“Swiss Cheese Candidate”: Mitt Romney’s Campaign Places Most Of His Life Off Limits
It’s hard to escape the impression that Mitt Romney’s campaign is about everything but Mitt Romney.
In an era of personality-driven politics, he is running on a central idea—fixing the economy—without the personal flair and calculated charisma that often define White House contenders.
It’s not the world’s worst strategy for a guy who is never going to match Barack Obama on the charm front or feel comfortable chatting with the ladies of The View. Romney is nonetheless running almost neck and neck with the incumbent after a bruising primary battle.
But to the extent that many Americans remain uneasy with Romney, it may be because he reveals so little of himself.
Indeed, Romney has cordoned off major sections of his life, leaving him little to share beyond policy talking points.
If he has one passion in life, it’s business. But Romney barely talks about his experience at Bain Capital, because he doesn’t want to engage on the thousands of jobs lost when his former firm took over ailing companies and sometimes pushed them into bankruptcy. When he talks about Bain, it’s to play defense, as when the Obama campaign put out last week’s video featuring steelworkers who were cut loose when their Bain-owned factory shut down. (Yes, Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker didn’t help the team by saying on Sunday that he is uncomfortable with such attacks on private equity, though he backtracked within hours. But how can Bain not be fair game for the president, given the nature of Romney’s campaign?)
The problem for Romney is that his job was to generate big profits for himself and his partners, not to serve as a job-creating agency, which is not exactly bumper-sticker material. So if Romney can’t talk with enthusiasm about his career as a capitalist—his central credential as a candidate—what can he talk about?
Well, he had a reasonably successful term as Massachusetts governor, the only elective office he’s ever held. But we don’t hear much about that. And the reason is hardly a mystery.
The centerpiece of his four years in Boston was a health-care plan passed with bipartisan support. But since Romneycare was the model for Obamacare, which brought the candidate so much grief during the primaries, he now treats it as radioactive.
As for the rest of his Massachusetts tenure, well, Romney doesn’t seem to be selling that either. He ran as a moderate—a pro-choicer, for example—and governed pretty much in that mold. In today’s Tea Party climate, Romney doesn’t want to remind Republicans that he was anything less than severely conservative. So that’s off the table, too.
What’s left? Romney seems determined not to talk about his faith. And there is a political downside. While The New York Times ran a largely positive and respectful front-page story on his Mormonism, it did include details that some would find off-putting, such as that he encouraged a working mother to quit her job so the church would bless her efforts to adopt a child.
My own feeling is that no one has any business demanding that Romney talk about his religion. But I don’t think he’s avoiding the subject solely because, say, evangelical Christians regard Mormonism with suspicion. He is essentially a private guy who believes that such matters are between him and his church, to the point that he won’t even boast about his missionary work as a young man.
But the expectations in our Oprahfied culture are that candidates are supposed to share, even overshare, on such matters. Asked about his favorite philosopher in one of his earliest debates, George W. Bush answered: “Christ, because he changed my heart.” (Bush also spoke about kicking the drinking habit.) Obama’s embrace of religion is such that he took his book title, The Audacity of Hope, from his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. (He also wrote about taking drugs as a young man.)
But Romney’s religion is more closed to outsiders than most, and he doesn’t seem to have many sins to confess, as Mormons don’t drink or smoke. So that part of Mitt also remains behind a curtain.
What remains is a kind of Swiss-cheese cutout of a life. Yes, Romney helped turn the Salt Lake City Olympics into a success, but that’s not enough to win the gold medal.
Romney doesn’t even talk much about his hobbies. Sports fan? I have no idea. Movie buff? Who knows? He once talked about hunting varmints, but that drew ridicule. Romney’s wife, Ann, brings a warm touch to describe the unzipped Mitt, but her husband remains decidedly zipped up.
Maybe Romney is running as the anti-charisma candidate. Maybe his team has decided to turn a weakness into a strength: if he can’t match the lofty orator, perhaps he can PowerPoint his way to the presidency by promising results. But on some level, Romney needs to find a way to move beyond bullet points in painting a picture of who he is.
By: Howard Kurtz, The Daily Beast, May 22, 2012
“Romney’s Tax Plan In Disgusting Perspective”: Making The Bush Tax Cuts Look Like A Gift To Poor People
In my post this morning on Cory Booker, I noted that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would save households taking in more than $1 million per year an average of at least $250,000 ever year. Let us just dwell on this number for a minute.
Earlier this month, Obama claimed the $250,000 figure. Politifact got to work on it. It turns out, says Politifact, that Obama was telling the truth, and in fact if anything could be described as using the more conservative of two ways of looking at the matter, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center.
You can read the Politifact description, which is thorough and clear. It comes down to this in plain language. As you know the Bush tax cuts are set to expire at the end of the year. Let’s say Romney is elected and the Bush cuts are extended, as Romney says he’ll do (and then some). If you don’t credit Romney with extending the Bush cuts–that is, if you just assume they were going to be extended anyhow–then his plan cuts the tax bill for those making more than $1 million a year by $250,000.
But if you credit President Romney with the extension of the Bush cuts, then Romney’s gift to uber-million households come to $390,000 a year. To see how insane this is, let’s add a little perspective: Let’s look at those same Bush tax cuts.
According to this report from Democratic staff in Congress on the impact of Bush cuts that was issued in 2007, households earnings $1 million or more per year received an average cut of $120,000 per year. Let’s think about this.
The Bush tax cuts “accomplished” the following: lowered the tax burden of the very rich to lowest point in 50 years; added $1.8 billion to the deficit; exploded the publicly held debt as a share of GDP; and didn’t really lead to a single net job (depending on how you measure, which will be the topic of a future post).
In other words, they were a disaster for the economy, and brutally inequitable.
And now, Romney’s plan would give the above $1 million per year households twice as much as Bush did, or three times as much. It’s really and truly sad and unbelievable that something like this is even discussed seriously by serious people. This plan makes Bush’s look like a gift to poor people. Of course Romney would say he’s cutting the lower classes’ taxes too, which he is, but that just proves how much more aggressively the Romney plan would deplete the treasury, which again we’ll dig into in detail at other points.
Voters know Bush wrecked the economy. For Romney this deserves to be and can be much a bigger pain than Bain.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 21, 2012
“Nauseating”: Cory Booker, Surrogate From Hell
If Cory Booker went on “Meet the Press” on Sunday with the intent of helping President Obama, then his appearance was an utter failure. But anyone who’s followed the enormously ambitious Newark mayor’s career closely knows he’s not one to pull a Joe Biden. He’s just too smart and too smooth to screw up so epically.
More likely, Booker went on the show to help himself and to advance his own long-term political prospects. And on that score, his appearance was a success.
You’ve probably seen or are now seeing the headlines Booker generated by calling the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s private equity background “nauseating” and likening them to efforts by some on the right to inject Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the campaign.
“Enough is enough,” Booker said. “Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright.”
He added: “I have to just say from a very personal level, I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity. To me, it’s just we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America. Especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people invest in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses. And this, to me — I’m very uncomfortable with.”
Playing up Romney’s Bain record is, of course, central to Obama’s general election plan. Romney is running as a business-savvy “job creator” and relying on the public’s tendency to associate private sector success with economic competence. There is no overstating how vital it is for Obama and his campaign to break that link, and to establish that Romney’s real expertise is in making investors rich – not adding jobs and improving the quality of life for middle class workers.
In belittling this strategy, Booker isn’t just breaking with Obama, he’s breaking with just about everyone who’s ever run against Romney – including Ted Kennedy, who used criticisms of Bain’s treatment of workers to pull away from Romney in their 1994 Senate race. Essentially, Kennedy created the blueprint that Obama is now using. Booker is also providing Republicans with a dream talking point: A top Obama surrogate not only disapproves of Obama’s use of Bain, he finds it nauseating!
It wouldn’t be surprising if Booker has already heard from the White House, and surely he’s now in for a world of abuse from Obama supporters. But that hardly means he made a mistake, at least in terms of his own ambition. Financial support from Wall Street and, more broadly speaking, the investor class has been key to Booker’s rise, and remains key to his future dreams.
It’s easy to forget, but before the world met Barack Obama in 2004, many believed that the first black president would be Booker. Armed with Stanford, Yale and Oxford degrees and all of the invaluable personal connections he forged at those institutions, he set out in the mid-1990s to craft a uniquely appealing political biography, swearing off lucrative job offers to move to Newark’s Central Ward and take up residence in public housing. Within a few years, he won a seat on the City Council, where he showed an early and consistent knack for self-generated publicity, most notably with a ten-day hunger strike in the summer of 1999.
That set the stage for Booker’s 2002 race for mayor, an ugly contest against incumbent Sharpe James, an entrenched icon of the city’s civil rights generation of black politicians. James, as any self-respecting Newark mayor would do, leveraged his clout for campaign contributions from city workers, vendors and those who aspired to be city workers and vendors.
Booker, meanwhile, had hardly lost touch with his old classmates, keeping one foot in Newark and the other in Manhattan, where he built on the connections to elite donors that he already had. He called the millions of dollars he raised for the race “love money.” The press – and James’ campaign – took note that almost all of it was from outside Newark, nearly half of it was from outside New Jersey, and a quarter of it came directly from Wall Street.
This helped bolster James’ claim that Booker, who grew up in an affluent suburb, was not an authentic Newarker. That attack resonated just enough to save James, who won in a squeaker. It was a pyrrhic victory, though: Booker had captured national interest – there was a Time profile during the campaign, and an Academy Award-nominated documentary followed – and immediately started campaigning for the next race, while a federal investigation soon swallowed up James. In 2006, Booker was elected with ease, while James was on his way to jail.
Since then, the only question in New Jersey has been when – and not if – Booker will seek to run for statewide office. In 2009, the beleaguered Jon Corzine begged him to run for lieutenant governor on his ticket, an offer that Booker wisely refused. He’s often touted as a potential gubernatorial candidate for 2013, but those who know him say his eye is more on the Senate seat now held by 88-year-old Frank Lautenberg, which will be up in 2014.
This is why it’s not at all surprising to see Booker going to bat for private equity. The allies he’s cultivated on Wall Street and in the financial industry (think, for instance, of his chummy relationship with Michael Bloomberg) have made Booker a prolific fundraiser, and when he ventured into the ultra-expensive statewide game, he’ll need them more than ever. Many of them have turned fiercely against Obama over the past few years, convinced that he’s unfairly targeted them. Booker’s words on “Meet the Press” may have enraged the average Obama supporter, but to the Wall Street class they were probably close to heroic – finally, a big-name Democrat with the cojones to call out Obama on his class warfare!
The Booker calculation, in other words, is probably that the average Democratic voter’s memory of his outburst will fade long before 2014 – but that the average Wall Street donor’s won’t.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, May 20, 2012
“A Choice Of Capitalisms”: Creative Acts vs Acts of Betrayal
In this election, we’re not having an argument that pits capitalism against socialism. We are trying to decide what kind of capitalism we want. It is a debate as American as Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay — which is to say that we have always done this. In light of the rise of inequality and the financial mess we just went through, it’s a discussion we very much need to have now.
The back-and-forth about Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old company, is part of something larger. So is the inquest into the implications of multibillion-dollar trading losses at JPMorgan Chase. Capitalism can produce wonders. It is also capable of self-destruction, and it can leave a lot of wounded people behind. The trick is to get the most out of what capitalism does well, while containing or preventing the problems it can cause.
To describe this grand debate is not to deny that President Obama’s campaign has some, shall we say, narrower motives in going after Bain. Obama’s lieutenants need to undermine Romney’s claim that his experience in the private equity business makes him just the guy to get our economy back on track.
The Bain conversation has already been instructive. Romney’s friends no less than his foes have had to face the fact that Bain’s purpose was never about job-creation. Its goal was to generate large returns to Bain’s partners and investors. It did that, which is why Romney is rich.
Romney wants to focus on the positive side of his business dealings that did create jobs. He wants to brag about the companies Bain helped bring to life, among them Staples, Sports Authority and Domino’s.
That’s fair enough. But having made an issue of Bain on the plus side, he also has to answer for the pain and suffering — or, as defenders of capitalism like to call it, the “creative destruction” — that some of Bain’s deals left in their wake.
This leads naturally to the question of how creative the destruction wrought by our current brand of capitalism actually is. Since the dawn of the leveraged buyout era three decades ago, many friends of capitalism have questioned whether loading companies with debt as part of these deals is good for companies and for the economy as a whole.
Does this approach cause unnecessary suffering among the employees of the companies in question and the communities that often lose plants and jobs as a result? Sucking pension and health funds dry to aggrandize investors seems less like a creative act than a betrayal of workers who made bargains with their employers in good faith.
More generally, while some of the innovations in the financial sphere have been beneficial to growth, it’s far from clear that this is true of all or even most of them. Some of them helped cause the downturn we are still trying to escape and created incentives for the dangerous risk-taking that led to JPMorgan’s troubles. And there’s little doubt that our new financial system has transferred wealth from other sectors of the economy to the people at the top of the financial business.
Vice President Biden’s speech last week in Youngstown, Ohio, drew wide attention for its criticism of Romney as someone who just doesn’t “get it.” But when Biden moved beyond Romney, he offered an energetic broadside against the new world of finance, and he picked the right venue to make his case: a noble blue-collar town that has been battered by the winds of globalization and economic change.
“You know the difference between having an economy that makes things that the rest of the world wants, and having an economy that is based on financialization of every product,” Biden told his listeners. “You know the difference between an economy . . . that’s built on making things rather than on collateralized debt, creative credit-default swaps, financial instruments like subprime mortgages. That’s not how you build an economy.”
Romney, by contrast, is wary of dismantling any of these nifty new Wall Street inventions, one reason why he wants to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reforms.
We need to have this great national argument. To borrow a term pioneered by Germany’s Christian Democrats, we can try to build a social market. Or we can have an anti-social market. An election is the right venue for deciding which it will be.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 20, 2012
“The Darkest Art Of All”: Mitt Romney’s Character Assassination Game
The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is not, as many liberals believe, that they play no-rules hardball. Instead, it’s their skill at projection—at accusing Democrats of doing what they are doing themselves, or are planning to do, or have done. That’s the real Rosetta stone. And that’s what Mitt Romney did this week when he called Barack Obama’s tough, but hardly extraordinary, ads about Bain Capital “character assassination.” He’s trying to make it so that Bain as a subject becomes off limits, and he’s laying the groundwork for later, when the real character assassination starts—and I hope your memory isn’t so short that you forget that he knows a thing or two about the topic himself.
Republicans have perfected many a dark campaign art over the years, from racial nudging and winking to suggesting that we’ll all be killed by terrorists if voters elect Democrats. But projection is the darkest art of all. And it’s so simple! When Republicans are acting like a mob—down in Dade County, for example—they accuse the Democrats of having a mob mentality. When they’re planning on blowing holes in the budget deficit bigger than the one the iceberg laid on the Titanic, via Paul Ryan’s budget and tax cuts for the rich, they stand up and accuse the Democrats of blowing holes in the budget. It works pretty well, too. All the conservative blogs pick up on it, and Fox and so on. And then, when the mainstream media sit down to write about the subject at hand, stories will note that “The GOP has been saying for months…”
This is what is happening here. Romney is trying to do two things. First, he’s trying to make any criticism of his Bain record out of bounds. Aware of course that he’s been forced by reality to revise downward from “more than 100,000” to “thousands” the number of jobs he helped create at Bain, he knows that he can’t use Bain as a plus to the extent that he wanted to. Think about it—the cornerstone of his career, the thing he spent 15 years of his life doing, the business he built (with Mr. Bain’s blessing and seed money)—pretty much out the window now. So that being the case, he needs to eliminate it as a minus. See if the referee will toss it out, if the judge (the media) will rule it inadmissible.
The obvious way to do that is to call any mention of it character assassination. Are those ads really character assassination? Do they say, for example: “Mitt Romney must be a really terrible and malevolent human being to have thrown those poor steel workers out on the street”? Because that would be an attack on Romney’s character. But no, they do not. They say Mitt Romney did us dirt. They’re emotional, sure. And if you want to say emotionally manipulative, all right by me. And yes, Joe Biden took it all a step or two further with his Ohio speech, saying Romney doesn’t understand the rest of us and so on.
But come on. That’s politics. Those aren’t character attacks. They’re salvos in a debate about what kinds of capitalism are good for regular people and what kinds aren’t. Campaigns Democratic or Republican don’t exactly elevate debates, Lord knows; but if we’re going to have arguments about how our society works, that’s a pretty useful one to have.
But the character-assassination label will come in handy—and this is Romney’s second purpose—when the Republican attacks on Obama really start. Maybe Romney is telling the truth, and his campaign will be all about how Obama promised nice things and seems like a nice young man but failed to deliver on them. His polling tells him he has to campaign like that for now, because Obama is far more likable to more people than he.
Something tells me, though, that the Romney campaign will eventually lower the boom. One might argue that it has already. What’s “apologizing for America,” after all? Aside from being a cheap and contemptible lie, is it not a kind of assault on the character of the president of the United States to accuse him of doing something that he hasn’t done, especially when the accusation is obviously meant to carry treasonous connotations? Romney’s “apologizing for America” line has always told us a great deal about character—Romney’s, not the president’s.
Don’t forget, finally, that Romney is pretty adept at character assassination himself. What do you call it when in those crucial primaries that he barely won against Rick Santorum—Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin—he was outspending Santorum six and nine and 12 to one with incredibly negative ads? Or the “tsunami of sleaze,” as my colleague John Avlon put it at the time that the Romney campaign dumped on Newt Gingrich in Florida, where 92 percent of the aired TV ads were negative? Those gutter attacks, aired over and over and over, are, it is worth remembering, the main reason the guy is the nominee. He was tied or behind in all those states until he emptied the trash. He wasn’t winning them over with his wit.
So it’s a bit rich to hear him saying now that he’s sad to see Obama in the gutter and he’s going to keep it on the up and up. But at some point, he’ll attack. And when he does, he’ll sigh sadly and say that he was forced into this position by that mean Obama, and he’ll count on everyone to forget the primary season, the foulest one by far in the modern history of American politics, for which the man who neither drinks nor swears bears the vast majority of the blame. That, come to think of it, is a “character” issue too.
BY: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 19, 2012
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