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“A Simple Defense”: Romney’s “Doublethink” Actually Endorses President Obama

President Obama wasn’t pleased with the new jobs numbers, but he urged Americans today to remember the mess he inherited and appreciate the progress.

Using exactly the kind of rhetoric Republicans dismiss as “tired excuses,” the president told reporters, “I came in and the jobs had been just falling off a cliff…. It takes a while to get things turned around. We were in a recession; we were losing jobs every month. We’ve turned it around and now we’re adding jobs…. We want to keep that going to the extent we can.”

Wait, did I say Obama today? I meant Mitt Romney, six years ago.

For those who can’t watch clips online (http://youtu.be/ArRj-dQXX3Y), Romney appeared at a press conference in 2006 and offered a defense for Massachusetts’ weak job numbers during his only term in office.

“You guys are bright enough to look at the numbers. I came in and the jobs had been just falling off a cliff. And I came in and they kept falling for 11 months. And then we turned around and we’re coming back. And that’s progress.

“And if you’re going to suggest to me that somehow the day I got elected, somehow jobs should immediately turn around, well that would be silly. It takes a while to get things turned around. We were in a recession; we were losing jobs every month, we’ve turned around, and since the turn around we’ve added 50,000 jobs. That’s progress.

“There will be some people who try to say, ‘Well governor, net-net you’ve only added a few thousand jobs since you’ve been in.’ Yeah, but I helped stop. I didn’t do it alone, the economy’s a big part of that, the private sector is what drives that, up and down, but we were in free-fall for three years and the last year of that I happened to be here and then we’ve turned it around as a state, private sector, government sector turned it around and now we’re adding jobs.

“We want to keep that going to the extent we can. We’re the, you know, we’re one part of that equation but not the whole thing. A lot of it is out of our control.”

I really shouldn’t be surprised, but quotes like these just amaze me. It’s almost as if Romney 2006 is endorsing Obama 2012.

The double standards are just extraordinary:

* Does the first year in office count? Romney says his first year doesn’t count, but Obama’s does.

* Does progress count? Romney says he’s a success because the economy went from losing jobs to adding jobs on his watch, but Obama’s a failure because the economy went from losing jobs to adding jobs on his watch?

* Does patience count? Romney says it’s “silly” to think a chief executive can turn an economy around immediately, except when he’s condemning Obama, when it’s fair and reasonable.

* Do inheritances count? Romney says what matters is that jobs were “falling off a cliff” when he took office, but when jobs were really “falling off a cliff” when Obama took office, voters aren’t supposed to care.

* Do excuses count? When Romney said, “A lot of it is out of our control,” it’s fine; when Obama says the same thing, it’s not.

* Does the public sector count? Romney said he helped turn the job market around by relying on, among other things, the “government sector.” But if Obama wants to do the same thing, the president is a misguided, big-government liberal.

Honestly, Obama could recite Romney’s comments, almost word for word, right now. And if he did, Romney, Republicans, and most of the media would reject it as unpersuasive, borderline desperate, spin.

The facts, however, are plain for anyone who cares about them. When Obama took office, the global economy was on the verge of collapse, the domestic economy was contracting at a level unseen since the Great Depression, the nation was hemorrhaging jobs, the American auto industry was collapsing, and we were shoveling money at Wall Street.

Nearly four years later, the economy is growing, America is adding jobs, the American auto industry is thriving, and the Obama administration made sure the Wall Street bailout was paid back.

By Mitt Romney’s own stated standards, President Obama has been a success. To argue otherwise is “silly.”

By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 6, 2012

July 8, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Obama Then And Now”: Breaking The Stalemate With A Superior Vision

President Obama’s bus tour through Ohio and Pennsylvania late last week offered a striking look at the evolution of a president. In 2008, Obama used soaring rhetoric and personal biography to talk about binding together a red-blue nation. His message today is about the urgent need to defeat a stubborn opposition party in order to move the country forward.

Four years ago, Obama used themes of hope and change to suggest that he could bring a new politics to Washington. He was open to the idea that, as he sometimes put it, the solutions to the country’s problems were somewhere between the rhetoric and visions of both parties. His goal, he said, was to help guide the country, through his leadership, to that imagined golden mean while sticking to his principles.

Today, the battle-scarred president who has met almost uniform resistance from the Republicans sees the world differently, or so it seems from the way he talked in Ohio and Pennsylvania. At nearly every stop, he made it clear that he sees November in the starkest of terms and that there can be but one winner. He asked supporters to help deliver a victory in November that would carry a message that his vision is superior to that of the Republicans.

In Maumee, Ohio, under a blazing sun on Thursday, he put it this way: “What’s holding us back from meeting our challenges — it’s not a lack of ideas, it’s not a lack of solutions. What’s holding us back is we’ve got a stalemate in Washington between these two visions of where the country needs to go. And this election is all about breaking that stalemate.”

On Friday morning in Poland, Ohio, just two hours after the latest jobs report showed another month of tepid growth: “We’ve got two fundamentally different ideas about where we should take the country. We’re trying to put Congress to work. And this election is about how we break that stalemate. And the good news is it’s in your power to break this stalemate.”

That is a change from the way he talked as a candidate in 2008. His message then was not so much about either-or choices. That was not the message he delivered when he first appeared on the national stage at the 2004 Democratic convention, nor was it the message he offered the night he scored his breakthrough victory in the 2008 Iowa caucuses that launched him toward the White House. He did not talk about elections as tiebreakers between two sides but of a country hungering for a new model for its politics.

“You came together as Democrats, Republicans and independents,” he said that night, “to stand up and say that we are one nation. We are one people . . . You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington; to end the political strategy that’s been all about division, and instead make it about addition; to build a coalition for change that stretches through red states and blue states.”

There was more to his message in 2008, certainly. He ran plenty of negative ads against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the Republican nominee. He drew distinctions between his ideas and those of Republican Party. He ran hard against then-President George W. Bush, especially the war in Iraq, and promised a change in direction.

But what resonated most was the aspirational side of his message. The country would meet its challenges only one way — together. Contrast that with the way he talked about the election as the sun was setting Thursday night in a park in Parma, Ohio. “There are two fundamentally different visions about how we move the country forward,” he said. “And the great thing about our democracy is you get to be the tiebreaker.”

There are obvious reasons why he sees things differently today. All presidents are changed by their experiences, and Obama’s battles, including polarized fights over the stimulus, health care, financial regulatory reform and ultimately the showdown over the debt ceiling, have given him a different perspective.

The turn came last summer. At this time in 2011, Obama was in the middle of negotiations with House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to raise the debt ceiling, talks that included a grand bargain to reduce the deficit and to begin to deal with the future costs of entitlement programs. Those talks later collapsed, amid recriminations and finger pointing.

Out of that debacle has come the rhetoric, from both sides, that frames the choice between the president and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the starkest of terms. Both Obama and Romney genuinely believe the other’s vision is deeply flawed, even dangerous for the country.

On both sides, it is a choice between black and white with little in between. On one side, it is seen as the threat of big government, shackles on the economy and an end to freedom. On the other side, it is seen as shredding the middle class in order to reward the rich. Swing voters in the middle are being asked to pick one side or the other, not to aspire to become part of the kind of united coalition of Democrats, Republicans and independents that Obama talked about in 2008.

Many Democrats say it’s about time that the president got tough, that he spent too much time trying to negotiate with Republicans who weren’t interested in negotiating with him. At the White House, the 2012 campaign really began in the aftermath of the debt ceiling debate. Let the voters settle what Washington politicians cannot.

The president may believe that by asking voters to break the tie — by delivering him a second term — Americans would be voting for an end to stalemated politics in Washington — sending a message to Republicans that they should finally start to bargain with him rather than opposing him.

So as he spoke across Ohio’s northern tier, there were faint echoes of 2008. “I’m not a Democrat first,” he told the audience in Maumee. “I’m an American first. I believe we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. And I believe what’s stopping us is not our capacity to meet our challenges. What’s stopping us is our politics. And that’s something you have the power to solve.”

But at its core, Obama’s message has shifted. The urgency in his appeal is grounded in his conviction that this is an election about ideas and policies and political philosophies, that the country faces a crucial moment and a clear choice. The country is in a far different place than it was when he first ran for office, and he is in a far different battle. And he has decided how he will fight it between now and November.

 

By: Dan Balz, The Take, The Washington Post, July 7, 2012

July 8, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Mitt Romney Has No Principles”: President Obama Tells It Like It Is

Campaigns often feature a division of labor when it comes to speaking about the candidate’s opponent, one in which the candidate makes polite but firm criticism, while the surrogates (campaign staff, other elected officials) say much harsher and more personal things. A good campaign makes sure that the two proceed along the same thematic lines so that they reinforce one another, but the fact that the candidate himself is more genteel in his language is supposed to preclude a backlash against him for being too “negative.” Frankly, I’ve always thought this is overblown, particularly the strange custom whereby it’s deemed a bit unseemly to refer to your opponent by name, such that saying “Mitt Romney is a jackass” would be horribly uncouth, but saying “My opponent is a jackass” is somehow more acceptable.

As the campaign goes on, this protocol fades away. Candidates’ comments take on a harder edge, beginning to resemble the comments their staffs make. It seems we may be entering this phase, as witnessed by this, which Obama said in an interview yesterday:

And the fact that a whole bunch of Republicans in Washington suddenly said, this is a tax—for six years he said it wasn’t, and now he has suddenly reversed himself. So the question becomes, are you doing that because of politics? Are you abandoning a principle that you fought for, for six years simply because you’re getting pressure for two days from Rush Limbaugh or some critics in Washington?

One of the things that you learn as President is that what you say matters and your principles matter. And sometimes, you’ve got to fight for things that you believe in and you can’t just switch on a dime.

That last part sounds identical to the things George W. Bush said about John Kerry in 2004, and it’s more personal than what we usually hear from Obama when he talks about Romney. Obama is talking about this not because a majority of the public agrees with him on the Affordable Care Act (it’s a wash) but because it is all but impossible for Mitt Romney to talk about health care without twisting himself into a logical pretzel that reinforces everything people believe about him being a flip-flopper. The personal attack (Mitt Romney is unprincipled) is the point, not the substantive attack (Mitt Romney flip-flopped on the mandate).

The election is in four months, and I think we’ll be hearing more and more of these kinds of criticisms from Obama. One of the big reasons is that when David Axelrod says Mitt Romney has no principles, it isn’t news, but when Barack Obama says it, it is.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 6, 2012

July 7, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“No Guilt On Mother’s Day”: President Obama Is His Mother’s Son

Barack Obama’s mother died on Nov. 7, 1995, a few weeks before her 53rd birthday. She was less than two years older than the president is now. Her death from uterine cancer came between two key events in her son’s life. Four months earlier “Dreams From My Father” had been published; it seemed destined to drown unnoticed in the deep ocean of books. One year later Obama won his first election, to the Illinois state Senate, the initial stop on his swift journey to the White House that, along the way, brought a mass audience to that forgotten memoir, which in its best-selling revival defined his political image and provided him with lifelong financial security.

The title of the book was at once understandable and misleading. Obama barely knew his father except in dreams, or nightmares. He spent time with the old man only once, when he was 10, for an unsatisfying month. It is harsh to say but nonetheless likely that Barack Obama II was lucky never to have lived with Barack Obama Sr., an abusive alcoholic. By far the most influential figures in Obama’s early life were his mother and grandmother. He has some of the demeanor of his grandmother and the will and much of the outlook of his mother. “Dreams From My Mother” better evokes his life’s story.

She was a woman of many names. Born Stanley Ann Dunham, she assumed, as most people did, that her unusual first name was imposed by her father. An uncle tells a different story, attributing the choice to Madelyn Dunham, Stanley Ann’s mother, who as a small-town Kansas girl yearned to emulate Bette Davis, the sophisticated actress she saw on the big screen at the air-conditioned Augusta Theater. While Madelyn was pregnant, Davis was starring in a movie in which she played a female character named Stanley. (As it happened, no two people could have been less alike than Madelyn’s daughter and this film character, who was cruel, cunning and racist.) Stanley Ann became Stannie Ann in grade school, Stanley in high school and, finally, Ann in adulthood. Her last name changed as often, from Dunham to Obama to Soetoro to a final spelling of Sutoro.

By any name, she was a searcher. She married a Kenyan and an Indonesian (both marriages collapsed; the first quickly, the second slowly) and spent most of her adult life overseas. She was constantly on the move. She earned a doctorate in anthropology and had an anthropologist’s nature as a participant observer, a character trait shared by her son. She was fascinated by other cultures and ways of living. A polyglot, she could speak Bahasa Indonesia fluently and had a working knowledge of Urdu, Hindi, Javanese, French and Latin. There was never a foreign film she did not want to see, a batik dress she did not want to wear, a mythology she did not wish to understand. In Indonesia, where she spent most of her adult life, she became obsessed with the work of rural blacksmiths, who were said to forge human souls. She devoted herself later to helping Javanese women maintain their handicraft livelihoods in a male-dominated society that practiced what she called “the gentle oppression” of women. She would wake up before dawn every morning and, in notebooks with the black-and-white speckled covers, record her travels, her encounters and her hopes for people, including her only son.

Barack Obama’s relationship with his mother was complicated. She called him Barry or Bar (sounds like bear). She pushed him to be serious and to look at people with empathy. He always felt protective of her, according to his memoir. He describes a scene in which she told him that she intended to marry Lolo Soetoro and that, after the marriage, they would all live in Indonesia. As Obama recalls it, he turned to her and asked, “But do you love him?” — a question that made her chin tremble. It was, at the least, precocious. At the time he was only only 31 / 2. But it was also in keeping with one of the themes that weaves through his dealings with his mother over the years — that she was naive and idealistic, sometimes too good for her own good. In the journal that his New York girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, kept during their time together in the early 1980s, Cook wrote, “Told me the other night of having pushed his mother away over past 2 years in an effort to extract himself from the role of supporting man in her life — she feels rejected and has withdrawn somewhat.”

Ann once joked that she had children with a Kenyan and an Indonesian so that the kids would not have light skin and get sunburns. She herself looked like a Kansas schoolmarm, she noted, which made it easy for her to sail through Customs during her foreign comings and goings. Barry, the hapa Kenyan, and his little sister Maya, the hapa Indonesian, could never say the same. The mother and her two children struggled to find their identities, but in very different ways. Ann found hers through her work and travels, a lifestyle that, among other things, meant she and her son were apart for most of his adolescence, he in Honolulu with his grandparents, she in Indonesia. The search for identity was more psychological for her children, something that Maya said her mother must have understood but never fully acknowledged. In her career, Ann was idealistic but not naive. If she at times came across as naive to her children, it was in the role of a mother not wanting her children to suffer.

“She made sure that laughter was the prevailing form of communication and that nothing ever became acrimonious and that everything was pretty and everything was sacred,” Maya told me during an interview. “Maybe she didn’t want us to suffer with identity. She wanted us to think of it as a gift. The fact that we were multilayered and multidimensional and multiracial — it meant that she was perhaps unprepared when we did struggle with issues of identity. She was not really able to help us grapple with that in any nuanced way. Perhaps she felt that if she did acknowledge the difficulty of it, she would feel guilty.”

No guilt on Mother’s Day. Barack Obama’s mother, by any name, did not live to see her son’s rise, but she shaped the essence of this president.

By: David Maraniss, The Washington Post Opinions, May 11, 2012

May 13, 2012 Posted by | Mothers Day | , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Discussions In The Quiet Room”: Bipartisanship Was Never Part Of The GOP Plan

Republicans never planned on working with President Obama.

This hasn’t received enough attention:

As President Barack Obama was celebrating his inauguration at various balls, top Republican lawmakers and strategists were conjuring up ways to submarine his presidency at a private dinner in Washington. […]

According to Draper, the guest list that night (which was just over 15 people in total) included Republican Reps. Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) and Dan Lungren (Calif.), along with Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.). The non-lawmakers present included Newt Gingrich, several years removed from his presidential campaign, and Frank Luntz, the long-time Republican wordsmith. Notably absent were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) — who, Draper writes, had an acrimonious relationship with Luntz.

For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama’s legislative platform.

In other words, there was nothing President Obama could have done to build common ground with Republicans. From the beginning, the plan was to relentlessly obstruct Obama, regardless of whether that was good for the country The GOP’s high-minded rhetoric of compromise and bipartisanship was bunk; cover for a plan to keep Democrats from accomplishing anything. It’s truly remarkable, and in an ideal world, would color any attempts from the GOP to portray itself as the victim of Democratic partisanship.

 

By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, April 26, 2012

April 27, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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