“Son Of Detroit”: Mitt Romney Overplayed His Hand In Michigan
In the campaign world, it’s almost a cardinal rule: Undersell your chances, then overdeliver at the ballot box. Former Gov. Mitt Romney never got the memo on this, and he might well pay a severe price for this misstep in next week’s Michigan primary.
After squeaking by in the disputed Maine nominating contest and getting clocked by Santorum in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado before that, Romney’s veneer of invincibility was gone and his campaign was left to deal with a harder question: Could he lose his home state of Michigan?
True, Romney was born in Michigan, where his father was a prominent auto executive and later governor. But Mitt Romney is more identified with Massachusetts, where he served as governor, or even with Mormon (like him) Utah, where he rescued the 2002 Winter Olympics.
He could’ve had it both ways. He could’ve acknowledged his family’s deep connection to Michigan without declaring himself “a son of Detroit.” Expectations would’ve been lower, and the connection—for any benefit it may hold next Tuesday—would’ve been solidified.
But he used those exact words—son of Detroit—to describe himself in a widely circulated op-ed in The Detroit News.
This went over about as well as could be expected for the campaign that can’t seem to shoot straight in recent weeks. Poll numbers barely budged. Talk of losing the home state intensified—one Republican U.S. senator said, “If Romney cannot win Michigan, we need a new candidate.” And the campaign had to pull out the checkbook and again try to buy a primary by carpet-bombing the opponents with negative ads.
Then, in hardscrabble Michigan—home to shuttered factories, high unemployment, and one of the weakest state economies in the nation—Romney decided to unleash his secret weapon—Donald Trump. The Donald, who endorsed Romney after his own campaign flamed out, toured the state stumping for Romney and, no doubt, making deep connections with working-class or wish-they-were-working-class voters in the Wolverine State.
At that point, the Obama campaign no longer could resist joining in the fun. A super PAC associated with the president made its own huge ad buy to thwart Romney’s plan for a happy homecoming. It’s like the Fourth of July in Michigan right now—negative ad bombs going off in every direction.
And because Romney could not leave well enough alone, could not underpromise and overdeliver, and could not resist calling himself “a son of Detroit,” his campaign has spent the last two weeks trying to douse the political equivalent of a five-alarm fire.
Romney should’ve focused on Arizona all along. Its primary—the same day as Michigan’s—yields 29 delegates in a winner-take-all format. Michigan’s yields 30, awarded proportionally. If Romney hadn’t spent a dime on Michigan, he probably would’ve ended up with more delegates on the day than his current chief rival, former Sen. Rick Santorum. Santorum lags in the polls in Arizona and didn’t help himself with a poor debate performance in the state on Wednesday night.
Ironically, as we inch closer to the two primaries next Tuesday, Team Romney has begun to lower expectations in Michigan—to say the state is not, in fact, a must-win for his campaign. No kidding.
But the Romney camp could’ve saved itself a lot of money and a giant headache if it had started off trying to shape the narrative rather than becoming beholden to it.
By: Fred O’Connell, U. S. News and World report, February 24, 2012
Raising Arizona: Maybe The Wrong Arizonan Is Facing Impeachment
When Arizona’s Independent Redistricting Commission came up with a new map, Republicans were apoplectic. GOP officials wanted the post-Census congressional district lines to be drawn in Republicans’ favor, and when the tripartisan panel, created by voters, came up with more balanced lines, the party went into attack mode.
This week, that attack included impeachment proceedings against the commission’s independent chair, Colleen Coyle Mathis, ousted by Gov. Jan Brewer and state Senate Republicans. And on what grounds did GOP officials impeach this official? Republicans cited “gross misconduct” as a justification.
Alan Colmes talked to Brewer yesterday on his radio show, asking the far-right governor to explain the rationale for impeachment. The discussion didn’t go well.
COLMES: What did Colleen do that was inappropriate, Colleen Mathis?
BREWER: Well she acted, uh, inappropriately. Well it was very, pretty much obvious that she in communications, and doing things, uh, not in the public, and the people of Arizona deserve that —
COLMES: You mean she was doing things secretly? Like what?
BREWER: They just simply need to operate in a lawful and open fashion….
COLMES: I’m trying to understand what she did. What are you accusing her of having done?
BREWER: Well she wasn’t operating in the proper manner.
The audio of the exchange really needs to be heard to be fully appreciated; the partial transcript doesn’t capture just how incoherent the Republican governor really was.
And given the circumstances, this matters. Brewer, as part of an unprecedented power grab, just led an impeachment crusade against an independent government official who’s done nothing wrong. The governor agreed to do this interview to explain the rationale for her decision, and then couldn’t explain the rationale for her decision.
The problem, of course, is that Brewer couldn’t admit the truth out loud: the redistricting commission didn’t rig the game to favor Republicans, so Republicans are retaliating against the redistricting commission.
On a related note, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) argued yesterday, “I think Arizonans should consider impeaching Jan Brewer.”
He has a point. If anyone’s guilty of “gross misconduct” in the Grand Canyon State, it would appear to be its governor.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 5, 2011
Arizona Senate President Pearce Has Been Recalled
Mark down July 8th as a day history was made in Arizona.
In a swift affirmation of Arizona’s fast-growing and powerful new political movement, Secretary of State Ken Bennett notified Gov. Jan Brewer that the once seemingly invincible architect of the state’s controversial SB 1070 “papers please” immigration law has officially been recalled. Bennett confirmed that the recall petitions delivered by the Citizens for a Better Arizona “exceeds the minimum signatures required by the Arizona Constitution.”
“Let’s make no mistake about it,” said Randy Parraz, co-founder of the Citizens for a Better Arizona. “Russell Pearce has been recalled.”
According to Bennett’s statement, Pearce has two options: Resign from office within five business days, or become a candidate in the recall election. Either way, Pearce becomes the first state senate president in recent memory to be recalled in the nation.
“No one expected this or picked up on this political earthquake,” said Parraz, one of the main organizers behind the extraordinary grassroots campaign, which electrified a bipartisan effort in Pearce’s Mesa district. Parraz credited a “dramatic shift” over the past six months due to Pearce’s often extremist leadership in state senate.
“We had people pouring into the office,” Parraz said, citing the role of Republicans, Democrats and Independents in the door-to-door canvassing initiative, “and they told us: Russell Pearce is too extreme for our district and state.”
Beyond his self-proclaimed key role in the state’s notorious SB 1070 law, Pearce oversaw a near circus-level of extremist and reckless legislation in the Arizona senate this past spring, including draconian cuts in education and health care. Mired in various scandals, Pearce infamously accused President Obama of “waging jihad” on America. And last month Fox News Phoenix explored his widely denounced connections to neo-Nazi hate groups. In a recent interview with FOX News, Pearce dismissed the recall effort as the work of “far left anarchists.”
In truth, the Secretary of State’s office confirmed that an additional one third of the necessary signatures had been properly collected and verified.
Within 15 days, Gov. Brewer must set the date for the recall election, which presumably will take place in November.
And while no single candidate has emerged to claim the frontrunner’s position, one thing is clear: The Citizens for a Better Arizona has galvanized a new era in Arizona politics.
By: Jeff Biggers, CommonDreams.org, July 11, 2011
The Supreme Court’s Continuing Defense Of The Powerful
The United States Supreme Court now sees its central task as comforting the already comfortable and afflicting those already afflicted.
If you are a large corporation or a political candidate backed by lots of private money, be assured that the court’s conservative majority will be there for you, solicitous of your needs and ready to swat away those pesky little people who dare to contest your power.
This court has created rules that will have the effect of declaring some corporations too big to be challenged through class actions, as
AT&T customers and female employees at Wal-Mart discovered.
And remember how sympathetic conservatives are supposed to be to the states as “laboratories of democracy,” pioneering solutions to hard problems?
Tell that to the people of Arizona.
They used a referendum to establish a highly practical system of financing political campaigns that the court, in a 5-4 decision Monday, eviscerated. It was designed to reduce corruption and give a fighting chance to candidates who decide to forgo contributions from special interests.
The people acted, noted Justice Elena Kagan in a brilliantly scalding dissent, after a scandal in which “nearly 10 percent of the state’s legislators were caught accepting campaign contributions or bribes in exchange for supporting a piece of legislation.”
Under Arizona’s “clean elections” initiative, candidates who raised a modest amount in very small contributions could receive a lump sum of public money. They could raise no further private funds.
No candidate had to join the public system. But if a privately financed candidate or the interest groups supporting his or her campaign started outspending one who was publicly financed, the public system came to the rescue with additional cash so the “clean money” candidate wouldn’t be blown out of the race by lethal dollar bills.
Why was this important? Kagan was spot on: “Candidates will choose to sign up” for public funding “only if the subsidy provided enables them to run competitive races.” Such breathtaking common sense has been missing from the majority’s recent campaign finance decisions — notably its Citizens United ruling, also a 5-4 conservative ukase, allowing our poor, beleaguered corporations to expand their power in American politics.
Here’s the stunning part: For years, opponents of campaign finance reform have accused those who want to repair the system of trying to reduce the amount of political speech. But Arizona’s law, as Kagan pointed out, “subsidizes and so produces more political speech.” And then there was this shot at Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion: “Except in a world gone topsy-turvy, additional campaign speech and electoral competition is not a First Amendment injury.”
Indeed, Roberts had to argue that those terribly downtrodden candidates financed with private money had their speech “burdened,” simply because their publicly financed opponents had the means to respond.
Kagan and the dissenters stood up for free speech. Roberts’ majority defended paid speech. The dissenters want to allow candidates to talk; the majority wants to enhance money’s ability to talk.
Roberts was especially exercised over any notion of “leveling the playing field” between private-money candidates and their challengers. He even included a footnote calling attention to the Citizens Clean Elections Commission’s Web site, which once said the law was passed “to level the playing field when it comes to running for office.” Horrors!
Kagan archly noted the “majority’s distaste for ‘leveling’ ” and then dismissed its obsession, observing that Roberts failed to take seriously the Arizona law’s central purpose of containing corruption. Leveling was the means, not the end.
Nonetheless, pay heed to how this conservative court majority bristles at nearly every effort to give the less wealthy and less powerful an opportunity to prevail, whether at the ballot box or in the courtroom. Not since the Gilded Age has a Supreme Court been so determined to strengthen the hand of corporations and the wealthy. Thus the importance of the Wal-Mart and AT&T cases, the latter described by the New York Times as “a devastating blow to consumer rights.” Will the court now feel so full of its power that it takes on the executive and legislative branches over the health-care law?
In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt warned that the courts had “grown to occupy a position unknown in any other country, a position of superiority over both the legislature and the executive.” Worse, “privilege has entrenched itself in many courts just as it formerly entrenched itself in many legislative bodies and in many executive offices.”
What happens to a democracy when its highest court dedicates itself to defending privilege? That’s the unfortunate experiment on which we are now embarked.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, Published June 29, 2011
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