enters office. “We’re going to put this together in a way that you will be able to see in writing with my signature, and you’ll be able to hold me accountable,” Gingrich said.
For Gingrich, it’s not enough to promise voters that you’ll bring change to Washington—you have to bring about that change in the span of a few hours. By my assessment, it seemed like far too ambitious of a plan, just given the taxing schedule of inauguration, what with changing tuxedos between each ball and whatnot. But Gingrich offered a rebuke to my timekeeper’s cynicism last night. “All of this is going to happen about two hours after the inaugural address,” Gingrich said.
Having knocked aside that pesky problem of feasibility, Gingrich added another pledge, “I will sign that day an executive order reinstating Ronald Reagan’s Mexico City Policy, no U.S. money will go anywhere in the world to pay for abortions, period.”
These first day pledges have an almost mystical power in Gingrich’s worldview. It’s not enough to encourage Congress to deconstruct all of the accomplishments of the Obama presidency in a matter of weeks; he’ll also implement every conservative pipe dream with a stroke of his pen. Since the world will be aware of his arrival in the Oval Office, Gingrich thinks the economy will change on a dime. “People say to me ‘how quickly will things turnaround?'” Gingrich told a large rally in The Villages on Sunday. “Let’s talk about jobs. Late on election night when we defeat Barack Obama people will start making decisions to create new jobs.”
With everything planned for that first day, Gingrich will quickly run out of plans to enact. My guess: should Gingrich’s presidency become a reality (a dwindling proposition after last night) he’ll roll out a mission accomplished banner by the start of the second week and send himself on a congratulatory tour of the country—likely hawking a book collecting all of his grand accomplishments.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, February 1, 2012
Mitt Romney Isn’t Too Perfect—He’s Too Phony
Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker has a theory: Former Gov. Mitt Romney doesn’t have a problem connecting with people; rather, people have trouble connecting with him.
Why? Because he’s too perfect:
[H]andsome, rich and successful, he is happily married to a beautiful wife, father to five strapping sons and grandfather to many. At the end of a long day of campaigning, his hair hasn’t moved. His shirt is still unwrinkled and neatly tucked into pressed jeans. He goes to bed the same way he woke up—sober, uncaffeinated, seamless and smiling in spite of the invectives hurled in his direction.
What’s wrong with this guy? Nada. Which is precisely the problem. …
For most everyday Americans, life is less tidy. Half have been or will be divorced. Someone in the family is an alcoholic or a drug user. Most can barely pay their bills, and there’s not much to look forward to. When most Americans of Romney’s vintage look in the mirror, they see an overweight person they don’t recognize.
Great Odin’s raven, I thought I’d heard it all!
I’m not omniscient enough to plumb the psyches of millions of “everyday Americans” and imagine what they see in the mirror. I’ll take my cues from the diverse handful of men who’ve seen up Romney up close. Sen. John McCain, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Sen. Fred Thompson campaigned against him in 2008. To varying degrees, each of these men quickly learned to despise Romney.
It’s clear that former Speaker Newt Gingrich and Gov. Rick Perry (and probably Herman Cain) also despise Romney. In the latter pair’s case, one could argue it’s sour grapes. But not in ’08, when Romney flopped badly.
My question to Parker and Jennifer Rubin and David Frum and all the others who are elbowing for room inside the Romney Tank is this: Why do these men fundamentally dislike Mitt Romney? Isn’t it because, on the matter of intellectual honesty, they find Romney all too human? According to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s Game Change, an insider’s chronicle of the ’08 campaign, McCain said at one point that he preferred former Rep. Tom Tancredo—”because at least he believes the things he says.”
Sure, McCain, Giuliani and Huckabee (as well as former Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Rep. Michele Bachmann) have come out in favor of Romney in this campaign, but they’re doing so out of partisan unity or professional positioning.
Lack of charisma or relatability is not an insurmountable obstacle in American politics. Even former Vice President Al Gore managed to win the popular vote, after all. Romney’s principal problem isn’t a lack of personal connection with people. It’s that he irritates people. He’s a transparent phony who, unlike President Bill Clinton, isn’t even particularly good at being phony.
I’d have far more respect for Mitt Romney if he had the guts to say what he really thinks, which is this.
According to Frum, this is akin to asking Romney to be a political martyr.
That’s silly.
Romney had two options besides committing harakiri.
He could’ve stayed in the private sector (where I hear that created thousands of jobs!), or if his thirst for power and influence could not be denied, he could’ve run as a moderate Democrat.
But Romney chose door. No. 3—to run as a belief-beggaring conservative Republican.
Sorry, Kathleen; I’m pretty happy when I look in the mirror and at my beautiful wife and children. And I still think Mitt Romney is a rancid impostor.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, February 1, 2012
“Rich American Exceptionalism”: Whose Swiss Bank Account Hedges Against The American Dollar?
No, that’s not a trick question. Yes, the answer is that easy. Of course, it’s Mitt Romney.
According to the manager of his trust, Mitt Romney’s Swiss bank account wasn’t an exercise in tax avoidance—rather, it was a hedge against a decline in the dollar. I’m not qualified to say whether or not his explanation is the full truth, but it certainly doesn’t provide evidence that Mitt Romney hates America. Obviously, an investment that bets on the decline of the dollar might not sound good, but when you have as much money as he does, you’re going to end up placing bets that might not be great soundbites for a campaign. In substantive terms, Romney is going to have a much bigger problem explaining why Bain profited from destroying companies than he will have explaining this.
But while the mere existence of the Swiss bank account doesn’t by itself raise questions about Mitt Romney’s loyalty to America, it provides one hell of a way to respond to Romney when he engages his his now-familiar attacks on President Obama’s loyalty. Despite all the attention paid to Newt Gingrich’s “food-stamp” line, Mitt Romney himself is no stranger to the hate card. His preferred formulation: that President Obama doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, that he seeks to “poison the American spirit”, and that he wants to turn America into Europe and “keep us from being one nation under God.”
Of course, Mitt Romney is nothing like that at all. He’s just the kind of guy who bets on America’s decline to protect his own ass.
The Tea Party Plan To Save Scott Walker
Tea partiers are gung-ho to help the Wisconsin governor fend off a recall vote—and their fate may well be tied to his.
As soon as April, millions of Wisconsinites will vote on whether to oust Gov. Scott Walker—a rising Republican star and arguably the most polarizing governor in politics today—just two years into his first term in office. Walker’s recall election is a referendum on his hardline conservative agenda, including curbing collective bargaining rights for state workers and slashing education funding. For Walker himself it’s a pivotal moment in his young political career.
The recall fight is also a crucial test for the tea party, the populist movement that helped elect Walker in 2010, vigorously defended him during last winter’s protests over his anti-union “budget repair” bill, and has been organizing to prevent his ouster. The movement’s support is flagging, its clout dwindling, its buzz mostly gone. But now, tea partiers at the state and national levels are rallying around Walker’s recall defense, hoping a victory could bolster the movement in a critical election year. A defeat, on the other hand, would give ammo to liberals and conservatives alike who say the tea party is all but dead.
In recent months, the Tea Party Express, a national organization, and the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama, a tea party-linked political action committee, have waded into the recall fight, blasting out more than a dozen emails to supporters and launching a $100,000 “money bomb” fundraiser to help defend Walker. They argue that the outcome has national implications for the 2012 presidential election; a Tea Party Express email to supporters in January announced that Wisconsin is “Ground Zero for the Battle Against Obama’s Liberal Agenda.”
The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama says it has raked in small donations from supporters throughout the country, from Napa, California, to Nashua, New Hampshire. The group’s director of grassroots outreach, Donald La Combe, wrote in an email to supporters that funds would go toward TV and radio ad campaigns as well as “war rooms” throughout Wisconsin to bolster Walker’s support among voters. “We’re going to win this fight, we’re going to DEFEAT the RECALL, and we’re going to stop Barack Obama from getting Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral Votes,” La Combe wrote. (Neither of the above groups responded to requests for comment.)
Two Wisconsin tea party groups, We the People of the Republic and the Wisconsin Grandsons of Liberty, claim to have signed up 11,000 volunteers and trained 4,000 of them to scrutinize the estimated 1 million signatures gathered by Walker foes. That signature total was nearly two times the 540,208 needed to launch the recall process; nonetheless, the two groups’ vetting operation, VerifyTheRecall.com, was created to root out duplicate signatures and “downright fraud” found in recall petitions for Walker and Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, their website says. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin branch of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded group that helped train and grow the tea party, held a town hall earlier this month touting the budget reforms enacted by Walker and state Republicans.
It’s not hard to see why the tea partiers would go all-in to defend Walker. There is no clear tea party favorite left to rally behind in the 2012 GOP presidential nomination fight with Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain all out of the race. Walker, on the other hand, is right in the tea party’s sweet spot: He battles unions, axes state spending, rejects federal funding, and is rigidly pro-life and pro-gun rights.
The tea party also has a lot of political capital invested in Walker. When intense anger over Walker’s anti-union “budget repair” bill spilled into the streets of the state capital of Madison last February, Americans for Prosperity swooped in to hold a counter-protest defending Walker. Other tea party groups also rushed to the aid of Walker and ripped his critics.
“Walker is a central figure to them, their Sir Galahad battling the evil unions,” says Theda Skocpol, a Harvard sociology professor and coauthor of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Walker ultimately signed the bill into law in March, and it later survived multiple legal challenges.
Last summer, Tea Party Express and Tea Party Nation, two national groups, launched a four-day bus tour across Wisconsin defending six Republicans facing recall elections for their roles in the battle over Walker’s anti-union bill. (Republicans lost two recall races, but clung to a narrow, one-seat majority in the state Senate—a “victory” the tea party claimed credit for.) Tea Party Express also ran TV ads defending Walker’s agenda on the economy.
How much influence does the tea party have at this point? An analysis last July by the liberal blog Think Progress found that the number of events held each month by the Tea Party Patriots, a national group, had dropped by half in the first seven months of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010. Harvard’s Skocpol affirms that tea party events “are falling off some, but there is not a collapse.”
A Pew Research Center analysis published in November found that 23 percent of people in the 60 districts represented nationwide by House Tea Party Caucus members disagreed with the tea party, up from 18 percent a year earlier. Meanwhile, 25 percent of respondents in those districts agreed with the tea party, an 8 percent drop. And a Rasmussen poll this month reported that dislike of the tea party was at an all-time high—and that 46 percent of respondents said the tea party would hurt the GOP in the 2012 elections.
A recent Marquette University poll (PDF) found similarly lackluster support for the tea party in Wisconsin. Forty one percent of respondents thought poorly of the tea party while 33 percent viewed it favorably.
Still, even if the tea party suffers a major defeat with Walker’s recall, their influence will be felt for years to come given the hardline agendas promoted by state and federal lawmakers swept into office in 2010. And Skocpol says the recall election could be a galvanizing event for the movement. “Because all of the tea party forces have not been able to unite on a GOP candidate for president, they’re going to redouble on things like the Wisconsin crusade,” she says. “Grassroots tea partiers everywhere will be be following and contributing to the Walker campaign.”
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