The Champion Of The Already Powerful: Mitt Romney’s Brand Of Extremism
Mitt Romney’s close call at the Iowa caucuses Tuesday will doubtless contribute to speculation that he is too “moderate” to appeal to Republican primary voters. While Romney has a complicated relationship with his new party-line stances on social issues, I’d argue that his new positions and his Olympian flip flops that he had to make to get there are only part of his problem. Romney isn’t too moderate for Republican voters — at this time in our country he’s simply the wrong kind of extreme.
The 2012 election will ultimately be a referendum on the kind of economic policies Americans want — ones that work for working people or ones that are designed by and for a privileged few. The Bush-instigated recession has compounded the unprecedented disparity between the richest few Americans and the millions who are struggling just to get by. President Obama’s efforts to put Americans back to work have been met at every turn by a Republican Congress unwilling to stimulate the nation’s economy and stabilize the nation’s finances, inexplicably eager to give a tax hike to working families but unwilling to let Bush’s damaging tax cuts for the wealthy expire. All the Republican frontrunners are offering similar reprises of Bush’s disastrous economic policies. But only one comes across immediately and undeniably as an extreme corporatist.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee hit Romney’s extremism problem on the head when he said the candidate “looks like the guy who fired you.” Most didn’t get to see his face at the time, but Mitt Romney has plenty of experience firing people from a distance, sending thousands of jobs overseas while raking in fat paychecks at Bain Capital that continue today years after his retirement. No wonder he hasn’t been able to shake the image of himself as a corporate fat-cat: he doesn’t just want to give corporations and the wealthy major tax cuts, he openly states that he thinks “corporations are people.”
And Romney’s out-of-touch image and pro-corporate extremism aren’t just turn-offs to progressives. A poll by The Hill this fall found that “55 percent of conservatives and 81 percent of centrists” see income inequality in America as a problem. A Bloomberg–Washington Post poll found that a majority of Republicans think the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes to help bring down the budget deficit. Corporate extremism at odds with the priorities of the base is the norm among the GOP presidential candidates — but only Romney embodies it.
Unfortunately, Romney’s near-miss with Santorum will help him frame himself a mainstream, electable candidate just conservative enough to make it through the Republican primary gauntlet. Santorum is the perfect foil: a right-wing ideologue so extreme he thinks states should be able to outlaw contraception, that homosexuality is akin to bestiality, that high obesity rates are an argument against food stamps, and that all married same-sex couples should have their unions annulled. But when it comes to policy, Romney’s positions on social issues are nearly indistinguishable from those of his crusading opponent. Romney has endorsed radical anti-choice “personhood amendments.” He rejects marriage equality and says he wouldn’t support a federal-level Employment Non-Discrimination Act. He opposes the DREAM Act. He’s even getting his legal policy advice from Robert Bork, a right-wing crusader so extreme the Senate wouldn’t confirm him to the Supreme Court.
Romney and Santorum would each be disastrous to America on both social and economic issues. But their near-tie in Iowa exposes a fault line that will be visible through the general election. So what’s the difference? While there is still a solid evangelical base that embraces the kind of social extremism offered by Santorum, American voters across the political spectrum are wary of the government-by-the-few embraced by the GOP and embodied by Romney.
Santorum is no less of an economic extremist than Romney, just as Romney is hardly less of a social extremist than Santorum. Every Republican candidate has called for trillions of dollars of tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, for ending Medicare as we know it, and for a return to George W. Bush’s disastrous economic policies. But Romney — through his biography, demeanor and tin ear — has, with good reason, become personally associated with these policies that cater to the wealthy and privileged and ignore the middle class.
The 2012 election will come down to a very basic choice. Do we want a champion of the middle class in the White House or the champion of those who are already powerful? Do you want to hire the guy who fired you? Iowa Republicans this week started answering that question.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, January 5, 2012
Romney Camp Admits That Its Bain Job Creation Number Is Bogus
Mitt Romney, last night’s Iowa caucus winner, has been on the campaign trail claiming that the private equity firm he ran, known as Bain Capital, was responsible for creating loads of jobs. Romney responded to criticism about his time at Bain by saying, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”
When a group of Romney backers ran an ad making the same claim, they were unable to back up the number with data. And as it turns out, the Romney camp can’t either, as it admitted that the statistic is nothing but cherry-picked job growth from a few companies that did well after they were bought by Bain:
[Romney spokesman Eric] Fehrnstrom says the 100,000 figure stems from the growth in jobs from three companies that Romney helped to start or grow while at Bain Capital: Staples (a gain of 89,000 jobs), The Sports Authority (15,000 jobs), and Domino’s (7,900 jobs).
This tally obviously does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved — and are based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain. (Indeed, Romney made his comments in response to a former employee of American Pad & Paper Co. who says he lost his job after Bain Capital took it private.)
Bain Capital has been responsible for thousands of layoffs at companies it bankrupted, such as American Pad & Paper, Dade International, and LIVE Entertainment, which Romney’s stat completely leaves out. He’s also taking credit for jobs created long after he left the firm to launch his political career. To sum it up, the stat Romney uses is incredibly dishonest, like much of his jobs rhetoric.
One of Romney’s Bain business partners has said that he “never thought of what I do for a living as job creation.” “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors,” he added. And Bain has certainly done that, maximizing earnings “by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits.” Due to a lucrative retirement deal, Romney is still making millions from Bain, as he goes across the country calling himself “middle class” and joking about being “unemployed.”
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, January 4, 2012
“Bain Capitalist”: Mitt Romney Haunted By His Victims
During Mitt Romney’s Senate campaign 17 years ago, the Republican politician was faring quite well against Ted Kennedy, right up until voters started hearing from some of Romney’s victims.
To briefly review, Romney got very rich running a private-equity firm, Bain Capital, which broke up companies and laid off American workers. He had considerable success orchestrating leveraged buyouts, seeking taxpayer subsidies, flipping companies quickly for large profits, and making money for investors, even when the employees of those companies were deemed collateral damage.
In the 1994 campaign, this mattered. Many of Romney’s victims drove to Massachusetts to protest the Republican’s campaign, and Democrats put together a half-dozen ads featuring laid-off workers who said they suffered while Romney lined his pockets at their expense.
It proved effective in 1994, and Dems hope it will work again in 2012.
A former employee of Bain Capital, GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney’s former company, said Sunday that Romney’s decisions cost him and many others their jobs.
Randy Johnson said Sunday that the former Massachusetts governor’s decisions as Bain’s CEO put him out of work.
Romney was the chief executive officer of Bain Capital in 1992 when the company purchased American Pad & Paper, or Ampad, and oversaw the management of that company and others.
Ampad went bankrupt in 2000, and investors netted over $100 million from the deal, according to the Boston Globe.
Johnson told reporters yesterday, “I really feel that he didn’t care about the workers. It was all about profit over people.”
For its part, the Romney campaign recently began arguing that critics of Bain Capital’s layoffs are borderline communists, trying to “put free enterprise on trial.”
Between this and Romney’s agenda — take away health care coverage from millions, tax breaks for the wealthy, free reign for Wall Street, more foreclosures — the “man of the people” routine may prove to be a tough sell.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 2, 2011
Mitt Antoinette: The Audacity Of The Rich
It’s a campaign tactic that’s been around for a long while, but Mitt Romney seems eager to perfect it: identify the candidate’s most damaging flaws, then project those flaws onto the candidate’s rivals. This week offered a classic example.
Mitt Romney on Thursday sought to portray President Barack Obama as out of touch with the struggles of everyday Americans — a charge he himself has often faced — by comparing the president to a former French queen who was overthrown during the French Revolution.
“When the president’s characterization of our economy was, ‘It could be worse,’ it reminded me of Marie Antoinette: ‘Let them eat cake,’” Romney said, referring to the infamously dismissive remark toward the poor attributed to the queen.
As Jon Chait noted, this is “in keeping with his favorite method of deflecting attacks.”
Romney anticipates his greatest vulnerability, then peremptorily lobs the charge against his adversary. That way, when his opponent uses the charge it’s repetitive.
Romney first deployed this technique against New Gingrich. He has deployed a furious assault against what was briefly his chief adversary, painting him as a flip-flopper who has wavered on abortion and even supported health care reform in Massachusetts. Gingrich was left stammering helplessly in response. After sifting through the charges and counter-charges, all the Republican voters knew was that you had two candidates accusing each other of flip-flopping and trying to help sick people get health insurance. The natural next step is to open his general election campaign by portraying Obama as a callous aristocrat.
At this point, anything’s possible.
It takes quite a bit of chutzpah for any candidate to campaign this way. For crying out loud, Romney accused Gingrich of taking both sides of every issue and being an unreliable champion of far-right causes. How does one even intellectually process something like this? Is it the result of a pathological lack of self-awareness, an assumption that voters are idiots, the belief that the media is hopelessly incompetent, or some combination of all of them?
But this Marie Antoinette line is arguably even more beautiful. Romney — who, by the way, speaks fluent French and spent nearly three years in France — amassed an enormous fortune thanks to a vulture-capitalist firm known for breaking apart companies and firing their American workforces. Despite a quarter-billion in the bank, and several mansions (one of which he intends to quadruple in size), Romney is running on a campaign platform that includes slashing public investments that benefit working families (including the total elimination of funding for Planned Parenthood), massive tax breaks for the very wealthy, repealing safeguards that protect the public from Wall Street recklessness, and calling for more foreclosures on those American families struggling to keep their homes.
Two weeks ago, Romney told PBS he’d like to see President Obama stop criticizing “Wall Street” and “insurance company executives” altogether. Yesterday, he debated whether he meets the “classical” definition of “a Wall Street guy.”
Romney thinks it’s funny to joke about being unemployed; he finds it inconvenient when he doesn’t have anything smaller than a $100 bill in his wallet while on the campaign trail; he doesn’t blink when offering to make a $10,000 bet; and he considers a $1,500 a year tax cut for the typical middle-class family to be a meaningless “band aid.”
This guy wants to compare Barack Obama to Marie Antoinette?
If votes are awarded on the basis of audacity, Romney should go ahead and start drafting his inaugural address.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 31, 2011
Mitt Romney’s Limited Understanding Of “Jobs”
Mitt Romney seems to think his strongest issue in a general-election race against President Obama is jobs. I’d argue he has that backwards.
In an interview with TIME Magazine’s Mark Halperin, Romney said, “I know that the Democrats will try and make this a campaign about Bain Capital…. 25 million people are out of work because of Barack Obama. And so I’ll compare my experience in the private sector where, net-net, we created over 100,000 jobs.”
“I’ll compare that record with his record, where he has not created any new jobs.”
This detachment from reality fascinates me, so let’s unwrap the argument.
First, the confused former governor believes 25 million people are out of work “because of Barack Obama.” If Romney can explain why Obama is to blame for a recession that began in 2007, I’d love to hear it. For that matter, the economy lost 3.6 million jobs in 2008 — the year before the president took office. How exactly is Obama responsible for that, too?
Second, Romney now claims to have created “over 100,000 jobs” at his vulture-capitalist firm. Romney also appears to have made this number up out of whole cloth. Indeed, two weeks ago, when Romney’s Super PAC ran an ad claiming he “helped create thousands of jobs” as CEO at Bain, Super PAC officials were asked to back that up with evidence. They refused.
Third, it’s remarkable that Romney is only willing to compare his “experience in the private sector.” What about when Romney was willing to put his experience to work in the public sector, during his one term as governor of Massachusetts? Romney doesn’t want to talk about it for a reason — his state’s record on job creation was “one of the worst in the country,” ranking 47th out of 50 states in job growth. It’s one of the reasons Romney left office after one term deeply unpopular, and why his former constituents don’t want him near the White House.
And fourth, Obama “has not created any new jobs”? The ease with which Romney lies continues to be disconcerting.
With one month remaining this year, the U.S. private sector has now added 1.67 million jobs in 2011, well ahead of last year’s private-sector total of 1.2 million, and the best year for businesses since 2006. Since March 2010, American businesses have created 2.9 million jobs.
I’d encourage Romney to consider this chart showing private-sector job growth by month since the Great Recession began…
…and this chart showing private-sector job growth by year over the last two decades (and 2011 isn’t over yet).
Reporters really need to brush up on this stuff. When Romney lies to their face — which seems to happen just about every day — they should be able to push back with reality.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 23, 2011
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