“A Shared Tribal Identy”: Romney’s Birther “Joke” Wasn’t A Joke
After weeks of false attacks on welfare, Romney has lost the benefit of the doubt.
This afternoon, while campaigning in Michigan, Mitt Romney made a little joke about President Obama’s birth certificate: http://youtu.be/cht3bitxknI
Here’s the text:
I love being home, in this place where Ann and I were raised. Where both of us were born … No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.
Here’s the Obama campaign’s response:
Throughout this campaign, Governor Romney has embraced the most strident voices in his party instead of standing up to them. It’s one thing to give the stage in Tampa to Donald Trump, Sheriff Arpaio, and Kris Kobach. But Governor Romney’s decision to directly enlist himself in the birther movement should give pause to any rational voter across America.
Naturally, Team Romney is trying to stop this from becoming a national story, and the campaign has offered a variety of excuses why Romney made the joke. My favorite comes from Romney advisor Kevin Madden. “The governor has always said, and has repeatedly said, he believes the president was born here in the United States,” Madden said. “He was only referencing that Michigan, where he is campaigning today, is the state where he himself was born and raised.”
Right.
Now, it’s unquestionably true that Mitt Romney isn’t a birther. He knows that President Obama was born in the United States and is fully eligible to serve as President of the United States.
But that isn’t an excuse, it’s an indictment.
Romney’s problem, throughout this campaign, has been his inability to seal the deal with skeptical conservatives. In the primaries, this forced him to take far-right positions on issues like abortion and immigration—he endorsed personhood amendments and “self-deportation”—and in the general election, it has led him to make a huge gamble by choosing Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan—whose plan for Medicare plan and views on reproductive rights are widely unpopular—as his running mate. If Romney were confident in his ability to win the GOP base, he would have gone with someone more moderate. But as it stands, he needed a conservative ideologue on the ticket to show his fealty to the movement.
The birther joke is further evidence that Romney is uncertain of his standing with the Republican base. It’s clear from the video that this was an intentional move to establish a shared tribal identity, and—judging from their laughter and obvious approval—that’s how it was understood by the largely white audience.
A plausible objection to this view is that Romney wasn’t trying to make a dogwhistle—that it was a harmless joke which went awry because of a bad delivery. Indeed, to push back against the emerging outrage, some journalists noted occasions when President Obama made birther jokes, while others set this as the other side of Obama’s snarky comments about Romney’s infamous incident with the family dog.
A few thoughts.
First, the video strongly suggests that this wasn’t a joke. Romney assumes a certain demeanor when he is joking in public—”ingratiating” is the word that comes to mind—and this had more in common with the Romney of debates and speeches: cool, controlled and confident.
But even if it was a joke, it’s important to understand the context. For the last month, Romney has devoted his campaign to falsely accuse Obama of gutting welfare’s work requirements (“You wouldn’t have to work, and wouldn’t have to train for a job”) This claim has been debunked by independent fact checkers, pundits, and major news organizations.
In each instance, analysts have noted the extent to which this attack is meant to play on racial fears and resentments. Romney’s welfare ads are meant to conjure images of “young bucks” and “welfare queens,” and are a callback to Newt Gingrich’s declaration of Obama as a “food stamp president.” Romney’s line on welfare is a mainstay of his stump speeches, and has been deployed whenever he’s addressing a crowd of working-class whites. Romney’s victory depends on winning a huge share of the white vote, to do so, he’s decided to play the politics of white resentment in the most explicit way possible.
If this were a stray remark, I would be willing to give Romney the benefit of the doubt. But given the background and context, I simply can’t believe that Romney made a mistake with his birther joke. It fits too well with everything else he’s done.
Between birtherism, the accusations of illegitimacy and the constant recourse to racialized attacks, it’s hard to deny that there’s something ugly lurking beneath right-wing opposition to Obama. Mitt Romney, who seeks to represent the 300 million people of this country, has decided to unleash it.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, August 24, 2012
“Witchy Woman”: Republicans Line Up To Rip Michele Bachmann
They were long afraid to do it, but now conservatives have their knives out for Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Senators in her own party, congressional candidates, a lawmaker in her state’s delegation and leaders of the House Republican Conference are all lambasting the Minnesota Republican for saying the wife of former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said merely floating the idea that Huma Abedin — a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — has family ties to the radical Middle East group is “pretty dangerous.”
“I don’t know Huma, but from everything I do know of her, she has a sterling character,” Boehner told reporters Thursday. “And I think accusations like this being thrown around are pretty dangerous.” Later on CNN, Boehner said he expects to speak to Bachmann soon.
Bachmann’s accusation came in a handful of letters to intelligence and national security agencies raising questions about the Muslim Brotherhood. The letters, also signed by four other Republicans, specifically mentioned Abedin, accusing her late father of having ties to the Brotherhood.
Boehner declined to entertain a reporter’s question about whether he would toss Bachmann off the Intelligence Committee, where she’s privy to highly classified information. Behind the scenes, leadership aides said they were shaken by the comments from someone as prominent as Bachmann.
And Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was described by several sources as incredibly angry when he heard of the incident.
The Republican backlash against Bachmann started with Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) statement on the Senate floor Wednesday, saying she had made “sinister accusations.”
Rep. Jeff Flake, a conservative Arizona lawmaker running for Senate, tweeted “Kudos to @SenJohnMcCain for his statement on Senate floor yesterday defending Clinton aide. Well said.”
Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) added: “Rep. Bachmann’s accusations about Sec. Clinton aide Huma Abedin are out-of-line. This kind of rhetoric has no place in our public discourse.”
Even the Minnesota delegation is dispensing with its characteristic niceness. Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim who served in the state Legislature with Bachmann in St. Paul, said it’s not personal, but Bachmann is out of line.
“It’s not right to question the loyalty of fellow Americans without any evidence,” said Ellison, whose district is based in Minneapolis. “I object when people do that.”
Bachmann has said her letters “are unfortunately being distorted.”
And while she did not specifically mention Abedin in a follow-up comment, Bachmann is not backing down from her premise of looking into threats from the Muslim Brotherhood: “I will not be silent as this administration appeases our enemies instead of telling the truth about the threats our country faces.”
She elaborated during an interview Thursday with conservative radio host Glenn Beck.
“She is the chief aide … to the Secretary of State,” Bachmann said of Abedin. “And we quoted from the document, and this has been well reported all across Arab media, that her father, her late father who is now deceased was a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, her brother was a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, and her mother was part of what’s called the Muslim Sisterhood.”
Yet more and more Republicans seem to feel more comfortable coming out publicly against Bachmann now — perhaps because she’s no longer engaged in a presidential primary and has returned to the House as a rank-and-file lawmaker.
Ed Rollins, her former presidential campaign manager, said in a post on Fox News’s website that Bachmann has “difficulty with her facts.”
Former New Jersey GOP Gov. Christine Todd Whitman wrote in POLITICO’s Arena, that “the sort of unfounded attack unleashed by Congresswoman Bachmann and her [colleagues] brings back painful memories of a low point in our history.”
Former Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, a recently retired Florida Republican, said “Michele means well but she sometimes doesn’t let proven facts get in the way of a possibility of having national television coverage.”
“Michele would be better served by having competent staff to check out these accusations before she goes out there sometimes appearing to be a ‘bomb thrower,’” Brown-Waite wrote on POLITICO.
Bachmann’s fundraising prowess remains impressive, but requests for donations seem dire. One last month was labeled “URGENT note from Michele,” and urged folks to pony up for her reelection effort against a self-funder who she said “will be able to keep pouring in millions of his own money to defeat me.” Her opponent is Jim Graves, a Minnesota businessman.
“My opponent just released his financial numbers and it will blow you away. His net worth is approximately $111 million. Yes, you read that correctly. One hundred and eleven million dollars,” according to a fundraising email June 26.
She remains a top House fundraiser, bringing in $1.8 million in the second quarter, bringing the total in her campaign account to $1.72 million. At this point in the previous cycle, she had $2.4 million on hand.
The question many Republicans and Democrats alike ask is whether her district — outside St. Paul — truly cares about issues like the allegations she made regarding Abedin.
“They know what she says, they know what she does,” Ellison told POLITICO. “Her district knows her. They know her well. We came into this place together. My district knows me, her district knows her. I guess they either like what she’s saying or they don’t dislike it enough to get rid of her. That’s it.”
By: Jake Sherman, Politico, July 19, 2012
“Nothing Personal, Just Policy”: Let Me Guess, Mitt Romney Has Gay Friends
George W. Bush has gay friends. So does Sarah Palin. Amazingly, so does Rick Santorum. And let me guess: soon Mitt Romney will, too.
Every Republican politician seems to have at least one gay friend these days. That’s not too difficult: even if you tried, it would be hard to live and work in America without meeting at least one openly gay person you can get along with. But for a right-wing politician having gay friends, shall we say, has benefits. These unnamed, unseen gay friends send a message that an anti-gay politician isn’t a hater. I mean, how can you hate your friends? It’s just policy, nothing personal.
Of course, the problem is that it is personal. Having gay friends doesn’t absolve one of anti-gay prejudice any more than loving one’s wife and daughters absolves one of defunding Planned Parenthood. Even if you’d be happy to have gay people over to dinner, that doesn’t give you a pass to deny them fundamental rights.
The “gay friends” defense is weak, but popular. And Mitt Romney, scrambling to clarify his position on equal rights after President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality, must be considering it right about now.
Romney has always been careful to stipulate that his various and elusive anti-gay policies have nothing to do with any personal anti-gay animus. This strategy was clear in a 2006 speech to the right-wing Family Research Council, recently unearthed by PFAW’s Right Wing Watch. In it, taking homophobia to a whole new level, the candidate declares that “the price of same-sex marriage is paid by the children” and amazingly asserts that marriage equality is the result of “spreading secular religion and its substitute values.” He then offers a spoon full a sugar with a call for an “outpouring of respect and tolerance for all people” and laughably encourages his listeners to “vigorously protest discrimination and bigotry.”
When President Obama announced last week that he supports marriage equality, Romney responded by repeating his opposition to not only marriage equality but also to civil unions. He then insisted that same-sex couples have the “right” to “have a loving relationship, or even to adopt a child.” The next day, he changed his mind about the adoption part. The day after that, he delivered a commencement address to Liberty University, which bans openly gay students and is allied with some of the most vile anti-gay rhetoric in the Religious Right today.
But none of this wavering matches Romney’s recent, brief hiring of an openly gay staffer, foreign policy spokesman Richard Grenell. A Republican adviser told the New York Times after Grenell was forced out of Romney’s campaign, “It’s not that the campaign cared whether Ric Grenell was gay. They believed this was a nonissue. But they didn’t want to confront the religious right.” Increasingly, when it comes to choosing between basic dignity and futile attempts to appease the far right, the mainstream GOP has been choosing the far right.
Unfortunately for Romney, the Religious Right, the object of his caving, isn’t buying his frantic attempts to pander. The most outspoken critic of Romney’s decision to hire Grenell quickly, the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, became the most outspoken critic of the decision to fire him. “How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me?” Fischer demanded.
It has to give at least some Republicans pause that the far right has become so extreme, and Republican leaders have become so subservient to their demands, that it is now not even possible to have any gay people work for a GOP campaign.
But soon Mitt Romney will tell us that he has gay friends.
By: MIchael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, may 15, 2012
“Atta Girl”: Mitt Romney Was A High School Gay-Bashing Bully
Mitt Romney, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, was a gay-bashing high school bully who said, “Atta girl,” to effeminate boys and shockingly had a days-long emotional attack that culminated with him pinning down a gay classmate and cutting off his bleached-blond long hair. Governor Romney claims he has no memory of any of these incidents that date back to 1965, according to a lengthy and heart-wrenching exposé in today’s Washington Post. An excerpt:
John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.
“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”
“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”
The Post article concludes with an emotional note about John Lauber:
He came out as gay to his family and close friends and led a vagabond life, taking dressage lessons in England and touring with the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders.
His hair thinned as he aged, and in the winter of 2004 he returned to Seattle, the closest thing he had to a base. He died there of liver cancer that December.
He kept his hair blond until he died, said his sister Chris. “He never stopped bleaching it.”
But Lauber was not the only target for the gay-bashing Mitt Romney.
In an English class, Gary Hummel, who was a closeted gay student at the time, recalled that his efforts to speak out in class were punctuated with Romney shouting, “Atta girl!” In the culture of that time and place, that was not entirely out of the norm. Hummel recalled some teachers using similar language.
Saul, Romney’s campaign spokeswoman, said the candidate has no recollection of the incident.
Yes, it was 1965, a different time, when these acts of anti-gay bullying were not just ignored or accepted, but often condoned.
But the handful of Mitt Romney’s classmates who either participated or didn’t stop it, not only remember his gay-bashing, they feel terrible about it. For Romney to not remember, and thus not be affected by his own gay-bashing, speaks volumes about his character.
The Romney campaign, and others, no doubt would say it was 1965. It doesn’t matter. But Mitt Romney married his wife Ann in 1969, just four years later, and that certainly matters in his campaign.
And they have on their campaign website a video that shows Mitt’s life, beginning with 1968, with the note:
“I think there’s one word that would be high on my list of a few words you would describe Mitt with. It would be trust. I think the qualities Mitt would bring to the Oval Office would be integrity, intelligence, an ability to see a problem and see a solution and make people recognize that he has those leadership qualities that would unite many people.” – Ann Romney
At what point do your actions matter?
By: David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement, May 10, 2012
“The Bigots Win”: North Carolina Passes Constitutional Amendment Bannig Marriage Equality
Sadly, as predicted, voters in North Carolina passed Amendment One, the law that bans already-banned same-sex marriage and tacks on a gratuitous “and no civil unions, either.” As Joan McCarter explained:
There would be no more legal unions between unmarried people, gay or straight. It could take health care benefits away from families, it could take away domestic violence protections, hospital visitation rights, and all the very basic protections of civil unions.
That’s why just about everyone—including North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue, former President Bill Clinton (and his daughter), Episcopal bishops, hundreds of business leaders, religious leaders, and members of both parties—opposed it. Because it’s hateful and wrong. But apparently, the state’s voters disagreed.
Way to go, North Carolina. You must be so proud.
By: Kaili Joy Gray, Daily Kos, May 8, 2012
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