Poor Timing On Mitt Romney’s “Frugal” Habits
The New York Times has a feature piece today on Mitt Romney’s “thrifty habits.” Apparently, the guy considers himself pretty cheap.
It was a stark sign of the tug of war, still evident in Mr. Romney’s life, between an instinctive, at times comical frugality, and an embrace of the lavish lifestyle that accompanied his swelling Wall Street fortune.
Mr. Romney, 64, has poured $52 million of his own money into campaigns for the Senate and the White House, but is obsessed with scoring cheap flights on the discount airline JetBlue.
He has acquired six-figure thoroughbred horses for his wife, Ann, yet plays golf with clubs from Kmart. And he has owned a series of multimillion-dollar homes, from a lakefront compound in New Hampshire to a beach house in California, but once rented a U-Haul to move his family’s belongings himself between two of the vacation retreats.
For the record, if a guy spends $12 million on one of several luxurious mansions, and then rents a U-Haul to move belongings himself, I’m not sure “frugal” is the right adjective.
In any case, the timing of the piece is unfortunate. The article invests 2,000 words in making the case that Romney “has never become entirely comfortable with his own wealth,” and is one of those guys who just doesn’t like to open his wallet, but the article went to print just as Romney was willing to drop $10,000 on a bet over a fairly obscure point during a nationally-televised debate.
As a rule, thrifty individuals don’t throw around five-figure wagers on a whim.
There was also this tidbit:
The Romneys lived in an affluent suburb, Bloomfield Hills, with a housekeeper and two refrigerators in the kitchen. But George Romney still required his children to mow the lawn, shovel snow, rake leaves, weed the garden. “I know he worried that because my brother, sisters and I had grown up in a prosperous family, we wouldn’t understand the lessons of hard work,” Mitt Romney wrote.
I’m pretty sure this is the same guy who later hired a landscaper that relied on undocumented workers and told the company, “Look, you can’t have any illegals working on our property. I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake, I can’t have illegals.”
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 11, 2011
“To Know Mitt Romney Is To Dislike Him”: Those Who Saw Romney’s Leadership Up Close
There’s a traditional model for presidential candidates when it comes to their pre-announcement career trajectory. It’s pretty straightforward: an official gets elected to a prominent office, he/she does well, his/her constituents are impressed, and the official parlays that success into a national campaign.
In recent decades, this is the path Obama, Bush, Clinton, and Reagan all took from statewide office to the White House. It’s always fascinated me how poorly Mitt Romney fits this model.
He was governor from 2003 to 2007, and as Edward Mason and Tom Mashberg explained the other day, Romney failed to impress much of anyone.
“His favorability was basically a straight line down from his honeymoon,” said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk University’s Political Research Center and a longtime Massachusetts pollster. “Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt.” […]
Romney entered the Massachusetts State House in January 2003 with a flashy favorability rating of 61 percent…. By November 2004, voters were souring, and a Suffolk poll found his favorable rating had dropped to 47 percent.
A year later, that rating sank another 14 points. Just 33 percent of Bay State voters had a favorable opinion of Romney in 2005, according to Suffolk, while 49 percent were unfavorable.
Things did not improve in 2006, when Suffolk found that his unfavorable rating had risen to 55 percent while his favorable remained stagnant.
By November 2006, as he closed out his increasingly absentee term, his overall job approval rating had cratered to 36 percent.
Thomas Whalen, a Boston University political science professor, put it this way: “To know Mitt Romney is to dislike him. That is the moral of the story.”
Maybe he looks better in hindsight? No, Romney’s former constituents still don’t like him and still don’t want him to be president.
Maybe it’s because he was a GOP governor in a reliably “blue” state? No, Massachusetts has had plenty of modern Republican governors — Weld, Cellucci, Swift — and all were more popular with their Bay State constituents than Romney.
This is all generally overlooked, which is a shame because it seems pretty important. We’re talking about a politician who’s held public office just once, for a grand total of four years. During that one term, his constituents got a good look at his leadership, and came to actively dislike him.
Romney looked at this and thought, “Hey, now I’m ready for a promotion to the White House!”
This really ought to come up on the campaign trail more often. Here’s the sample question reporters can ask Romney: why were you so woefully unpopular with your own constituents when voters gave you a chance to lead?
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 11, 2011
A Rare Politician, “Newt Gingrich Is A Lousy Human Being”
Newt Gingrich is a lousy human being. Any assessment of his presidential aspirations has to begin with that. It’s always worth considering what motivates a politician, particularly given all the personal complexities that attend a life lived in public, but with Newt Gingrich this is particularly relevant. We have had some very successful presidents whose personal lives were messy and complicated and we have had some terrible and even disastrous presidents whose personal lives seemed relatively stable, but it’s rare that we have a president who is such a lousy human being and whose politics are no better. Newt Gingrich is a rare politician, but he won’t be president. He is a rare politician because he is such a lousy human being and because his politics are so terrible. He won’t be president precisely because he is such a lousy human being and because his politics are so terrible.
The politics of Newt Gingrich are obvious. Not only is he a cookie-cutter Republican champion of the 1 percent, he also is an enemy of the 99 percent. A typical Republican hypocrite on fiscal responsibility, he espouses a balanced budget but after voting for the policies of Reagan and the elder Bush that created the largest federal deficits in history, he then voted against the Bush tax increases that were meant to begin to address them. He then voted against the Clinton tax increases on the wealthy that helped balance the budget and spark the economic boom that created near full employment. And while opposing most of the best of President Clinton’s policies, he supported President Clinton’s worst policies. He now calls for possibly reinstating Glass-Steagall, but at the time he helped spearhead its repeal. And, of course, while opposing any restraints on the rapacious greed of the worst 1 percenters, he also opposes government programs that help those victimized by them. He proposed to privatize Social Security, which would have taken guaranteed income from the elderly and placed it in the hands of the same investment bankers who after being unfettered from Glass-Steagall crashed the economy; and with the economy still staggering from the Bush-Cheney economic meltdown, he is waging war on food stamps, while throwing in a racist dogwhistle at President Obama, just for good measure. He wants a Medicare voucher plan, which would take guaranteed health care from the elderly and place their medical security in the hands of those always benevolent private insurers. He wants to restructure the tax code, making the 1 percent even more disproportionately wealthy while adding even more to the federal deficit.
If it seems Newt Gingrich hates all things government, that’s only part of the story. Because while he does oppose using the government to help those who most need help, he does seem to love its ability to enrich himself. In fact, lest anyone forget, Gingrich’s long career in public office came to an ignominious end after he was caught using tax-exempt funds for overt political propagandizing, the wider investigation of which by the House Ethics Committee he obstructed by providing false information, the result of which was an enormously bipartisan House vote to make him the first Speaker of the House ever to be disciplined for ethical wrongdoing. And within a year, and just four years after leading the GOP to a House majority, he was so unpopular within his own caucus that he was forced to abandon his leadership, and soon his tenure in Congress. After which he went on to become a very well-paid non-lobbyist lobbyist. Newt Gingrich has never demonstrated any interest in helping make the world better for all, but he does love to make the world a better place for Newt Gingrich. Indeed, he seems to abide by a credo of asking not what he can do for his country but what his country can do for him. But that’s not even the worst of it.
In my opinion, and speaking only for myself, it is a fundamental wrong to politicize politicians’ personal lives. The private behavior of consenting adults is their business not ours. Even if they hypocritically attempt to politicize the personal behavior of others, theirs remains sacrosanct. That applies to Anthony Weiner and it applies to Sarah Palin. But when Newt Gingrich argued over a divorce with his first wife while she was lying in a hospital bed the day after her third surgery for cancer treatments, that was not the private behavior of consenting adults. Gingrich’s first wife was not consenting to being so abused. Gingrich was demonstrating his utter disregard for what most people would consider a basic sense of humanity. As Robert Scheer wrote in 1994:
The man has chutzpah. In his 1974 campaign, he ran on the slogan, “Newt’s family is like your family.” A sad but perhaps accurate commentary on life in suburban Georgia. In 1978, he ran an ad blasting his opponent, Virginia Shapard, saying, “If elected, Virginia will move to Washington, but her husband and her children will remain in Griffin.” Under Gingrich’s photo, it said: “When elected, Newt will keep his family together.”And he did, until he filed for divorce 16 months later. His wife told the court she wanted to stay married although she had “ample grounds” for divorce herself. But she complained bitterly that he failed to support the family. As her petition stated:
“Despite repeated notices . . . plaintiff has failed and refused to voluntarily provide reasonable support sufficient to include payment of usual and normal living expenses, including drugs, water, sewage, garbage, gas, electric and telephone service for defendant and the minor children. As a result, many of such accounts are two or three months past due with notices of intent to cut off service . . . . “
The man who led the Republican drive to punish the less fortunate by cutting off what was and is framed as coddling government services was then ordered by a judge to provide basic child and family support. And it’s even worse. Because the same deadbeat dad who refused to take personal responsibility for his own children’s “normal living expenses” would go on to promote a political plan for single moms and their children that was right out of the most dystopian Victorian nightmare. As recently referenced by digby:
In 1994, during the early days of the public debate on welfare reform, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich ignited a media firestorm by suggesting that orphanages are better for poor children than life with a mother on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Responding to blistering criticism, he first defended the proposal by invoking the idyllic orphanage life of the 1938 film “Boys Town,” finally retreating, at least rhetorically, from the entire controversy. Orphanages became just another blip on the nation’s radar screen, or so it seemed.In fact, the plan to revive orphanages is embedded in the Personal Responsibility Act, the Republican plan for welfare reform, and is a major piece of the Republican Contract With America. The Republicans’ pledge promised to balance the budget, protect defense spending, and cut taxes, targeting programs for the poor–cash assistance, food, housing, medical, and child care–as the big areas for major budget savings. Parents who are poor, it has been predicted, will have little or no choice but to watch their children board the orphan trains in search of shelter and food.
Newt Gingrich seems to have a problem with children. His own children. The children of single teenaged moms. Poor children:
“It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid,” said the former House speaker, according to CNN. “Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.””You’re going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America,” he added.
Change the culture of poverty? By punishing the poor? By punishing poor children? And of course, getting rid of unionized janitors undoubtedly would create even more poor children, because when you have a broken economy and chronic unemployment and you then start getting rid of some of the remaining well-paying jobs, you end up with more unemployed people. More people who were earning incomes and then suddenly aren’t. Some of whom undoubtedly have children. Children who then will become poor. Poor children created by Gingrich’s plan who then under Gingrich’s plan would be forced to find work, and maybe even would end up getting their parents’ old jobs. As non-unionized child labor janitors in their own schools.
Newt Gingrich personifies everything that is wrong with Washington. Even consummate DC Republican George Will can’t contain his disdain:
Gingrich, however, embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive.
And it’s astonishing that such a verity isn’t even the worst. Newt Gingrich wants to wage political war on poor children. And it calls into question the values of anyone who would support Gingrich. Any Republican who supports Newt Gingrich cannot claim to support families, family values, or any recognizable form of morality. Should Gingrich’s candidacy prevail in his party, it would prove once and for all that the much espoused Republican values are nothing but lies.
By: Lawrence Lewis, Daily Kos, December 11, 2011
Gingrich: Great Debater, Greatly Flawed Candidate
Was that a wink?
Looked like it to me: As Rep. Ron Paul accused Newt Gingrich of flip-flopping, lobbying and putting taxpayers’ money in his pockets, the former House speaker looked into the audience and winked. As if to say: “I got this.”
And, for the most part, he did. The latest GOP front-runner showed Saturday night why many Republican voters suddenly believe he is the best candidate to challenge President Obama. For all his flaws — and those who worked with Gingrich say he has many of them, probably too many to be president — the former House speaker is a brilliant debater:
— He took a punch as well as he threw them.
— He defended his checkered record, even if that meant steamrolling the truth (Gingrich claimed he never lobbied or backed cap-and-trade legislation).
— He kept his ego and temper in check. Barely.
Yes, Gingrich is a great debater. But he’s not a great candidate and, if you watched closely enough, you could almost see his heavy baggage littering the debate stage.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry alluded to Gingrich’s marital difficulties: “I’ve always been of the opinion that if you cheat on your wife,” Perry said, “you’ll cheat on your business partner.”
Gingrich kept his cool. “I’ve made mistakes at times,” he replied. “I’ve had to go to God for forgiveness.”
Early in the debate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took dead aim at Gingrich’s record and rhetoric on climate change, lunar landings and child labor laws. He also accused Gingrich of being a career politician.
Gingrich seized the moment. “Let’s be candid,” he said, “The only reason you didn’t become a career politician is you lost to Teddy Kennedy in ’94.”
Killer line.
Yet in the next breath, Gingrich showed why he would be a vulnerable candidate against Obama. Defending his proposal to put poor kids to work in school cafeterias, the former House speaker said, “I’ll stand by the idea: Young people ought to learn how to work. Middle kids do work routinely. We need to give poor kids the same opportunity.”
What? Poor kids don’t work? Spoken by a Washington insider, a callous and cold politician who is out of touch with the rest of America.
His churlish side showed when Rep. Michele Bachmann accused the two leading candidates of being “Newt Romney” clones. Gingrich struck back with a disconnected answer that misled the audience about the extent of his lobbying and took a detour so he could brag about his best-selling books. “I know that doesn’t happen to fit your model,” Gingrich snapped at Bachmann, “but it happens to be true.”
Viewers were left to wonder whether Gingrich’s response was more arrogant, inaccurate or irrelevant.
But, hey, he’s a great debater.
By: Ron Fournier, The Atlantic, December 10, 2011
Newt Gingrich’s Dangerous, Self-Aggrandizing Foreign Policy
A mere four months ago, Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign had just imploded, his top staff had resigned en masse, and the disgraced former House speaker was apparently engaged in nothing more than a self-promotion tour. Now, his inexplicable revival as a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination requires that Americans understand just how dangerous he would be if he became president. Like many of his rivals, Gingrich is reliably hawkish on foreign policy, but he has the habit of framing issues in stark, apocalyptic terms that inevitably exaggerate the scale of contemporary threats. There is every reason to expect that U.S. foreign policy would become even more militarized and confrontational under a President Gingrich, and America’s relations with much of the world would deteriorate quickly.
Many Republicans flatter Gingrich by treating him as one of the party’s intellectuals, but Gingrich frequently shows that he is unable or unwilling to make crucial distinctions in his treatment of international problems. He complains on his campaign website that “we currently view Iraq, Afghanistan, and the many other danger spots of the globe as if they are isolated, independent situations,” and that America “lacks a unified grand strategy for defeating radical Islamism.” But these conflicts are largely separate from one another, and there is no such thing as a monolithic, global, radical Islamism that can be addressed by one strategy. No conflicts around the world can be properly understood except by focusing on local circumstances, but for Gingrich, the ideological emphasis on a unified global threat takes priority over proper analysis.
Gingrich’s formulation doesn’t allow for recognizing the differences among diverse Islamist groups, and it prevents him from seeing how those differences could be used to American advantage. Instead, he lumps them together much as the absurd “Islamofascist” label did during the last decade, and adopts a posture of hostility toward much of the Islamic world as a result. This failure of intellect was on display last year when Gingrich joined in the ridiculous demagoguery against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” whose ecumenical supporters Gingrich predictably labeled “radical Islamists.” Far from “telling the truth about our enemies,” Gingrich has a tendency to imagine enemies where none exist.
He has referred to Iran’s nuclear program as an “apocalyptic Iranian nuclear threat,” which grossly exaggerates the danger from future Iranian nuclear weapons and misleads the public into believing that Iran has decided to acquire nuclear weapons. Gingrich’s judgment of the Iranian threat is so exaggerated that he has claimed that it’s worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis. He openly supports waging covert war against Iran to thwart the threat he is exaggerating, which ensures that tensions between the U.S. and Iran would increase dramatically in the event that Gingrich took office.
While Gingrich often refers to himself as a “cheap hawk,” he has been firmly opposed to current proposals for military spending cuts. The ambitious and active role Gingrich envisions for the U.S. in the world precludes the possibility of meaningful reductions in military spending. Fiscal conservatives should expect no help from Gingrich in reducing the Pentagon’s budget.
Civil libertarians may have the most to fear from Gingrich. He has defended practices of indefinite detention, torture, and targeted assassinations of U.S. citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki. Gingrich has articulated justifications for virtually every government abuse committed in the name of national security in the last ten years, so we should expect nothing less from his administration if he came to power.
Another worrisome sign of Gingrich’s belligerence was the approval he gave to John McCain’s dangerous overreaction to the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia. Despite the Georgian government’s role in escalating the conflict, McCain famously declared that “we are all Georgians,” and insisted that the U.S. support Georgia during its short, disastrous war. Gingrich called this “one of the best moments McCain had in the campaign so far,” which tells us that Gingrich believes that McCain’s aggressive, knee-jerk response to a foreign crisis was correct, and that it’s presumably the sort of response Gingrich would offer in a similar situation.
Perhaps worst of all is Gingrich’s supreme confidence in his own intellectual superiority. This means he will not be easily dissuaded from making policy on the basis of his numerous misjudgments about foreign threats and U.S. interests. A Gingrich administration promises to give America many of the misguided and harmful policies of the Bush years, but the errors will be compounded by Gingrich’s presumption that he understands the world far better than anyone else.
By: Daniel Larison, The Week, December 8, 2011
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 
