“Compassionless Conservatism”: A Gaffe Is When A Republican Tells The Truth
This Sunday, I attended a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival in which moderator Ta-Nehisi Coates started out with a question for the panelists: Does this campaign season matter? Are we learning anything about the candidates? I was in the audience, but my response would be: Yes, it matters, and we’re learning a great deal. But it’s mostly about what the Republican Party really thinks.
While this election season may appear gaffe-tastic, the most viral moments weren’t misspoken words. Rather, they reveal what’s deep in the conservative heart—opinions that many had warned existed for a long time (and had even appeared in real-life legislation) but have now been put into stark relief for the general public. This election season has been highly instructional about deep-seated beliefs on the right.
The latest and perhaps most viral—nabbing Mother Jones, which broke the story, over 8 million visitors—was Romney’s now-infamous hidden camera 47 percent comment. Here’s what he said:
There are 47 percent of the people…. who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what… These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax…. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
Romney has stood by his comments, with his economic adviser swearing to “triple down” on them. And in fact the ideas he expresses are nothing new to the party. Worse, given the candidness of the moment, Romney expressed what can only be characterized as unabashed disdain for half of the country. It’s not just that he’s worried, as the conservatives who cling to the 47 percent figure explain, that this constituency won’t vote for tax cuts and instead will vote for higher social safety net payouts. He dismisses them entirely because he can “never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
What that sentiment leaves out, of course, is that while these Americans didn’t pay income taxes (thanks to many policies pushed into law by Republicans themselves), it doesn’t mean they don’t pay any taxes. Over 60 percent of them paid payroll taxes, which means that they also held jobs. Nearly everyone pays sales tax. Another 22 percent of this group was elderly. Add that up, and what he’s mostly talking about are the working poor and low-income older Americans. These are the people that Romney dismisses as taking no responsibility for their lives.
Far from an outlier, Romney’s statement has a long, long history. As my colleague at the Roosevelt Institute Mark Schmitt pointed out last week, this narrative around the 47 percent was hatched in the lab of the American Enterprise Institute. It’s been spouted by the likes of Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Republican VP pick Paul Ryan himself. But Romney’s remarks revealed an even more deep-seated disdain for the working poor than is normally expressed. It’s not just about taxes; it’s a belief that those at the bottom are worth less of his attention and care than the rest of the country. So much for compassionate conservatism. Romney’s remarks revealed once and for all that there is a deep disrespect for working-class and low-income people struggling to get by thriving at the heart of the Republican Party.
And it sheds light on another comment of his that blew up not so long ago: “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” At the time, the quote seemed a bit out of context, because Romney continued, “We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” Yet in his hidden-camera moment, he makes it clear just how much he despises the safety net he says should catch the poor. He scoffs at those who require assistance for healthcare, food and housing, some of the most basic provisions that this country is supposed to ensure those who are at the bottom of the income scale. Yet another moment of clarity, made even clearer by his recent comments.
We’ve seen some other very telling moments from the Republican nominee this cycle. There was “Corporations are people, my friend,” an unabashed and straightforward articulation of the conservative ethos that fueled the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. Then there was the telling, fully five-second silence from Romney aides when asked whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Act, exposing discomfort with equal pay legislation.
But it’s not just the presidential candidate who has haphazardly revealed truths. Just last month, before we were talking about the 47 percent, we were talking about “legitimate” rape. Remember Todd Akin? Who could forget? On a random Sunday in the middle of August, Akin told a TV interviewer, “[F]rom what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Just like Romney, Akin refused to apologize for the meaning behind his words, explaining he merely meant to say “forcible rape,” not “legitimate rape.”
But this wasn’t the first time he—or the Republican Party—used the word “forcible” to categorize rapes that count and those that don’t. Akin co-sponsored the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act in early 2011, which would have tightened the definition of rape for abortions that are covered by the federal exception to only “forcible” ones. While some noticed this at the time, Akin’s remarks made it crystal clear to anyone half tuned in that the Republican Party thinks some rapes count and others don’t. In particular, if you weren’t roughed up when you were raped—if you were drugged, or date raped, or the victim of incest—you weren’t “really” raped.
There are other truths that surfaced about the conservative view of reproductive health. Primaries are often a process of learning, as more marginal candidates push the mainstream ones to address issues they normally wouldn’t. And right on cue, Rick Santorum made birth control, an issue many thought was settled, a debate point. Perhaps his views were made clearest by an interview with the Christian site Caffeinated Thoughts, in which he warned of “the dangers of contraception,” calling it “not okay.”
Shortly after, Irin Carmon summed up his position thus: “Rick Santorum is coming for your birth control.” In fact, conservative opposition to not just abortion, which continues to be a polarizing topic, but birth control, which does not, has been building for quite some time. But many have been in denial—Carmon herself got a wave of pushback for the title of her piece. And yet months later, contraception was once again in the news as the Catholic bishops came out swinging against the Obama administration’s decision to mandate co-pay-free coverage of contraception as part of the ACA. And we all remember what happened next—the fight devolved into Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut for talking about (her friend’s) contraception needs. The cat is out of the bag: the GOP thinks using contraception, which virtually every woman will do in her lifetime, makes you a dirty whore and doesn’t support increased access.
These awkwardly worded statements and admissions of belief in what candidates assumed were safe spaces are hugely important. It may seem ridiculous that a hidden camera video can fuel three weeks of the news cycle. But what Romney revealed was more than an ability to keep putting his foot in his mouth. Republicans, perhaps more than ever, have exposed long-held beliefs this campaign season. They’re just finally going viral.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, September 25, 2012
“We Never Liked You Anyway”: The Knives Are Out As Conservatives Turn On Romney
As often as not, parties nominate candidates for president that pretty much all their own partisans acknowledge are less than inspiring. Democrats were so excited about Barack Obama in 2008 partly because their previous two nominees, John Kerry and Al Gore, rode to the nomination on a stirring sentiment of “Well, OK, I guess.” The same happened to Republicans, who adored the easygoing George W. Bush after the grim candidacies of Bob Dole and Bush’s father. And now that Mitt Romney has suffered through an awful few weeks—a mediocre convention, an embarrassing response to the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi, then the release of the “47 percent” video in which Romney accused almost half of America of refusing to “take responsibility for their own lives”—the knives have come out.
First it was a widely shared Politico story full of intramural Romney campaign sniping, most directed at chief strategist Stuart Stevens (the article full of anonymous backstabbing is the hallmark of a struggling campaign, as midlevel staffers explain to reporters how everything would be going better if they were in charge). Then came a parade of criticism from prominent conservative commentators. Peggy Noonan called the Romney campaign a “rolling calamity.” David Brooks responded to the 47 percent comment by sounding like Romney talking about Obama: “It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America.” Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said Romney and others in his party “mouth libertarian nonsense, unable to even describe some of the largest challenges of our time.”
William Kristol called Romney’s remarks “arrogant and stupid” and asked, “Has there been a presidential race in modern times featuring two candidates who have done so little over their lifetimes for our country, and who have so little substance to say about the future of our country?” Sarah Palin even got into the act, encouraging Romney and Paul Ryan to “go rogue” to revive their campaign, though whom she thought they should rebel against (themselves?) was unclear. Romney’s problems even trickled down to other races, as one Republican Senate candidate after another rushed to distance themselves from Romney’s dismissal of the 47 percent. No wonder the strain of removing sharp implements from her husband’s back led Ann Romney to tell conservatives, “Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring.” It’s a little late for that though; Republicans are stuck with Romney whether they like it or not. And they’re making sure everyone knows they don’t.
Romney is not yet doomed, of course. Something might happen to upend the campaign and convince large numbers of people to change their votes. But an Obama victory remains more likely than not, which means that a few months from now Republicans will be telling each other that they saw it coming all along.
It isn’t hard to figure out what they’ll be saying. The first explanation for their loss will be a strategic one. “I worked for the Romney campaign,” Republicans will say, “but they never took my advice.” He should have spent more time talking about the economy, or more time talking about social issues. He should have worked harder to win Hispanic votes, or spent more resources on the ground game and less on television ads. He was too vague in his policy prescriptions, not giving America enough of a sense of what he wanted to do.
Of course, they’ll say the news media were hopelessly biased against Romney, elevating every one of his mistakes and ignoring the self-evidently horrifying things Obama said. (Did you know that once, 14 years ago, Obama used the word “redistribution” favorably? I mean, come on!) Forever seeing ideological bias when the truth is that those trailing in the polls get negative coverage and those leading get positive coverage (a kind of bias in itself, but not the kind conservatives mean), they are practiced at blaming their own failures on the media.
On the fringes, they’ll say Democrats cheated, something they’ve believed in the past and will no doubt believe in the future (in late 2009, one poll found that a majority of Republicans believed ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama). The idea that a majority of voters willingly chose this president conservatives despise so fervently strikes them as simply impossible, so there must have been a secret conspiracy assuring his election. This year the only voting conspiracy is no secret; it’s the coordinated Republican effort to put as many roadblocks as possible between Democratic voters and the polls, from photo-ID requirements to purging rolls of voters whose names suggest they might just be noncitizens. Yet should Obama win, conservative websites will trumpet every available story of someone suspicious who cast a ballot, as though it were possible to mobilize millions of voter impersonators to flood the booths.
Then there will be the explanations about Mitt Romney himself, and this is where conservatives will begin to move toward agreement. Some may gently suggest that perhaps a party dogged by a reputation for caring only about the rich could have done better than to nominate a guy with a quarter of a billion dollars whose 2011 tax return was so complex it ran to 379 pages, and who exudes a strange combination of overeagerness and sheer terror whenever he comes in contact with people whose incomes fall below six figures. But in the end, Republicans will agree that for all Mitt Romney’s weaknesses as a candidate, his real problem was that he just wasn’t conservative enough.
As Digby has observed many times, as far as Republicans are concerned, conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. If Republicans lose at the polls or preside over disastrous policies, the only possible explanation is that they weren’t true enough to their ideology. It may be true that Romney became, in his own words, “severely conservative.” He gave the party’s base everything they wanted (and kept giving it to them long after it became a liability). He adopted their agenda, aligned his policy positions with theirs, and told them whatever he thought they wanted to hear, with sometimes disastrous results (see “47 percent”). But they’ll say the problem was that he didn’t really believe it deep down in his heart, and the voters could tell. If only they had nominated a true conservative, everything would have been different.
There may be a Republican here or there telling the party that they’ve gone astray. Perhaps Christie Whitman will write an op-ed lamenting her party’s turn to the right. But as they have in the past, these voices will be ignored. Republicans will promise never to make the same mistake again. Next time, they’ll pledge, we’ll nominate a real conservative, and our ideological purity will be rewarded at the polls.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 25, 2012
“Days Late, Dollars Short”: Mitt Romney’s Tax Returns Still Incomplete
After months of withering attacks, Mitt Romney has finally (sort of) lifted the veil of secrecy around his personal finances. At 3 pm, his campaign released his full 2011 tax return and a summary from PriceWaterhouseCooper of his tax filings over twenty years, from 1990–2009.
The bottom line: as everyone suspected, Romney pays a lower tax rate than the typical middle-class family—and he seems to have purposely engineered a higher rate for himself for optical reasons. Moreover, by only summarizing the past twenty years of returns, there’s a lot we don’t know.
Here’s a look at what we learned so far—check back for updates.
2011 returns
The top-line takeaway from the returns isn’t particularly good—his 2011 tax rate was 14.1 percent, below the effective tax rate for most Americans despite Romney’s vast wealth. (The middle 20 percent of households paid a 16 percent federal income tax rate in 2010). Most of Romney’s income is from capital gains, which is taxed at a lower rate than income—and Obama wants to change that and raise the rate, while Romney does not.
The returns are sure to underscore the absurdity of someone who made $13,696,951 last year, as Romney did, paying a lower tax rate than, say, a plumber in Memphis.
Additionally, by the campaign’s own admission, Romney purposely did not deduct all of his charitable giving—claiming only $2.25 million out of about $4 million—to make his rate “conform to the Governor’s statement in August…that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years.” If he did the deductions in full, he would have paid around 9 percent. (By Romney’s own standard, this disqualifies him: he said on the trail that “frankly if I had paid more than are legally due I don’t think I’d be qualified to become president. I’d think people would want me to follow the law and pay only what the tax code requires).
So here’s a guy who made over $13 million last year, paying a lower tax rate than most Americans, and purposely paying more to the IRS so as not to seem too rich. If this is what Romney’s campaign wanted to change the conversation to, they must have been really unhappy with what it was.
The 1990–2009 Summary
Romney’s trustee, Brad Malt, has a summary of the summary on the campaign website. (Note that Malt oversees Romney’s supposedly blind trust, which makes it interesting he’s also serving a campaign function here). It says:
- In each year during the entire 20-year period period, the Romneys owed both state and federal income taxes.
- Over the entire 20-year period period, the average annual effective federal tax rate was 20.20%.
- Over the entire 20-year period period, the lowest annual effective federal personal tax rate was 13.66%.
- Over the entire 20-year period period, the Romneys gave to charity an average of 13.45% of their adjusted gross income.
This is a really sneaky maneuver. The tax rate averages out to a semi-respectable 20.20 percent, but what does that really tell us? It’s still possible that in really high-earning years, Romney paid an absurdly low tax rate. If he paid a normal rate in lower-earning years, it could still produce that average.
And if Romney did pay really low rates during high-income years, what mechanisms did he use? What sort of tax shelters might he have employed? We don’t know that either, and aren’t likely to find out unless Romney releases the actual returns—something he required of all his potential vice-presidental nominees.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, September 21, 2012
“Disdain For Workers”: Of The Wealthy, By The Wealthy, And For The Wealthy
By now everyone knows how Mitt Romney, speaking to donors in Boca Raton, washed his hands of almost half the country — the 47 percent who don’t pay income taxes — declaring, “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” By now, also, many people are aware that the great bulk of the 47 percent are hardly moochers; most are working families who pay payroll taxes, and elderly or disabled Americans make up a majority of the rest.
But here’s the question: Should we imagine that Mr. Romney and his party would think better of the 47 percent on learning that the great majority of them actually are or were hard workers, who very much have taken personal responsibility for their lives? And the answer is no.
For the fact is that the modern Republican Party just doesn’t have much respect for people who work for other people, no matter how faithfully and well they do their jobs. All the party’s affection is reserved for “job creators,” a k a employers and investors. Leading figures in the party find it hard even to pretend to have any regard for ordinary working families — who, it goes without saying, make up the vast majority of Americans.
Am I exaggerating? Consider the Twitter message sent out by Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader, on Labor Day — a holiday that specifically celebrates America’s workers. Here’s what it said, in its entirety: “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yes, on a day set aside to honor workers, all Mr. Cantor could bring himself to do was praise their bosses.
Lest you think that this was just a personal slip, consider Mr. Romney’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. What did he have to say about American workers? Actually, nothing: the words “worker” or “workers” never passed his lips. This was in strong contrast to President Obama’s convention speech a week later, which put a lot of emphasis on workers — especially, of course, but not only, workers who benefited from the auto bailout.
And when Mr. Romney waxed rhapsodic about the opportunities America offered to immigrants, he declared that they came in pursuit of “freedom to build a business.” What about those who came here not to found businesses, but simply to make an honest living? Not worth mentioning.
Needless to say, the G.O.P.’s disdain for workers goes deeper than rhetoric. It’s deeply embedded in the party’s policy priorities. Mr. Romney’s remarks spoke to a widespread belief on the right that taxes on working Americans are, if anything, too low. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal famously described low-income workers whose wages fall below the income-tax threshold as “lucky duckies.”
What really needs cutting, the right believes, are taxes on corporate profits, capital gains, dividends, and very high salaries — that is, taxes that fall on investors and executives, not ordinary workers. This despite the fact that people who derive their income from investments, not wages — people like, say, Willard Mitt Romney — already pay remarkably little in taxes.
Where does this disdain for workers come from? Some of it, obviously, reflects the influence of money in politics: big-money donors, like the ones Mr. Romney was speaking to when he went off on half the nation, don’t live paycheck to paycheck. But it also reflects the extent to which the G.O.P. has been taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, in which a handful of heroic businessmen are responsible for all economic good, while the rest of us are just along for the ride.
In the eyes of those who share this vision, the wealthy deserve special treatment, and not just in the form of low taxes. They must also receive respect, indeed deference, at all times. That’s why even the slightest hint from the president that the rich might not be all that — that, say, some bankers may have behaved badly, or that even “job creators” depend on government-built infrastructure — elicits frantic cries that Mr. Obama is a socialist.
Now, such sentiments aren’t new; “Atlas Shrugged” was, after all, published in 1957. In the past, however, even Republican politicians who privately shared the elite’s contempt for the masses knew enough to keep it to themselves and managed to fake some appreciation for ordinary workers. At this point, however, the party’s contempt for the working class is apparently too complete, too pervasive to hide.
The point is that what people are now calling the Boca Moment wasn’t some trivial gaffe. It was a window into the true attitudes of what has become a party of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy, a party that considers the rest of us unworthy of even a pretense of respect.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 20, 2012
“A One-Man Blooper Reel”: The Media Should Go Easy On Mitt Romney For Their Own Sake
“The media wants to beat up Mitt Romney,” Sean Hannity told his Fox News viewers this week, “which is driving me nuts.”
Me too, Sean. Much as I’d like to see Hannity driven nuts, I agree that we in the media have been far too rough on the Republican presidential nominee. In fact, I send this urgent appeal to my fellow members of the lamestream media: Please go easy on the guy — for our own sake.
First, Romney was pounded for his false and tone-deaf statements about the attacks on U.S. embassies in Libya and Egypt; in a weak moment, I joined in the criticism.
Then Politico came out Sunday night with an article titled “Inside the campaign: How Mitt Romney stumbled,” discourteously detailing all sorts of infighting and missteps.
Worst of all was Monday, when my friend David Corn had the temerity to post on Mother Jones a surreptitiously recorded video of Romney dismissing nearly half the country as moochers.
At this rate, Romney will surely lose the election — and for journalism, this would be a tragedy.
At these times of declining revenue, we in the media need to stay true to our core interests. As the old saying goes, we should “vote the story.” And the better story in this election is clearly President Romney.
Romney’s hit parade — insulting the British, inviting Clint Eastwood to the Republican convention, flubbing Libya and now dismissing half the nation as parasites — may make good copy for the next seven weeks. But if we go easy on the man, we could have four years of gaffes instead of just seven more weeks. Admittedly, this may not be the best outcome for the country, or for the world. But in this race, there is no denying that one man will give us much better material.
President Obama has many talents, but he is not good copy. He speaks grammatically, in fully formed paragraphs. He has yet to produce a scandal of any magnitude. He is maddeningly on message, and his few gaffes — “you didn’t build that,” “the private sector is doing fine” — are inflammatory only out of context. If it weren’t for the occasional relief offered by Joe Biden, the Samaritans would have installed a suicide-prevention hotline in the White House press room by now.
Romney, by contrast, showed his potential for miscues in his first presidential run (see: varmints, hunting of), but he truly blossomed in the gaffe department this cycle, when he became a one-man blooper reel:
“Corporations are people, my friend.”
“I like being able to fire people.”
“I’m not concerned about the very poor.”
“Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs.”
“Ten thousand bucks? $10,000 bet?”
“I have some great friends that are NASCAR team owners.”
“There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.”
“I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake; we can’t have illegals.”
In addition, Romney frequently gives the media fresh opportunities to rerun the blooper reel with his attempts to explain the original mistakes. This goes back to his explanation for why he strapped his dog Seamus to the top of the family car: The dog “enjoyed himself” up there.
More recently, Romney offered this explanation for his claim that Obama was making America a less Christian nation. “I’m not familiar precisely with what I said, but I’ll stand by what I said, whatever it was,” he said.
Saying zany things and then standing by them: From a presidential nominee, this is newsworthy. From a president, it could be sensational.
Romney caused an international incident when he went to London and spoke of “disconcerting” signs that the Brits weren’t prepared to host the Olympics. Were he to do that as president, he could bring transatlantic relations back to War of 1812 levels — and that would be a big story.
At home, likewise, he has caused consternation with his remark that 47 percent of Americans “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name it” and won’t “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” If he governed that way as president, he could stir up social unrest not seen in half a century — and that, too, would be quite a story.
Usually, reporters have little trouble recognizing our self-interest. For all of Newt Gingrich’s complaints about media bias during his primary candidacy, reporters fantasized about a Gingrich presidency.
We should do the same now as we consider prospects for a Romney presidency: gaffes in news conferences, diplomatic slights at state dinners or ham-handed attempts to placate conservatives in Congress. This is exactly the man our industry needs. Be gentle.
I’m from the mainstream media, and I approve this message.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 18, 2012
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