“Breathtaking Dishonesty”: Romney Revives The Big Republican Lie
As Mitt Romney and the GOP’s merry band of private-equity foes take their delicious war over “good” vs. “bad” capitalism to South Carolina, don’t expect Romney’s triumphalist New Hampshire victory speech to shut his rivals down. With the slugfest heading south, the real shocker is that Romney’s chipper “I like being able to fire people” line — which will now become permanent background noise in our world, like the hum of the air conditioning — is actually much worse in context than it was when taken out.
Aficionados of this Romney gaffe know by now that Romney was referring to being able to “fire” health insurance companies that aren’t providing adequate care and coverage. But the terrible fraud in his explanation hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.
“I don’t want to live in a world where we have Obamacare telling us which insurance we have to have, which doctor we can have, which hospital we go to,” Romney said in a rare news conference Monday afternoon to clarify his remarks. “I believe in the setting as I described this morning, where people are able to choose their own doctor, choose their own insurance company. If they don’t like their insurance company or their provider, they can get rid of it.”
On Tuesday he added: “I was talking about, as you know, insurance companies. We’d all like to get rid of our insurance companies — don’t want Obama to tell us we can’t.”
Romney’s dishonesty here is breathtaking. I used to think Republicans had taken chutzpah to unsurpassable new heights when they refused on principle to lift the debt ceiling last summer – despite having passed the Paul Ryan budget, which added more than $5 trillion in debt over the next decade.
But Romney may have topped that. He’s saying that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act — which offers people precisely the choice among competing private insurers that Romney’s own health-care reform did in Massachusetts — is instead some cartoon version of socialized medicine.
It’s a blatant falsehood. The Big Republican Lie.
Now, if Rick Perry had said this, you might say that the man just doesn’t know whereof he speaks. When Rush Limbaugh makes such bogus claims, you put it down to the ravings of an entertainer and propagandist. But Romney is a smart man. He’s also supposed to be a serious man, not a huckster. He knows better. Yet he’s made these outrageous false claims repeatedly. So this is a conscious, premeditated Big Lie.
What should we make of all this?
Let’s review. A candidate makes an obviously insensitive, unattractive remark that makes him sound like a callous, coldhearted boss, but the remark has been taken out of context. That “fire” sound bite will nonetheless become a staple of rivals’ ads and part of the Democratic onslaught if Romney is the nominee. (Look for it to be paired with Mike Huckabee’s perfect quip from 2008 that Romney “looks like the guy who fired you.”)
A fairminded citizen might feel a pang of sympathy for a politician who has to watch every word, lest it be taken out of context and turned against him. That’s why we get such robotic candidates and officials, after all.
But such sympathy dries up when it turns out that Romney’s actual meaning involves the Big Republican Lie on health care. When, in fact, Obama’s law offers exactly the same choices, via exactly the same kind of insurance exchanges, that Romney brought to Massachusetts.
Here’s another wrinkle. Romney’s passage of that health-care law – the one he’s mischaracterizing when he’s not busy running away from it – was a landmark achievement. He was the only governor who passed a bipartisan universal health-care bill. Facts are facts.
So what are we supposed to think of this man?
Here’s what we know. Romney will very casually tell the Big Lie if he thinks it will help him win. He’ll also work to enact universal health coverage if he thinks it’s a sensible path for his constituents and serves his own political ambitions once in office. Does this make him shameless and untrustworthy? A problem-solver? Both? Is belief in his own claim on power the only core conviction we can count on from Mitt Romney? Is any other presidential contender — or president — any different?
Just some questions to mull as you microwave the popcorn and settle down to watch the 30-minute video on Romney’s time at Bain in the days ahead. In the meantime, if the dictionary defines “misfire” as “to fail to ignite when expected,” and “spitfire” means “a quick tempered or highly emotional person,” I’m betting that by the time South Carolina votes, we’ll be looking at a “Mittfire” — a candidate whose loose talk on firing means he hasn’t wrapped things up when he’d hoped and who’s hopping mad about it. There’s a twist or turn left in the Grand Old Party yet.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 11, 2012
Mitt Romney’s Extremist Agenda Often Overlooked
Watching video clips of Romney’s flip-flopping on just about every major issue is a tiring experience. But his lurid history of pandering to exploit the latest trends in political idiocy should not distract voters from the raw truth of what he stands for today, which is an all-out capitulation to the agenda of the vulture capitalists.
The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuval explains it well in her WaPo op-ed, “Extremist in Pinstripes.” Vanden Heuval reviews Romney’s extremist positions on social issues, immigration, increasing the military budget and notes his call to push the Supreme Court even further to the right with his appointments.
She provides a disturbing account of Romney’s blase certitude in support of draconian cuts in Pell grants, Medicaid and food stamps, children’s health programs and aid to people with disabilities to “give multinationals a tax holiday” and give millionaires a nearly $300K tax cut, and adds:
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Romney, as Mike Huckabee once famously noted, “looks like the guy who laid you off.” At Bain, he was the guy who fired you. In a review of 77 major deals that Bain capital did when Romney headed the firm, the Wall Street Journal found that “22% [of the businesses that Bain invested in] either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses.” Of course, Bain produced remarkable returns for its investors, including Romney.
Romney’s flip-flopping proclivities are the easy target for commentators and pundits. But no one should be deluded by speculation that Romney will flip back toward moderate conservatism, if elected. As vanden Heuval argues,
…This isn’t the plan of a moderate. The conservative garb isn’t something Romney has donned for the primaries. These policies…are consistent with Romney’s background as a corporate raider. And as his fundraising shows, they play well in the plush offices of big finance where Romney made his fortune. He is a champion for the 1 percent, peddling a program that will ensure that working Americans bear the cost for the mess left by Wall Street’s extremes while the buccaneer bankers, corporate raiders and private equity gamblers are free to go back to preying on America.
Vanden Heuval’s article should provoke a sobering reassessment among those who have entertained the fantasy that Romney would govern as a moderate. As E. J. Dionne points out, chameleon Romney has proven highly adept as deluding his fellow Republicans across the party’s ideological spectrum that he reflects their views. Dems should not be so gullible, for there is every reason to believe his election would unleash the worst elements of vulture capitalism.
By: J. P. Green, The Democratic Strategist, January 11, 2012
So, Should We Start Calling Gingrich A Socialist?
You mean the wealthy on Wall Street aren’t benevolent “job creators” after all and that one of the pirate captains flying the Jolly Roger of buccaneer capitalism is a “predatory corporate raider” who goes by the name of Mitt Romney? Who knew?
In boardrooms across America, the plutocrats are freaking out. Their carefully plotted strategy of making the 2012 election a referendum between economic “freedom” and suffocating “big government” is being blown to smithereens by that infamous bomb-thrower, Newt Gingrich, who is detonating the idea that unsupervised laissez faire capitalism is the unmitigated blessing its cheerleaders at the Wall Street Journal have always claimed it to be.
I guess I spoke too soon when I wrote the other day that an entire philosophical tradition of conservative anti-capitalism had been lost now that the Republican Party has made itself into the wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street. But how was I to know Newt Gingrich was about to launch a jihad against the black magic of compound interest?
Gingrich is the guy, remember, who closed down the government in order to stick it to President Clinton for a perceived slight he suffered on Air Force One. So, why should we be surprised that Gingrich would lay waste to 30 years of supply-side mythology if doing so let him get back at that spoiled rich kid who used daddy’s money to torment him in Iowa?
This is what everyone in the Republican Party was afraid from the start Gingrich would do to them given his well-known MO, says Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum: “Destroy them utterly if they declined to nominate him.”
And with a $5 million in the bank thanks to right-wing casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, Gingrich now has lots of money to put to use the Karl Rove strategy of inflicting maximum pain by hitting an opponent right where he’s strongest. And in South Carolina Gingrich intends to hit Mitt Romney where he is strongest, specifically by pulling down all those statues erected to “The Job Creator from Bain Capital.”
The political effect of these attack ads, says New York magazine’s Jon Chait, is to tear down Romney’s carefully-crafted image in such a way that “his private-sector experience becomes an indicator — not that he will fix the economy — but that he will help the already-rich. It’s a smash-you-over-the-head blunt message, with ominous music and storybook dialogue.”
And according to the transcript of the ad Gingrich plans to run: “Mitt Romney was not a capitalist during his reign at Bain. He was a predatory corporate raider. His firm didn’t seek to create value. Instead, like a scavenger, Romney looked for businesses he could pick apart. Indeed, he represented the worst possible kind of predator, operating within the law but well outside the bounds of what most real capitalists consider ethical…..He and his friends at Bain were bad guys. Any real capitalists should disavow Romney’s ‘creative destruction’ model that made him wealthy at the expense of thousands of American jobs.”
This is brutal stuff that plays right into President Obama’s hands as he portrays the GOP as the Party of the One Percent unconcerned with the fate of the other 99%, says Drum. It also undermines the whole trickle-down rationale underpinning finance capitalism.
The supply-side oligarchs who rule the Republican Establishment are beside themselves as they circle the wagons against this madman from Georgia, who not only says Wall Street plutocrats who preach the virtues of capitalism have no clothes but that the clothes they do have on order are being imported from Chinese sweat shops which pay slave wages to child coolie labor.
The day before voters went to the polls in New Hampshire’s primary, the Wall Street Journal reported that the right wing Club for Growth reflected the shock among conservatives when it went after Gingrich for his “disgusting” attacks against Romney and his record at Bain Capital.
The group’s president, former Rep. Chris Chocola (R-Ind), said in a written statement: “Attacking Governor Romney for participating in free-market capitalism is just beyond the pale for any purported ‘Reagan conservative.'”
Like smart traders who buy low and sell high, America’s plutocracy has profited spectacularly from the yawning gap which exists between the values used by the public to judge and reward economic behavior and the public’s understanding of the revolutionary changes in the economy over the past 30 years that have made those values obsolete.
When conservatives talk about the virtue of competition and “entrepreneurship,” for example, they are exploiting the ignorance of a public that still believes America’s economy is dominated by people who make things and so thinks rewards should naturally go to those who can make things faster, better, cheaper.
As a reader on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Beast site put it: “Most Americans appreciate a free market system in which those that produce the best goods and services at the best value should be successful and become wealthy. However, when people become fabulously wealthy at the expense of others while producing nothing but investment gain for the investors, I think most Americans take pause.”
Yet, as economic historian Kevin Phillips notes, Wall Street is no longer the servant of Main Street where profits are confined to the earnings it can make by providing capital to entrepreneurs and businesses to invest in real things and good ideas. Today, financial firms earn more than 40% of all corporate profits and command a quarter of stock market capitalization — up from just 6% when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 – largely because of the powers Wall Street’s been given from deregulation to create debt and to earn fees from the distribution of that debt.
Historically, says Phillips, this transformation from a making to a papering economy “is as momentous as the emergence of railroads, iron and steel and the displacement of agriculture during the decades after the Civil War.”
And the problem for Mitt Romney is that he embodies these fundamental if poorly understood changes, which is why Republicans are so furious with Newt Gingrich for putting this all up in lights.
All Republicans talk about free markets, says Kevin Drum, but Mitt Romney has actually lived it. “That makes him a more concrete messenger, someone who can credibly say that he not only believes in free markets, but has lots of experience in making them work.”
Chances are that when Americans hear about free enterprise from conservatives “it’s usually accompanied by images of sunrises over wheat fields, hardworking farmers, and small-town construction workers heading home after a day of honest labor,” says Drum. “It is very definitely not accompanied by images of well-coiffed guys in suits and green eyeshades, making millions by sitting in boardrooms and approving mass layoffs by adding a quick line to a spreadsheet before they head out to lunch.”
Someone like Newt Gingrich can get up on his soapbox and keep things “fuzzy” by delivering a stem-winder about free markets, the glories of competition and keeping government off our backs “and then just walk off the stage — mission accomplished,” says Drum.
Not so Mitt Romney. When Romney talks about free markets the stakes are much higher, says Drum.
“He can’t get away with platitudes,” says Drum. “His experience at Bain Capital will inevitably be Exhibit 1 in just what he means when he talks about free markets.”
Short of being the CEO of Goldman Sachs, “this is quite possibly the worst possible face you can imagine for a conservative message about the glories of free enterprise and wealth creation,” adds Drum. “Romney, whether he likes it or not, won’t be able to talk about those glories without also facing up to the human destruction that often follows in its wake.”
Americans may say they are for free markets. But at the end of the day they are just regular folks who believe in a regular day’s pay for a regular day’s work. So, “if you rub their noses in the true face of modern capitalism, they aren’t going to like what they see,” Drum insists.
And that is what Gingrich is threatening to do. So, you can understand why Republicans and their wealthy benefactors are so uneasy — and incensed — by what Gingrich is about to do.
The revolutionary bomb-thrower who once brought down a House Speaker and ended 40 years of consecutive Democratic rule is now poised to blow up the Republican Party’s designated heir apparent and with him the Republican Party’s name-brand issue.
Wouldn’t it be ironic, then, if Newt Gingrich’s final act as America’s most famous radical was to squander the profits Republicans have so regularly earned — both economically and politically – through the arbitrage which exploits the gap between fact and fiction, reality and myth, in America’s system of free market capitalism?
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, January 11, 2012
“House Of Bain”: GOP Rallies Around Vulture Capitalism, Not Mitt Romney
I’ve got to admit it: Liberals are at a disadvantage when it comes to judging where the GOP primary is headed. Last week I was sure that conservatives were settling on Rick Santorum, and his supposed blue-collar family values, as the official not-Mitt Romney candidate after his strong Iowa showing. Not quite yet. Sunday I was sure Newt Gingrich’s slashing “King of Bain” ad, attacking Romney as a looter and a job destroyer for his Bain Capital record, would be devastating in a country where the economy is the top issue and unemployment remains high.
It was devastating, all right. To Gingrich. The former House speaker got a beatdown from fellow conservatives this week, with Rush Limbaugh mocking him as an Occupy Wall Street supporter and the National Review harrumphing at the notion that Gingrich targeted Romney’s Bain success because he “apparently expect(s) Republican voters to regard that as a liability.” By the time he made his “I’m tied for fourth place!” speech in New Hampshire Tuesday night, Gingrich looked broken. He abandoned his slashing attacks on Romney’s career and stuck to decrying the “years of decay” under President Obama, recounting his alleged successes as House speaker in the ’90s, and rambling wearily about “innovation.” A few minutes later, over on Fox, a disapproving Sean Hannity smacked sixth-place loser Rick Perry for his attacks on Romney, and echoed Limbaugh’s sneering comparison with Occupy Wall Street ideology.
It’s an interesting moment. Multiple news organizations reported that even close allies are telling Gingrich to cut out the attacks on Romney, but he’s already purchased an estimated $1.5 million in South Carolina airtime for his “House of Bain” spots, plus a nasty ad claiming Romney had “governed pro-abortion” in Massachusetts. What’s Gingrich going to do? He hates Romney, but he loves predatory capitalism as much as Limbaugh does. He doesn’t believe his own Bain Capital attacks. Can he continue to hurt Romney without damaging his own chances to return to the right-wing gravy train when he goes down to defeat? Trust me, the monied interests are not interested in hiring anti-capitalist “historians” to not-lobby for them. Gingrich is torn between vengeance and greed. Sucks to be him. Fun to watch.
It’s also fun to watch conservative Republicans rally around Romney not because they like him but because he’s become the face of the hallowed free market. As he headed to conservative South Carolina, hotbed of Tea Party radicalism, Romney got a boost from its extremist Sen. Jim DeMint, who predicted the former Massachusetts governor would win the Jan. 21 primary. DeMint is staying neutral, he told radio host Mark Steyn Tuesday night, “because Republicans are not yet united and I want to focus on the Senate.” But he praised Romney’s victory speech for “hitting a lot of the hot buttons for me about balancing the budget,” adding “Frankly, I’m a little concerned about the few Republicans who have criticized some of what I consider free market principles here.” He went on: “Some of the others who might have had an advantage here have really crossed paths, crossed ways with some Republicans as they have criticized free enterprise concepts.” DeMint’s remarks could give other Tea Party leaders an excuse to back Romney, though they don’t trust him, in the name of defending capitalism.
I still think there’s a possibility the Bain attacks will resonate with some Republican voters, and maybe in South Carolina, which has a 9.9 percent unemployment rate, compared to under 6 percent in Iowa and New Hampshire. It’s possible Gingrich and Perry’s attacks will open up political space for Santorum, who’s been careful not to attack capitalism as he sticks to his blue-collar platitudes and culture-war campaign. It was great to see New Hampshire voters chasten Santorum by repeatedly challenging his homophobia in public forums and giving him a fifth place finish. But his campaign told the Huffington Post he’ll spend at least $1 million on advertising in South Carolina. Maybe he’s still got a chance.
It’s a tiny one. Super PACs connected to Romney are set to spend $6 million in South Carolina and Florida in the next three weeks. Meanwhile, as every non-Romney candidate vows to head to South Carolina, they split the conservative vote and increase the chances that Romney gets the victory. Perry claimed he’s soldiering on. So did Jon Huntsman, despite a third-place showing that wasn’t enough to make him a serious candidate, since he bet everything on New Hampshire. “Third place is a ticket to ride, ladies and gentlemen,” Huntsman told the crowd, but nobody believes that. Late Tuesday night, Huntsman’s father and financier reportedly hadn’t decided whether to keep bankrolling his son’s bid. (And people mock Romney for his wealth.)
If it weren’t for Ron Paul’s foreign policy views, we might be talking about whether conservatives could coalesce around his candidacy. He underperformed expectations in Iowa but he came in a strong second Tuesday night. As much as I loathe his domestic politics, I enjoyed hearing the crowd chanting “Bring them home” when he promised to get troops out of Afghanistan. Paul will stay in the race and, given his caucus strategy, he could rack up delegates. I don’t know where that will take him – is he dreaming of Vice President Rand Paul? – but it’s great to think about the Ron Paul crowd heckling Mitt Romney when he doubles down on his hawkish, expansionist foreign policy promises in Tampa.
Romney’s heading into a scorched-earth South Carolina primary, but he’s got to be feeling pretty good about his first two outings. In New Hampshire, he won the ultra-rich, of course, but he also got Tea Party members and evangelicals, according to exit polls. He gave a much better victory speech than he did a week ago, because this time he used his teleprompter. He hit not only Obama but his Republican rivals for practicing “the bitter politics of envy,” which has more zing than the standard GOP class warfare line.
The private equity mogul can’t understand that criticism of his Bain career — “restructuring” companies, cutting their workforce and forcing almost a quarter into bankruptcy — isn’t about jealousy, but justice. People are starting to understand that finance capitalism works for the top 1 percent, but not the rest of us. So while Gingrich’s attacks aren’t likely to help his candidacy, they’re a boost to the man he presumably wants to defeat more than Romney. President Obama has to look forward to running against a guy his GOP rivals called a looter and a vulture capitalist. The fact that all of those rivals are fighting on after New Hampshire helps Romney win the nomination, but it could also help the Democrats hold the White House.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 11, 2012
Mitt Romney’s Money Problem
Mitt Romney is fast becoming the Scrooge McDuck of the 2012 presidential race.
In Disney’s version, McDuck is Donald Duck’s rich uncle, fond of diving into his money bin and swimming through his gold coins. Romney achieved much the same effect years ago when he posed with fellow Bain Capital executives for a photo showing paper money pouring from their pockets and mouths.
But as he stumps through New Hampshire en route to his probable victory Tuesday in the state’s GOP presidential primary, Romney’s riches are bringing him a wealth of trouble.
Speaking at a Chamber of Commerce event at a Radisson hotel here, he was discussing the value of shopping around for health insurance when he turned to the camera, and said, with perverse pleasure, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”
Thus did the likely Republican nominee film, pro bono, one of President Obama’s first reelection ads.
If this weren’t enough evidence that Romney represented the Plutocrat Progress Party, the first questioner confirmed it.
“In this historic election, we need to convince the masses that our vision as conservatives benefits them,” she said. “So my question is: How will you as the nominee get the minds of America behind you?”
At least she didn’t say “unwashed masses.”
Romney didn’t show any concern that the woman had spoken aloud from the plutocrats’ playbook. “That is the question of my campaign, of course,” he said.
Of course.
The candidate, who last year told a group of unemployed Floridians that “I’m also unemployed,” worried aloud on Sunday that “there were a couple of times I wondered if I was going to get a pink slip” when he worked in the consulting business – an enterprise that helped build his personal wealth to as much as $250 million.
Perhaps realizing that the pink-slip pronouncement was problematic, the owner of multiple homes and horses asserted on Monday that “I started off, actually, at the entry level, coming out of graduate school.”
Newly minted MBAs from Romney’s Harvard can count on making well into the six figures in their “entry-level” jobs at consulting firms.
The entry-level explanation didn’t advance far with Romney’s rivals.
Rick Perry, whose net worth is rather south of Romney’s, responded while touring a restaurant in South Carolina: “Now, I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company, Bain Capital, with all the jobs that they killed, I’m sure he was worried that he’d run out of pink slips.”
And Newt Gingrich described Bain Capital as a “small group of rich people manipulating the lives of thousands of people and taking all the money.”
Gingrich, however, lives in a glass mansion on this one. He boasts about his $60,000-a-pop speeches and has taken to complaining about food-stamp recipients in his speeches here in New Hampshire.
By the time Romney arrived at his next event on Monday, he was clearly out of sorts. First, he mixed up his own offspring as he made the introductions: “My third son is Ben, who has been missing. He’s a doctor from Utah. He came in last night. Special applause.” After the applause, Romney revised: “What did I say? My third son is coming tonight. Ben is my fourth.”
Romney went on to attempt to explain the value of shopping around for health insurance – this time without mentioning the pleasure he gets from firing people. He likened it to auto insurance. “If you watch on TV, the little animal, little gecko? You see these guys competing hard for your business.”
In the audience, many of the 150 reporters looked at one another and smiled.
The candidate had already treated them to a wealth of blue-blooded phrases during the day, seasoning his speech to the Chamber of Commerce with phrases such as “net-net” and “if you’re in a C-corporation” and “get a pro forma together.”
Net-net, nothing says “common man” quite like “get a pro forma together.”
Romney was not done with his “firing” line, however. After his event, held in a metal fabricating plant, he returned to take questions from the unwashed masses of the news corps, including 35 TV cameras.
He said that his fondness for firing was limited to health-insurance providers, and that “people are going to take things out of context and make it something it is not.”
This from a man who recently released an ad appearing to show President Obama saying that “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” In fact, Obama, in the 2008 passage, was quoting an aide to John McCain.
And now Romney is complaining about being taken out of context? That’s rich.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 9, 2011
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