“Fear And Deference To Conservatives”: What A Romney Presidency Would Look Like
Late yesterday afternoon, Mitt Romney released a statement explicitly calling on Todd Akin to withdraw from Missouri’s Senate race.
“Today, his fellow Missourians urged him to step aside, and I think he should accept their counsel and exit the Senate race,” the statement read.
Akin, of course, ignored this. A few hours later, the statutory deadline for a no-questions-asked candidate switch passed and Akin remained the Republican nominee. That doesn’t guarantee he’ll still be around in November; in a series of morning show interviews today, he indicated that he might still reconsider his candidacy. But for now, he’s defied his party’s soon-to-be presidential nominee, who also apparently enlisted his running mate in the effort to push Akin out.
In and of itself, this doesn’t say much about Romney’s clout within his party. After all, literally dozens of leading Republicans have publicly and privately pleaded with Akin to withdraw, urgings that have been backed by threats from the GOP’s national Senate campaign committee and its top outside money group to withhold critical financial support. If Akin is willing to thumb his nose at all of this, then it’s hardly surprising he’d do the same to Romney.
What’s noteworthy, though, is the timing of Romney’s withdrawal call, and the evolution of his public comments on Akin. Here we see further evidence of a phenomenon that has defined Romney’s candidacy and would define a Romney presidency: fear of and deference to conservative leaders.
When news of Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment broke Sunday, the Romney campaign’s initial response was this very tepid statement: “Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan disagree with Mr. Akin’s statement, and a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape.”
It was only the next day, when outrage began building and Republicans with more credibility with the party’s conservative base began rebuking Akin, that Romney made a more forceful statement to National Review, calling Akin’s words “insulting, inexcusable and, frankly, wrong.” And it was only when just about everyone who’s anyone in the Republican Party had called on Akin to quit that Romney finally did the same late yesterday.
You could argue that this was mainly a case of a campaign trying to protect its candidate from undue embarrassment. By yesterday afternoon, the lack of a withdrawal call from Romney was becoming noticeable, since just about every other Republican had issued one. So he had little choice but to speak up. But before then, maybe it made sense for him to stay quiet, rather than risk looking weak by having Akin ignore his request.
The problem with this theory is that public opinion is so overwhelmingly against Akin and his remarks that there was a clear political incentive for Romney to speak up early – especially when you consider his low personal favorable score and the widespread perception that he lives in terror of offending his party’s base. Here was an opportunity to look like a leader. And if Akin had ignored him, well, that would have said more about him than Romney.
Instead, it looks like Romney chose to take the temperature of conservative leaders first, then adjusted his behavior accordingly. So we went from a weak initial statement Sunday night to a stronger rebuke Monday to a call for withdrawal Tuesday afternoon. This is classic Romney behavior. He’s well aware that conservatives are deeply suspicious of him, and capable of inflicting serious political damage on him if he alienates them. This was obviously true during the GOP primaries and remains true today, with heavy conservative turnout key to Romney’s November hopes. And it would be even more true if he’s elected president; the threat of a conservative activist/media-inspired revolt would hover over every critical Romney decision.
His response to the Akin drama shows that Romney is willing to stand up to a member of his own party – but only if just about everyone else in his party is already doing it.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, August 22, 2012
“Political And Ethical Fraud”: Mitt Romney’s “Nothing We Can Believe In”
One of the things we’ll learn this presidential election is whether the Republican Party can survive itself. As we’ve seen in the ten days since Governor Mitt Romney picked Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, and most acutely in the last 72 hours since the fiasco involving Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin broke, the party is reaching what may be the most critical moment of its quarter-century-long identity crisis. In the way that Franklin Roosevelt did for Democrats during the 1930s, by sheer force of personality and eloquence Ronald Reagan in the 1980s resolved tensions that had riven the party for years. He could incarnate the party so fully as to invite and absolve fellow travelers who might be suspiciously less than true believers. After Reagan, no one else could do this; even as what now constitutes the conservative wing of the party invokes Reagan’s name with a sobriety that borders on the biblical, that wing has moved considerably to the right of him.
Now the party hastens to control the damage from the Akin episode. This is complicated because, as the record of the last decade makes clear, particularly among Republicans in the House of Representatives, this past weekend Akin expressed, as accurately as he did unartfully, the party’s grim view of women, with its overt implication that rape is the result of women making cavalier and surely sordid choices about their sexuality and its consequences, the conclusion being that a woman who gets pregnant by definition hasn’t been raped. Notwithstanding protests that Akin is an “aberration,” anyone who pays even the most distracted attention knows that what he said reflects not only legislation co-sponsored by Congressman Ryan, not only evangelicals who are closing ranks behind Akin, not only “personhood” amendments on state ballots across the country declaring an embryo a human being with full civil rights, but also the platform that the Republican Party will present to its national convention in five days, with language that replicates language from the platform four years ago and the platform four years before that. Akin is despised by the Republican establishment because his numbskullery has to do not with his convictions, which are entirely in line with the party’s, but with the guileless whim that gave them voice, rather than leaving them shrewdly relegated to less boisterous fine print in a platform that the establishment hopes will appease the party’s base while no one else notices. Whether that comes to pass next week, when the position for which Akin is being chastised this week is codified on the convention floor in Tampa, remains to be seen.
Even as the Akin position on abortion and rape has become more ruthless since the Republican convention that first nominated Reagan more than 30 years ago, the party has gotten away with it because it’s always been able to nullify the position politically. Abortion wasn’t demonstrably a factor in President George W. Bush’s narrow 2004 re-election, and it wasn’t a factor in Senator John McCain’s seven-point loss in 2008. Subterfuge will be more difficult this year. In part this is because of the Akin furor, of course; in part it’s because the furor exists in a context dramatically more difficult to disguise, following similar positions on abortion stated by other candidates who ran for the Republican nomination and the aspersions cast on a female law student by radio goon Rush Limbaugh some months back. In part it’s because the Akin position is held by the party’s prospective nominee for the second highest office in the land. Mostly, however, it’s because the party’s prospective nominee for the first highest office in the land is so spectacularly a political and ethical fraud that no one bothers arguing about it anymore. The base distrusted the party’s nominee four years ago not because it didn’t know what Senator McCain believed but because it did. It knew what he believed about torture as an American policy of war. It knew what he believed about immigration reform. It knew what he believed about campaign-finance reform.
Actually, by now the base knows what Governor Romney believes, too. By now we all know what Governor Romney believes; by now his beliefs are more manifest and less mysterious than that of any candidate who’s ever run. Governor Romney believes nothing. Politically speaking, Governor Romney is nothing. Mustering up outrage over this nothingness makes as much sense as mustering up outrage over a galactic black hole. What’s happening in and to the Republican Party this past week isn’t an aberration; it’s happening because of what the party has become and whom it’s nominating, which is someone caught between the base that he so rapaciously rushed to appease with the Ryan nomination and the other 65 percent of the country that looks at a Rorschach inkblot without seeing a splattered fetus. One of the great modern political organizations of the last century and a half, the party of not only Reagan but Dwight Eisenhower and Theodore Roosevelt and the greatest president the country ever had, is in the grip of a collective psychosis. Like its nominee, the party itself is caught between two political irreconcilables: its own super-conscience, with its barbaric view of human nature that calls itself moral and its hostile regard of empirical fact that calls itself spiritual; and the 2012 model of its embodiment, the nominee who has no view—of fact or humanity or anything else—that doesn’t serve the ends of his own success. When a party is as deeply stricken as the Republicans in terms of who they are, such a nominee can only be the void that stares back.
By: Steve Erickson, The American Prospect, August 22, 2012
“Mitt’s Most Shameless Lie”: So Craven And Demagogic, You’d Think Even He Would Be Embarrassed
People who lie a lot also tend to whine a lot, particularly when their prevarications are exposed. As a presidential candidate, Mitt Romney gives the impression of never having been in a fair fight. He’s remarkably thin-skinned for somebody in public life.
Everybody expects politicians to embellish the truth, but Romney’s epic misrepresentations continue to astonish. Yet he appears flabbergasted that anybody’s allowed to talk back. Why, my dear fellow, it simply isn’t done.
Maybe this works in the executive suites and country clubs where Romney’s spent his life. But it’s a dubious strategy in an American presidential campaign. Regarding his taxes, for example, Romney could easily quell suspicion that he’s hiding something politically disqualifying. Release five years’ worth of returns (half the number President Obama’s put on the record), and move on.
Instead, he essentially demands that voters take his gentleman’s word that he’s never paid less than (a meager) 13% in taxes. However, his recent statement didn’t specify “federal income taxes,” a significant omission for somebody who made his fortune manipulating the tax code. If Romney’s arrived at the 13% figure by combining state, local, sales, excise, as well as real estate taxes on his several mansions, voters deserve to know.
Reporters should also ask, straight up, if Romney took advantage of the IRS’s 2009 one-time amnesty for money hidden in foreign bank accounts.
Yes or no?
But Romney’s taxes are trivial compared to the ugly falsehoods his campaign’s spreading about Medicare—sowing fear and division among seniors in a transparent attempt to divert attention from his and Paul Ryan’s plan to “save” the program by turning it from a guaranteed insurance benefit to a privatized voucher system.
Here’s the script of a new TV ad the Romney campaign’s running:
“You paid in to Medicare for years. Every paycheck. Now, when you need it, Obama has cut $716 billion from Medicare. Why? To pay for Obamacare. So now the money you paid for your guaranteed health care is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you.”
Got that? Your benefits, paid for by your Medicare taxes, are supposedly being taken away and given to others. In case that’s too subtle, Romney himself has said “there’s only one president that I know of in history that has robbed Medicare.” He told an audience in Ohio that Obama “has taken $716 billion out of the Medicare trust fund. He’s raided that trust fund.”
And do you know what he did with it? He used it to pay for Obamacare, a risky, unproven, federal takeover of health care.”
On “Meet the Press,” Republican National Committee chairman Rience Priebus declared that “This president stole…$700 billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare. If any person in this entire debate has blood on their hands in regard to Medicare, it’s Barack Obama.”
Robbed, stole, raided, blood on his hands.
Then who IS Obamacare for, if not for you and yours?
A recent letter to my local newspaper spelled out what Romney’s too tasteful to say: “obese, lay-about, cigarette-smoking, drug-taking, welfare-sucking, emergency-room-visiting no-accounts…[who] expect the government to provide them everything for free.”
That’s right, THEM.
THEY are getting YOUR benefits.
Of course Romney’s smart enough to understand what the letter writer clearly doesn’t, which is that YOU’VE ALWAYS PAID for others’ medical care in the most wasteful, inefficient way possible. No matter who’s elected, you’ll keep paying until Congress passes a law saying hospitals can refuse sick and injured patients who can’t pay. Which would not only be immoral, but a public health menace.
That’s why Massachusetts has “Romneycare,” the only worthwhile accomplishment of Mitt’s public career, which he now wants people to forget.
Romney’s also smart enough to know that not a single dime has been robbed, stolen or otherwise removed from the Medicare trust fund. Indeed, its life has been extended. Nobody’s benefits have been altered in any way.
That’s a lie so craven and demagogic you’d think even Mitt Romney would be embarrassed.
What the Affordable Care Act does do is something conservatives have long clamored for: It cuts, not benefits, but Medicare’s future costs by roughly 10% (or $700 billion) over a ten year period by A.) Reducing corporate subsidies to insurance companies administering Medicare Advantage plans, and B.) Slowing the rate of growth in payments to hospitals.
Furthermore, the health care industry agreed to these changes during negotiations over the new law: Insurance companies because they’re gaining millions of new customers; hospitals because Obamacare virtually eliminates their huge problem of non-paying patients.
Got that? Because almost everybody will have health insurance under Obamacare, hospitals, private insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid alike can quit robbing Peter to pay Paul, effecting significant savings.
These economies are in your interest whether you’re a Medicare beneficiary or not.
That is, if you’re clear-eyed enough to see through the Republican candidate’s shameless falsehoods.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, August 22, 2012
“The GOP’s Crazy Core”: The Media Cuts The Far Right Too Much Slack
Does the across-the-board denunciation of Representative Todd Akin’s comments mean that other Tea Party platforms are ready for dismantling?
The pragmatic Republican establishment (despite the Tea Party, there still is one) is frantic to jettison Representative Todd Akin’s toxic comments on conception and rape, and to quarantine the scientifically-challenged congressman.
Much of the commentary has been about how Akin’s clumsiness connects to Republican vulnerability on other issues important to women. But this raises a larger question: Why is the Republican lunatic position politically toxic only on this particular issue?
The Tea Party position, after all, has become (or already was) the “mainstream” Republican position on at least a dozen other issues—denying climate change, rejecting evolution, embracing bogus science on homosexuality, destroying regulation of palpable harm to consumers, defending the right of assassins to bring AK-47s to schools, and on and on.
So why is this lunatic fringe position different from all other lunatic positions? Here are some conjectures:
Almost everyone is a feminist on the subject of rape. A politician can’t appear to be condoning it, even indirectly. It’s this, and not the ignorance of how women’s bodies work, that makes the congressman radioactive.
And why is almost everyone a feminist on the subject of rape? Because the basic gains of the women’s movement on core issues, despite its supposed recent eclipse, were durable. The political scientist Jane Mansbridge of Harvard, in her research on “everyday feminism,” found that most women, even they did not use the label, have attitudes on a wide range of issues from work to sexuality, that by any measure are feminist.
So why do the several other lunatic positions of the Republican Party not turn out to be politically radioactive?
Because the media cuts the far right too much slack—just look at the respectful coverage of climate change deniers and anti-evolution nuts rebranded as “Intelligent Design.”
Because Democrats have no guts on such issues as gun control.
Because the women’s movement was a movement, while many of the other issues where Republicans embrace insane views do not have movements on the other side.
This leaves two intriguing other questions:
Are enough crazies on the rape issue, (like those who see the rape exemption in anti-abortion legislation as a “loophole”), that this whole affair smokes out latent animosities between the Tea Party base and the pragmatic (though equally lunatic) party elite?
One thing the Tea Party base hates is being dictated to by party professionals. That’s why they delight in taking out incumbents. That’s why they’d rather be right than win. Akin shows every sign of becoming a martyr for this faction. The dust-up just confirms that Romney is nothing but a pragmatist.
And will the connections between Akin’s comments on legitimate rape and Republican vulnerability on other women’s issues lead Democrats and the press to make some of these other connections to the broader range of extremist views that now pass as the Republican mainstream?
Akin was no accident. When true crazies take over your party, they eventually display their true colors—and yours.
By: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, August 21, 2012
“Republican Values And Aspirations”: The GOP Wants To Make This Todd Akin’s World
For nearly 30 years, Republicans have supported an amendment that would outlaw abortion in all instances.
Yesterday morning, before the GOP completely turned its back on Todd Akin, I noted that—despite their harumphing—few Republicans disagreed with the substance of Akin’s remarks. In Congress and across the country, GOP lawmakers have supported a raft of bills designed to restrict or end abortion, as well as most forms of contraception. Look no further than the Republican platform, which—as CNN reports—will include radical and restrictive language on abortion:
”Faithful to the ‘self-evident’ truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed,“ the draft platform declares. ”We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.”
Republicans have been quick to distance themselves from Akin. Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown—who is running a tough reelection campaign against Elizabeth Warren, a liberal icon—has called on him to resign from the race. Nevada Senator Dean Heller followed suit—“He should not be the standard bearer for the Republican party in Missouri”—and was joined by National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn. The Texas Senator advised Akin to “carefully consider what is best for him, his family, the Republican Party, and the values that he cares about and has fought for throughout his career in public service.”
Even Mitt Romney issued a harsher condemnation after a tepid initial response: “Rep. Akin’s comments on rape are insulting, inexcusable, and, frankly, wrong,” Romney told The National Review. “Like millions of other Americans, we found them to be offensive.”
Of course, none of this changes the substance of the Republican Party’s stance on abortion. “Personhood” amendments have become popular with Republicans on the state level, and the human life amendment—which is functionally indistinguishable from “personhood”—has been a part of the GOP platform since 1984, with nearly identical language in each instance. Platforms don’t dictate the policy of elected officials, but they are a statement of the party’s values and aspirations.
What does the GOP aspire to? An America where abortion is outlawed in all instances: no exceptions for rape, no exceptions for incest, and no exceptions for medical emergency. The variety and availability of contraception would be sharply limited, and the rate of pregnancy significantly higher. The rate of abortion might go down, but the number of women killed as a result of illicit abortions would be guaranteed to increase. Todd Akin would be happy with this world; the human life amendment would keep women from “punishing” children and result in a world where even more were born as a result of rape.
I don’t actually believe that rank-and-file Republicans want a world where abortions are deadly and more women are forced to carry the children of their rapists. But that’s the world a human life amendment would create. Moreover, it’s not empty language—236 House Republicans voted for the Protect Life Act last October, which would have the same effect.
Todd Akin is in the mainstream of the Republican Party on this issue, and has been for a long time. His only mistake was honesty.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, August 21, 2012
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