More than most elections, the contest for President this fall is likely to be decided less on “wedge issues” — or even candidate positions that are symbolic of who is on whose side — and more on the character and core values of the candidates — and for that matter on the question of the core values of the society we hope to leave to our children.
Last Friday, speaking to the Democratic Caucus Policy Conference, Vice-President Joe Biden told a story that speaks volumes about the character of Barack Obama.
According to Biden, the day before he ordered the raid that finally stopped Osama Bin Laden, President Obama met with his top national security advisers in the Situation Room. At the close of the meeting, he went around the room asking each person for his or her recommendation on whether to launch the risky nighttime mission.
As it went around the table, Leon Panetta recommended that the President proceed. Most of the others expressed reservations and handicapped the odds of success as only fair. Finally, the President got to Biden who said he recommended not proceeding until two additional steps were taken to enhance the odds.
Then the President stood and told his advisers he would let them know of his decision in the morning.
The next day, as Obama stepped onto his helicopter to leave on a day trip, he turned to his National Security Adviser, Tom Donilan, and issued a simple order: “let’s go.”
Much more was at stake in the Bin Laden mission than success or failure killing or capturing the most wanted fugitive of modern times. In some respects Obama’s Presidency itself was at stake.
To quote Biden, “The President has a backbone like a ramrod.”
Whether or not you like all of his policies — or all of his decisions — it’s hard to argue that Barack Obama is not a tough, decisive guy — a guy who is guided by solid core principles and has a disciplined, laser-focused will. This is not a President that flip-flops in the political wind or is swayed by the last person who talks to him. Above all, Barack Obama is centered. He has a solid core built around strong core values.
America — and the rest of the world — have seen those character traits over and over again during the last four years.
They saw them when he announced his candidacy to become the first African American president of the United States — and then organized the highly disciplined, leave-no-stone-unturned campaign that elected him 2008.
They saw that same inner toughness in his — at the time unpopular — decision that saved the American auto industry.
In early 2009, Obama simply refused to throw in the towel on health care reform, when the election of Senator Scott Brown made it appear impossible to succeed — and he won.
Later that year, Obama’s force of will guaranteed the passage of Wall Street reform and the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And his willingness to just say no to Republican obstructionism last month by making a recess appointment of Richard Cordray, guaranteed that American financial institutions — for the first time — have a regulator dedicated solely to looking out for the interests of everyday consumers.
Obama has remained determined and unflappable in the face of the toughest economic and political environment in sixty years and has emerged from three years of battle ready to wage a highly organized, focused campaign this fall that will center on most fundamental question facing our society: whether we will have a nation where we look out for each other, and have each other’s back — or a society where we are all in this alone.
Obama intends to make this campaign a battle over core values — a choice between a society where we are all responsible for our future, and for each other — or a society where selfishness is our highest value — where “greed is good.” His campaign will frame the choice before America as whether we have a government dedicated to defending privilege — or one whose mission is giving everyone a fair shot, a fair share, and a guarantee that we all have to play by the same set of rules. His campaign will be about reigniting the values that underlie the American Dream and the hopes of the middle class and all of those who aspire to it. It will be about restoring fairness and opportunity and hope.
Contrast that kind of President — and that kind of campaign — with Obama’s likely opponent, Mitt Romney.
Right after the 2004 election I was riding in a New Jersey taxicab. The driver was a typical male New Jersey cabbie. “So what do you think of Corzine?” I asked.” “Oh, Corzine, tough guy. Like him,” he replied about the then-Senator.
“What do you think of Bush?” I said. “Like him too. Tough guy. Stands up for what he believes,” came the answer.
“How about Hillary Clinton?” I asked. “Tough gal. Like her,” he said.
“What about Kerry?” I asked. “Kerry? Can’t stand him. Flip-flopper–a phony.”
Ideology, policy positions — none of that mattered to this cabdriver who liked Corzine, Clinton and Bush. He wanted a tough, committed leader. But the Republicans had convinced him of its central message — “John Kerry is a flip-flopper–a phony.”
Bush strategist Karl Rove had sold that version of Kerry — a Senator who in fact has strong core values — largely because of his tendency to “Senate-speak.” He also realized that Kerry’s vote for the Iraq War, and then against continued funding in 2004, could be portrayed as the symbolically powerful flip-flop. The icing on the cake was Kerry’s explanation of the 2004 vote: “I voted for it before I voted against it.” Rove illustrated his flip-flop message with an iconic commercial that featured pictures of Kerry windsurfing and tacking one way and then another.
Kerry’s perceived lack of core values was the factor that, more than any other, led to George Bush’s second term as president.
Voters want leaders who believe in something other than their own election. Quite correctly they want leaders with a strong moral center. They want leaders who make and keep commitments to their principles and to other people. And they want to know that the candidates they support are the leaders they will get after the election — not, as John Huntsman said of Romney, “a well-oiled weathervane”.
Romney has never seen a position he couldn’t change if he determined it would be to his advantage to do so. He thinks of politics as a business marketing project, where you say what you think you need to in order to maximize sales. Romney doesn’t think of voters as citizens to be engaged — he thinks of them as customers to be manipulated.
As Massachusetts Governor, Romney was pro-choice — now he is anti-choice.
Romney was the author of the Massachusetts health care plan that in many respects served as the model for Obama’s own health care plan. Now he wants to repeal “Obamacare.”
Romney once refused to sign the “no new tax pledge.” Now he has signed the “no new tax pledge.”
Romney favored extension of the assault weapons ban. Now he opposes extension of the assault weapon ban.
Once he said the TARP “was the right thing to do.” Now he says he opposed it.
Right after the economy collapsed he said he favored an economic stimulus program; now he says he opposed the stimulus bill.
Once Romney said he believed that human activity contributed to global warming; now he says he doesn’t think we know what causes global warming.
One day he was emphatically neutral on Ohio Governor Kasich’s union-busting legislation — that was ultimately “vetoed” by the Ohio voters. The next day he one hundred percent supported that legislation.
Romney is a guy who, when called on his flip-flops and inconsistencies, said: “I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake.”
The reason Romney is having such a difficult time making the sale in the Republican primary contest is that many Republicans don’t think he has strong core beliefs, don’t trust him and think he’s a phony.
Wait until he has to convince swing voters that he’s anything more than a “vulture capitalist” who will say anything and do anything to make the biggest deal of his life — the “acquisition” of the government of the United States of America.
But, you say, maybe he will flip-flop back into a more “moderate” Mitt Romney if he becomes President. Don’t bet on it. People who have no core values will sell their services to the highest bidder. Romney’s Presidency has already been sold lock, stock and barrel to the big Wall Street banks, the CEO class, the multi-millionaires who are behind his super PAC and the Republican Establishment that have financed his campaign.
In fact, throughout his career, Mitt Romney has demonstrated that his only “core value” is his own financial and political success. In Romney’s view, both in politics and in business, every other belief or commitment can be thrown overboard if it weighs him down in his quest for success. And that goes for the people and communities that were impacted by the “creative destruction” of his corporate takeovers and leveraged buyouts at Bain Capital. To him, they were apparently nothing more than “collateral damage.”
In the end, it is likely that the ultimate irony of the Romney campaign will be that his own willingness to toss aside positions and values that might at one time or another have appeared inconvenient, will ultimately weigh him down more than anything else.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post, January 29, 2012
February 1, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012, GOP Presidential Candidates | American Values, Auto Industry, Barack Obama, CFPB, Health Reform, Mitt Romney, Politics, TARP |
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Here are some things you could learn about black Americans from the recent statements and insinuations of Republican presidential candidates, Republican congressmen and Republican-friendly radio personalities:
Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them somethingbecause they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.
Judging by these claims, all of which have actually been put forward recently, here is a modest prediction: This presidential election will be one of the most race-soaked in recent history. It is already more race-soaked than the 2008 election, which, of course, marked the first time that a black man became a major-party candidate.
I don’t know why this is. Perhaps because Senator John McCain, the Republican contender in 2008, generally and admirably refused to race-bait. But the Republican candidates in today’s contest aren’t so meticulous about avoiding the temptation to dog-whistle their way to the nomination.
A Dark Art
Dog-whistling — the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters –is one of the darkest political arts. In this race, Newt Gingrich is streets ahead of his nearest competitor in its use. In addition to his comments about black children working as janitors, he has repeatedly referred to Obama as the country’s “food-stamp president.”
Food stamps have been fixed in the minds of many white voters as a government subsidy misused by blacks at leastsince 1976, when Ronald Reagan complained of “strapping young bucks” who used public assistance to buy “T-bone steaks.” (It is distressing to remember, in light of Reagan’s subsequent beatification, that he was to racial dog-whistling what Pat Buchanan has been to Jew-baiting; it was Reagan who also introduced the “welfare queen” into public discourse.)
The genius of dog-whistling is its deniability. It would be difficult for a figure such as Rush Limbaugh to run for public office, given his record of fairly straightforward race-baiting. (Limbaugh, who in the words of Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy is an “excellent entrepreneur of racial resentment,” has been on a tear lately. He has accused Obama — who he says “talks honky”around white people — and the first lady of abusing public funds as payback for the ill-treatment afforded their ancestors.)
But “food-stamp president” is just indirect enough that Gingrich is protected from detrimental blowback, at least during the largely white Republican primaries.
Kennedy, who studies the role of race in national elections, told me last week of a rule he uses to measure whether a candidate’s appeal to prejudice will succeed: If it takes more than two sentences for a critic to explain why a dog-whistle is a dog-whistle, the whistler wins. Gingrich seems to understand this, and so, despite criticism from blacks, has made the term “food-stamppresident” a staple of his stump speeches.
New Realization
Kennedy offers the theory that this campaign’s dog-whistling may be prompted by a realization by right-leaning provocateurs that voters have become inured to charges of racism. I suspect another phenomenon has hastened this realization: A handful of black Republicans have abetted dog-whistling by making their own bombastic statements about the degraded moral health of the black community, the putative foreignness of the Obamas and the Democratic Party’s plantation-like qualities.
The former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who last week endorsed Gingrich, told me in an interview last year that Obama was more “international” than American. He also said that, unlike Obama, he rejects the label“African-American” because he feels “more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa.”
Representative Allen West of Florida, one of two black Republican House members, recently called the Democratic Party a “21st-century plantation” and compared himself to Harriet Tubman. In August, he said, “Today in the black community, we see individuals who are either wedded to a subsistence check or an employment check. Democrat physical enslavement has now become liberal economic enslavement, which is just as horrible.”
How far in intent is West’s message from this one, recently delivered by Rick Santorum in Sioux City, Iowa: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” (Santorum laterdenied that he said the word “black,” arguing that what he actually said was “blah.” The denial is not credible.)
The writer Gary Younge has noted that in Woodbury County, which includes Sioux City, nine times more whites use food stamps than blacks do. But it doesn’t matter: Santorum wasn’t driven from the race for making such a blatant appeal to white resentment — instead, he won the Iowa caucus.
An Odd Video
Recently, I watched an educational children’s video produced by a company part-owned by Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate (and current Fox News host). The video series, called “Learn Our History,” is meant as a corrective to a left-wing interpretation of the American story.
In one episode, a group of children are transported to Washington, in the late 1970s, a time when, we are told,“people are out of work and some of their morals are just gone.” The group, walking down a cartoon version of a street from “The Wire,” is confronted by a black mugger in a tank-top emblazoned with the word “Disco.” (Yes,“Disco.”) The mugger says to the time-travelers, “Gimme yo money!”
I asked Huckabee why the video advanced this particular stereotype. We had been speaking about the rationale for the video series, and he had just finished telling me that the project was meant to encourage moral leadership. Then he told me he had nothing to do with writing the show’s scripts, but it was his impression that the mugger wasn’t meant to be black. In any case, we were talking about a cartoon, he said, and cartoons traffic in“caricature.”
This is something cartoons share with many of today’s leading Republicans.
By: Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, January 31, 2012
February 1, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012, GOP Presidential Candidates, Racism | Dog Whistles, GOP, Newt Gingrich, Politics, Republicans, Right Wing, Teaparty |
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In conservative political folklore, the 1964 election was a crushing defeat that laid the philosophical groundwork that ultimately led to Ronald Reagan’s triumph.
No one likes to talk as proudly about 1968’s razor-thin election of Richard Nixon. It’s much more sanitary to take Sen. Barry Goldwater and skip straight to Reagan. But ’68 was at least as important as ’64, and maybe more so; it was that campaign that yielded the potent Southern strategy; the counter-counterculture; the full-throated resentment toward coastal elites. If ’64 was aimed at the conservative mind, ’68 was aimed at the conservative viscera.
The late Gov. George Romney, of course, was a minor figure in the drama of ’68. A moderate Rockefeller Republican, he would lose soundly to Nixon, the former vice president and California senator.
With all this in mind, I looked up one of my favorite modern political histories, Garry Wills’s Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man.
Here’s what Wills had to say about that era’s candidate Romney:
Romney built up a belief in his “nonpolitical” background: here was a man (men thought) who worked his way up in the business world and then—sincere novice amid deal-fettered pros—entered politics with the innocence of an outsider. The truth is that Romney began his career in politics, after three unsuccessful attempts (at three different schools) to get a college education. He went to Washington, in pursuit of his childhood sweetheart, the intense Lenore, and got a job as an aide to Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts. He did work on tariff bills that equipped him for a new career—a lobbyist for Alcoa, he spent nine years as a Washington glad-hander around Burning Tree Country Club and the National Press Club. Then he became an automobile lobbyist (on the carmakers’ Trade Advisory Commission), dealing with the National Recovery Administration. From this post he rose to become manager of the AMA (American Manufacturers Association)—an office that made him, in wartime, managing director of the Automotive Council for War Production. He had now spent nineteen years fronting for big business among politicians.
Hmph. This sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? To be fair, former Gov. Mitt Romney succeeded in business before failing at politics, and he never was a lobbyist. But there’s still the same “pious baloney” about a private-sector white knight riding in to save government.
Yet here are a couple of key differences between Romney pere and fils. According to Wills, George Romney wasn’t known for smarts: “Robert McNamara, who urged Romney to get into politics when they were both auto men around Detroit, later came to know him better: Romney’s trouble, he concluded, is that the man ‘has no brains.’ ”
Even more interesting, there’s this. Romney’s presidential ambitions were significantly thwarted by his change of heart over the Vietnam War. He’d gone from supporting it as “morally right and necessary” to calling for peace “at an early time.” He compared a briefing he’d received in November 1965 to “brainwashing.”
This was no convenient flip-flop, however. Wills notes:
His greatest gift had been mesmeric power to convince others because he so convinced himself. The blue eyes burn toward you under that low white cap of hair; the block of athletic face is rigid with fresh seizures of sincerity. He has a fanatic’s belief in everything he says or does, and a prophet’s fierce anger if anyone questions him. A desire to keep his burning conviction unsullied by earthly ties explains his later aloofness from politics and politicians. … He went down, thrashing ridiculously, in 1968; yet he maintained to the end that it was a public service for him to call his briefing a case of successful brainwashing.
In this, the son is strikingly unlike the father. It’s clear that, whatever else Mitt Romney gleaned from the experience of ’68, he learned about the sometimes necessary art of insincerity. Everything about Mitt’s political career to this point suggests that he’s not content to go down in honorable defeat, as Goldwater did. He will not be undone by “seizures of sincerity” or a “prophet’s anger.” He is smarter, more devious, and more contemptuous than his father.
If he could speak to his father on the other side, he might say, “You tried your way, Dad. Now I’m trying mine. This is how a Rockefeller Republican overcomes the ‘muttonheads’ who fell for Goldwater and Nixon.”
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, January 31, 2012
February 1, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012, GOP Presidential Candidates | Barry Goldwater, Conservatives, George Romney, GOP, Mitt Romney, Politics, Republicans, Rockefeller Republican |
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The Republican primary campaign has highlighted the barely concealed contempt in which Mitt Romney holds the electorate, especially the Republican electorate. One adviser has expressed his astonishment that GOP voters fall for clowns like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich:
“They like preachers,” the adviser said of the tea party demographic. “If you take them to a tent meeting, they’ll get whipped into a frenzy. That’s how people like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich get women to fall into bed with them.”
That is an insult putatively directed at Romney’s rivals, but which reflects heavily on the voters themselves. Another fresh insult comes today, by way of John Dickerson, who reports that Gingrich’s assault on Juan Williams worked because “‘Williams was a stand-in for Barack Obama in people’s minds,’ said one Romney adviser.”
Gee, whatever could Williams and Obama have in common? Can this be interpreted as meaning anything other than that South Carolina Republicans are a pack of racist buffoons?
Romney’s disdain for the electorate is one of his more deeply rooted traits. During his father’s 1968 presidential campaign, Romney wrote, “how can the American public like such muttonheads?”
I find that contempt pretty well-founded, and it is a relief that Romney does not believe the nonsense he spouts during the campaign. But the persistent awkwardness of Romney’s campaign style reflects this basic tension. It’s easy to try to persuade somebody for whom you have basic respect. It’s persuading somebody whom you consider stupid — while you must conceal any trace of your disdain — that’s excruciatingly difficult. Romney’s awkward manner on the trail is the agony of suppressed contempt.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 1, 2012
February 1, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | Electorate, GOP, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Politics, Republicans, Teaparty, Voters |
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He’s the only Mormon in the presidential race, but that doesn’t mean Mitt Romney is the only candidate Mormons support. Another favorite White House hopeful? Ron Paul, whose demand that Washington strictly adhere to the Constitution has some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints singing his praise.
“You cannot grow up in the church and not hear of and be taught that the Constitution is an inspired document,” says Connor Boyack, a Mormon who heads the Utah Tenth Amendment Center. “And when it comes to who best supports and defends the Constitution, Ron Paul is that guy.”
In Paul’s hunt for convention delegates, the Mormon vote will be key in early caucus states such as Nevada, where 25 percent of GOP caucus-goers in 2008 were LDS members. Exit polls from 2008 show nine of 10 Mormon voters cast ballots for Romney, but the Texas congressman is seeing a surge in support there and elsewhere.
While the Salt Lake City-based church does not officially endorse any candidate for president, members like Boyack have been preaching the gospel of Ron Paul. Boyack explains that Romney might be a brother in faith, but Paul’s commitment to upholding the tenets of the Constitution make him a more ideological choice for Mormons. A controversial and sometimes persecuted group, Mormons have historically looked to the Constitution as a safeguard to preserve their religious freedom. The Constitution is even mentioned in the church’s Doctrine and Covenants, described as revelations to the church’s founder, Joseph Smith. Brigham Young University religion professor Richard Bennett says the devotion to the Constitution came after an 1833 attack on a Mormon church in Missouri. Bennett says God told Smith to use the Constitution to fight the persecution of his church.
Paul’s team has been quick to highlight the Mormon support, setting up a special “Latter Day Saints for Ron Paul” Facebook page (“liked” by over 1,300 fans). It’s one of a number dedicated to pro-Paul coalitions, including evangelicals, Protestants, and Catholics, as well as truckers, gamers, and accountants. The candidate is also featured in a five-minute Web ad, recycled from the 2008 campaign, titled, “Ron Paul preserves, protects, defends LDS Constitution view.”
Paul spokesman Gary Howard says, “Members of the LDS church make up one of those important coalitions, all of which are great assets in this campaign. Dr. Paul’s message resonates with everyone who believes in the principles he espouses: limited government, personal and economic liberty.”
By; Lauren Fox, U. S. News and World Report, January 30, 2012
January 31, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Constitution, Joseph Smith, Mitt Romney, Mormonism, Politics, Religious Freedom, Ron Paul |
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