“Pathological Dishonesty”: On The Campaign Trail With Mitt Romney
Paul Krugman argued today that Mitt Romney “is running a campaign of almost pathological dishonesty.” That need not be considered hyperbole.
Indeed, Greg Sargent added this morning that Romney’s “falsehoods and all around dissembling” may be designed to “simply wear reporters and commentators down by trafficking in them so heavily that they throw up their hands and give up on trying to track or debunk them.”
But I remain undeterred. A couple of months ago, I launched a Friday afternoon feature, highlighting the most offensive Mitt Romney falsehoods of the week. It moved to Maddow Blog a few weeks ago, so let’s keep this going with another installment.
1. Romney told an audience in Arizona this week, in reference to President Obama, “He said he’d cut the deficit in half. He’s doubled it. He’s doubled it.”
For an alleged numbers guy, Romney is either lying or he’s bad at arithmetic. When Obama took office, the deficit was about $1.3 trillion. Last year, it was $1.29 trillion. This year, it’s on track to be about $1.1 trillion. Does Romney not know what “double” means?
2. On health care, Romney argued, “Our bill [Romneycare] was 70 pages; his bill [Obamacare] is 2,700 pages.”
This not just a dumb argument, it’s also not true.
3. On foreign policy, Romney said, “[T]his president should have put in place crippling sanctions against Iran, he did not.”
Actually, he did.
4. Romney claimed that Syria is Iran’s “route to the sea.”
Iran has 1,520 miles of its own coastline — and doesn’t share a border with Syria.
5. Romney boasted, “I also served in the Olympics, balanced a budget there.”
Well, that’s not entirely right. He hired lobbyists to get a taxpayer bailout for the Olympics and then balanced the budget.
6. Romney claimed, “You can’t be, I don’t believe, anything but a fiscal conservative and run a business, because if you don’t balance your budget, you go out of business.”
That’s both untrue and ridiculous. Businesses operate in the red all the time, and take out loans for capital improvements, expansions, acquisitions, etc. If Romney’s background is in the private sector, how could he not know this?
7. On contraception access, Romney argued, “I don’t think we’ve seen in the history of this country the kind of attack on religious conscience, religious freedom, religious tolerance that we’ve seen under Barack Obama.”
That’s so ridiculous, even Romney couldn’t actually mean that.
8. Also on contraception access, Romney said, “[The Obama administration is] requiring the Catholic Church to provide for its employees and its various enterprises health care insurance that would include birth control, sterilization and the morning-after pill. Unbelievable.”
Yes, it’s literally unbelievable, because he’s lying: churches are exempt. (He’s also contradicting his own previous position.)
9. On the Affordable Care Act, Romney said, “I will repeal Obamacare for a lot of reasons. One, I don’t want to spend another trillion dollars… Number two, I don’t believe the federal government should cut Medicare by some $500 billion.”
One, the ACA saves money and reduces the deficit. Number two, the Medicare claim continues to be wildly misleading.
10. On Pentagon spending, Romney claimed, “This is a president who is … cutting our military budget by roughly a trillion dollars.”
That’s not even close to being true.
11. On international affairs, Romney argued about the president, “He decided to give Russia their number one foreign policy objective — removal of our missile defense sites from Eastern Europe — and got nothing in return.”
That’s just not what happened.
12. Romney’s new attack ad says Rick Santorum voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Santorum left the Senate in 2006 — three years before Sotomayor’s confirmation. [Update: It looks like the Romney camp played fast and loose on this one, showing Sotomayor with President Obama in 2009 when she was nominated for the Supreme Court, but counting Santorum’s vote when Sotomayor was a lower-court nominee. The implication for viewers is that Santorum backed Sotomayor for the high court, which is not true, when he and other Republicans did support her confirmation to a lower court.]
Foreign Policy columnist Michael Cohen noted yesterday that he understands that “politicians mislead and occasionally fib,” but added, “[H]onestly, I’ve never seen anyone do it as brazenly as Mitt Romney.”
With each passing week, I find it harder to disagree with such a sentiment.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 24, 2012
Rick Santorum: The GOP’s Unelectable Soul Mate
Could GOP primary voters have finally found their soul mate? In the person of former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, they may have stumbled upon a presidential candidate who can speak their language with a forceful authenticity that simply can’t be programmed into Mitt Romney.
And as if by divine providence, the rise of Santorum coincides with the return of culture war issues—gay marriage, abortion, and, especially, contraception—upon which he has earned his reputation and loyal following among conservatives.
But Santorum’s turn as the not-Romney of the moment and the sudden political shift from jobs to social issues illustrate the perilous political position into which the GOP is charging headlong. It’s a confluence of candidate and issues that can lay bare the cultural gap that has grown between the Republican base and the mainstream of American politics.
Take the birth control flap. When the administration rolled out a new rule requiring, for example, Catholic-related organizations like schools and hospitals to include contraceptive coverage as part of their employees’ health insurance, it was denounced as a disaster even by regular allies of President Obama. The president “utterly botched” the policy, liberal columnist E.J. Dionne said. The rule put the country on the brink of a “religious war” and was a “dissing, in common parlance, of Catholics,” pundit Mark Shields opined. Moderate Democrats like former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine quickly repudiated the mandate.
Republicans sensed an opportunity, and even after the president unveiled a compromise whereby the contraceptives would be paid for by insurance companies rather than the offended institutions, they doubled down. They denounced Obama’s accommodation and pushed legislation allowing employers or insurers to dispense with any health insurance item that pricked their conscience. In this they had the enthusiastic partnership of the bishops of the Catholic Church, who were equally unmoved by the deal.
What they did not have, however, was the support of either the broad electorate or the bishops’ flock, a fact illustrated by the preponderance of recent polling data on the issue. A survey released by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, for example, showed that 56 percent of voters support the birth control benefit, and 53 percent of Catholics do. The same firm later polled the Obama compromise and found that 57 percent of Catholics, including 59 percent of Catholic women, support it. With the compromise, 56 percent of Catholic independents favor the contraception mandate.
These figures are not outliers. Another survey released by the Public Religion Research Institute, found that the pre-compromise rule had the support of 62 percent of women, 58 percent of Catholics, and 51 percent of independents (and 55 percent of Americans overall). The only group in the survey that opposed the rule was white evangelical Protestants, with 38 percent in favor and 56 percent against, raising the question of whether the Catholic bishops are stewarding the right church. A New York Times/CBS News poll last week found that 65 percent of voters support the compromise, including a majority of Catholic voters.
One of the few recent surveys that produced a markedly different result, from Pew, showed that among those who have heard of the rule, opinion is closely divided—hardly the stuff to power the initial pronouncements of Obama’s doom with Catholic voters or to support the GOP going all in on the issue. All these figures help explain why, in the face of fretting that the contraceptive rule was a political blunder, Gallup announced last week that the president’s approval rating among Catholics was statistically unchanged.
But those same polls show Republican voters are, for the most part, strongly opposed to the mandate and to the compromise, which helps explain why the party continues to battle the policy on the Hill and in the campaign, which brings us back to Rick Santorum.
No candidate is better positioned to capitalize on the resurgence of culture war issues (not only birth control, but also California’s ban on gay marriage being struck down, and the Planned Parenthood-Susan G. Komen spat) than Santorum, who made his name in culture skirmishes, most famously comparing homosexuality to bestiality.
He’s been almost as outspoken on birth control. “One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is, I think, the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea,” he told the conservative blog Caffeinated Thoughts last October. “Many in the Christian faith have said, ‘Well, that’s okay. Contraception’s okay.’ It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” Here’s a candidate, in other words, who is ready to turn the power of the bully pulpit against … contraception.
He has on other occasions said that he doesn’t think contraception works, that “it’s harmful to women” and “harmful to our society.” More generally, he has denounced the “whole idea of personal autonomy,” and the notion that “government should keep our taxes down and keep regulations low, [but] shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom … shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues.”
That kind of cultural conservative hawkishness might play in a GOP primary, but it’s why so many political observers view Santorum as completely unelectable. Which leaves Romney in a tough position: How does the self-described “severe conservative” attack his rival for being too severely conservative?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, February 22, 2012
Culture Wars: Republicans Are “Unprotected” on Contraception
During the 1928 presidential campaign, nutty right-wing Protestants claimed that Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated for president by a major party, was planning to extend New York’s Holland Tunnel all the way to the Vatican.
Today’s tunnel would run from the Vatican to a suburban Pentecostal megachurch.
We learned this week that U.S. Catholics support President Barack Obama’s Feb. 10 compromise on contraception in almost identical numbers to the population as a whole. Many of those sticking with the Catholic bishops in opposition are evangelical Protestants.
Historians are rubbing their eyes in wonder that the spiritual and political descendants of Protestants who founded the Know Nothing Party in the 1850s on anti-Papist ideas — who hassled not just Al Smith but also John F. Kennedy for supposed ties to Rome — are now embracing Catholics. Rick Santorum was recently greeted at Oral Roberts University by an enthusiastic crowd of 4,000.
Yes, politics makes strange bedfellows, and in this case, the Republicans, by throwing in their lot with the bishops, are using no protection. Like the controversy over the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation withdrawing support from Planned Parenthood over its provision of abortion services, this struggle leaves Republicans politically exposed.
Redefining the Debate
At first, the Komen case looked like just another example of anti-abortion activists flexing their muscles against hapless women’s health advocates. Then came a furious, highly effective counterassault fueled by liberal social media, a new counterweight to conservative talk radio in defining the terms of debate. The outcome of that flap, in which the Komen foundation reversed itself and apologized, shows that bashing Planned Parenthood may work in Republican primaries but will be poison in the general election.
The demand for “conscience” exemptions from Obamacare for Catholic hospitals, schools and charities (churches were already exempt) also looked good for the Republicans initially. Conservatives thought that they had a chance to revive the “culture wars” — the wedge-issue appeals to faith and family that have worked so well in the past. For more than a week, Republicans made Obama look like the guy who ordered Joan of Arc burned at the stake.
Their problem is that they never know when to stop. Recall the case of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman in a persistent vegetative state whose plight led conservative lawmakers to champion federal legislation in 2005 to keep her alive. The measure passed, but public opinion polls afterward showed the law was widely unpopular and a clear case of congressional overreach.
This time conservatives stuck with the argument that the president was abusing religious freedom even when that attack was no longer plausible. By decreeing that insurance companies, not Catholic institutions, will pay for contraceptives in employee health-care plans (as allowed under the Affordable Care Act), the president successfully shifted the subject back to birth control, where he’s on solid political footing.
Obama’s like a quarterback who calls a bad play and seems trapped in the pocket, then scrambles for big yardage.
Put Into Context
The bad play resulted from poor political planning inside the White House, which failed to line up supporters to defend its decision. But it’s a little more defensible when you know the context. For months, the pressure seemed to come from the left. The White House learned that 28 states (including Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts) already require that health plans under their jurisdiction cover contraceptives. These rules had survived court challenges on religious freedom grounds. In fact, women’s groups were threatening lawsuits if Obamacare didn’t also require such coverage, and some government lawyers argued that the new law provided no authority for any exemptions for institutions receiving federal money.
Obama’s team debated the issue and, contrary to published reports, the discussion didn’t break down cleanly along gender lines, with women on one side and Catholic men on the other. When the rule was made public on Jan. 20, White House press secretary Jay Carney faced not a single question about it. Then the regional and religious press embraced the story, and within a week even liberal Catholic columnists like E.J. Dionne and Mark Shields were up in arms.
But the firestorm may prove to be a political blessing. If the president had started on Jan. 20 with the compromise he eventually arrived at on Feb. 10, it would have been a one-day story for health-care policy wonks. Birth control would never have surfaced as a political issue.
Instead contraception is now the elephant in the bedroom — the issue that no one in the Republican establishment wants to talk about because they know it’s a disaster for them.
The Republicans may end up with a nominee, Rick Santorum, who has warned of “the dangers of contraception in this country.” He said: “It’s not OK because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
This from a candidate who recently said of the president: “He thinks he knows better how to run your lives.”
Imagine what Obama would do with that in a debate.
Instead of running away from Santorum, many Republicans are running toward him — once again, failing to get the memo on when to stop. Senator Scott Brown co-sponsored a bill this week with Senator Roy Blunt that would let any employer with a “moral conviction” (a term left undefined in the legislation) deny access to any health service, including contraception, they personally oppose. This weapon is aimed at Obamacare, but it will probably boomerang on Brown, who is locked in a tight re- election campaign in Massachusetts against Elizabeth Warren.
With all the major candidates this year enjoying seemingly happy marriages, it didn’t seem as if sex would figure much in this campaign. Wrong. The independent women who will help determine the election want the government — and their bosses – – out of their private lives.
The culture wars are over, and the Republicans lost.
By: Jonathan Alter, Bloomberg News, February 19, 2012
Why I Wish Catholic Leaders Would Stop Saying Our Church Is Under Attack
On Friday the White House reached a compromise on the contraception mandate that can satisfy both reproductive health advocates and Catholic hospitals. For those like Rick Santorum, though, who have been loudly and repeatedly accusing the Obama administration of engaging in “overt hostility to faith in America,” this isn’t enough. But if this is really a war against religion, maybe it’s time to ask the people of faith who are supposedly under attack. People like me.
My expertise on this topic is personal. Mine is a family in which priests and nuns outweigh any other profession except nurses. My mom taught nursing and medicine at a Catholic college, and placed nursing students in Catholic hospitals for 40 years. Family, faith, and taking care of people—these values are at the core of what we were taught growing up. Perhaps that is why the harsh tones, the imaginary division of the world into two camps—the faithful under attack and the attackers—seems more politics than theology. Certainly it is extremely distant from the millions of lives that could be affected by these conservative outcries. This would merely be entertaining election year political shenanigans if there were not so many lives at stake. More than 11 million women use birth control; millions more will have access to it under the new law.
In fact, birth control use is nearly universal in the United States, even among Catholic women. One recent study shows that 98 percent of sexually experienced Catholic women will have used birth control at some point in their lives. Nearly 60 percent of women use birth control pills for something other than, or in addition to, contraception. For example for women at risk for ovarian cancer, taking birth control pills for five years reduces their risk of getting cancer by 50%. Should women have to explain to employers they need coverage for serious illnesses, not birth control, in order to obtain the medicine their doctor prescribes?
Yes, there is a religious freedom question at stake, not only for employers but also employees. But much of this is already settled territory. The wide use of contraception long ago opened up the complex nature of religion in the public square and already found resolution, well before these election year political attacks. The new Department of Health and Human Services rule comes years after advances in 28 states, where regulations similar to the HHS rule have prompted religious leaders and policy makers to create solutions that serve women and their families and faith-based organizations. Take, for example, DePaul University, the nation’s largest Catholic college, which has confirmed that its employee benefits include prescription birth control coverage. DePaul is not alone—the Archdiocese of New York provided contraceptive coverage for medical reasons even prior to a state law mandating it, as did Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Diocese itself now provides coverage under Wisconsin law.
I agree with the Bishops that there are cases when the religious freedom of an employer trumps that of an employee. For example, when I was a secretary at the Sacred Heart Rectory, I wouldn’t expect my health care plan to include prescription contraception because I worked for the church. Under Obama’s regulation, religious institutions, like the church I grew up in, are exempt. Synagogues and other houses of worship do not have to provide contraception. Period.
But when Notre Dame is the single largest employer in South Bend, Indiana, with Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center not far behind, how could we say, “Sorry, you should move if you want to have affordable access to these health services.” It is discordant with my Catholic and my American values that a receptionist at the local hospital making around $26,000 a year should have to shell out nearly $600 for birth control or cede control to her employer over when to start a family, when she is already paying in to her health care plan. The new agreement would take this difficult question off the table by allowing the women and men working at these religious affiliated organizations to receive the equal and affordable access through their insurers directly without engaging their employers.
It is about time we raise the policy debate in Washington to keep up with complexity of faith, health and family that most Americans already navigate in their daily lives. Most Americans are religious. Fifty-five percent told Gallup that religion is “very important” to them. But these same Americans are also focused on the health of their families and they are, in fact, using birth control. Newt, Mitt, Rick, and all the other gentlemen trying to demagogue this issue would be best served listening to the folks in the pews before launching any more pious screeds. Most of America’s faithful families aren’t under attack from a “war on religion.” I for one don’t feel under attack—except perhaps from a small group of Republican presidential candidates who keep ignoring the voices, values, and lives of women like me.
By: Tara McGuinness, The New Republic, February 13, 2012
“Extreme Positions”: The GOP Again Goes For The 1%
Fighting contraception. Stopping domestic violence protections. Extending tax cuts for the wealthy, while hiking taxes on the middle class. Welcoming white supremacists to a conference, but banning gay conservatives. The GOP has followed its extremist fringe off the deep end, leaving the rest of us back in the reality-based world, and befuddled. Their strategists warned them not to do this, but it appears that to the GOP, unhinged fringe issues are like catnip.
It wasn’t a surprise to see Republican luminaries, including Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell flock to major conservative conference last week that also included a panel session featuring a white supremacist. But it was ironic that this same event, the Conservative Political Action Conference, banned a group of gay conservatives from participating, accusing them of alienating so-called “family values” groups like the Family Research Council (FRC).
The banned group, GOProud, is hardly radical, even by right-wing standards — it split from the Log Cabin Republicans because it thought the older group was too concerned with gay rights. Beyond pushing the much feared “The Gay Agenda,” now just being gay excludes you from the biggest conservative conference of the year. Being a white supremacist gets you on a panel.
This year, CPAC banned the gays to gain back the FRC — and white supremacists came as a bonus. The leaders of the GOP — including a few aspiring leaders of the free world — came along for the ride.
But CPAC was just the beginning of what has been a surreal week for a major political party. On Friday, President Obama announced a compromise with Catholic leaders who objected to religious institutions being included in the contraception coverage mandate for employee insurance. The compromise, which spared Catholic institutions from providing contraception coverage while ensuring that female employees would still have access to it, was not enough for the Catholic bishops and GOP leaders. Instead, they announced that they wanted a rule that would allow any employer to renounce any insurance coverage for any procedure they find morally objectionable.
Anyone who has ever had health insurance knows that that’s an extreme position — allowing employers to pick and choose what procedures they’ll provide insurance for? — but it’s one that Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and the leaders of the House and Senate GOP jumped right on.
And attacking contraception is just the beginning. Republicans in the Senate are blocking a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act because it includes protections for LGBT people and undocumented immigrants. The Virginia House just passed a bill that would require women seeking abortions to undergo an invasive trans-vaginal ultrasound without their consent, and another that would put access to birth control at risk. The latter, a so-called “personhood” bill, is so extreme a similar measure was rejected by Mississippi voters by double digits last year — yes, that Mississippi. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who is widely considered to be a top candidate for the GOP vice presidential nomination, has said he will sign the forced ultrasound bill and may sign the “personhood” measure.
Finally, on another issue important to millions of American families — middle class tax cuts — the GOP gave in and joined the rest of us in reality. While Republicans had been making rumblings about repeating their disastrous stunt in December where they threatened to raise payroll taxes on working Americans because the cost would be offset by a miniscule tax on the very rich, they ultimately gave in — while leaving lower-profile but equally important issues of extending unemployment benefits and fixing Medicare payments for doctors in the lurch.
Where is the mainstream of the GOP? And why aren’t they speaking up? 99 percent of American women who have ever been sexually active have used birth control. 59 percent of Americans think all employers should have to provide comprehensive health insurance to their employees — including to women. Sixty-six percent think the wealthiest should pay a bit more to help all Americans get by in a bad economy. As of last year, 56 percent said gay and lesbian relationships are “morally acceptable” — and although I haven’t seen polling, I’d bet that the “morally acceptable” number for white supremacists is significantly lower.
Polls are polls and politicians shouldn’t govern by them, but shouldn’t they notice when they’re falling off the deep end? The GOP, in pursuing the agenda of the most extreme factions of its base, has left moderates within its own party and American common sense behind. This isn’t just bad for them politically — in the long run, it’s bad for the country. There are plenty of serious issues that demand our attention — jobs, housing, the energy crisis, crumbling infrastructure. But instead of tackling these, the GOP seems determined to fixate on a parade of dangerous nonsense.
By: Michael B, Keegan, the Huffington Post, February 16, 2012
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