“Eye Of The Storm”: The Sudden Disappearance Of The Welfare Lie
It began on August 7. The Romney campaign launched a major offensive on welfare policy, accusing President Obama of “gutting” existing law and “dropping work requirements.”
The attack was as obvious a lie as has ever been spoken by a presidential candidate. Mitt Romney had made this up, but proceeded to repeat the lie in every stump speech, and in five separate ads released over the course of two weeks. This one, racially-charged, entirely-made-up claim had quickly become the centerpiece of the entire Republican campaign.
And then something interesting happened. It disappeared.
Sahil Kapur reported the other day that Romney, in his convention address, chose not to repeat the lie, and the claim wasn’t included in Paul Ryan’s convention speech, either. When I checked the transcripts for Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Condoleezza Rice, and Jeb Bush, not one of them made even the slightest reference to the welfare lie.
But wait, there’s more. Romney has given three speeches since his convention address, delivering remarks in Lakeland, Jacksonville, and Cincinnati. The combined total of references to welfare in those speeches? Zero.
Also, I spoke this morning with a Democratic source who confirmed that the Romney campaign’s television ad featuring the welfare lie is not currently on the air.
So, over the course of about a week, this one transparent falsehood went from being the most potent attack in the Republican arsenal to a lie Romney and his team suddenly didn’t want to repeat.
What happened? For now, we can only speculate — the campaign has not explained the shift — but I wonder whether the allegations of racism started to take a toll.
Not only had every independent analysis proven that Romney was blatantly lying, but there was a growing consensus that the Republican was deliberately trying to exploit racism to advance his ambitions.
On Wednesday, the day before Romney’s speech, National Journal‘s Ron Fournier wrote a lengthy piece making clear that the GOP candidate has been playing a carefully-crafted racial game, and given Fournier’s credibility with the political establishment, his analysis was widely noticed, and raised questions anew about how far the former governor would go to base his campaign on an ugly, divisive deception.
It’s quite possible Romney found it easier to switch to other falsehoods, rather than risk alienating the American mainstream by sticking with his racist lie.
Or maybe I have this backwards and this is merely the eye of the storm. Romney will reportedly launch its next round of ad buys tomorrow, and maybe the welfare lie will be up front and center once again. As of today, however, the absence of the lie is hard to miss, given how invested Republicans were in the false accusation a week ago.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 4, 2012
“Unvarnished Negativity”: The Romney Campaign Continues To Lack A Positive Message
Since the Republican National Convention wrapped up last week, the Romney/Ryan campaign has abandoned its brief pretense of running a positive campaign based on leveling with the American people about serious issues. It’s back to all attacks on President Obama, all the time. On Tuesday they issued multiple press releases gleefully celebrating President Obama’s giving himself a grade of “incomplete” on his first term. On the campaign trail and in interviews Ryan has repeatedly asserted, as Romney argued in his nomination acceptance speech at the RNC on Thursday, that President Obama cannot tell the American people they are better off than they were four years ago. (As Media Matters points out, cable news channels, especially Fox News, have complicitly repeated this charge without offering context of the economic freefall we were in when President Obama took office.)
A close examination of the GOP’s major speeches from last week shows that even their nominally affirmative case for small government was internally inconsistent. The crucial applause lines actually undermined their arguments. Between that, and their immediate return to unvarnished negativity, it is clear that the Republican Party simply does not have a positive conservative message for this election cycle.
The RNC was supposed to be filled with homage to the virtues of private enterprise. But both of their main speakers on Thursday night—Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mitt Romney—implicitly made the case for the necessity of government instead.
When it comes to exhorting a nation to collective democratic action, private equity investment can seem a bit lacking. As anyone who watched the biographical video of Romney on Thursday night noticed, investing in a chain of office supply stores just isn’t that inspiring.
Perhaps that’s why Romney tried to summon memories of America’s supposed mid-twentieth-century greatness, he talked about a government program. Although he never actually used the acronym NASA, that’s what he was talking about when he said:
When President Kennedy challenged Americans to go to the moon, the question wasn’t whether we’d get there, it was only when we’d get there.
The soles of Neil Armstrong’s boots on the moon made permanent impressions on OUR [emphasis in original text] souls and in our national psyche. Ann and I watched those steps together on her parent’s sofa. Like all Americans we went to bed that night knowing we lived in the greatest country in the history of the world.
God bless Neil Armstrong.
Tonight that American flag is still there on the moon. And I don’t doubt for a second that Neil Armstrong’s spirit is still with us: that unique blend of optimism, humility and the utter confidence that when the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American.
Nothing about this reflects the advantages of limited government. The space program is a governmental endeavor, not the work of some plucky businessman. Its success illustrates the virtues of collectivism, not individuality. Indeed, Romney’s kicker: “you need an American,” makes no sense. Neil Armstrong did not get to the moon by himself. What the moon landing shows is that for “the really big stuff” you need the American government.
Similarly, Rubio said, “Mitt Romney knows America’s prosperity didn’t happen because our government simply spent more. It happened because our people used their own money to open a business.” But as anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of the modern economy knows, the vast majority of new businesses are not opened entirely with the proprietor’s own money. Rather, they borrow money from a bank or—as Romney would surely point out—venture capitalists. This in turn, necessitates a functioning banking system. As we have learned over the years, a functioning banking system requires governmental institutions such as the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
As President Obama might have said, with regard to everything from the monetary system to the space program, “you didn’t build that.”
Meanwhile, one of the most oft-repeated anti-Obama talking points was taken to its logical conclusion, and its absurdity was thus demonstrated. Republicans like to joke that President Obama has never had a “real” job, meaning one in the private sector. This has even morphed into a shorthand that he has never had a job before the presidency at all. For example, Tim Pawlenty joked in his speech in Tampa: “Barack Obama’s failed us. But look, it’s understandable. A lot of people fail at their first job.”
Strictly speaking, this is not actually true. Besides the fact that most people would probably consider community organizer, law professor, book author, state senator and US senator to be jobs, Obama worked for several years after college at the Business International Group, a publishing and advisory firm that assisted US companies abroad. (It was later bought by the Economist Group and is now part of the Economist Intelligence Unit.)
But current Republican ideology holds that jobs in the nonprofit sector or public sector are not real jobs. And since Obama never talks about his brief foray into the for-profit sector, Republicans figure they can assume their listeners won’t know about it. So, in his acceptance speech at the RNC, Mitt Romney said, “[Obama] took office without the basic qualification that most Americans have and one that was essential to his task. He had almost no experience working in a business. Jobs to him are about government.”
Even just a cursory examination of this claim shows it makes a lot less sense than Romney—and his audience, which cheered enthusiastically—assumes it does. Business is a broad category: a teenager who spends his summer flipping burgers at McDonald’s works “in a business.” Is Romney seriously suggesting that such work experience would make one better qualified for the presidency than serving in the United States Senate and teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago? Taken literally, Romney’s comments would mean just that.
Coincidentally enough, Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan and his cheerleaders in the conservative media have actually cited the summer Ryan spent working at a McDonald’s as evidence of his real-life experience. That’s because, if you accept Romney’s standard of presidential qualification, his running mate is otherwise badly unqualified. Ryan has spent his entire professional career working in politics and political advocacy. And yet this does not bother Romney nor his supporters.
It shouldn’t. There is absolutely no reason to think that Herman Cain—a successful businessman in the fast food industry, who has a ridiculous tax plan and demonstrated disturbing ignorance of international affairs—would make a better president than Paul Ryan. The president’s effect on the economy comes through macroeconomic policy making. One can understand that well, or poorly, from a variety of backgrounds. Republicans know this. That’s why they’ve nominated career politicians for the presidency or vice-presidency before, and they happily nominated Ryan this year. There is nothing wrong with that. But it means there is something very hypocritical about their attack on Obama’s work experience.
Given the rank hypocrisy of their convention rhetoric, and their reversion to one-note economic attacks on Obama immediately thereafter, it looks like Romney’s hopes of reinventing his image and reframing the race will surely be dashed.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, September 4, 2012
“Southern De-Construction”: With Voter Suppression, The Confederacy Rises Again
On Sunday I attended a fascinating panel of Southern politics experts convened by UNC-Chapel Hill. One of the major takeaways from the session was how diverse the South has become. For instance, Charlotte, the host city of the DNC, is now 45 percent white, 35 percent African-American and 13 percent Hispanic.
Among baby boomers aged 55–64, the South is 72 percent white. Among kids 15 or under, the South is 51 percent white, 22 percent Hispanic, 21 percent African-American and 6 percent other (which includes Asian-Americans and Native-Americans). In North Carolina, people of color accounted for 61 percent of the 1.5 million new residents the state gained over the past decade. Since 2008, the black and Hispanic share of eligible voters in North Carolina has grown by 2.5 percent, while the percentage of the white vote has decreased by a similar margin. This increasing diversity allowed Obama to win the Southern states of Florida, North Carolina and Virginia in 2008—all of which are competitive again in 2012.
The region’s changing demographics are a “ticking time bomb for Republicans,” said Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center. The Southern GOP is 88 percent white. The Southern Democratic Party is 50 percent white, 36 percent African-American, 9 percent Hispanic and 5 percent other. The GOP’s dominance among white voters—who favor Romney over Obama by 26 points in the region—has allowed Republicans to control most of the region politically. But that will only be the case for so long if demographic trends continue to accelerate. Yet instead of courting the growing minority vote, Republicans across the South are actively limiting political representation for minority voters and making it harder for them to vote.
Eight of eleven states in the former Confederacy have passed restrictive voting laws since the 2010 election, as part of a broader war on voting undertaken by the GOP. Some of these changes have been mitigated by recent federal and state court rulings against the GOP, yet it’s still breathtaking to consider the different ways Republicans have sought to suppress the minority vote in the region.
– Laws mandating strict forms of government-issued identification to cast a ballot were passed in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. Virginia tightened a looser voter ID law. A federal court blocked Texas’s discriminatory voter ID law last week and will rule on South Carolina’s law shortly. Mississippi and Alabama must also receive preclearance for their voter ID laws—which are scheduled to go into effect in 2013 and 2014—from a federal court in Washington or the Department of Justice under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. According to a 2005 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, 11 percent of US citizens don’t have government-issued IDs, but the number is 25 percent among African-Americans.
– Laws requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote were passed in Alabama and Tennessee. Restrictions on voter registration drives were enacted in Florida and Texas. Florida’s law has been overturned by a federal court. Texas’s law has also been blocked by a state judge. Data from the 2004 and 2008 elections in Florida show that “African-American and Hispanic citizens are about twice as likely to register to vote through drives as white voters,” according to Project Vote.
– Early voting periods were reduced in Florida, Georgia and Tennessee. African-Americans in states like Florida were twice as likely to cast ballots during early voting as white voters. According to University of Florida political scientist Daniel Smith, 800,000 voters in Florida cast ballots during early voting hours in 2008 eliminated by the GOP. A federal court overturned the law in the five Florida counties covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
– Florida also prevented felons convicted of non-violent crimes from voting after they’ve served their time, which disenfranchised nearly 200,000 Floridians who would have been eligible to vote in 2012. Blacks are 13 percent of registered voters in Florida but 23 percent of disenfranchised felons.
– Only three Southern states—Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina—did not pass restrictive voting laws since 2010. North Carolina Democratic Governor Bev Perdue twice vetoed efforts by North Carolina Republicans to pass a strict voter ID law before the 2012 election. If GOP gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory wins in November, it’s all but certain a tough voter ID law will be among the first pieces of legislation he signs.
– In conjunction with these new voting restrictions, Republicans all across the South used their control of state legislatures following 2010 to pass redistricting maps that will lead to a re-segregation of Southern politics, placing as many Democratic lawmakers into as few “majority minority” districts as possible as a way to maximize the number of Republican seats. “Their goal is to make the Republican Party a solidly white party and to make the Democratic Party a majority African-American one,” says Kareem Crayton, professor of law at UNC-Chapel Hill and an expert on voting rights in the South. The Texas redistricting maps, which a federal court ruled last week were “enacted with discriminatory purpose,” are simply a more extreme version of an effort that has been replicated in virtually every Southern state to undercut black and Hispanic political representation.
The consequences of these changes will be to make it harder for growing minority populations to be able to cast a ballot in much of the South and to make the region more segregated politically at a time when it is becoming more diverse demographically. “The net effect is that the potential for any coalition to exist in the Democratic Party of moderate-to-progressive whites and African-American voters is pretty much decimated,” says Crayton. Obama is betting he can once again turn out such a coalition in states like Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, but that task has become tougher in 2012. The outlook for state and local Democrats in the region is far bleaker.
The regression in the South today when it comes to voting rights is eerily reminiscent of tragic earlier periods in the region’s beleaguered racial history. “After Reconstruction, we saw efforts by conservative whites in Southern state legislatures to cut back on opportunities for black Americans to cast a ballot,” says Crayton. “It’s hard to dismiss the theory that what we’re seeing today is a replay of that scenario.”
Today, four southern states (Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas) are supporting a constitutional challenge to Section 5 originating in Shelby County, Alabama. When Republicans in Tampa yearned for the good ‘ol days, it was hard not to get the feeling that they were thinking of a time in the South when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not exist.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, September 4, 2012
“By The People, For The People”: Proof Obamacare Puts Control Of Healthcare In The Hands Of The Consumer
One of the key talking points consistently mouthed by opponents of the Affordable Care Act is their declaration that the law wrests control of healthcare out from the hands of the consumer and places it squarely under the control of the federal government.
And yet, the meme—like so many others employed by dedicated Obamacare bashers— is simply not true.
Now, we can prove it.
You have likely never heard about the section of the ACA that provides federal loans to help launch consumer owned and controlled health insurance plans. The money is available for insurance plans showing a reasonable chance for success, are owned by the membership (people like you and I) and operated by a board of directors where members comprise the majority -not passive investors looking to make a buck.
It is health insurance by the people and for the people.
Tufts Medical Center in Massachusetts—along with their physician group and a company which owns and operates two hospitals in the region—has acted on this provision of the law and received $88.5 million in federal funds to create the state’s first member owned and controlled health insurance plan. While the program is being put together by a panel of experts, once the insurance plan is qualified to do business by the state’s insurance regulators, they will begin signing up individuals and small businesses who will not only become the owners of the plan, they will ultimately end up running the company.
How’s that for putting control of our healthcare back into the hands of the consumer?
The not-for-profit plan entitled the Minuteman Health Initiative—which expects to offer health insurance coverage in Eastern and Central Massachusetts beginning in 2014—is looking to bring down the cost of premiums to its members by streamlining the billing process and allowing providers to work directly with employers.
According to Dr. Jeff Lasker, chief executive of the Tufts physician group, New England Quality Care Alliance, “Imagine working closely with an employer who can help us gather data and, with employees’ permission, to be able to share that data with their primary care providers. “
Imagine, indeed.
Physicians, hospitals and consumers working alongside one another to design coverage options that better meet the needs of all the participants in the healthcare equation in the effort to bring about a better result for everyone—and done in an environment where the consumer is in control of the board of directors rather than profit driven executives whose bonuses are determined by how much money is left in the till at the end of the quarter.
Can there be anyone who does not see the great potential in this concept?
We are a nation where our health care is, for most of our citizens, controlled by private insurance companies—not the United States government. If you don’t believe that, just ask your physician what he or she must go through to get an insurance company to approve a treatment or procedure you need and how you end up paying for all this time your doctor invests in fighting for your care.
Will the Minuteman Health Initiative work? Will it accomplish the goal of lowering costs and providing appropriate benefits to consumers while allowing for a workable compensation structure to health care providers—all under the direction of the very people who depend on the plan for their health care needs?
We’ll see.
But if you don’t try something, you never find better solutions. And should the Minuteman plan work out, we can expect to see similar programs launched in every state in the union—insurance plans designed to work for both provider and beneficiary and all under the control of the people who actually pay the premiums and depend upon the benefits for the security of their families.
I don’t care how much you think you detest Obamacare. If you aren’t rooting for success in the case of the Minuteman Health Initiative—and the law that made it possible—you simply are not paying attention.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, Forbes, September 1, 2012
“The Obama Exception”: Why The “Are You Better Off” Line Won’t Work For Republicans
Martin O’Malley, Maryland’s very ambitious Democratic governor, stepped in it a bit on Sunday when he said that Americans aren’t better off today than they were four years ago.
It was a dream sound bite for Republicans, who seem convinced that swing voters will ultimately turn on President Obama if they feel the same way. Not surprisingly, Obama’s team moved quickly to provide a different answer, and O’Malley has since said that he thinks Americans are “clearly better off” now.
This illustrates the tricky spot Obama is in. He obviously can’t run the kind of feel good reelection campaign that every incumbent president dreams of, and he risks seeming like he’s trying to spin away the very real anxiety millions of Americans still feel whenever he claims his policies are working or highlights an encouraging economic statistic. But staying mute is hardly an option; doing so would concede the point and make it that much easier for Romney’s team to argue that Obama is a failed president.
And so, O’Malley’s comment aside, Democrats have settled on a message similar to what Brad Woodhouse, the DNC’s communications director, said on CNN this morning:
The truth is though is that the American people know. I mean, we were literally a plane that was heading — the trajectory was towards the ground when the president took over. He got the stick, he’s pulled us up out of that decline.
We were losing 800,000 jobs a month. Lost 3.5 millions, Americans I know have not forgotten, we lost 3.5 million jobs in the last six months of the Bush administration. We gained 4.5 million jobs over the past two and a half years.
So if you just put those side by side, clearly we’re better off. However, we have a long way to go.
Context isn’t an easy sell in politics, especially since there’s usually little room for collective memory or foresight in mass opinion. But Obama’s argument may be an exception, because polls consistently show that Americans do remember what happened four years ago – who was president when the economy melted down, how severe and terrifying the fallout was, and how impossible the situation that Obama inherited was. There is evidence that memories of George W. Bush have translated into a benefit-of-the-doubt effect for Obama, leaving him in better political shape than in incumbent president in this economic climate should be.
This is why, as Greg Sargent argued Sunday, Romney’s team may be miscalculating in depending so much on economic anxiety to push swing voters into their camp. They have the examples of 1992 and 1980, the last two times incumbent presidents were defeated for reelection, in mind, but those situations were different. The “Are you better off?” question, in fact, was basically invented in ’80, when Ronald Reagan employed it to devastating effect in his debate with Jimmy Carter. The line worked so well because inflation had nearly tripled on Carter’s watch, and unemployment had climbed nearly two points in the 18 months before the election. To the casual voter, the answer to Reagan’s question was simple and obvious. There was no room for context.
It was the same in 1992. The unemployment rate had been around 5 percent when George H.W. Bush took office, but by the summer of his reelection year it had spiked to nearly 8 percent. The fall brought some signs of improvement, but it was too late for the incumbent. It sure seemed like something had happened on Bush’s watch to hurt an economy that had been working pretty well when he came to power.
This is a much different election. The economy was in a freefall that hadn’t been seen since FDR’s days as Obama was taking the oath of office. If the Wall Street meltdown had played out in September 2009, Obama probably wouldn’t be getting much benefit of the doubt now. But it played out in September 2008, at the end of a presidency that the overwhelming majority of voters had decided was a disaster. This doesn’t mean Obama is in the clear; the polls are close, and even if he wins, it will probably be by a narrow margin. But “Are you better off?” doesn’t automatically undermine him the way it did with Carter and Bush 41.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, September 3, 2012
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