“Fighting Words”: Why Mitt Romney Will Regret His Tough Talk On Iran
Every presidential election season, it seems, is marked by flights of rhetorical fancy on foreign policy. There was John F. Kennedy’s mythical “missile gap“; Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Blame America Firsters“ charge against Democrats; Bill Clinton’s evocative (and quickly backtracked from) “butchers of Beijing” line; and then my personal favorite — George H.W. Bush saying his dog Millie “knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos” (the two bozos in question being Bill Clinton and Al Gore).
This year, however, with the notable exception of anti-interventionist Ron Paul, Republicans are pulling out all the stops on the one foreign policy/national security issue that seems to unite them like no other: Iran and its nuclear program. Consider for a moment the spate of off-the-wall statements each of the GOP aspirants has made about Iran this campaign season.
According to Mitt Romney, “The greatest threat the world faces is a nuclear Iran.” There is, he claims, “no price that is worth an Iranian nuclear weapon,” and he has pledged that if he is president, Iran will “not have a nuclear weapon.”
Fighting words indeed. But they seem downright sober when compared to Rick Santorum — who has not only advocated air strikes to eliminate Tehran’s nuclear aspirations, but has also said Iran is “ruled by the equivalent of al Qaeda on top of this country”; “the principle virtue of the Islamic Republic of Iran is not freedom, opportunity — it’s martyrdom”; and that oldie-but-goodie: “they hate us because of who we are and what we believe in.”
Yet, when it comes to sky-is-falling rhetoric, Santorum takes a back seat to Newt Gingrich, who in a GOP debate this fall hinted the United States might not “survive” an Iranian nuke and in 2006 actually compared the Iranian leadership to Nazis. “This is 1935 and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is as close to Adolf Hitler as we’ve seen,” Gingrich told Human Events magazine. He said at the time that the top priority of the United States should be “overthrowing the government of Iran” with force, if necessary. It’s an argument he has doubled down on this year with calls for killing Iranian scientists and “breaking up their systems” — actions that would be veritable acts of war. He has said bombing Iran is a “fantasy” and the only real way to prevent an Iranian nuke is to depose the regime via conventional war, if necessary.
The latter view was even endorsed by Jon Huntsman, who, when asked if he would consider boots on the ground to stop Iran from getting a bomb, said he wouldn’t be able to “live with the implications of not doing it.” According to Huntsman, all “options [are] on the table.”
It should be noted that such proclamations are, well, a bit divorced from reality. Iran is at best a second-rate power, with an outdated and not terribly advanced conventional military force that is barely able to project power outside its borders. This week, Iranian fisherman even needed the U.S. Navy to rescue them from the clutches of Somali pirates. As Fareed Zakaria noted earlier this month, sanctions have pushed Iran’s economy “into a nose-dive.” Its currency has plunged in value, housing prices are up by 20 percent, the cost of food staples has jumped 40 percent, and the country’s “political system is fractured and fragmenting.” And if 2009’s Green Movement is any indication, there is widespread — if underground — political dissent in the country.
Regionally, Iran has rarely if ever been more isolated. Its one ally, Syria, has its hands full dealing with a domestic uprising, the Gulf states have joined together under a U.S. security umbrella, the Saudis are buying billions in new weaponry from Washington, and the European Union is inching ever closer to a ban on Iranian oil imports — a move that could have a devastating impact on the already battered Iranian economy. Compounding all that is the fact that Iranian scientists are continuing to get killed in the streets of Tehran, and the country’s missile-development program may have just blown itself up.
So why, then, are Republican candidates treating Iran like it’s the modern embodiment of Nazi Germany, al Qaeda, and the Soviet Union, all wrapped up in a mischievous and explosive ball?
The long answer is Americans don’t like Iran, they are afraid of nuclear weapons and images of mushroom clouds, and Muslims with weapons of mass destruction are scary. Frankly, GOP primary voters care about threats to Israel — and sanctions and diplomacy are less impressive than the promise that American airplanes will soon be dropping bombs on reinforced bunkers.
But the short answer is this is pretty much all the GOP has. Want to claim that Obama has been soft on terror? That whole killing Osama bin Laden thing makes that a bit tough. Same goes for all the al Qaeda lieutenants who have been killed in drone strikes. What about pulling out of Iraq? Good luck finding many Americans who disagree with that decision. How about Afghanistan and Obama’s call to begin pulling out troops in 2014? First, it’s hard to argue that Obama didn’t give war a chance in the Hindu Kush; second, Afghanistan is a less and less popular war every day. How about the claim that Obama has thrown Israel under the bus vis-à-vis the Palestinians? That’s not going to make all that much of a difference. It turns out the two groups of voters most concerned about Israel (American Jewsand evangelical Christians) likely already have a pretty clear sense whom they’ll be voting for in November.
On the matter of reducing the defense budget — a dicey proposition in an election year — by getting Republicans to agree to military spending cuts as part of the debt limit deal, Obama largely neutralized GOP attacks on the issue. And it’s not as if many Americans desperately wantto see military spending significantly increased in an age of political austerity.
In the end, since there is no good near-term solution for stopping Iran from getting a bomb –and since Iran continues to engage in provocative behavior like threatening for the umpteenth time to close the Straits of Hormuz — it is the one issue that Republicans can try to pin on the Democratic president, claiming he is weak on national security.
In the end, however, such accusations are unlikely to have much staying power. As Scott Clement points out, even Republicans prefer diplomacy over the use of military force. In fact, compare the Obama approach to Iran (diplomacy, a regional security architecture, likely covert action, and crippling economic sanctions) with the Republican approach (diplomacy, a regional security architecture, likely covert action, and crippling economic sanctions). There really isn’t much of a difference, except for the threatened use of force and all the doomsday talk. But it’s there that the GOP rhetoric could have severe consequences.
As Republicans rattle their sabers this winter, they risk locking themselves into a dangerous position on Iran, should one actually win in November. Just ask Obama how pledging to devote more resources to the fight in Afghanistan in 2008 played out for his presidency.
With Romney et al. declaring that Iran will not get a nuke while they are president and with pledges of support for unilateral action on the part of Israel — including the use of military force — to stop Tehran from getting a bomb, Republicans may find themselves stuck with a dangerous policy on Iran that smacks of brinksmanship. Moreover, all the tough talk on Iran will also limit Obama’s ability to open negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program if the opportunity presents itself. Considering the increasingly desperate economic and political situation there, this might not necessarily be so far-fetched.
In the midst of a feisty presidential campaign, the Republicans’ muscular rhetoric might seem a surefire way to create a political opening. But the ramifications of these existential threats have the potential to live on far past Election Day.
By: Michael Cohen, Foreign Policy, January 6, 2012
Mitt Romney’s Money Problem
Mitt Romney is fast becoming the Scrooge McDuck of the 2012 presidential race.
In Disney’s version, McDuck is Donald Duck’s rich uncle, fond of diving into his money bin and swimming through his gold coins. Romney achieved much the same effect years ago when he posed with fellow Bain Capital executives for a photo showing paper money pouring from their pockets and mouths.
But as he stumps through New Hampshire en route to his probable victory Tuesday in the state’s GOP presidential primary, Romney’s riches are bringing him a wealth of trouble.
Speaking at a Chamber of Commerce event at a Radisson hotel here, he was discussing the value of shopping around for health insurance when he turned to the camera, and said, with perverse pleasure, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”
Thus did the likely Republican nominee film, pro bono, one of President Obama’s first reelection ads.
If this weren’t enough evidence that Romney represented the Plutocrat Progress Party, the first questioner confirmed it.
“In this historic election, we need to convince the masses that our vision as conservatives benefits them,” she said. “So my question is: How will you as the nominee get the minds of America behind you?”
At least she didn’t say “unwashed masses.”
Romney didn’t show any concern that the woman had spoken aloud from the plutocrats’ playbook. “That is the question of my campaign, of course,” he said.
Of course.
The candidate, who last year told a group of unemployed Floridians that “I’m also unemployed,” worried aloud on Sunday that “there were a couple of times I wondered if I was going to get a pink slip” when he worked in the consulting business – an enterprise that helped build his personal wealth to as much as $250 million.
Perhaps realizing that the pink-slip pronouncement was problematic, the owner of multiple homes and horses asserted on Monday that “I started off, actually, at the entry level, coming out of graduate school.”
Newly minted MBAs from Romney’s Harvard can count on making well into the six figures in their “entry-level” jobs at consulting firms.
The entry-level explanation didn’t advance far with Romney’s rivals.
Rick Perry, whose net worth is rather south of Romney’s, responded while touring a restaurant in South Carolina: “Now, I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company, Bain Capital, with all the jobs that they killed, I’m sure he was worried that he’d run out of pink slips.”
And Newt Gingrich described Bain Capital as a “small group of rich people manipulating the lives of thousands of people and taking all the money.”
Gingrich, however, lives in a glass mansion on this one. He boasts about his $60,000-a-pop speeches and has taken to complaining about food-stamp recipients in his speeches here in New Hampshire.
By the time Romney arrived at his next event on Monday, he was clearly out of sorts. First, he mixed up his own offspring as he made the introductions: “My third son is Ben, who has been missing. He’s a doctor from Utah. He came in last night. Special applause.” After the applause, Romney revised: “What did I say? My third son is coming tonight. Ben is my fourth.”
Romney went on to attempt to explain the value of shopping around for health insurance – this time without mentioning the pleasure he gets from firing people. He likened it to auto insurance. “If you watch on TV, the little animal, little gecko? You see these guys competing hard for your business.”
In the audience, many of the 150 reporters looked at one another and smiled.
The candidate had already treated them to a wealth of blue-blooded phrases during the day, seasoning his speech to the Chamber of Commerce with phrases such as “net-net” and “if you’re in a C-corporation” and “get a pro forma together.”
Net-net, nothing says “common man” quite like “get a pro forma together.”
Romney was not done with his “firing” line, however. After his event, held in a metal fabricating plant, he returned to take questions from the unwashed masses of the news corps, including 35 TV cameras.
He said that his fondness for firing was limited to health-insurance providers, and that “people are going to take things out of context and make it something it is not.”
This from a man who recently released an ad appearing to show President Obama saying that “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” In fact, Obama, in the 2008 passage, was quoting an aide to John McCain.
And now Romney is complaining about being taken out of context? That’s rich.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 9, 2011
Would Mitt Romney’s “Competence” Really Fix Washington?
The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson offers measured praise to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign and its all-but-inevitable march to the 2012 presidential nomination.
Gerson concludes this way:
Like Dwight Eisenhower, Romney is a man of vague ideology and deep values. In political matters, he is empirical and pragmatic. He studies problems, assesses risks, calculates likely outcomes. Those expecting Romney to be a philosophic leader will be disappointed. He is a management consultant, and a good one.
Has the moment of the management consultant arrived in American politics? In our desperate drought of public competence, Romney has a strong case to make.
I’m not sure how Romney Competence is supposed to work in practice.
For starters, the basic instinct of conservative economic policy is that government should stay out of the way and let the Bain Capitals of the world work their creative-destructive magic. It seems to me you don’t need to have run Bain Capital in order to, as president, stay out of its way.
Maybe that’s too snarky.
Okay, then. Let’s agree that it’s not former Gov. Romney’s specific expertise as a business consultant that’s needed in Washington. What we need in a president, more generally, is someone with deeply-rooted experience as a manager or executive.
Fine.
If we’re talking about the day-to-day demands of running the government—a big, formidable, complex job—I agree.
But let’s picture President Romney, with his deep management experience, his love of data, his (as Gerson puts it) belief that the “real task of governing” is “making systems work.” Let’s picture management-systems-loving President Romney negotiating with Congress. I want to know how, exactly, does Romney Competence deal with a “system” that’s riven by ideology? How does he make that one “work”?
When it comes to budgeting and fiscal reform, there’s no lack of number-crunches and data-lovers in Washington.
Occasionally, some of them even formulate actual proposals for lawmakers’ consideration.
Why, the current president of the United States established a commission to come up with a plan to achieve long-term fiscal sustainability!
What came of it?
Nothing.
Was it a lack of competence that explains why President Obama let the Bowles-Simpson plan twist in the wind? And why the debt-ceiling and “supercommittee” negotiations tanked so ignominiously?
When Tea Partyers refuse any increases in government revenue—even if they’re generated via code simplification rather than individual rate hikes, and even when they’re accompanied by entitlement reform—are they incompetent?
Is it so-called competence that divides Republican Sen. Tom Coburn from Americans for Tax Reform activist Grover Norquist?
Or is it something else? (Hint: it begins with an “i” and ends with a “y”.)
I genuinely want to know what difference it would make to have Mitt Romney, rather than one of his rivals, in the room with Coburn and Norquist.
Is it competence that’s urgently needed—or courage?
Which occasions the question I’ve been asking all along: When has Mitt Romney ever displayed political courage?
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, January 10, 2012
The “Up In The Air” Candidate: Mitt Romney’s “I Like Being Able to Fire People” Problem
There’s a scene in the movie Up in the Air in which George Clooney’s character, a corporate hatchet man who flies around the country firing people on behalf of his merger masters, turns to his eager young apprentice and explains why he’s able to avoid romantic entanglements:
“You know that moment when you look into somebody’s eyes and you can feel them staring into your soul and the whole world goes quiet just for a second?”
She answers, “Yes.”
And Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, replies with hollow certainty, “Right, well I don’t.”
Ladies and gentlemen, meet former Gov. Mitt Romney, the “Up in the Air” candidate. Romney’s Bain Capital was the living embodiment of the Up in the Air ethic: form an investment group, take over the businesses, and fire the workers to pay off the investors. The human wreckage that resulted was merely collateral damage.
On Monday, Mitt Romney strung together seven words that should never be connected by any candidate: “I like being able to fire people.” Romney was speaking about being able to fire people providing him services, but the quotation figures to haunt him long after its context has been forgotten.
That because of Romney’s long-term problem: the feeling among voters that in many cases, “I like being able to fire people” is exactly what he meant for the workaday folks at the companies Bain Capital picked clean.
As the New York Times put it in their editorial, “The Corporate Candidates,”
The problem with Mr. Romney’s pitch is the kind of businessman he was: specifically, a buyer of flailing companies who squeezed out the inefficiencies (often known as employees) and then sold or merged them for a hefty profit. More than a fifth of them later went bankrupt…This kind of leveraged capitalism…is one of the reasons for the growth in the income gap, tipping the wealth in the economy toward the people at the top.
One of these companies, as according to Reuters, was a steel mill in Kansas City that Bain took over in 1993 and went bankrupt in 2001, putting 750 people out of work. Reuters reports that Bain’s profits were $12 million on its $8 million initial investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees
Meanwhile, one of the people Bain helped put out of work,
Joe Soptic found a job as a school custodian. The $24,000 salary was roughly one-third of his former pay, and the health plan did not cover his wife, Ranae.
When Ranae started losing weight, “I tried to get her to the doctor and she wouldn’t go,” Soptic said. She ended up in the county hospital with pneumonia, where doctors discovered her advanced lung cancer. She died two weeks later.
Soptic was left with nearly $30,000 in medical bills. He drained a $12,000 savings account and the hospital wrote off the balance.
“I worked hard all my life and played by the rules, and they allowed this to happen,” Soptic said.
Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign has gleefully jumped on Romney’s “I like being able to fire people” stumble and turned it into a ringtone, since Perry’s towel-snapping days at A&M are never far behind him. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, bankrolled by (ironically) antilabor casino owner Sheldon Adelson, is running ads and infomercials in South Carolina hammering Romney over Bain. Copying Sen. Teddy Kennedy in ’94, Gingrich is relying on the laid-off workers to tell Romney’s story. And even former Gov. Jon Huntsman, the supposed nice guy in the campaign, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday that Romney has no “core”.
All of this is laying down an effective emotional narrative for the Obama re-election campaign. Voters, as any pollster can tell you, decide how they feel about a candidate and once they have there’s little you can do to change it. The question isn’t whether the Bain attacks have factual resonance, the question is whether they have emotional resonance.
Should Romney get the nomination—and odds are he will—the emotional belief that Mitt Romney is the empty, “Up in the Air” Candidate will be his undoing in November.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, January 10, 2012
Some Conservatives Already Quietly Surrendering To Romney
It is usually assumed that the invisible primary ends with the Iowa Caucuses, when the party rank-and-file begin to have their say. But thanks to an exceptionally chaotic and unpredictable pre-caucus period, the central dynamic of the invisible primary–Mitt Romney’s wooing of conservatives skeptical of him–has been extended. And now it’s reached a new phase: The internal struggle among conservative opinion-leaders about when it will prove necessary to throw in the towel and settle for Romney.
The most underreported feature of the contest so far is that most conservatives have already reconciled themselves to Romney as the nominee. They may prefer someone else, and in pursuit of that preference–or to keep ideological pressure on Romney–they may continue to raise alarms about the front-runner’s record, positions, or general-election strategy. But it is exceedingly difficult to find a significant conservative figure who has not already pledged to back Mitt fully if he’s the nominee.
As a result, there will be no last-ditch rightwing crusade to deny Romney the nomination. Nor will a discouraged base threaten to throw the general election to Obama. Instead, you can expect to see an increasingly public debate on the right about the costs and benefits of further resistance, until an eventual surrender.
There are powerful arguments for throwing in the towel early, though the factor most often pointed to by the Beltway commentariat–Mitt’s superior electability–is not necessarily the strongest. Yes, some conservatives (along with most Democrats) have embraced the conventional wisdom that successful candidates must be able to move to the center to win and deemed Romney the obvious choice on electability grounds. But these are people largely already in his camp. Though it’s sometimes hard for political pros to accept, most conservatives simply don’t buy the CW. They actually believe what they have been repeatedly saying since they pulled the GOP hard right after two straight general election debacles: This is a conservative country whose electorate responds best to a clear, consistent conservative message. The 2010 results confirmed that in their minds–and neither political scientists nor polls nor pundits can persuade them otherwise.
So if electability is not a clinching argument for getting on board the Romney Express, what might be? The main temptation for conservatives to call it a day is the strong likelihood that an extended nominating contest will become so nasty, divisive, and cash-draining that it will damage the ticket far more than any “base” misgivings about Romney might. Even as Republicans celebrate the general election advantage they expect from Super-PACs, their lethal power in intra-party battles is becoming plainer every day, and now that Gingrich has foresworn positive campaigning, none of the survivors can be expected to play nice.
Just as importantly, “true conservatives” have doubts and divisions about the ideological reliability of Mitt’s surviving rivals. Santorum is regarded by some as an Washington insider and Big Government Conservative. Newt’s heresies were amply aired by those attack ads in Iowa. And Perry, the closest thing to a consensus “true conservative” candidate, greatly upset believers with his position on immigration.
And so, conservative leaders may well be asking themselves: Is the dubious value of nominating Santorum or Gingrich or even Perry instead of Romney worth the risk of creating the foundation for an Obama campaign assault on the eventual winner as a flip-flopping opportunist with the character of a feral cat?
Possibly not. Currently the most important residual reason for continuing the anti-Romney resistance is the feeling that he hasn’t yet paid sufficient deference to movement conservatives (even though, ironically, he was their candidate four years ago) or made sufficient promises to make their priorities his own. These are concerns that should be able to be finessed. There may well be furious behind-the-scene negotiations going on to ensure that Mitt doesn’t emulate his new supporter John McCain by getting all “mavericky” in the general election or implicitly triangulating against the Right. And it could culminate in a sort of political Groundhog Day, when a particularly powerful opinion leader signals the troops to shorten or extend the nominating contest (though the leader best positioned to do so, Sen. Jim DeMint, has indicated he does not intend to make an endorsement at all.)
So the fight could go on for a while, but not for an extended period (unless Romney does something uncharacteristically stupid, or Rick Perry achieves a complete resurrection). In head if not heart, conservative elites have already given their hand to Mitt, and much of what’s going on at the present is simply a matter of maintaining appearances and executing a solid pre-nup.
By: Ed Kilgore, The Democratic Strategist, January 9, 2012
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