Mitt! Mitt! Mitt!: It’s A Bad Sign When One Of Your Errors Is Your Book Title
This was the week we’ve been waiting for! Decades into the future, you will be able to tell your grandchildren where you were when Mitt Romney announced that he had formed a presidential exploratory committee.
Who knew he needed to explore? He said he was running on his Christmas card, for Lord’s sake.
My job today is to give you a run-through of every book Mitt Romney has ever written. Fortunately, there are only two: “Turnaround,” which is about his stint as the leader of the troubled 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games, and “No Apology,” his campaign tome, which used to be subtitled “The Case for American Greatness” but is now “Believe in America.”
Perhaps three. When the new paperback edition of “No Apology” came out in February, early readers noted that not only had Romney added a new subtitle but also a new preface, ranting about the founders-hating big spenders who are now running the country. And, most notably, he had also changed some critical chunks of the original to make the text more Tea Party-friendly.
For instance, paperback Romney has now noticed that the Massachusetts health insurance law that he championed as governor does have some flaws, all of which are because of anti-freedom provisions that the Democrats in the State Legislature put in. Also, the stimulus was way, way worse than he originally thought.
We all know that Mitt has a habit of, um, mutating to the political winds. So even in its earlier incarnation, the book had a decidedly uneven tone. “Despite my affiliation with the Republican Party, I don’t think of myself as highly partisan,” Moderate Mitt wrote toward the end. This comes after 300 pages of unrelenting attacks on Barack Obama and every member of his party since Andrew Jackson. He blames Bill Clinton for everything from cutting military spending to presiding over an administration during which “birth to teenage mothers rose to their highest level in decades.” I’m sure this week’s Romney does not regard that as a partisan statement even though teenage birth rates actually fell spectacularly during that exact period.
The book is heavy into policy and rather sparse on personal history, except for the parts that relate to his dad being a successful businessman and Mitt himself being an entrepreneurial hero along the deal-making, business-closing, job-slashing private equity line. Romney’s earlier book, “Turnaround,” had some great stories about his Mormon ancestors, including a great-grandmother who single-handedly drove her children to Mexico in a covered wagon during the Indian wars. “At one point along the way, she came across freshly slaughtered U.S. Cavalry horses. She paused only long enough to pry the shoes from the wasted horses, re-shod her own wagon horses, and journey on,” he wrote. Truly, “No Apology” could use a whole lot more of Hannah Romney and a whole lot less about the causes of the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
Also, there is not a single mention in “No Apology” of the fact that Romney once drove to Canada with the family Irish setter strapped to the roof of the car. I regard this as a critical oversight, although perhaps it was Seamus that Romney was thinking of when he chose his title.
But, according to the book, “No Apology” refers to Romney’s objections to President Obama’s alleged habit of going around the world, asking other countries to forgive America for its faults. This Obama apologizing tour is an article of Tea Party faith, but one that PolitiFact analyzed a while back and found it to be false. (“Yes, there is criticism in some of his speeches, but it’s typically leavened by praise for the United States and its ideals.”)
Anybody can make a mistake, but it’s a bad sign when one of your errors is your title.
Of all the awful books by presidential candidates I have read this year, “No Apology” was the hardest to get through. To be fair, Romney does write a lot about the issues, but in a way that makes you feel as if you’re trapped at a school assembly where a long-winded donor is telling you what life is all about. (“If I may return to my engine analogy from earlier in this chapter: Our economy is powered by two pistons …”)
“Turnaround” is a much easier book to read, even though it requires a pretty keen interest in how the Salt Lake City Olympics planners saved the day after Mitt took over in 1999. I was particularly fascinated by Romney’s insistent contention that he is a fun guy. (“I love jokes, and I love laughing.”) There is not much evidence of actual humor, although Romney says that when he visited the Clinton White House, he prankishly protested being given a visitor’s badge that had a red A on it, saying, “I’m not the one that cheated on my wife.”
Maybe you had to be there.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 15, 2011
How Quickly We Forget: Dick Cheney, “Deficits Don’t Matter”
Sure, it’s huge, but big deficits don’t always lead to bad economic health. As we found during The Great Depression, the opposite is also true.
For those worried about the future, huge federal deficits remain the gift that keeps on giving, or taking, depending on your point of view. They are always around, always huge, and seem to be an issue that neither party has immunity from.
If you care to bash Republicans over this issue you need look no further than former Vice President Dick Cheney who told former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that “deficits don’t matter” when the latter voiced concerns about the size of the federal bill. Cheney later fired O’Neill, presumably for thinking deficits actually mattered.
Still, Cheney was true to his word, as the White House of George W. Bush raised the federal deficit every year it was in office. When Bush started his presidency, the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product hovered at 60%. By the time he exited, it was closer to 80%. Surely the first part of President Obama’s term will see that ratio only rise further, as the federal government fully deploys the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, the $200 billion Term Asset Backed Loan Securities Facility and the $500-$1 trillion Public-Private Investment Program, among other alphabet soup bailouts.
Of course, to critics of Obama, including conservatives, now deficits do matter a lot more than they did a year ago. Look no further than the well-covered “tea parties” to see an instance where partisanship has seemed to trump fiscal stewardship, or at least short-term memory.
By: David Serchuk: Article originally posted August 5, 2009, Forbes.com
A Vision Of Optimism And Equal Opportunity: What It Means To Be A Democrat
I’m glad I waited for President Obama’s heralded budget speech Wednesday before criticizing it (such a novel idea); there was much to praise in it and little to challenge. The best news: Obama laid out the kind of sweeping “story” of American democracy, and the bold vision of how we grow together, that I thought was too much to ask for even yesterday. He even talked about the scariest fact of American inequality: The dangerous hold the top 1 percent of Americans has on wealth, income and (he didn’t say this) politics. He pushed back on the cruel GOP deficit plan, made his toughest case yet for tax hikes on the richest, and stayed away from the worst ideas floated by his own deficit commission. The devil will be in the deficit-cutting details, and frankly, there weren’t a whole lot of them in the speech. But the president came out fighting with firmness, and with a rhetoric of social justice and equality, that I haven’t seen enough of these last two years.
Obama acknowledged our American history as “rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.” But he quickly identified “another thread running throughout our history”:
A belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation. We believe, in the words of our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves. And so we’ve built a strong military to keep us secure, and public schools and universities to educate our citizens. We’ve laid down railroads and highways to facilitate travel and commerce. We’ve supported the work of scientists and researchers whose discoveries have saved lives, unleashed repeated technological revolutions, and led to countless new jobs and entire industries. Each of us has benefited from these investments, and we are a more prosperous country as a result.
Part of this American belief that we are all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff, may strike any one of us. “There but for the grace of God go I,” we say to ourselves, and so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, and those with disabilities. We are a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further – we would not be a great country without those commitments.
So far, so good. It got even better when Obama took direct aim at Paul Ryan’s cruel and ludicrous budget plan. He laid out its many cuts, and concluded:
These are the kind of cuts that tell us we can’t afford the America we believe in. And they paint a vision of our future that’s deeply pessimistic. It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can’t afford to send them. Go to China and you’ll see businesses opening research labs and solar facilities. South Korean children are outpacing our kids in math and science. Brazil is investing billions in new infrastructure and can run half their cars not on high-priced gasoline, but biofuels. And yet, we are presented with a vision that says the United States of America – the greatest nation on Earth – can’t afford any of this.
Then he attacked the Gilded Age social inequality and tax cuts that have helped create our troubles:
Think about it. In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs? That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.
Indulge me here, because this is how Democrats should be talking, and rarely do:
The America I know is generous and compassionate; a land of opportunity and optimism. We take responsibility for ourselves and each other; for the country we want and the future we share. We are the nation that built a railroad across a continent and brought light to communities shrouded in darkness. We sent a generation to college on the GI bill and saved millions of seniors from poverty with Social Security and Medicare. We have led the world in scientific research and technological breakthroughs that have transformed millions of lives.
This is who we are. This is the America I know. We don’t have to choose between a future of spiraling debt and one where we forfeit investments in our people and our country. To meet our fiscal challenge, we will need to make reforms. We will all need to make sacrifices. But we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in. And as long as I’m President, we won’t.
That’s the president I voted for.
On the meat of the president’s plan to cut the deficit: He deserves credit for rejecting Medicare vouchers, for turning aside specific talk about Social Security (even though it has nothing to do with the federal deficit, the privatizers and Obama’s friends on his deficit commission wanted it thrown on the table in a grand bargain that can only be bad news for Democrats and working people; Obama seemed not to be willing to do that); for promising that reforms and innovations already part of the Affordable Care Act will bring down the costs of Medicare and Medicaid; and for saying we need bigger defense cuts than so far proposed.
(Small point: I liked the way Obama trashed Ryan without mentioning him — you don’t fight down — but I wish he’d been a tiny bit more confrontational on exactly what Ryan’s “Medicare vouchers” would do; if seniors could afford insurance at all, which is debatable, they’d certainly be at the mercy of privatized “death panels” refusing care over its costs. I say that because I’m sure some GOP prevaricator will bring back the “death panel” lie now that Obama has committed to curbing costs in Medicare. I hope I’m wrong.)
My quibbles? I’m still concerned that Obama has agreed to freeze the 12 percent of the budget that goes to “discretionary spending.” And I’m assuming that freeze includes the cuts made this week. I don’t like his promise of $3 in spending cuts for every dollar raised in revenue via tax hikes. In a statement, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka praised the speech but added: “President Obama does not yet have the balance right between spending cuts and new revenue.” I also never like it when Obama undermines himself by saying things like:
I don’t expect the details in any final agreement to look exactly like the approach I laid out today. I’m eager to hear other ideas from all ends of the political spectrum.
I know, I know, he thinks it makes him sound reasonable to independents; I worry he sounds weak to Republicans. If Obama thinks the plan he laid out is as far to the left as Ryan’s plan is to the right, and that the answer is to meet in the glorious middle, we’re all in trouble.
But for today, I’ll take him at his word. After the speech, pundits called it the opening salvo of the Obama 2012 reelection campaign, as though there was something wrong with that. If these are the founding principles of the president’s 2012 campaign, Democrats and the country will be better off than we’ve been in a while.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, April 13, 2011
Unfettered Money: The Enabling Of Campaign “Speech”
When the Supreme Court ruled that money equals speech 35 years ago, it was responding to forces of technology and economics reshaping American politics that made it much more expensive to run a campaign. While ruling that public financing and limits on contributions are valid ways to limit donors’ undue influence, it struck down candidate, campaign and independent spending limits.
Now the court’s conservative majority is again reshaping politics, ruling that what matters most for money and speech is their “fair market” impact. The result will be closer scrutiny of public financing, while enabling even more rampant spending by wealthy candidates.
In the landmark 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo, the court said that “virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money,” so restricting campaign spending meant restricting political speech. The First Amendment required that political speech be unfettered, so the same was required for political spending.
But when the court ruled that money equals speech, it didn’t mean, literally, that money is speech. It meant that money enabled speech. A political contribution enabled the symbolic, or indirect, speech of the donor and the actual speech of the candidate — and may the best speech win. The focus was on enabling the speech, not the money.
That changed in 2008 when the conservative majority struck down a federal rule that had tripled the limit on campaign contributions for a candidate outspent by a rich, self-financed opponent. Justice Samuel Alito Jr. wrote that the rule diminished “the effectiveness” of the rich candidate’s spending and of his speech.
In oral argument recently, the court’s conservatives appeared ready to take their next step in restricting campaign finance reform and to strike down Arizona’s public financing mechanism called triggered matching funds. This is one of the most compelling innovations in the country. The state will match for a state-financed candidate what an opponent raises in private contributions up to triple the initial amount of state financing.
To William Maurer, the lawyer opposing the Arizona mechanism, whenever “a privately financed candidate speaks above a certain amount, the government creates real penalties for them to have engaged in unfettered political expression.” That “speaks” was not a slip, but a reinforcement of the money-equals-speech notion.
The fundamental problem, he said, is “the government turning my speech into the vehicle by which my entire political message is undercut,” because the public funds triggered are a penalty that reduces the impact of the privately financed candidate’s spending and speech. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. made clear in the argument that he, too, sees triggered matching public funds as a limit on the privately financed candidate’s speech.
That makes no sense. Arizona’s mechanism means more candidates — not just the wealthy — will be able to run in elections. And that means more political speech, not less. But that view depends on seeing money as enabling speech, not vice versa. Money already has far too much sway everywhere in politics. If the court continues this way, the damage and corruption will be enormous.
By: Editorial, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, April 11, 2011
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