“What Do They Have To Hide?”: Romney, The Senate GOP And the Right-Wing Secrecy Machine
Yesterday, Senate Republicans voted, for a second time in two days, to continue their filibuster of the DISCLOSE Act, a bill that would simply require outside groups spending money on elections to tell the public where their money comes from. At the same time, not surprisingly, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is in hot water for failing to disclose more than the minimum of personal tax returns and lying about his history at the company that made his fortune — all while we know that a portion of his wealth was hidden in infamously secretive Swiss bank accounts.
Senate Republicans and Romney are spending a lot of time and energy this week to keep their financial histories secret. It’s only natural to ask: What do they have to hide?
You would think the DISCLOSE Act would be an easy bill to pass. In fact, many Republican Senators were “for it before they were against it“. What it does is simple: it requires any organization — corporation, union, super PAC or non-profit — that spends money influencing elections to report within a day any election-related expenditure of $10,000 or more. It also requires that these organizations make public the names of the individuals and corporations contributing $10,000 or more to fund this election spending. In short, all those front groups that have been pouring money into elections since Citizens United will have to disclose who their major donors are. Voters would know who was trying to tell them what.
This is not a partisan issue. Disclosure requirements, like those in the DISCLOSE Act, were endorsed as constitutional by the Supreme Court majority that handed down Citizens United. Even the conservative justices who saw no problem with more money in politics assumed that disclosure would be a check on the integrity of the election process.
But Republicans in Congress have been fighting tooth and nail to keep DISCLOSE from the books. Why? The fact that they might not want to publicize the motives of some of these super donors, and the fact that the new flood of outside political spending overwhelmingly favors conservatives, might have something to do with it.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is having disclosure problems of his own. It’s standard practice for presidential candidates to release their past tax returns — President Obama has made public his returns from the past dozen years. Even Romney called on his gubernatorial opponents in Massachusetts to release their returns. (In a classic Romney flip-flop, when he was later asked to hold himself to the same standard, he said his original demands had been wrong).
The only conclusion to draw from Romney’s tax-return reticence is that there’s something he doesn’t want us to see. The recent revelations that Romney has told conflicting stories about when he left his job at Bain Capital might give us a taste of what he’s kept hidden. And hiding part of his fortune in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and in Swiss bank accounts that have for centuries epitomized financial secrecy doesn’t help.
The issue of financial disclosure isn’t a sideshow to this election — it’s a big part of what this election is about. How can we trust senators who spend more time covering up the sources of election spending on their behalf than they do legislating? How can we trust a candidate who won’t be open and honest with voters about the source of his personal fortune and the taxes he has paid?
Full disclosure should be a no-brainer in honest politics. The public knows that. Even the Supreme Court knows that. The only people who seem to be missing the message are the politicians who are desperately trying to win elections without telling voters who might be buying them.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Blog, The Huffington Post, July 18, 2012
“The Inheritance”: George W. Bush, The Last Guy Mitt Romney Wants In The News
Maybe there’ll come a time somewhere in the future when a Republican presidential candidate jumps at the chance to associate himself with George W. Bush, but we’re not anywhere near that point yet.
In 2008, John McCain kept as much distance from the then-president as possible, appearing with him for a brief, perfunctory endorsement announcement at the White House and relegating him to a pre-taped video appearance at the GOP convention in St. Paul. This time around, Bush was absent when his parents offered a high-profile show of support to Mitt Romney in March, confirming his backing of the presumptive GOP nominee weeks later in a quick, off-camera comment to a reporter while boarding an elevator.
But by the minimal standards of his post-presidency, Bush is really stepping out this week. First, he unveiled a new book that purports to offer a road map to sustained 4 percent economic growth. Then he agreed to an on-camera interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson, who wrote speeches for George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The presidential race came up only once during their hour-long chat, with Bush explaining that he doesn’t want to be in the political game anymore, but that “I’m interested in politics. I’m a supporter of Mitt Romney. But, you know, he can do well without me.” Still, that’s more than Bush has previously had to say on the subject, guaranteeing that it will make news.
In fairness, Bush’s low profile since 2009 isn’t entirely attributable to his pariah status. His father made a point of stepping back from politics after leaving the White House in 1993 and not publicly weighing in on his successor’s administration. In part, W is simply affirming this tradition. But in the 1996 presidential election, the elder Bush was granted a prominent prime time role at the GOP’s national convention, and Bob Dole made a point of conferring with him at the height of the general election campaign.
By contrast, Romney and his fellow Republicans have spent the last three years doing their best to pretend W’s presidency never happened, acknowledging him only when they’re forced to and changing the subject as quickly as possible. The politics are understandable: The GOP’s strategy since 2009 has been to channel the public’s intense economic anxiety into a backlash against Obama that will restore control of the legislative and executive branches to the GOP. That much of the country’s suffering can be linked to the epic economic meltdown that came on W’s watch in 2008 is not something they’d prefer anyone to dwell on.
But, polls show, most voters do remember what happened in 2008 and who was president at the time. This offers President Obama a potential opening to win reelection under economic conditions that you might think would doom an incumbent president. As I’ve noted before, there is research that suggests Obama’s approval rating and standing in head-to-head match-ups with Romney is significantly better than it should be based on the state of the economy – evidence, it would seem, that the uniquely catastrophic circumstances under which he came to power are affording him the benefit of the doubt from some voters.
In that sense, Bush’s reemergence this week is only bad news for Romney, and only good news for Obama. So it’s not surprising that the president scheduled a campaign swing through Texas this week, playing the Bush card without actually mentioning his predecessor’s name:
“We spent almost a decade doing what they prescribed,” Mr. Obama said. “And how did it turn out? We didn’t see greater job growth. We didn’t see middle-class security. We saw the opposite. And it all culminated in the worst financial crisis in our lifetimes, precisely because there were no regulations that were adequate to the kinds of recklessness that was being carried out.” He added, “I don’t know how you guys operate in your life. But my general rule is, if I do something and it doesn’t work, I don’t go back to doing it.”
It’s possible the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney’s Bain background or his own tax return stonewalling will end up costing Romney a critical point or two (and thus the election) in November. But if Obama survives this campaign, it seems far more likely it will be because voters remembered exactly what he inherited in 2009 and exactly whom he inherited it from.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, July 18, 2012
“An Exercise In False Equivalency”: It’s Not “Swift Boating” If It’s True
Outlining the growing controversy about the timeline of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital career, CNN’s Jim Acosta recently asked the candidate if he believed he was “being swift-boated in this campaign.” Later that same evening, reporting on Anderson Cooper 360, CNN’s Tom Forman forged a tighter connection, suggesting “Republican analysts fear Mitt Romney could become the second politician from Massachusetts swift boated out of the presidency.”
Here’s how Forman described the Swift Boat affair [emphasis added]:
FORMAN: He’s talking about the Swift Boat campaign, in which President Bush’s challenger John Kerry was demonized over what his campaign considered an attribute. His decorated service as a soldier in Vietnam. The Swift Boat ads, backed by a group of pro-Bush veterans, questioned the Democratic challenger’s conduct in the war, his anti-war activities later and his patriotism.
Kerry was slow to respond and never very effective in refuting their claims even though his critics offered little in the way of proof. He lost the election of course. And for many Democrats, swift-boating became a catch-all term for any unfair, untrue, personal assault on a candidate.
Trying to tie contemporary questions about Romney’s Bain past with an infamous GOP smear campaign is an exercise in false equivalency. “The Swift Boat campaign was completely a lie,” Esquires’ Charles Pierce recently reminded readers. “Nothing the Swifties said about John Kerry was true.” And yet, despite the cavernous gap between the Swift Boat affair and the ongoing Bain story, the comparison continues to gain currency.
The conservative Washington Examiner editorial page on Monday lamented the “Swift-Baining of Mitt Romney.” What had the Obama campaign done that was so unfair to the Republican candidate? It had “seized on reports by liberal websites Mother Jones and Talking Points Memo — and later by the Boston Globe — citing Securities and Exchange Commission filings that listed Romney as the CEO of Bain after he was said to have left for the Olympics.”
Quoting news outlets that cite government documents regarding Romney’s employment record now constitutes a smear campaign?
Let’s stipulate this fact going forward: A candidate having his résumé or biography examined during the course of a presidential campaign does not constitute being “swift boated.” Enthusiastic “vetting” of candidates’ backgrounds is a routine aspect of general elections.
The distinguishing feature of a Swift Boat smear campaign, of course, was that virtually every single war-era allegation made against Kerry’s military service proved to be false, leaving the assumption that the entire point of the coordinated, deep-pocketed attack was to purposefully spread as manly lies as possible. And not just small fibs, but truly unconscionable lies about a serviceman’s record during the unpopular Vietnam War.
That’s what being Swift Boated is about. Prior to 2004, modern campaigns had never seen anything like it. And in the two White House campaigns that have unfolded since, nothing has approached the radical brand of prevarication that epitomized the lowly Republican attacks on Kerry.
By contrast, there’s no dispute regarding the fact that 2002 SEC documents indicate that Romney was listed as Bain’s chairman, managing director and CEO years after he claimed to have left the company. The only debate is regarding what that means. Romney suggests the titles were symbolic and that he had no influence over the management of the company during those three years. Skeptics suggest it’s not likely that a company’s president, managing director and CEO would remain permanently out of the business’ loop for three years (while still drawing a salary).
Either way, the dispute hardly rises to the level of a smear campaign, let alone a Swift Boat-like assault on Romney’s honor. Note that government documents support the claims about Romney’s ongoing links to Bain until 2002, whereas government documents in 2004 routinely undercut right-wing fabrications about Romney’s war record.
Meanwhile, this clumsy Swirt Boat comparison remains in play. From the New York Times:
Conservatives have lit up talk radio programs across the country, worrying whether Mr. Romney’s business record has been ”Swift Boated,” referring to attacks waged against Senator John Kerry’s military record in 2004.
So conservatives fret Romney’s being “Swift Boated,” yet conservatives insist to this day there was nothing unethical about what Swift Boat veterans did to Kerry.
Previously, from Michelle Malkin:
A reminder to conservatives: “Swift-Boating” does not equal smearing. Swift-Boating means exposing hard truths about corrupt Democrats.
From Rush Limbaugh:
[Swift Boat Veterans] were right on the money, and nobody has disproven anything they claimed in any of their ads, statements, written commentaries, or anything of the sort.
In truth, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign represented a singularly awful chapter in American politics. Let’s not pretend every time a candidate has to answer uncomfortable questions about his past that the Swift Boat Vets are riding again.
By: Eric Boehlert, Sr. Fellow, Media Matters, July 17, 2012
“Saint Joan Of The Tundra”: Mitt’s Troubles Never End
It’s looking like Mitt Romney might name his VP pick pretty soon, which is probably a good idea given that the release of the pick will result in a few days of positive coverage when the news media is consumed with something other than what Bain Capital did when, or what juicy nuggets might be contained within Romney’s hidden tax returns. But there’s a downside: once we do get to the Republican convention, the VP nominee will be old news, so the media can pay much more attention to intra-party squabbling. And nobody likes a good squabble more than Sarah Palin. Remember her?
The Romney camp will not comment on Palin, or on plans for the convention, but one adviser associated with the campaign suggested that Palin would be prohibited from speaking at the Republican convention by her contract with Fox News. “It’s true I’m prohibited from doing some things,” Palin says, “but this is the first I’ve heard anyone suggest that as an excuse, er, reason to stay away from engaging in the presidential race. I’m quite confident Fox’s top brass would never strip anyone of their First Amendment rights in this regard.” (Fox says her contract would not prohibit speaking at the convention if she sought permission.)
Palin is keeping the dates open in late August, just in case. In any event, she says, she plans to be politically active between now and November, starting with a Michigan Tea Party appearance, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity. “No matter the Romney campaign strategy,” she says, “I intend to do all I can to join others in motivating the grassroots made up of independents and constitutional conservatives who can replace Barack Obama at the ballot box.”
So here’s the dilemma. If Romney doesn’t let Palin speak at the convention, we get all kinds of stories about pissed off Tea Partiers denouncing Romney for forsaking their Saint Joan of the Tundra, Fox sends her there anyway so she’s just hanging around, and she steals a not insignificant portion of Romney’s thunder. But if he does let her speak, the American public gets reminded that the Republican party is dominated by a bunch of paranoid extremist know-nothings, and Romney looks weak for giving in to them.
Right now, Romney and his advisors are trying to figure out if they can send her on an urgent four-month diplomatic mission to the Arctic Circle. The trouble with Sarah Palin is that nobody tells her what to do. I can’t wait for her to run for president in four years.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 17, 2012
“No Discernable Vision”: Knowing How The Economy Works Is Not Enough
This week will see the release of The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs, a collection of essays from the George W. Bush Institute with a forward by the former president himself. It’s true that annual GDP growth never actually reached 4 percent during Bush’s two terms in office and averaged only 2.4 percent even if we generously exclude the disastrous year of 2008. But look at it this way: Who knows more about what the president ought to do about the economy than Dubya does? After all, there’s only one living American (Bill Clinton) with as much experience being president, so Bush must have the answers we need.
A ridiculous argument? Of course. That’s because experience only gets you so far. It’s obviously a good thing, all else being equal, for the president to know a lot about the economy, just as it’s a good thing for him to know a lot about foreign affairs or domestic policy. But the truth is that although the government has to solve many practical problems, and it’s important to have smart, knowledgeable people in government to work on them, the presidency is not a technocratic position.
For a long time, Republicans grasped this much better than their opponents. It was the Democrats who seemed to prize experience and knowledge, looking admiringly at candidates who understood how government works and could be counted on to manage the problem-solving efforts that would be required, while Republicans favored candidates like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who argued that vision was more important than skills. Yet this year, Republicans have nominated a candidate with no discernible vision whose candidacy is based almost entirely on the knowledge and management experience he supposedly gained in business.
It’s odd that for someone whose argument is so much about his preparation and experience, Mitt Romney barely ever mentions the one job he held that actually resembles being president—the governorship of Massachusetts. But we’ve had former governors who made excellent presidents and former governors who made terrible ones. And the brevity of Barack Obama’s tenure in the Senate didn’t stop him from amassing what was arguably the most impressive string of legislative victories in half a century during his first two years in office.
Mitt Romney barely bothers to persuade the voters that he will be able to get things done in Congress or that he understands foreign policy. Instead, the phrase he repeats over and over on the campaign trail is “I know how the economy works.” The current arguments over Bain Capital notwithstanding, this has been the basic rationale for Romney’s candidacy, that during his time in business he gained a body of knowledge and a unique insight that will allow him, as president, to make dramatic improvements in the economy. During the primaries he argued that this experience would make him a better president than his Republican opponents, and today he argues that it would make him a better president than Barack Obama.
But if there were a magic key to unlock spectacular growth and widely shared prosperity, you’d think we would have found it by now. There hasn’t been a president in decades, the current one included, who didn’t have lots of businesspeople working in his administration. And Barack Obama talks to corporate leaders all the time. If Romney knows something they don’t, he hasn’t told us what it is. If you read through his economic plan, you’ll find that it contains the same things Republicans always advocate: lower taxes, reduced regulations, free trade, and so on. You’ve certainly heard Romney say that his business experience helps him understand the economy. But have you ever heard him say what exactly he learned that no one else knows?
Perhaps he plans to unveil this remarkable insight once the election is over; if so, one can hope that as a patriotic American he’ll share it with the country even if he loses. Because even if it involved some policies that conservatives like, you can bet that President Obama would be happy to take the bargain if it would deliver something like the sustained 4 percent growth George W. Bush promises. If you really could create a humming economy just by cutting taxes for the wealthy and creating some “Reagan Economic Zones” (yes, that’s something Romney proposes, though he doesn’t say much about what it means), Obama would do it. The reason he doesn’t isn’t that he’s a socialist; it’s that the argument isn’t all that persuasive.
So no, Mitt Romney is not in possession of a secret that can deliver us to economic nirvana. We can try to determine whether anything less than admirable happened at Bain Capital during Romney’s time there, and if so how much responsibility he bears. But even if all those questions are answered in Romney’s favor, it wouldn’t change the fact that the policies he advocates are derived not from his experience but from his politics and his moral perspective, just as Barack Obama’s are.
I’m not sure if Romney actually believes that keeping taxes for the wealthy as low as possible and scaling back regulations really does bring prosperity for all. But if he does, it isn’t because he concluded that after a careful examination of the evidence (if that were the case, the last decade would have been the most prosperous in American history). He favors those policies because that’s what his party believes and because they reflect his values. Romney may “know how the economy works” in certain ways. But that knowledge isn’t enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 17, 2012
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