“Blood Money Brothers”: Why Mitt Romney Is Embracing Birther Donald Trump
So Mitt Romney’s newest fundraising effort involves not only appearing with the world’s most famous birther, Donald Trump, but also dining with him and a lucky, raffle-winning supporter. OK, I give up: What exactly is Romney thinking?
My own snarky first reaction is that Donald Trump is the kind of rich guy that Mitt Romney imagines the common people can relate to. Romney, remember, has a habit of saying things like he doesn’t follow NASCAR “as closely as some of the most ardent fans, but I have some friends who are NASCAR team owners.” Maybe he thinks Trump—known far and wide for a decorating style that gives new meaning to the word vulgar—has the common touch in a way that stolid Romney doesn’t? That can’t be it, right?
Thinking I must be missing something here, I checked with a couple of top GOP operatives. “I got nothin’,” one says. Another offers the Godfather theory for dealing with Trump: “Yes, it reinforces the ‘I have wealthy friends’ stereotype,” the Republican strategist says. “And whenever Trump says something stupid it’s magnified 10-fold, so there are serious downsides to it. But in the end you would rather embrace it—like the Godfather line about keeping your enemies close.” It’s better to have Trump running amok inside the tent than causing trouble outside of it, in other words. Trump, remember, has floated the idea of a third-party candidacy, which could only serve to divide the anti-Obama vote (a December Public Policy Polling survey had Trump pulling 19 percent in a three-way race with Obama and Romney, with 7 in 10 of his supporters coming from Romney’s column). “We’d rather have Donald Trump saying ‘you’re hired’ than ‘you’re fired,” the strategist says.
Maybe so. But Trump has become inextricably linked to the birther movement, and he won’t shut up about it. Just this week, he spoke to the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove and after getting the preliminaries out of the way (saying he’s “honored” that Team Romney wants him and his Las Vegas hotel to help fundraise), then Trump “launched into a furious disquisition concerning Obama’s place of birth.” To be clear: Trump wasn’t unwillingly goaded into spouting his Obama-was-born-in-Kenya theories. He practically lead with them.
From the Beast:
“Look, it’s very simple,” said Trump, who has spent the past 13 months questioning Obama’s constitutional eligibility to occupy the White House (and only doubled down with his stubborn skepticism after Obama produced a long-form birth certificate, certifying he was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Hawaii[)], … “A book publisher came out three days ago and said that in his written synopsis of his book,” Trump went on, “he said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. His mother never spent a day in the hospital.”
Actually, Obama’s literary agency at the time, two decades ago, published a recently discovered catalogue of clients and their projects that included erroneous information about Obama and a prospective book about race that he ended up not writing. An agency assistant back then, Miriam Goderich, said last week that she was mistaken when she wrote that Obama was born in Kenya.
But Trump isn’t buying it.
At what point does Romney throw up his hands and run screaming from this guy? Trump isn’t simply off-message, talking about something other than the economy, he’s dangerously off-message, reminding anyone who will listen that a nontrivial portion of the GOP has been taken over by conspiracy theorist weirdos.
Maybe Romney thinks Trump can help shore up his support with the conservative base? That seems dubious. The most recent poll numbers for Trump I could find were a year old, but after briefly leading the GOP field last year, the Apprentice host had cratered in opinion surveys. As of May 2011, 34 percent of GOPers viewed Trump favorably while 53 percent viewed him unfavorably. This was mere weeks after he was leading the field.
Nevertheless, the Romney campaign has invited supporters to contribute $3 for the chance to win dinner with the Mittster and the Donald. This is a copy of the Obama campaign’s $3 low dollar fundraising efforts where dinner with the president has been raffled off (such a small amount not only adds up, but also gives people buy-in, making them more likely to support the campaign financially and in other ways down the line).
While the GOP offers dinner with Trump and Romney, the Democrats are asking for $3 for a chance to dine with Obama and Bill Clinton. Honestly, while dinner with the current and former president would no doubt be more interesting and intellectually stimulating, there is a certain freak show appeal to watching Romney and Trump interact. And freak show does sell.
Maybe Trump really is Romney’s idea of a rich guy with the common touch.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, May 25, 2012
“A Responsibility To The Truth”: Why Is There A Resurgence Of Congressional Birtherism?
There is no serious debate over whether Barack Obama is an American citizen. He is.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from saying otherwise. For example, Rep. Vicky Hartzler, a Republican representing Missouri’s 4th district. Following the standard template for these things, she was asked by a constituent at a town hall about the president’s birth certificate. And following the template, she failed to denounce or even disagree with this disproven idea:
I don’t know, I haven’t seen it. I’m just at the same place you are on that. You read this, you read that. But I don’t understand why he didn’t show that right away. I mean, if someone asked for my birth certificate, I’d get my baby book and hand it out and say ‘Here it is,’ so I don’t know …. I have doubts that it is really his real birth certificate, and I think a lot of Americans do, but they claim it is, so we are just going to go with that.
A spokesman clarified her comments to Politicotoday, but the explanation neither addressed her statement nor her actual views; after all, she repeated the statements to a reporter immediately following the original meeting.
Crazy, right? But not isolated. In March, Rep. Cliff Stearns — the man whose questions about Planned Parenthood led to the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision to cut off funding for the organization — made similar comments. “All I can tell you is that the general consensus is that he has produced a birth certificate,” he said. “The question is, is it legitimate? That’s where we stand now.” When I contacted Stearns spokesman Paul Flusche to ask about it, his response was, “This office won’t comment on every video posted by liberal groups” — as though the video had somehow been conjured without Stearns’ involvement.
I’m on the record as objecting to polls about Obama’s (or really anyone’s) religion or place of birth because they reinforce a false impression. There are facts here; and opinion is really irrelevant. But it’s a different situation with elected officials, who have a certain responsibility to the truth. There’s no acceptable excuse for Stearns or Hartzler. Stearns is locked in a tight primary (his opponent even accused him of trying to bribe him out of the race, which Stearns denies), so perhaps it’s a panicked pander. Hartzler, on the other hand, appears to be in a safe GOP district: Although she unseated Democrat Ike Skelton two years ago, the district is quite red and he was something of a vestigial presence.
If members of Congress truly believe that the president isn’t an American citizen, then they surely have the obligation to single-mindedly focus on proving that and ejecting him from office. But since they almost certainly don’t believe it and just as certainly can’t prove it (since it’s false), they instead have an obligation to speak out against birtherism. Unfortunately, as members of Congress spend more time mixing with constituents as they campaign, we’re only likely to hear more incidents along these lines.
By: David A. Graham, Associate Editor, The Atlantic Magazine, April 9, 2012
“Still Not Fully American”: Republicans Keep Moving Obama To Europe
This is what progress looks like for a president named Barack Hussein Obama.
Not so long ago, many in conservative and Republican ranks were eager to paint him as an alien creature far removed from American life as most Americans understand it. A determined cadre insisted Obama was not even eligible to be president, claiming he was born outside the United States. Obama eventually put that to rest by making public his birth certificate, which proved he was born in Hawaii.
Fox News falsely reported that he had attended a “madrassa” during his childhood in Indonesia. (He actually went to a public, non-religious school.) And Newt Gingrich concluded that Obama exhibited “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior,” a strange description that’s hard to square with such Obama undertakings as ordering the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Obama’s adversaries have not thrown in the towel in their efforts to distance him from his own country. But they are bringing him closer and closer to home.
Thus did Mitt Romney’s victory speech after the New Hampshire primary link Obama to Europe not once or twice but three times. Obama, Romney said, “wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society” and “takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe” as opposed to “the cities and small towns of America.”
“I want you to remember when our White House reflected the best of who we are,” Romney declared, “not the worst of what Europe has become.”
So Obama is still not fully American, in Romney’s telling. But conservatives talk a great deal about defending and preserving Western civilization, which we share with our European friends. So moving Obama from Indonesia and Kenya to Europe seems like a big concession for their side. Who knows? In a few months, Obama might even be moved to some midpoint in the Atlantic.
The Europeanization of Obama is progress in another way. Not so long ago, it was common for the extreme right to accuse liberals of harboring a desire to turn the U.S. into a Soviet-style communist state. Now that the Soviet Union is dead — and China, which claims to be communist, is pioneering an anti-democratic capitalist model — that particular libel is passe. If the very worst the liberals are trying to do is mimic European social democracy, that sure beats creating gulags or imposing commissars.
The most benign reading of Romney’s speech is that he is suggesting Obama’s economic policies will send us into a crisis like the one that has engulfed the European Union. This charge is nonsense. Like it or not, the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have been far more aggressive than their European counterparts in protecting our financial institutions from the sorts of problems that European banks face. And we have a strong federal government, which the European Union lacks. A crisis in Rhode Island would not threaten the nation the way a meltdown in Greece affects the E.U.
And the core premise of Romney’s claim is untrue. The notion that Obama wants to turn the United States into a “European-style entitlement society” is laughable. It’s not even a fair description of Europe, which boasts of some highly productive and innovative capitalist economies. As for Obama, he has bent over backward to strengthen market capitalism, sometimes to the consternation of his own supporters. Yes, Obama is trying to get more people health insurance. Is that a bad idea just because the Europeans have done a better job of this than we have?
But by far the biggest flaw in Romney’s Euro-Obama riff is the implication that there is something terribly wrong about learning from Europe. The genius of the American character is that we have always been willing to take lessons from any country that had something to teach us. We don’t turn away from good ideas just because they didn’t originate here. We refine them and adjust them to suit our needs and our tradition. Openness is an American strength.
Two fine historians, James Kloppenberg and Daniel Rodgers, have written illuminating books on how progressive ideas crisscrossed the Atlantic at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were all happy to learn from Europe. Were they un-American? Then again, no one ever accused them of “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior.” Is it asking too much of Obama’s opponents to acknowledge once and for all that he is really and truly American?
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 15, 2012
No Brains In The Head: Truly The Dumbest `American Exceptionalism’ Attack Yet
I didn’t think the right’s “American exceptionalism” attack on Obama could get any dumber, but Sarah Palin has now outdone them all. She’s now faulting Obama for insufficient praise for our armed forces:
She also made a slight dig at President Obama for saying Monday at Arlington National Cemetery that his “most solemn responsibility as president [is] to serve as commander in chief of one of the finest fighting forces in the world.” Answering a question about Memorial Day, Palin said, “This is the greatest fighting force in the world, the U.S. military. It’s not just one of the greatest fighting forces. And I sure hope our president recognizes that. We’re not just one of many. We are the best.”
As it happens, the reporter got Obama’s quote a bit wrong. This is what Obama actually said: “It is my most solemn responsibility as President, to serve as Commander-in-Chief of one of the finest fighting forces the world has ever known.” But this isn’t good enough for Palin: If Obama doesn’t say that our armed forces are the bestest, baddest, most ass kicking-ist fighting forces in all of human history, he’s subtly denigrating the troops.
This is a reminder, if you needed one, that the charge that Obama doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism — which has taken literally dozens of forms now — will be central to the 2012 campaign. It’s also a reminder, though, of what this attack line is really about. It’s impossible to imagine that a significant number of voters could hear Palin’s latest attack and come away thinking there’s something to it; her claim is just too dumb for people to take seriously. But these sorts of attacks aren’t about the actual claims themselves.
Rather, they are part of a much broader effort to insinuate that you should find Obama’s character, story, motives, identity, cultural instincts and intentions towards our country to be alien and fundamentally suspect. The idea is to keep piling various versions of this charge — no matter how ludicrous — on top of one another, like snow piling up on a roof.
Mitt Romney has already made it completely plain that various versions of this insinuation will be a major feature of the 2012 GOP nominee’s argument against Obama. Donald Trump’s experiment in birther hucksterism — even though it crashed and burned — confirmed this beyond any doubt. Now Palin is at it, too.
Hearing this kind of thing from Palin actually makes me want her to run. Who better than her to reveal how vacuous, childish, jingoistic and unbecoming of the presidency this sort of nonsense really is?
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, May 31, 2011
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