“The Coming Post-Election GOP Freak Out”: For Republicans, Any Turn Of Bad Luck Or Unwanted Results Is A Conspiracy
What’s the state of mind this weekend of the conservative outrage machine? With regard to liberals, I think it’s fair to say as of Saturday that most of us (excepting your allowed-for percentage of nervous nellies) expect Barack Obama to win. If he somehow doesn’t, we’ll be surprised and deeply depressed. But provided the outcome doesn’t involve some kind of Florida-style shenanigans, in a couple days’ time, we’ll come to terms with it.
Meanwhile–conservatives? I think that they are certain that Mitt Romney will win and that all information to the contrary is a pack of lies; that they will be completely shocked and outraged if he doesn’t; that, if he loses, it will be the inevitable product of foul play; and that therefore they’ll immediately start scouring the landscape looking for parties to blame and will keep themselves in a state suspended agitation for…days, weeks, four years, forever. Which wouldn’t matter to the rest of us but for the fact that they’ll continue to have the power to screw up the country.
The conservatives I read, and certainly my conservative commenters, just can’t wait for Tuesday, when the American people will arise out of their torpor and finally send Obama to the dugout. I’m continually struck–nay, impressed, even–by the iron certainty with which they say this, and by their unswerving ability to pluck out the favorable polls (getting fewer and farther between, incidentally) and throw a bucket of ice-cold water on the ones they don’t like.
Objective reality says Obama is ahead. But to conservatives, there’s always something wrong in objective-reality land, always a reason to claim that the world is in fact spinning in the opposite direction. Quinnipiac has too many Democrats! PPP is a Democratic firm! This one oversampled blacks, that one Latinos. And of course, these objections are never merely just stated. They’re the rhetorical equivalent of dirty nuclear bombs. Conservatives on Twitter howl derisively at these polls as if their purveyors are offering alchemical cures for venereal disease.
We’re all prey to “confirmation bias,” as Paul Waldman called it in his American Prospect column Friday. We look at the polls that we know will be more likely to show the result we want to see. With Republicans, that has meant Rasmussen, obviously, and Gallup. With liberals it has meant…well, virtually every other polling operation under God’s golden sun, more often than not, because the simple fact remains that Obama has led in most polls for a year, nationwide and statewide.
But there’s confirmation bias, and there’s denial. Pennsylvania is up for grabs? If you say so, wingosphere. But Obama’s led in 53 straight polls there, journalist Eric Boehlert tweeted yesterday. In the last two days we’ve seen about 20 different state polls. Obama led in 18. If my guy were on the business end of results like those, I’d be psychologically preparing myself.
Which, indeed, I am anyway. You never really know. The mess in Eastern Pennsylvania could, maybe, so discourage turnout in the Obama-friendliest areas of the state he could lose. Fifty-three straight polls, and 18 out of 20, could be wrong. That many polls have never been that wrong before, but I guess there’s a first time for everything. (Please don’t mention 1948, wingers–comparing polling then to polling today is like comparing a ’48 Plymouth to a new Lexus.)
You never really know. Most liberals acknowledge this simple reality. But wingers seem to know, or think they know. Of course they don’t know, and deep down they know that they don’t know, which must be a kind of psychological torture to them, and so they compensate for having to endure that torture by putting up that front of absolute certainty, which in turn brings its own rewards whatever the result. Their guy wins, they get to say, “Ha! I knew it all along.” Their guy loses, they get to be outraged and blame the blacks, the media, the pollsters, Nate Silver. In a weird sort of way I suspect many of them prefer the latter outcome.
Yes, it’s strange. And it’s made all the stranger because I would imagine that outside the political realm, most conservatives are pretty reasonable people who accept outcomes just like the rest of us. If their team loses the Super Bowl, or their kid’s project doesn’t win the science fair, or even if they get passed over for that promotion, most conservatives surely are unhappy, as anyone would be, but they fundamentally accept the legitimacy of the outcome.
But not in politics. In the political realm, we have this hate machine, this massive propaganda apparatus, that tells conservatives that any turn of bad luck is not merely bad luck but the result of a conspiracy that society has hatched against them. Thus, Mitt Romney–whom conservatives used to hate, before they were forced to embrace him–has made no mistakes on the campaign trail. The furor over the 47 percent remarks, the two debate losses, and much else–these aren’t signs of his misjudgment or fallibility. To conservatives, they’re all part of the broader plot against him, and more importantly against them.
And so, when you look at the world that way, the conspiracy never dies, the rope never stops spinning. If Obama wins, the excuses will start coming; the excuses will mushroom quickly into reasons why the victory was illegitimate; illegitimacy thus “established,” the next mission is to oppose Obama at every turn with even greater fervor. Any political means necessary to stop or even remove him will become justified. It’s all as predictable as a goose sh*tting. And if Obama does win, it will start Wednesday morning. What am I saying? I meant Tuesday night.
By: MIchael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 4, 2012
“Blind To Every Human Virtue”: Mitt Romney And Bain Capital Create Their Own 47% “Victims”
Here’s the 47% Question: If the hedge fund founded by the Republican candidate for president buys a company in a small Midwestern town and then sends all its jobs to China, do those workers thereby become the “victims” Mitt Romney had in mind when he dismissed those who “do not take responsibility for their lives” because they are “dependent” on government?
That’s the situation facing 170 workers at an auto sensor manufacturing plant in Freeport, Illinois after a Bain Capital-owned company, Sensata Technologies, bought out their factory and then decided it would be cheaper to board up the plant and send its parts to China — but not before subjecting workers to the final humiliation of training their Chinese replacements.
In response, some workers have set up a camp across from the factory and are calling “Bainport” to protest the move, according to Dave Johnson at Truthout. Others have asked Mitt Romney to intercede on their behalf with his former company, foolishly taking Romney at his word that, as president, he would “get tough” with China and fight for every American job. Good luck with that.
It’s not as if the company is hurting for money. According to a company financial statement quoted by Johnson, Sensata’s net income last year was $355 million, up 16% from 2010. Its total revenues were $1.8 billion in 2011, up almost 19% from the year before.
Yet, Romney’s former colleague, Sensata board chairman Paul Edgerley, says Bain’s responsibilities to investors demands shuttering the Freeport plant and shipping operations to Asia.
Johnson says the layoffs will surely have a ripple-effect in this small town of about 25,000 that has only three principal employers and a poverty rate well above the national average. And so, Bain’s decision to move the plant to China is a dagger in the heart of this community, says Johnson, and represents “the epitome of corporate America’s lack of patriotism, [with] it’s capital unmoored from any sense of responsibility for the people that make the profits or the communities where they live.”
In moving the plant to China, Sensata is simply operating according to the business strategy mapped out for the hedge fund by Romney himself: Buy assets with little money down. Load them with debt. Raid their pension funds. Break their unions. Then “harvest them” for profits.
On that infamous video disrespecting the bottom 47%, Romney makes a dubious value judgment when he says individuals who are not resourceful or self-reliant enough to make it in the survival-of-the-fittest jungle created for them by cut-throat capitalists like those at Bain Capital are therefore “irresponsible” when they lean on others in hard times, especially when it’s the crutch of government.
That’s the same self-serving justification we hear from conservative economists like Charles Murray who ignore the consequences of globalization and technological change and blame instead the middle class for its own shrunken prospects when average Americans stray from the traditional family values and old-fashioned American work ethic Murray thinks is all that separates rich from poor.
Romney’s is an ethic that equates “morality” with “success.” This may help explain a presidential campaign that justifies egregious falsehoods and elaborate fabrications if they win Romney a point or two with a gullible public.
Newt Gingrich was right when he called out Romney during the Republican primaries as a “predatory corporate raider” who only pretends to be a real capitalist.
A real capitalist, said the original Austrian-school economist Joseph Schumpeter, would know that the fruits of the free market’s dynamic innovations could only be harvested by societies prudent enough to make provision for the victims of capitalism’s relentless change.
Schumpeter, Austria’s finance minister in 1919 and the originator of the famous phrase about capitalism’s “creative destruction,” believed public relief during Hard Times was “imperative on moral and social grounds” and also important to stabilize demand, writes Hans-Michael Trautwein.
“Schumpeter was in favor of unemployment relief as the best way to counteract the effects of the business cycle on workers’ welfare,” says Trautwein in a paper on the great economists’ views on unemployment.
Predators like Mitt Romney, in contrast, want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the benefits that go with destroying other people’s lives for their own profit but without the responsibility to pay the least in compensation.
A real capitalist concerned about the viability of a free market capitalist system in a democratic society would be far more alert to the caveats Schumpeter laid out. And the fact that Romney isn’t, as he speaks contemptuously of the victims his Bain Capital business model have created, exposes Romney as someone who cares little about the free market beyond his own ability to profit spectacularly from the very same unregulated and lightly taxed rigged system he would promote as president.
The irony of the rapacious worldview Romney shares with many in America’s plutocratic class is that it fails as both morals and economics. This is one reasonRomney’s peculiar brand of buccaneer capitalism has so often had to be rescued from itself.
How can it be possible, for example, that a company like Citibank could sell securities it knows to be toxic to one set of customers while at the same time betting on those very same securities to default – and then only getting a $285 million fine from regulators, which is a slap on the wrist considering the monstrous sums involved?
That is what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wants to know when he says of Citibank’s fraud” “It doesn’t get any more immoral than this.”
Romney complains about the 47% he says are parasites. Yet, as Friedman notes, “there is in our economy now a disconnect between pay and performance,” which is a fairly serviceable definition of “parasite” in my book.
Under the rules now in place, says Friedman, Romney’s Bain Capital can make tens of millions of dollars on firms it buys that go bankrupt. A bank like Citigroup can sell toxic securities to a hedge fund that loses hundreds of millions of dollars on the deal while Citigroup still makes $160 million in fees and trading profits betting against those same assets.
Despite the wrong turns it has taken in recent decades, Friedman still believes capitalism and free markets are the best engines for generating growth and relieving poverty — “provided they are balanced with meaningful transparency, regulation and oversight.”
What we’ve lost in the last decade, he says, is that balance. “And if we don’t get it back — and there is now a tidal wave of money resisting that — we will have another crisis. And, if that happens, the cry for justice could turn ugly.”
Mitt Romney sells himself as a successful businessman who “knows” how to create jobs because he “understands” what it takes because Romney himself is rich. In place of policy, in other words, all that Romney has to offer is biography.
Mitt Romney wants to be our president. Yet as Chrystia Freeland reminds us, Romney embraces a “ravage capitalism that is loyal to no nation-state and blind to every human virtue but profit” – a win-at-all-costs ethos that has a familiar, if dangerous, pedigree among history’s self-destructive ruling classes.
What separates successful states from failed ones, says the author of Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, are governing institutions that are either inclusive or extractive.
Extractive states are those controlled by ruling elites whose sole objective is extracting as much wealth as they can from the rest of society, says Freeland, while inclusive states “give everyone access to economic opportunity.”
Greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity which, in turn, creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness, says Freeland
Elites themselves prosper from these inclusive systems, says Freeland, but there also comes a time when these elites face the self-destructive temptation to pull up the ladder behind them once they’ve extracted wealth from the broader community “to such a degree that the society becomes dysfunctional and mired by social problems.”
Marx’s famous warning about capitalism containing the seeds of its own destruction may be the danger America faces today, says Freeland, as the 1% percent “pulls away from everyone else” by cannibalizing the broad Middle Class Republic that America has built up since the Second World War — with its public investments in education, infrastructure, basic research and development and health and retirement security — and as these elites pursue “an economic, political and social agenda that increases that gap even further and ultimately destroys the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.”
This is the absurdity of Mitt Romney’s comment about the 47% who are “dependent upon government,” says Freeland, since it’s those at the “top of the economic pyramid who have been most effective at capturing government support — and at getting others to pay for it.”
Today’s super-rich may be different from you and me but they are no different from their plutocratic predecessors throughout history, says Freeland.
“Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power,” she writes. “Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good. The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that they threaten the system that created them.”
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, November 3, 2012
“A Delusional One-Percenter”: The Case Against Mitt Romney
Every election is a choice between imperfect alternatives. I will examine both choices in turn, but the first one, Mitt Romney, has rendered the normal analytic tools useless. The different iterations of his career differ so wildly, yet comport so perfectly with his political ambitions of the moment, that it is simply impossible to separate his panders from his actual beliefs, the means from the ends. It is easy to present Romney’s constant reinventions as a character flaw, but all politicians tailor their beliefs to suit the moment; Romney’s unique misfortune is that he has had to court such divergent electorates — first a liberal general electorate in Massachusetts, then Republican primary voters of an increasingly rabid bent in 2008 and 2012, and finally America as a whole after securing the nomination.
One can plausibly imagine Romney as a genuine right-winger, first implanted in hostile deep blue territory, hiding his arch-conservative beliefs in order to secure the brass ring he coveted before he was liberated from running for reelection and unmasked himself to his fellow Republicans nationwide as the “conservative businessman” he always was. One can just as plausibly imagine him as his father’s true political heir, covertly plotting to move his party sharply leftward, a turn he would execute only once he had burrowed undetected beneath its ideological perimeter.
The true picture is a mystery, probably lying somewhere between these points. Undoubtedly, what Romney believes in above all is himself. As a friend of his told Politico last month, at a moment when his campaign appeared hopeless, Romney approaches politics like a business deal: “Just do and say what you need to do to get the deal done, and then when it’s done, do what you know actually needs to be done to make the company a success.” (This was the reporters’ paraphrase, not the friend’s own words.)
He meant this not in the spirit of exposing Romney’s fraudulence, but in an elegiac way — a lament for a great man who would do good if only given a chance. From a certain perspective, there is an understandable and even admirable elitism at work. Romney truly believes in his own abilities and — unlike George W. Bush, who was handed every professional success in his life — has justification for his confidence. He is a highly intelligent, accomplished individual.
Some version of Romney’s own fantasy — that, once in office, he will craft sensible and data-driven, and perhaps even bipartisan, solutions to our problems — surely accounts for his political resurrection. Starting with the transformative first presidential debate, Romney has wafted the sweet, nostalgic scent of moderate Republicanism into the air. Might he offer the sort of pragmatic leadership that was the hallmark of his party in a bygone era — a George H.W. Bush, a second-term Reagan, an Eisenhower, a Nixon minus the criminal paranoia? Some moderates supporting him, like reformist conservative Ross Douthat or the Des Moines Register editorial board, have filled the many voids of Romney’s program with some version of this fantasy. It is an attractive scenario to many, and one worth considering seriously.
This hopeful vision immediately runs into a wall of deductive logic. If Romney were truly planning to govern from the center, why would he leave himself so exposed to Obama’s attacks that he is a plutocrat peddling warmed-over Bushonomics? The election offers Romney his moment of maximal leverage over his party’s right-wing base. If he actually wanted to cut a budget deal along the lines of Bowles-Simpson, or replace Dodd-Frank with some other way of preventing the next financial crisis, or replace Obamacare with some other plan to cover the uninsured, there would be no better time to announce it than now, when he could sorely use some hard evidence of his moderation. He has not done so — either because he does not want to or because he fears a revolt by the Republican base. But if he fears such a revolt now, when his base has no recourse but to withhold support and reelect Obama, he will also fear it once in office, when conservatives could oppose him without making their worst political nightmare come true as a result.
And so the reality remains that a vote for Romney is a vote for his party — a party that, by almost universal acclimation, utterly failed when last entrusted with governing. Romney may be brainier, more competent, and more mentally nimble than George W. Bush. But his party has, unbelievably, grown far more extreme in the years since Bush departed. Unbelievable though it may sound to those outside the conservative movement, conservative introspection into the Bush years has yielded the conclusion that the party erred only in its excessive compassion — it permitted too much social spending and, perhaps, cut taxes too much on the poor. Barely any points of contact remain between party doctrine and the consensus views of economists and other experts. The party has almost no capacity to respond to the conditions and problems that actually exist in the world.
Economists have coalesced around aggressive monetary easing in order to pump liquidity into a shocked market; Republicans have instead embraced the gold standard and warned incessantly of imminent inflation, undaunted by their total wrongness. In the face of a consensus for short-term fiscal stimulus, they have turned back to ancient Austrian doctrines and urged immediate spending cuts. In the face of rising global temperatures and a hardening scientific consensus on the role of carbon emissions, their energy plan is to dig up and burn every last molecule of coal and oil as rapidly as possible. Confronted by skyrocketing income inequality, they insist on cutting the top tax rate and slashing — to levels of around half — programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and children’s health insurance. They refuse to allow any tax increase to soften the depth of such cuts and the catastrophic social impact they would unleash.
The last element may be the most instructive and revealing. The most important intellectual pathology to afflict conservatism during the Obama era is its embrace of Ayn Rand’s moral philosophy of capitalism. Rand considered the free market a perfect arbiter of a person’s worth; their market earnings reflect their contribution to society, and their right to keep those earnings was absolute. Politics, as she saw it, was essentially a struggle of the market’s virtuous winners to protect their wealth from confiscation by the hordes of inferiors who could outnumber them.
Paul Ryan, a figure who (unlike Romney) commands vast personal and ideological loyalty from the party, is also its most famous Randian. He has repeatedly praised Rand as a visionary and cited her work as the touchstone of his entire political career. But the Randian toxin has spread throughout the party. It’s the basis of Ryan’s frequently proclaimed belief that society is divided between “makers” and “takers.” It also informed Romney’s infamous diatribe against the lazy, freeloading 47 percenters. It is a grotesque, cruel, and disqualifying ethical framework for governing.
Naturally, this circles us back to the irrepressible question of what Romney himself actually believes. The vast industry devoted to exploring the unknowable question of Romney’s true beliefs has largely ignored a simple and obvious possibility: That Romney has undergone the same political and/or psychological transformation that so many members of his class have since 2009. If there is one hard fact that American journalism has established since 2009, it is that many of America’s rich have gone flat-out bonkers under President Obama. Gabriel Sherman first documented this phenomenon in his fantastic 2009 profile in this magazine, “The Wail of the 1%,” which described how the financial elite had come to see themselves as persecuted, largely faultless targets of Obama and their greedy countrymen. Alec MacGillis and Chrystia Freeland have painted a similar picture.
The ranks of the panicked, angry rich include Democrats as well as Republicans and elites from various fields, but the most vociferous strains have occurred among the financial industry and among Republicans. All this is to say, had he retired from public life after 2008, super-wealthy Republican financier Mitt Romney is exactly the kind of person you’d expect to have lost his mind, the perfect socioeconomic profile of a man raging at Obama and his mob. Indeed, it would be strange if, at the very time his entire life had come to focus on the goal of unseating Obama, and he was ensconced among Obama’s most affluent and most implacable enemies, Romney was somehow immune to the psychological maladies sweeping through his class.
Seen in this light, Romney’s belief in himself as a just and deserving leader is not merely a form of personal ambition free of ideological content. His faith in himself blends seamlessly into a faith in his fellow Übermenschen — the Job Creators who make our country go, who surround him and whose views shaped his program. To think of Romney as torn between two poles, then, is a mistake. Both his fealty to his party and his belief in his own abilities point in the same direction: the entitlement of the superrich to govern the country.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, October 31, 2012
“Medicaid On The Ballot”: Unfortunately Mr. Romney, A Lack Of Insurance Does Kill People
There’s a lot we don’t know about what Mitt Romney would do if he won. He refuses to say which tax loopholes he would close to make up for $5 trillion in tax cuts; his economic “plan” is an empty shell.
But one thing is clear: If he wins, Medicaid — which now covers more than 50 million Americans, and which President Obama would expand further as part of his health reform — will face savage cuts. Estimates suggest that a Romney victory would deny health insurance to about 45 million people who would have coverage if he lost, with two-thirds of that difference due to the assault on Medicaid.
So this election is, to an important degree, really about Medicaid. And this, in turn, means that you need to know something more about the program.
For while Medicaid is generally viewed as health care for the nonelderly poor, that’s only part of the story. And focusing solely on who Medicaid covers can obscure an equally important fact: Medicaid has been more successful at controlling costs than any other major part of the nation’s health care system.
So, about coverage: most Medicaid beneficiaries are indeed relatively young (because older people are covered by Medicare) and relatively poor (because eligibility for Medicaid, unlike Medicare, is determined by need). But more than nine million Americans benefit from both Medicare and Medicaid, and elderly or disabled beneficiaries account for the majority of Medicaid’s costs. And contrary to what you may have heard, the great majority of Medicaid beneficiaries are in working families.
For those who get coverage through the program, Medicaid is a much-needed form of financial aid. It is also, quite literally, a lifesaver. Mr. Romney has said that a lack of health insurance doesn’t kill people in America; oh yes, it does, and states that expand Medicaid coverage show striking drops in mortality.
So Medicaid does a vast amount of good. But at what cost? There’s a widespread perception, gleefully fed by right-wing politicians and propagandists, that Medicaid has “runaway” costs. But the truth is just the opposite. While costs grew rapidly in 2009-10, as a depressed economy made more Americans eligible for the program, the longer-term reality is that Medicaid is significantly better at controlling costs than the rest of our health care system.
How much better? According to the best available estimates, the average cost of health care for adult Medicaid recipients is about 20 percent less than it would be if they had private insurance. The gap for children is even larger.
And the gap has been widening over time: Medicaid costs have consistently risen a bit less rapidly than Medicare costs, and much less rapidly than premiums on private insurance.
How does Medicaid achieve these lower costs? Partly by having much lower administrative costs than private insurers. It’s always worth remembering that when it comes to health care, it’s the private sector, not government programs, that suffers from stifling, costly bureaucracy.
Also, Medicaid is much more effective at bargaining with the medical-industrial complex.
Consider, for example, drug prices. Last year a government study compared the prices that Medicaid paid for brand-name drugs with those paid by Medicare Part D — also a government program, but one run through private insurance companies, and explicitly forbidden from using its power in the market to bargain for lower prices. The conclusion: Medicaid pays almost a third less on average. That’s a lot of money.
Is Medicaid perfect? Of course not. Most notably, the hard bargain it drives with health providers means that quite a few doctors are reluctant to see Medicaid patients. Yet given the problems facing American health care — sharply rising costs and declining private-sector coverage — Medicaid has to be regarded as a highly successful program. It provides good if not great coverage to tens of millions of people who would otherwise be left out in the cold, and as I said, it does much right to keep costs down.
By any reasonable standard, this is a program that should be expanded, not slashed — and a major expansion of Medicaid is part of the Affordable Care Act.
Why, then, are Republicans so determined to do the reverse, and kill this success story? You know the answers. Partly it’s their general hostility to anything that helps the 47 percent — those Americans whom they consider moochers who need to be taught self-reliance. Partly it’s the fact that Medicaid’s success is a reproach to their antigovernment ideology.
The question — and it’s a question the American people will answer very soon — is whether they’ll get to indulge these prejudices at the expense of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 28, 2012
“Please Proceed, Governor”: A Clear Win For Obama–He Punched Hard, And He Punched With Facts
Not a close call. President Obama won the second presidential debate as clearly and decisively as he lost the first. For anyone who disagrees, three simple words: “Please proceed, Governor.”
This icy invitation to Mitt Romney came amid an exchange about the killings of State Department officials in Libya. Obama noted that in his initial Rose Garden remarks, he classified the attack as an act of terror. Romney, perhaps misinformed by the right-wing propaganda machine, tried to insist that the president waited weeks to call the incident terrorism. “Get the transcript,” Obama said.
Moderator Candy Crowley stepped in and noted that Obama was correct. (Indeed, according to the transcript, Obama classified the attack as among “acts of terror” that would not deter or deflect U.S. foreign policy.) Having embarrassed himself, Romney had the good sense to move on.
It was a moment that encapsulated what Obama accomplished Tuesday night: He punched hard, and he punched with facts.
In these debates, superficialities can be important. Downcast and mopey in the first encounter, this time Obama was sharp and combative throughout. He went after Romney directly and personally; I lost track of the number of times Obama charged that some Romney assertion or another was flatly untrue. He quoted Romney’s past statements that directly contradict what Romney is saying now. All evening, he was in Romney’s face.
It’s not that Romney had an awful night and certainly not that he was some kind of shrinking violet. But in the first debate, Obama’s passivity allowed Romney to interrupt, interject and generally control the flow of the conversation in a way that seemed merely forceful, not obnoxious. Tuesday night, with Obama playing offense, Romney had to dial his own performance up a notch. At times he seemed a little cranky, a little flustered.
The town hall format — and Crowley’s firm hand — ensured that the debate covered quite a lot of ground. Obama got to fight on favorable political terrain. A question about equal pay for women, for example, allowed him to question Romney’s position on women’s reproductive rights and whether health insurance should have to pay for contraception. A question about immigration let Obama note that Romney has vowed to veto the Dream Act for those brought here without papers as children.
Allowing Obama to make direct appeals to women and Latinos was probably not in the Romney game plan.
Romney did get to make his pitch, however. He made clear that the central theme of his candidacy is a promise to create jobs. Given the state of the economy, it would be stunning if people didn’t at least give him a hearing.
“I understand that I can get this country on track again,” Romney said. “We don’t have to settle for what we’re going through. We don’t have to settle for gasoline at four bucks. We don’t have to settle for unemployment at a chronically high level. We don’t have to settle for 47 million people on food stamps. We don’t have to settle for 50 percent of kids coming out of college not able to get work. We don’t have to settle for 23 million people struggling to find a good job. If I become president, I’ll get America working again.”
Obama sought to demonstrate that Romney’s bold words are backed up by nonsensical policies. He wanted to make Romney sound more like a salesman than a statesman. We won’t know until new polls come in whether he succeeded.
But all in all, not Romney’s best outing. Responding to the final question, he said he cared for “100 percent of the American people.” He never should have opened that door, because it invited Obama to give his best speech of the evening:
“I believe Governor Romney is a good man. Loves his family, cares about his faith. But I also believe that when he said behind closed doors that 47 percent of the country considered themselves victims who refuse personal responsibility, think about who he was talking about.
“Folks on Social Security who’ve worked all their lives. Veterans who’ve sacrificed for this country. Students who are out there trying to hopefully advance their own dreams, but also this country’s dreams. Soldiers who are overseas fighting for us right now. People who are working hard every day, paying payroll tax, gas taxes, but don’t make enough income. And I want to fight for them.”
Romney won’t get to respond until the final debate on Monday. The tiebreaker.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 17, 2012
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