“Of Hooters, Zombies and Senators”: Attention Must Be Paid To Races In The House And Senate
Today, let’s take a look at debates that do not involve Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. You can thank me later.
I am talking about the races for the United States Senate, people. Attention must be paid! And, as a reward, we can also discuss a new campaign ad featuring zombies.
There are 33 Senate contests this year, although voters in some of the states may not have noticed there’s anything going on. In Texas, for instance, Paul Sadler, a Democrat, has had a tough time getting any attention in his battle against the Tea Party fan favorite Ted Cruz. Except, perhaps, when he called Cruz a “troll” in their first debate.
In Utah, Scott Howell, a Democrat, has been arguing that if the 78-year-old Senator Orrin Hatch wins, he might “die before his term is through.” Suggesting a longtime incumbent is over the hill is a venerable election technique, but you really are supposed to be a little more delicate about it. Howell also proposed having 29 debates. The fact that Hatch agreed to only two was, he claimed, proof of the senator’s fading stamina.
Nobody in Massachusetts could have missed the fact that there’s a Senate race going on. In their last debate, Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren sounded like two angry squirrels trapped in a small closet. A high point came when the candidates were asked to name their ideal Supreme Court justice. “That’s a great question!” said Brown brightly, in what appeared to be a stall for time. He came up with Antonin Scalia. Then, after boos from the audience, Brown added more names, until he had picked about half the current court, from John Roberts to Sonia Sotomayor.
Meanwhile, in Nebraska, the Democrat Bob Kerrey began his debate remarks with: “First of all, let me assure you that I’m still Bob Kerrey.” This seemed to be a bad sign.
There are actually about only a dozen Senate races in which there is serious suspense about who’s going to win. To the Republicans’ dismay, many of them are in states that were supposed to be a lock for the G.O.P.
Tea Party pressure produced several terrible candidates. We have all heard about Todd Akin in Missouri, who claimed after a recent debate that Senator Claire McCaskill wasn’t sufficiently “ladylike.” Since then, Akin has doubled down on a claim that doctors frequently perform abortions on women who aren’t pregnant.
In others, the Republicans found awful candidates without any help from the far right.
Senator Bill Nelson in Florida received the gift of Representative Connie Mack IV as his Republican opponent, and promptly unveiled an ad calling Mack “a promoter for Hooters with a history of barroom brawling, altercation and road rage.” Mack’s fortunes seem to have been sliding ever since. Recently, while he was greeting voters at a Donut Hole cafe, one elderly couple asked him to get them a menu.
Some Democratic candidates are also turning out to be stronger than anticipated — like Arizona’s Richard Carmona, a Hispanic physician who served as surgeon general under President George W. Bush. Carmona is a Vietnam combat veteran who worked as a SWAT team leader for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. “In 1992,” his campaign biography reports, “he rappelled from a helicopter to rescue a paramedic stranded on a mountainside when their medevac helicopter crashed during a snowstorm, inspiring a made-for-TV movie.”
Let that be a lesson. If the Democrats in Texas had just nominated a Hispanic Vietnam combat veteran who saved crash victims and inspired a TV movie, they wouldn’t have to depend on debates to get some attention.
The race where the Democrats are getting a nasty surprise is in Connecticut, where Representative Chris Murphy is having a tough time against the Republican Linda McMahon, the former professional wrestling mogul. McMahon has spent a record $70 million of her own money over the past three years trying to convince voters that what Connecticut really needs is a senator who knows how to create jobs in a simulated sport awash in violence, sexism and steroid abuse.
Improbable candidates who don’t have $70 million to blanket their state in ads can always just cobble something really weird together, put it up on the Web and hope it goes viral.
Last time around, Carly Fiorina, who was running for Senate in California, created a sensation with “Demon Sheep,” featuring an actor wearing a sheep mask with glowing red eyes.
Now John Dennis, the Republican opponent of the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, has a new California sheep-themed conversation-starter. It portrays Pelosi as the leader of a cult of zombies, preparing a lamb for sacrifice. Then Dennis breaks in, saves the lamb, calls one of the zombies “Dude,” and denounces Pelosi for supporting the indefinite detention of American citizens who are suspected of being terrorists.
Not your typical Republican. Dennis ran against Pelosi before and got 15 percent of the vote. But I feel the zombie ad could well push him up into the 20s.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 5, 2012
“Jobs Report Truthers Return”: Anytime There Are Positive Jobs Numbers, Conservatives Cry Conspiracy
Today’s jobs report, showing the unemployment rate dropped below 8 percent for the first time in over 40 moths, will have Democrats gleeful and Republicans (deep in their hearts) despondent. But what if the numbers are actually just a part of a plot to get President Obama reelected? It’s a stupid question, but the immediate reaction of many conservative media figures has been not only to ask it, but to answer it as well.
On Fox News, which completely ignored the numbers for the first 30 minutes they were out in favor of stories about (what else?) gold and a live performance by 12-year-old Jackie Evancho, host Bill Hemer darkly warned, as he summarized the report, “a lot of questions remain about those numbers.” Co-host Martha MacCallum agreed that the report “raises a lot questions.” Finally, they brought on Fox Business analyst Stuart Varney to give it to us straight: “There is widespread mistrust of this report and these numbers, because there are clear contradictions.” Varney explained that many of the jobs created are part-time, and that there were discrepancies between the two surveys that make up the report (one looks at jobs added and the other calculates the unemployment rate).
“Oh how convenient that the rate drops below 8 percent for the first time in 43 months five weeks before an election! That’s why there’s some mistrust of these numbers,” Varney continued. And while questioning the numbers produced by the economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Varney approvingly cited statistics from Mitt Romney’s stump speech, saying the 23 million underemployed figure Romney often invokes shows the jobs situation is “grim.”
Just a month ago, Varney didn’t question the validity of the previous jobs report. “OK, I say this is a flat-out bad report on the state of the economy. America simply is not at work,” Varney said in one of two quotes that landed on a GOP tipsheet. But in his defense, that report did show bad news for Obama while the new one is likely good news for the president, so he’s just doing his job.
And Varney wasn’t alone. As Salon’s Andrew Leonard noted this morning, former GE CEO and frequent Obama critic Jack Welch was quick on the draw too, tweeting, “Unbelievable jobs numbers .. these Chicago guys will do anything .. can’t debate so change numbers.” There were other theories too. Conn Carroll, a senior writer at the conservative Washington Examiner, thinks the conspiracy goes far beyond the BLS. “I don’t think BLS cooked numbers. I think a bunch of Dems lied about getting jobs. That would have same effect,” he tweeted. Eric Bolling, another Fox News host, tweeted, “WOW Obama Labor Dept (7.8%) smarter than all 25 of Americas top Economists (8.2%est).. or something far more insideous [sic].” Bob Metcalfe, a conservative academic, added, “Who’da thought Obama’s Labor Department, as their October Surprise, would report the highest one-month ‘employment’ jump in 29 years?” Sonny Bunch, the managing editor of the Washington Free Beacon, tweeted — we assume facetiously — “THEORY: George Soros hired 500k part-time hole-diggers/hole-filler-inners to artificially depress unemployment rate.”
All this fits into a long, dark tradition of questioning BLS data. President Nixon even sent a top aide to make a list of all the people he suspected were Jews in the agencies because he believed they were tweaking economics forecasts to make the president look bad.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, October 5, 2012
“The Sound of Crickets”: Conservative Sites Silent About GOP Voter-Registration Fraud
What began last week as a trickle—a report from the Palm Beach Post that the Florida Republican Party was cutting ties with a firm that turned in “questionable” voter-registration forms in one county—has now grown into a pretty ugly flood. Turns out the Florida GOP paid the firm, Strategic Allied Consulting, to do voter registration, while the Republican National Committee paid the same firm millions to register voters in four other battleground states: Virginia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Colorado. The group allegedly submitted forms with dead voters’ information and fake information—and in some cases, may have changed voters’ party affiliations to Republican without alerting the voters. More disturbing, the firm the Republicans were paying, Strategic Allied Consulting, is one of several that GOP consultant Nathan Sproul has run over the last decade. Along the way, Sproul’s companies have been accused of everything from refusing to register Democratic voters to shredding the voter-registration forms of Democrats. Yet Sproul continued to get lucrative contracts from the GOP. And the conservative media has had precious little to say about it.
Josh Marshall called the news a “thunderclap of schadenfreude” and it’s hard to think of a more apt description. Republicans and their media backers have long criticized mass voter-registration drives, often pushed by progressive—if not necessarily partisan—groups. The 2008 ACORN voter registration non-scandal has been a cultural touchstone for the right. But what’s alleged against Sproul and Srategic Allied Consulting is is far more serious.
ACORN’s 2008 situation revealed problems not unusual to mass voter-registration drives. First, hundreds of thousands of voter-registration forms turned out to be duplicates; the voters were already registered and for whatever reason—likely because they weren’t sure—filled out a form anyway. That lead to hundreds of thousands of forms being rejected. Meanwhile, some paid canvassers faked voter-registration forms, filling them out for Mickey Mouse or John Smith. ACORN’s organizers flagged problematic ballots and turned information over to the authorities. In the end, several employees were charged with forgery. But there was no evidence that ACORN was trying to influence the outcome of an election, nor would any of these incidents result in voter fraud. Even if Mickey Mouse was registered to vote, it hardly means Mickey Mouse could cast a ballot. The canvassers were trying to make an easy buck.
While there’s no evidence that ACORN’s errors had any impact on election outcomes, it didn’t stop the conservative feeding frenzy. Breitbart.com was particularly prolific and, let’s say, creative in its coverage of the non-scandal, with headlines like “ACORN Corruption Runs Deep” and, as ACORN began to shut down, “Gangster Group Will Be Bankrupt Soon But Fake Spinoff Groups Will Carry On the Corruption.” No worries about downplaying the news when a progressive group was involved.
The efforts by the Republican Party and Sproul are significantly more disturbing than ACORN’s error-prone registration cards, primarily because these incidents could affect election outcomes. The consultant, Nathan Sproul, had already established himself as a shady character in 2004, when one of his previous companies, Voters Outreach of America, was accused of major legal violations, including destroying Democrats’ voter-registration forms and refusing to register non-Republicans. By destroying Democratic voter registrations, as Sproul’s group allegedly did, people who believe themselves to be registered could be turned away at the polls. Furthermore, the track record of accusations, including the suspicious forms turned in this year, seem to indicate a top-down policy of the Republican Party more than poor decision-making by some low-level canvassers.
When the news broke, the Republican National Committee ended its relationship with Sproul. But that left an obvious question: If Sproul was accused of such suspicious activities in 2004, why was the RNC still doing business with him? After making a total of $8 million in 2004, Sproul had already made $3 million this year from the RNC alone. (He was also getting six-figure checks from several state parties, as Lee Fang reports.)
But oddly enough, in spite of all the questions this news seems to raise, Nathan Sproul and Strategic Allied Consulting barely seem to exist in the conservative corners of the media. A search at RedState yielded 0 results. So did a search at Breitbart.com. Even Matt Drudge, who never seems to let a juicy headline pass by, ignored one when it came to Sproul and his company—or to this actual evidence of a political party cavorting with genuinely sketchy voter-registration efforts. We must give Tucker Carlson’sThe Daily Caller credit, though: It did run a single republished AP story—one with no mention of Sproul’s long history with the GOP.
Compare that to the number of stories mentioning ACORN over the last four years: RedState has 68, The Daily Caller 128, and Drudge 166. A search for “ACORN” on Breitbart.com, meanwhile, reveals a staggering 1,450 entries.
Given how loudly these media sites have criticized legitimate and non-partisan voter registration drives for mistakes, in some cases effectively ending the efforts with a barrage of negative press, the silence here speaks volumes. Here is an actual example of the activity so many GOP activists are constantly searching for: evidence of voter- registration drives being used for partisan purposes.
But then again, there’s likely no time to write about a genuine case of voter registration manipulation when you’re so busy producing new stories about President Obama’s relation to ACORN, a group that no longer exists, five years after the fact.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, October 5, 2012
“A Gigantic House Of Cards”: Mitt Romney Gets Away With It, For Now
So other than the fading echoes of Republican celebration and Democratic angst from last night’s presidential debate, and the wait we will now have to endure to see if it made any tangible difference in the contest, what should we actually carry away from the event?
I’ve already confessed myself a non-expert on the “visuals,” and on the “energy level” of the candidates, because I honestly don’t give a damn about any of that. What Mitt Romney needed to do last night, however, was relatively clear: reintroduce himself to swing voters as someone other than a distant plutocrat, and fill in the gaping holes (of omission and commission) in his policy agenda. With quite a bit of help from Barack Obama, he achieved both of those goals, at least temporarily, and in that respect he “won.”
But it came at a price. Jonathan Bernstein summed it up nicely last night at WaPo:
Romney’s policy positions are even more of a shambles now than they were previously. Romney’s position, over and over again, is to simply bluff it on policy. His tax plan continues to be the most obvious one, but it really happens across the board. Romney insisted tonight more than once that his tax plan will keep taxes the same for the wealthy, cut them for everyone else, and not add to the deficit. Forget about the Tax Policy Center; just that much is obviously incoherent and impossible. And, more to the point, it’s clear he’s going to keep on insisting that it adds up, no matter how clearly it doesn’t. But it’s not just that; on every policy, he’s just going to insist that the consequences of his plans that anyone might not like simply don’t exist, so that he’s for sweeping spending cuts but insists that no particular program that anyone brings up might lose any funding, or that he’s for repealing Obamacare but those with pre-existing conditions will magically be protected.
In other words, Mitt Romney lied a lot, and his lies extended beyond his own policies to those of the president (particularly in health care and “green jobs”). His self-representation, moreover, as a deeply caring moderate who shares the president’s goals but is far more eager to reach across the aisle, must have caused some bitter laughter behind the scenes in conservative circles. But because the president, presumably quite deliberately, chose not to depict Romney as a liar and a phony, Mitt largely got away with it, at least for the moment.
Jon Chait believes that Romney has finally pulled off his “etch-a-sketch” moment, reinventing himself as the moderate Republican he once seemed to be in Massachusetts, at a moment when conservatives were too terrified of defeat to object, as they certainly would have earlier in the year if he had hedged on his tax cut plan, let his heart bleed all over the stage for the unemployed and suffering, and begged for a chance to work with Democrats.
But atmospherics aside, what did Mitt actually change last night? He’s long claimed his tax plan wouldn’t increase the deficit, and wouldn’t reduce the relative tax burden on high earners. Last night he said he wouldn’t pursue it if his plan violated either of those principles. But since he’s denied repeatedly there’s any risk of that, why should anybody believe he’d somehow sacrifice the crown jewel of Republican policy–tax cuts for the wealthy–when he’s in office, surrounded by Republicans clamoring for it? But you’d best believe a lot of assurances were going out last night from Team Mitt to conservative opinion leaders denying anything had changed other than how Romney chose to frame and defend his tax plan.
Had Obama more effectively counterpunched last night (or had Jim Lehrer not provided the most passive moderation of a debate in memory), Mitt might not have been able to pull off this feat of prestidigitation. After all, when you think about it, Romney is now saying the high-end tax cuts that Republicans want more than life itself just won’t happen unless he can come up with revenue offsets that don’t change the tax burden, and also get through spending reductions that he’s consistently refused to identify (yea, promised to oppose when it came to most popular spending categories). It’s all a gigantic house of cards. And even if you buy the ludicrous assumption that Romney was sincere in his desire not to upset anyone with his policies, his party won’t for a moment let him actually “move to the center.” Hell, they spent the entire primary season roping him in, and even if they let him posture and maneuver a bit right now, the rope’s still around his neck and their brand is on his posterior.
Obama continually talked around the central problem, attacking the vagueness of Romney’s policies and near the end, finally just coming right out and saying Mitt’s hiding something. But he could not bring himself to say out loud that Mitt’s a serial dissembler who owes his political soul to extremist ideologues and depends strictly on a hidden-hand presentation of his record and agenda. I guess it wouldn’t have been “presidential.”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 4, 2012
“Let Me Count The Ways”: Would A Republican Candidate Lie About Taxes?
The United States faces a gigantic economic choice next year, and last night’s debate centered largely around what Mitt Romney would do about it. Romney’s plan is to lock the Bush tax cuts into place, reduce the long-term deficit entirely through spending cuts, enact an additional 20 percent tax rate cut that would disproportionately benefit the rich and cover the cost through unspecified closings of tax deductions. But Romney labored tirelessly, and with evident success, to portray himself in a far more egalitarian light. Every time President Obama described the cost of his tax rate cost, Romney dismissed it as untrue, pledged that his plan would not reduce the current tax burden on the rich, and even implied that he would make the rich pay higher taxes by closing their loopholes.
It was a virtuoso performance. But what does it tell us about how Romney would govern if elected? Here he was making promises about how he would govern that flatly contrasted with his plans. Which promises should we believe? Ross Douthat argues that Romney’s soothing moderate rhetoric shows that he is likely to govern as the moderate he presented himself as.
It’s worth considering a similar — in many ways, identical — episode that took place a dozen years before. During the 2000 election, the growth of a budget surplus offered the country a major choice. Al Gore proposed to use most of the surplus to retire the national debt and the balance for public investment. George W. Bush proposed a large, regressive income tax that Gore warned would exacerbate inequality and jeopardize the soundness of the budget.
Then, as now, the Republican simply denied over and over that his plan would do what the Democrats said it would. Bush portrayed his plan as devoting just a small fraction of the surplus to tax cuts and described his tax cut itself as benefitting the poor far more than the rich. And you certainly could find circumstantial evidence to suggest that Bush might govern the way he portrayed himself, rather than the way his plan read. He had governed in a bipartisan way in Texas, he had explicitly denounced the conservative wing of the Congressional GOP, and he had surrounded himself with moderate advisers like Michael Gerson and Karen Hughes.
But Bush in fact followed through on what his plan actually did, which happened to be what Gore described it as, and not what Bush described it as. His promises to maintain the budget surplus and direct most of the tax cuts to lower-earners fell by the wayside. What mattered was the party, and the Republican Party was committed to a policy of regressive tax cuts.
The Bush-Gore debates centered primarily around Gore’s endless, frustrating attempts to pin down Bush’s priorities. I compiled pieces of Bush denying he would pursue what turned out to be the centerpiece of his administration’s economic agenda.
Here’s Bush in the first presidential debate:
I want to take one-half of the surplus and dedicate it to Social Security. One-quarter of the surplus for important projects …
tonight we’re going to hear some phony numbers about what I think and what we ought to do. …
this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers. I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the calculator. It’s fuzzy math. It’s a scaring — he’s trying to scare people in the voting booth. Under my tax plan that he continues to criticize, I set one-third. The federal government should take no more than a third of anybody’s check. But I also dropped the bottom rate from 15% to 10%. Because by far the vast majority of the help goes to people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. …
After my plan is in place, the wealthiest Americans will pay a higher percentage of taxes then they do today…
Let me tell you what the facts are. The facts are after my plan, the wealthiest of Americans pay more taxes of the percentage of the whole than they do today.
First of all, that’s simply not true what he just said, of course. And secondly, I repeat to you —
MODERATOR: What is not true, Governor?
That we spent — the top 1% receive 223 as opposed to 445 billion in new spending. The top — let’s talk about my tax plan. The top 1% will pay one-third of all the federal income taxes. And in return, get one-fifth of the benefits, because most of the tax reductions go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. …
GORE: I think that what — I think the point of that is that anybody would have a hard time trying to make a tax cut plan that is so large, that would put us into such big deficits, that gives almost half the benefits to the wealthiest of the wealthy. I think anybody would have a hard time explaining that clearly in a way that makes sense to the average person.
BUSH: That’s the kind of exaggeration I was just talking about. (LAUGHTER)
But the top 1% will end up paying one-third of the taxes in America and they get one-fifth of the benefits.
Under my plan, if you make — the top — the wealthy people pay 62% of the taxes today. Afterwards they pay 64%. This is a fair plan. You know why? Because the tax code is unfair for people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. If you’re a single mother making $22,000 a year today and you’re trying to raise two children, for every additional dollar you earn you pay a higher marginal rate on that dollar than someone making $200,000, and that’s not right. So I want to do something about that.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, October 4, 2012
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