“Silence Them!”: Romney On Teachers And Their Unions
Mitt Romney has absolutely no problem with billionaires buying elections. In fact, had it not been for billionaires’ buying elections, he would not be the Republican nominee for president.
But Romney has a big, big problem with working people’s participating in the political process. Especially teachers.
America’s primary proponent of big money in politics now says that he wants to silence K-12 teachers who pool their resources in order to defend public education for kids whose parents might not be wealthy enough to pay the $39,000 a year it costs to send them to the elite Cranbrook Schools attended by young Willard Mitt.
“We simply can’t have a setting where the teachers unions are able to contribute tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of politicians and then those politicians, when elected, stand across from them at the bargaining table, supposedly to represent the interest of the kids. I think it’s a mistake,” the Republican nominee for president of 53 percent of the United States said during an appearance Tuesday with NBC’s Education Nation. “I think we’ve got to get the money out of the teachers unions going into campaigns. It’s the wrong way for us to go.”
That’s rich.
So rich in irony, in fact, that it could be the most hypocritical statement uttered by a candidate who has had no trouble scaling the heights of hypocrisy.
If Romney wanted to get money out of politics altogether and replace the current crisis with a system where election campaigns were publicly funded, his comments might be taken seriously. But that’s not the case. Romney just wants “reforms” that silence individuals and organizations that do not share his antipathy for public education.
Romney is troubled that unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association voice political opinions. But he is not troubled by Bain capitalists’ pooling their resources in Super PACs and buying election results.
Indeed, if it had not been for massive spending by the lavishly funded Romney Super PAC “Restore Our Future” on Republican primary season attack ads—which poured tens of millions of dollars into the nasty work of destroying more popular rivals for the nomination.
When he was facing a withering assault by “Restore Our Future” in Iowa, Gingrich said Romney would “buy the election if he could.”
Romney could. And he did.
Never in the history of American presidential elections has so weak and dysfunctional a candidate as Romney been able to hold his own as a presidential contender solely because of the money donated by very wealthy individuals and corporations to the agencies that seek to elect him.
Yet he now attacks teachers who are merely seeking to assure that—in the face of frequently ridiculous and consistently ill-informed media coverage, brutal attacks by so-called “think tanks” and neglect even by Democratic politicians—the voices of supporters of public education are heard when voters are considering the future of public education.
Romney is the most consistently and aggressively anti-union candidate ever to be nominated for the presidency by a major American political party. His disdain for organized labor has been consistently and aggressively stated. He’s an enthusiastic backer of moves to bust public sector unions, he supports so-called “right-to-work” laws as a tool states can use to bust private-sector unions and he wants to do away with guarantees that workers on construction projects are fairly compensated and able to negotiate to keep job sites safe. The Republican platform on which Romney and Paul Ryan are running goes so far as to call for the “enactment of a National Right-to-Work law,” which would effectively undo more the seventy-five years of labor laws in this country.
That’s extremism in the defense not of liberty but of plutocracy. But there are points where Romney goes beyond extremism.
When it comes to the role of teacher unions, the Republican nominee’s royalist tendencies come to the fore. Unable to recognize the absolute absurdity of a nominee who would not be a nominee were it not for the support he has received from billionaires and millionaires seeking to prevent kindergarten teachers from pooling small donations to defend their schools, his message is the modern-day equivalent of the monarch of old sneering at the rabble and ordering his minions, Silence them!
By: John Nichols, The Nation, September 26, 2012
“No, We Can’t All Get Along”: As Long As There Are Republicans, It Really Doesn’t Matter If We Do
Mitt Romney seems to have decided to run an entire presidential campaign on quibbling semantic arguments, which is certainly a novel approach, but not one I’d recommend for future candidates. It’s not that every campaign doesn’t spend way too much time complaining about the words their opponent says, but he really has taken it to a totally different level; every day seems to bring a new expression of feigned outrage at something Barack Obama said.
Over at MSNBC’s “Lean Forward” blog, I have a new piece about one of these inane back-and-forths that happened last week, when Obama said he learned you couldn’t change Washington from the inside, and Romney got really peeved and promised he would change it from the inside. My point was essentially that if I hear one more pundit talk about the good old days when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill would argue during the day, then share a beer and bellow some old Irish sea shanties in the evening, I think I’m going to lose it:
Let’s look at the biggest accomplishment of Barack Obama’s first term, the passage of the Affordable Care Act. In that Univision interview, Obama tried to describe this as a triumph of change from the outside, as the American people exerted pressure on their representatives. But that’s not really what happened. There was some outside organizing, but it probably didn’t carry the day. The reform that one president after another failed to accomplish didn’t happen because Barack Obama and his supporters changed Washington. It happened because Obama wrestled with Washington, struggled with it, and finally overcame roadblocks both institutional (the filibuster) and personal (the narcissistic cynicism of characters like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson). And today, almost everything about those processes remains the same. If Obama tries to do something else as ambitious in his second term, it’ll be just as difficult.
What matters isn’t whether Washington was transformed, but that because of Obama’s health care victory, 30 million more Americans will have health insurance, and that starting in 2014 none of us will be denied coverage because of our pre-existing conditions, and all of the other positive results of the ACA. If you’re the parent of a child with leukemia who can now get insurance, that’s change you can believe in.
Guess what: if Barack Obama wins a second term, things are going to be just as unfriendly as they were during the first term. Yes, Barack Obama failed in his promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together, just like George W. Bush failed in his promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together and Bill Clinton failed in his promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together. But while it would certainly be nice if everybody could get along, in the end that’s about one-zillionth as important as what they do or don’t do for the public.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 25, 2012
“We Never Liked You Anyway”: The Knives Are Out As Conservatives Turn On Romney
As often as not, parties nominate candidates for president that pretty much all their own partisans acknowledge are less than inspiring. Democrats were so excited about Barack Obama in 2008 partly because their previous two nominees, John Kerry and Al Gore, rode to the nomination on a stirring sentiment of “Well, OK, I guess.” The same happened to Republicans, who adored the easygoing George W. Bush after the grim candidacies of Bob Dole and Bush’s father. And now that Mitt Romney has suffered through an awful few weeks—a mediocre convention, an embarrassing response to the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi, then the release of the “47 percent” video in which Romney accused almost half of America of refusing to “take responsibility for their own lives”—the knives have come out.
First it was a widely shared Politico story full of intramural Romney campaign sniping, most directed at chief strategist Stuart Stevens (the article full of anonymous backstabbing is the hallmark of a struggling campaign, as midlevel staffers explain to reporters how everything would be going better if they were in charge). Then came a parade of criticism from prominent conservative commentators. Peggy Noonan called the Romney campaign a “rolling calamity.” David Brooks responded to the 47 percent comment by sounding like Romney talking about Obama: “It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America.” Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said Romney and others in his party “mouth libertarian nonsense, unable to even describe some of the largest challenges of our time.”
William Kristol called Romney’s remarks “arrogant and stupid” and asked, “Has there been a presidential race in modern times featuring two candidates who have done so little over their lifetimes for our country, and who have so little substance to say about the future of our country?” Sarah Palin even got into the act, encouraging Romney and Paul Ryan to “go rogue” to revive their campaign, though whom she thought they should rebel against (themselves?) was unclear. Romney’s problems even trickled down to other races, as one Republican Senate candidate after another rushed to distance themselves from Romney’s dismissal of the 47 percent. No wonder the strain of removing sharp implements from her husband’s back led Ann Romney to tell conservatives, “Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring.” It’s a little late for that though; Republicans are stuck with Romney whether they like it or not. And they’re making sure everyone knows they don’t.
Romney is not yet doomed, of course. Something might happen to upend the campaign and convince large numbers of people to change their votes. But an Obama victory remains more likely than not, which means that a few months from now Republicans will be telling each other that they saw it coming all along.
It isn’t hard to figure out what they’ll be saying. The first explanation for their loss will be a strategic one. “I worked for the Romney campaign,” Republicans will say, “but they never took my advice.” He should have spent more time talking about the economy, or more time talking about social issues. He should have worked harder to win Hispanic votes, or spent more resources on the ground game and less on television ads. He was too vague in his policy prescriptions, not giving America enough of a sense of what he wanted to do.
Of course, they’ll say the news media were hopelessly biased against Romney, elevating every one of his mistakes and ignoring the self-evidently horrifying things Obama said. (Did you know that once, 14 years ago, Obama used the word “redistribution” favorably? I mean, come on!) Forever seeing ideological bias when the truth is that those trailing in the polls get negative coverage and those leading get positive coverage (a kind of bias in itself, but not the kind conservatives mean), they are practiced at blaming their own failures on the media.
On the fringes, they’ll say Democrats cheated, something they’ve believed in the past and will no doubt believe in the future (in late 2009, one poll found that a majority of Republicans believed ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama). The idea that a majority of voters willingly chose this president conservatives despise so fervently strikes them as simply impossible, so there must have been a secret conspiracy assuring his election. This year the only voting conspiracy is no secret; it’s the coordinated Republican effort to put as many roadblocks as possible between Democratic voters and the polls, from photo-ID requirements to purging rolls of voters whose names suggest they might just be noncitizens. Yet should Obama win, conservative websites will trumpet every available story of someone suspicious who cast a ballot, as though it were possible to mobilize millions of voter impersonators to flood the booths.
Then there will be the explanations about Mitt Romney himself, and this is where conservatives will begin to move toward agreement. Some may gently suggest that perhaps a party dogged by a reputation for caring only about the rich could have done better than to nominate a guy with a quarter of a billion dollars whose 2011 tax return was so complex it ran to 379 pages, and who exudes a strange combination of overeagerness and sheer terror whenever he comes in contact with people whose incomes fall below six figures. But in the end, Republicans will agree that for all Mitt Romney’s weaknesses as a candidate, his real problem was that he just wasn’t conservative enough.
As Digby has observed many times, as far as Republicans are concerned, conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. If Republicans lose at the polls or preside over disastrous policies, the only possible explanation is that they weren’t true enough to their ideology. It may be true that Romney became, in his own words, “severely conservative.” He gave the party’s base everything they wanted (and kept giving it to them long after it became a liability). He adopted their agenda, aligned his policy positions with theirs, and told them whatever he thought they wanted to hear, with sometimes disastrous results (see “47 percent”). But they’ll say the problem was that he didn’t really believe it deep down in his heart, and the voters could tell. If only they had nominated a true conservative, everything would have been different.
There may be a Republican here or there telling the party that they’ve gone astray. Perhaps Christie Whitman will write an op-ed lamenting her party’s turn to the right. But as they have in the past, these voices will be ignored. Republicans will promise never to make the same mistake again. Next time, they’ll pledge, we’ll nominate a real conservative, and our ideological purity will be rewarded at the polls.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 25, 2012
“Mitt’s De-Pressurized Brain”: Keep This Man Away From The FAA
I’m still not sure exactly what to make of Romney’s comment about airplane windows. I’m sure you know by now that he was talking about his wife’s brush with aviation malfunction last week when he said:
“I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. And I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were. When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.”
I have a very clear memory from my childhood. I had always assumed–I was five or so–that airplane windows rolled up and down, as in a car. Like all children I loved rolling down the car window and feeling the wind on my face, and I remember thinking, wow, wouldn’t that be cool, imagine the wind smacking you in the face at that speed.
When I got on my first airplane, a little propeller plane ferrying the family Tomasky from Morgantown up to Pittsburgh, I bounded into the window seat, looked around, and with great frustration asked my mother where the hand crank was. She laughed at me. Dad explained the general principle of the pressurized cabin, demonstated so pointedly to American movie-going audiences just a few years before in Goldfinger. And boy did I feel stupid.
Or is Goldfinger a myth? I think of Executive Decision, the awesome 1996 film that I would name as the movie I could watch a million times if NPR asked me (that is, you’re not supposed to name a truly great film, but something a little quirky; I watch ED every time I see it’s on cable). The bomb blows a big hole in the side of the craft, and stuff goes all over the place and a few people are sucked out, but after a while, Kurt Russell does manage to stabilize her, and she lands intact, hole and all. Who out there knows?
Jim Fallows, a highly experienced pilot, as I’m sure you know, wrote the other day that he has heard that Romney is afraid of flying. I have some limited sympathy with this. On the one hand, it always sort of astonishes me that this little metal tube is mightier than nature, and I can’t quite believe it will prove to be so. On the other, I am aware that this truth is demonstrated roughly 50,000 times a day (or more) across the world, every day, and I relax. So I think that’s pretty weird for a man who’s undoubtedly flown all over the world on little corporate jets.
I guess this probably has nothing to do with his fitness for office, on which he’s already disqualified himself several times anyway, but it’s possibly the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard a supposedly smart grown adult say, that you should be able to open airplane windows. It’s like…what? Like thinking that you should be able to jump off a tall building and live. Yeah–someone get to work on that!
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 25, 2012
“Mitt Romney’s Sham Economic Plan”: A Right Wing Fantasy With A Right Wing Set Of Goals
Well, it seems like a good week for Mitt Romney to try to steer the conversation back to the economy. It doesn’t help him, granted, when people like Bill Kristol are saying that Obama managed the financial crisis “pretty well.” But foreign policy and the culture-warrior stuff hasn’t played so well for him, and after all, the economy was supposed to be his raison d’être in the first place, and the first debate is coming up next week, so why not? The only problem is that the economy doesn’t really help him either. As long as he refuses to be specific about which tax loopholes he’d close, he can’t talk economy with any real credibility.
A quick catch-you-up for those you who haven’t gotten this message yet. Romney wants to cut everyone’s tax rates. He acknowledges this will reduce revenue. He says he’ll make up the revenue by closing loopholes, but only those used by the wealthy. Experts say there aren’t enough of those. So he’ll have to close loopholes that middle-class people depend on. And obviously, that is a subject he has no desire to discuss.
Romney’s tax plan is absolutely central to his economic argument—everything, from growth to jobs to cutting the deficit, starts with cutting taxes. And it’s worth noting that, on this as on all issues, he’s moved hard right. He had one tax plan last year, but it clearly didn’t placate the right wing, so he came back in the late spring and released the new and current one, bigger and “bolder,” more Ryanesque and Norquistesque.
As with everything else he’s done to please the right, it’s causing him all sorts of problems back here on planet Earth. His numbers don’t add up, he knows they don’t add up, and so when pressed, he insists that they do, while ducking the kind of questions that presidential candidates from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to Gary Bauer and Lamar Alexander routinely have answers for. A number of journalists have tried, and all have failed.
And so, on 60 Minutes Sunday, Steve Kroft gave it another shot, only to be told by Romney that specifics would be a hindrance at this point because “if you want to work together with people across the aisle, you lay out your principles and your policy, you work together with them, but you don’t hand them a complete document and say, ‘Here, take this or leave it.’ Look, leadership is not a take it or leave it thing.
That’s just so obviously a dodge that he doesn’t even deserve an E for effort. No one is compelling him to say to Congress, “Here’s my plan, take it or leave it.” He can and in fact should say to Congress, “Here’s my plan, now let’s talk.” That’s actually what leadership is.
It’s my view that Romney’s intentional vagueness here is hurting him very badly. This may seem on its surface like the kind of thing that’s a little too wonky for your average American, but I say au contraire. I think most people grasp the problem here all too well.
There are a lot of details about politics and policy the American people don’t really get. But there are some things they do get. They get that they are permitted under current law to deduct the interest they pay on their mortgages. They get that their contributions to their health-care premiums are taken out of their paychecks before taxes are levied. And they—a fairly solid majority, anyway—get that supply-side economics has given the middle class the shaft and benefited the wealthy.
So when they hear a guy worth a quarter-billion dollars say he’s cutting taxes but won’t discuss loopholes, this is what I think they hear: he’s going to help himself and his friends, and we’re going to be left paying the bill. There may not be much class envy in America, but there is that much, anyway.
So let’s take a step back and unravel this. The economy was supposed to be Romney’s great strength. The Obama campaign hit him pretty hard on Bain and his business experience, so that advantage was neutralized. But still, he had the chance to say, “Bain aside, this here is how I’m going to fix the economy.” This is something all campaigns do. Romney has a five-point plan, but it’s not really a plan per se. It’s mostly just a set of goals. It’s as if I came up with a five-point plan to become rich and famous that went: write bestselling novel, win Oscar with follow-up screenplay, write movie theme song, and have Adele record it, start successful restaurant chain, invent next Internet.
It’s nice to see that this flimflam actually can’t work. People scoff at politicians’ promises, and I understand why, but in fact, behind most campaign promises are teams of policy experts at least trying to figure out how the candidate can fulfill that promise once in office. Romney’s promise is a right-wing fantasy that will benefit the same people who always benefit from Republican policies. Most voters can sense this. So he can’t really campaign now on the economy either. That doesn’t leave many options.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 25, 2012
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