Why Romney’s Relationship With GOP Voters Is Like An Arranged Marriage
Other than the losing candidates themselves, the people unhappiest with the Iowa results must be journalists and Democrats.
Journalists for the simple and obvious reason that a fierce battle is a lot more interesting to watch, and to write about, than a triumphal march. And Democrats because, even though Mitt Romney didn’t emerge from the caucuses entirely unscathed, what he suffered was, as they used to say in old cowboy movies, “just a flesh wound.” And since Democrats know Romney is the most dangerous — arguably the only dangerous — Republican presidential candidate in the field, they would like to have seen him injured far more grievously than actually occurred. An eight-vote win isn’t much of a win (his margin of victory was even narrower than Al Gore’s in the 2000 presidential election), but no one can call it a defeat.
Perhaps the best way to think about Republican primary voters this year is to imagine them as the bride in an arranged marriage. Her parents have chosen well for her, better than she had any right to expect; she has no grounds for complaint and knows it. The groom they have found for her is responsible, decent, reliable, a good provider, and even very handsome. But he just doesn’t excite her. There’s nothing about him that makes her heart beat faster. When she contemplates a future being wedded to him, something inside her shrivels up and dies.
So in the months before the marriage she goes a little crazy. Spends her nights at the bars in a bad section of town. Lets inappropriate strangers buy her drinks, and goes home with more than a few of them. Deep in her heart, she knows her behavior isn’t merely ill advised, it’s foolhardy. These guys (and even one woman!) won’t make her happy even for a night, let alone a lifetime. They’re all wrong, and some of them are even a little nuts. But they’re dashing and dangerous and transgressive, and she’s in that heedless mood where she just doesn’t give a damn. By morning, she always realizes she’s made a dreadful mistake. But that’s desperation for you: She doesn’t want to be reasonable, she wants to rebel. And this is looking like her last chance. Of course, on some level, she’s aware she’s going to be marching down the aisle with Mr. Sensible soon enough.
For those of us watching this matrimonial crisis closely, the only question remaining prior to Iowa was whether there was time for one more folly before she came to her senses. We knew the identity of the one guy on a bar stool she hadn’t hooked up with, we just didn’t know if she’d have an opportunity to plant herself on the back of his Harley before reality set in. Well, as became evident in the last week before the Republicans caucused, the answer was yes.
As with each of her previous flings, she didn’t begin to know enough about this fellow before deciding he might be worth a tumble. Rick Santorum appears personable, boyish, and pleasant. He gives every indication of being an upright sort of person. But his politics are genuinely abhorrent, so far outside the American mainstream as to be almost Falangist. Once his views become more widely known, he would drive voters away in droves; with sufficient exposure, it’s unlikely he could carry a single state outside the deep South. The only reasons he did so well in Iowa are a) he was the last alternative still standing, and b) while he’s known to be conservative, a buzzword that makes Republicans salivate without requesting a definition, the full extent of his views aren’t well known at all, and would not survive scrutiny.
The battle isn’t quite over. Santorum hasn’t yet undergone the sort of examination that undid, in turn, Trump, Bachmann, Cain, Perry, and Gingrich. He might have time to make a little mischief in New Hampshire before that happens, and South Carolina might be congenial territory for him regardless. And he has a spirited, spiteful ally in Newt Gingrich. Gingrich feels aggrieved, and when Gingrich feels aggrieved, he gets mean. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he gets meaner. He must know he’s going down, but he’s going to do everything he can to pull Mitt Romney down with him. Pure personal vengeance. Many of Romney’s vulnerabilities are well enough known by now to occasion no surprise, but I think we’re going to see him suffer some serious new knife wounds, front and back, during the next few debates.
Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. But he will be a damaged nominee. Which isn’t to say he will lose — it’s much too early for those kinds of predictions — but it does mean his path to victory is steeper and more tortuous than it had to be.
Two other thoughts: President Obama’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray was, yes, an appropriate and justified exercise of executive power. But it was also, in a modest and opening-gambit sort of way, an announcement of how he is going to run for re-election this year: Like Harry Truman in 1948. His opponent will be not only Mitt Romney, but the Congressional Republican Party.
And most interestingly, I suspect Iowa may mark the turning point in the way the country views the Supreme Court’s recent, indefensible decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It was a decision most conservatives embraced when first issued, but the mischievous and entirely foreseeable consequences of this idiotic piece of jurisprudence are now visible for all to see. The fact that the State Supreme Court of a conservative state like Montana seems to agree has to be taken as a great big fat straw in the wind.
By: Erik Tarloff, The Atlantic, January 6, 2012
Mitt Romney, Son Of “Citizen’s United”
First, a confession. If Mitt Romney becomes president I’m partly to blame.
Ten years ago I ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts — which would have given me the opportunity to whip Mitt Romney’s ass in the general election,
I blew it. In the final week of the primary I was neck and neck with the state treasurer, but then my money ran out, which meant my TV ads stopped. Declining the suggestion of my campaign manager to take out a second mortgage on my home, I frantically phoned anyone I could find who hadn’t yet contributed $500, the maximum state law allowed. I didn’t raise beans. In the end, the treasurer won the primary, Romney won the general election and became governor, and I went back to being a professor.
But my fantasy of beating Romney may be nothing more than a fantasy because Romney had — and still has — something I never did (and I’m not referring to his gleaming white teeth, carefully-coiffed hairline, or height). He has money, and he has connections to much more money.
Mitt Romney was then and still is the candidate of big money.
In the last weeks before the just-completed Iowa caucuses, Romney spent over $3 million relentlessly torpedoing Newt Gingrich with negative ads — cutting Gingrich’s support by half and hurtling him from first place to fourth. But Romney kept his fingerprints off the torpedo. Technically the money didn’t even come from his campaign.
It came from a Super PAC called “Restore Our Future,” which can sop up unlimited amounts from a few hugely wealthy donors without even disclosing their names. That’s because “Restore Our Future” is officially independent of the Romney campaign — although its chief fundraiser comes out of Romney’s finance team, its key political strategist was political director of Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign, its treasurer is Romney’s former chief counsel, and its media whiz had been part of Romney’s media team.
“Restore Our Future” is to Mitt Romney’s campaign as the dark side of the moon is to the moon. And it reveals the grotesque result of the Supreme Court’s decision a year ago in Citizen United vs the Federal Election Commission, which reversed more than a century of efforts to curb the influence of big money on politics.
If income and wealth in America were as widely shared as in the first three decades after World War II, we’d have less reason to worry. But now, with an almost unprecedented concentration of money at the very top, Citizens United invites the worst corruption our democracy has witnessed since the Gilded Age.
And Romney and Citizens United were made for each other. Other candidates have quietly set up Super PACs of their own, and President Obama has his Super PAC already busily tapping into whatever reservoirs of big money it can find. But Mitt’s unique ties to the biggest money pits enable him to take unique advantage of the Court’s scurrilous invitation.
The New York Times reports that New York hedge-fund managers and Boston financiers contributed almost $30 million to “Restore Our Future” before the Iowa caucuses. And “Restore Our Future“‘s faux independence has allowed Romney to publicly distance himself from them, their money, and the dirty work that their money has bought.
More than anyone else running for president, Mitt Romney personifies the top 1 percent in America — actually, the top one-tenth of one percent. It’s not just his four homes and estimated $200 million fortune, not just his wheeling and dealing in leveraged-buyouts and private equity, not even the jobless refugees of his financial maneuvers that makes him the Gordon Gekko of presidential aspirants.
It’s his connections to the epicenters of big money in America — especially to top executives and financiers in the habit of investing for handsome returns. And there are almost no better returns than those found in tax benefits, government subsidies, loan guarantees, bailouts, regulatory exemptions, federal contracts, and trade deals generating hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars a year.
Romney, in other words, is the candidate Citizens United created, the creature given life by Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito all playing Dr. Frankenstein.
Given what the Court has wrought, my conscience is less burdened. Had I whipped Romney’s ass ten years ago I might only have delayed his awakening. But I fear for the country.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, January 5, 2012
“What Happened In Iowa Won’t Stay In Iowa”: Super PACs Are A Dangerous New Weapon
The barrage of commercials tells the story: This is a presidential election without meaningful contribution limits or timely disclosure, outsourced to political action committees whose spending often dwarfs that of the candidates they support.
The PACs’ benign, intentionally uninformative names belie the brutal nature of their attack ads and the closeness of their relationships with the candidates, despite the requirement that they operate independently.
The leading example, in terms of financial firepower and ferocity of assault, is “Restore Our Future,” the Mitt Romney-supporting super PAC that has unleashed a $4 million barrage against Newt Gingrich. (It worked. Gingrich complained of being “Romney-boated,” a reference to the Swift boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004.)
The committee is run by Carl Forti, political director of Romney’s 2008 campaign. Its treasurer is Charles Spies, the Romney 2008 general counsel. Its fundraiser, Steve Roche, headed the Romney 2012 finance team until jumping to the super PAC last summer. And to underscore the flimsiness of the PAC’s supposed independence, Romney himself has spoken at “Restore Our Future” events.
Yet up-to-date information about who is bankrolling this effort will not be available until the end of January, by which point four states will have voted and Romney may have the nomination wrapped up.
The last time “Restore Our Future” disclosed its donors to the Federal Election Commission was six months ago, when it reported raising $12 million. The committee would have had to update the information by Jan. 15 but — as have several other super PACs — it managed to postpone that two more weeks by changing its filing status from quarterly to monthly.
Of course, “Restore Our Future” isn’t alone — nor is the super PAC a Republican phenomenon. Rick Perry supporters have formed the “Make Us Great Again” PAC. Gingrich has “Winning Our Future.”
In New Hampshire, the “Our Destiny” PAC backing Jon Huntsman, and reportedly funded by the candidate’s wealthy father, has a new ad calling on voters to “stop the chameleon.” (That would be Romney.) On the Democratic side, Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney, former aides to President Obama, launched “Priorities USA,” which has already aired anti-Romney ads.
The rise of these groups erodes the twin pillars of a functional campaign finance system: limits on the size of contributions and timely information about who is writing the checks.
“The establishment of the candidate-specific super PAC is a vehicle to completely destroy candidate contribution limits,” says Fred Wertheimer, president of the campaign finance reform group Democracy 21, which is releasing a report on the phenomenon. “It is a vehicle that will spread to Congress and it will lead us back to a system of pure legalized bribery, because you will be back, pre-Watergate, to unlimited contributions that are going for all practical purposes directly to candidates.”
Bonus points: The super PAC funds the dirty work of attack ads while the candidate gets to remain above the fray, not required to appear on camera to say that he or she approved this message.
“I view the super PAC as the evil twin of the candidate’s campaign committee,” Federal Election Commission member Ellen Weintraub told me.
The emergence of these entities is the unanticipated but logical outgrowth of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC. The uproar over the opinion involved the justices giving the all-clear to unlimited corporate independent expenditures on behalf of candidates, and this is still a potential problem.
But as a practical matter, most publicly held corporations are squeamish about being associated with such direct advocacy. Instead, the real-world impact of Citizens United, in combination with lower-court rulings, was to usher in the era of the super PAC.
“By definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion, dismissing the notion that such spending could be corrosive.
Did he really mean to clear the path for independent expenditure committees backing a particular candidate — and bankrolled by the candidate’s father or run by his former top aides?
“How can it possibly be true that to give more than $2,500 to a candidate is potentially corrupting but to give millions to an outside group that is acting on the candidate’s behalf is not?” Weintraub asked.
Absent legislative intervention (unlikely) or regulatory action (even less likely), the super PAC is a dangerous new force in American politics. What happened in Iowa won’t stay in Iowa.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 3, 2012
Montana Supreme Court Says “Citizens United” Does Not Apply In Big Sky State
Montana’s Supreme Court has issued a stunning rebuke to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens Uniteddecision in 2010 that infamously decreed corporations had constitutional rights to directly spend money on ‘independent expenditures’ in campaigns.
The Montana Court vigorously upheld the state’s right to regulate how corporations can raise and spend money after a secretive Colorado corporation, Western Tradition Partnership, and a Montana sportsman’s group and local businessman sued to overturn a 1912 state law banning direct corporate spending on electoral campaigns.
“Organizations like WTP that act as a conduit for anonymously spending by others represent a threat to the political marketplace,” wrote Mike McGrath, Chief Justice of the Montana Supreme Court, for the majority. “Clearly the impact of unlimited corporate donations creates a dominating impact on the political process and inevitably minimizes the impact of individual citizens.”
The 80-page ruling is remarkable in many respects. Throughout, including in a lengthy dissent by a state Supreme Court justice who felt Montana was dutibound to abide by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the Montana Court attacked the thinking behind the Citizens United decision and the impact of big money in political culture, including the notion that corporations are deserving of the same political speech rights as citizens.
“While, as a member of this Court, I am bound to follow Citizens United, I do not have to agree with the [U.S.] Supreme Court’s decision,” wrote Justice James C. Nelson, in his dissent. “And, to be absolutely clear, I do not agree with it. For starters, the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable. Indeed, it has astounded most Americans. The truth is that corporations wield enormous power in Congress and in state legislatures. It is hard to tell where government ends and corporate America begins: the transition is seamless and overlapping.”
“It should be noted that the Montana Corrupt Practices Act was adopted in 1912 at a time when the country’s focus was on preventing political corruption, not on protecting corporate influence,” wrote Nelson, later in his dissent.
Western Tradition Partnership
The lead group that sued to overturn the Montana ban on direct corporate spending in campaigns followed a very deliberate course of clashing with virtually every aspect of Montana campaign finance law. The lawyers behind the litigation believe that they should face no limits or accountabililty for any political fund-raising or spending.
The Montana Supreme Court’s majority opinion described why Western Tradition Partnership was as slippery an organization as one finds in modern politics. They noted how the groups lawyers claimed that they should be allowed to spend freely because the group would have to disclose that activity under Montana law, when as the state’s Chief Justice noted in his opinion, the same group, using another name, actually had sued the state to overturn those very disclosure laws.
Moreover, the ruling quoted a fund-raising brochure that said, “If you decide to support this program, no politician, no bureaucrat, and no radical environmentalist will ever know you made this program possible.” The group also is involved in a third suit challenging the state’s campaign spending disclosure law.
“We take note that Western Tradition appears to be engaged in a multi-front attack on both contribution restrictions and the transparency that accompanies campaign disclosure requirements,” the Court said, adding in a footnote that the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices called the group a “sham” because it failed to register with the state, and refused to disclose the sources of its funds or its spending—as required by law.
Rebutting Citizens United
Lawyers attacking the Montana ban on direct corporate spending said the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2010 Citizens United ruling removed any barrier to corporate spending. But the Montana Supreme Court disagreed and took a more nuanced view.
The U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United found there was no compelling reason why a non-profit corporation that produced an anti-Hillary Clinton video should be prevented from showing that video in the weeks before Election Day—as a new federal campaign law had banned. But the Citizens United ruling did not remove all bans on corporate speech, the Montana Court said. “The Supreme Court held that laws that burden political speech are subject to strict scrutiny, which requires the government to prove that the law furthers a compelling state interest and is narrowly tailored to that interest.”
The Montana Court then launched into detailed explanations of sufficiently compelling state interests to merit sustaining the century-old law. The majority opinion read like a history lesson that recounting how the state, especially in the decades following its founding in 1889, struggled to restrict the power and influence of mining corporations. In 1906, the citizenry amended the state Constitution to allow for ballot initiatives. Six years later it passed the ban on corporate spending, specifically to curb mining companies based in Butte. The Court noted that the state—then and now—was beset with corporate players whose money, power and influence easily overshadow individuals.
“What was true a century ago is as true today: distant corporate interests mean that corporate dominated campaigns will only work ‘in the essential interest of outsiders with local interests a very secondary consideration,’” the opinion said, quoting a historian’s testimony from a lower state court that reviewed the case. “While specific corporate interests come and go in Montana, they are always present.”
The Court said Montana had a political tradition that has emerged in intervening decades and they wanted Montana to remain a state where candidates run low-budget, personal campaigns and do not rely on anonymous, well-financed messaging from outsiders.
The Court pointed out that judicial elections were particularly vulnerable to anonymous spending by large corporations. Montana’s 2008 Chief Justice race had advertising from all candidates costing about $60,000, it noted. “It is clear that an entity like Massey Coal, willing to spend even hundreds of thousands of dollars, much less millions, on a Montana judicial election could effectively drown out all other voices.”
These various factors—a history of citizenry fighting corporate corruption, political traditions of low-budget campaigning, and the vulnerability of judicial elections to corporate spending—were sufficiently compelling, the Court said, to preserve the century-old ban on corporate spending in the face of the Citizens United ruling.
“The question then, is when in the last 99 years did Montana lose the power or interest sufficient to support the statute, if it ever did,” the majority said. “We think not. Issues of corporate influence, sparse population, dependence upon agriculture and extractive resource development, location as a transportation corridor, and low campaign costs make Montana especially vulnerable to continued efforts of corporate control to the detriment of democracy and the republican form of government.”
Concluding, the Court said that the sportsman’s group and businessman who sued to overturn the law were not prohibited from participating in politics by the ban on direct corporate spending. And it said Western Tradition Partnership could follow the same rules as anyone else. “WTP can still speak through its own political committee/PAC as hundreds of organizations in Montana do on an ongoing basis,” the Court said. “The difference then is that under Montana law the PAC has to comply with Montana’s disclosure and reporting laws.”
There is little doubt that the anonymous money behind Western Tradition Partnership will appeal the Montana Supreme Court ruling in federal court—and even seek to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. However, even it it does that, the ruling issued Friday by Montana’s Supreme Court will endure as a monumental defense of a state’s right to curb political corruption and the excesses of big-money politics.
Corruption and Corporate Personhood
Justice Nelson, who dissented because he believed that the state had to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling, concluded by fervently disagreeing with the assumptions behind the Citizens United ruling, starting with the Roberts Court’s assumption that spending large sums in campaigns was not inherently corrupting.
Nelson said independent expenditures by corporations in political campaigns—where political players are not supposed to coordinate their actions with candidate campaigns—absolutely were noticed and influenced the lawmaking process. “In the real world of politics,” he wrote, “the “quid pro quo” of both direct contributions to candidates and independent expenditures on their behalf is loyalty. And, in practical effect, experience teaches us that money corrupts, and enough of it corrupts absolutely.”
Nelson closed by slamming the legal theory of corporate personhood—that corporations, because they are run and owned by people, should have the same constitutional freedoms as individuals under the Bill of Rights. Corporatist judges, such as the Roberts Court, believe that corporations and people are indistinguishable under the law. In contrast, constitutional conservatives know very well that the framers of the U.S. Constitution distrusted large economic enterprises and drafted a document to protect individual businessmen, farmers and tradespeople from economic exploitation.
“While I recognize that this doctrine is firmly entrenched in law,” Nelson began, “I find the concept entirely offensive. Corporations are artificial creatures of law. As such, they should enjoy only those powers—not constitutional rights, but legislatively-conferred powers—that are concomitant with their legitimate function, that being limited liability investment vehicles for business. Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental natural rights with soulless creations of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons.”
As Nelson said, ending his dissent, “the [U.S.] Supreme Court has spoken. It has interpreted the protections of the First Amendment vis-a-vis corporate political speech. Agree with its decision or not, Montana’s judiciary and elected officers are bound to accept and enforce the [U.S.] Supreme Court’s ruling…”
But the Montana Supreme Court has also spoken—and with a clarity that is rare to behold.
By: Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet, January 1, 2012
“Going, Going, Gone”: The Presidential Auction Of 2012
The conservative radio host Michael Savage this week presented an unusual offer to Newt Gingrich.
“Newt Gingrich is unelectable,” Savage said of the improbable new front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. “Therefore, I am offering Newt Gingrich 1 million dollars to drop out of the presidential race for the sake of the nation.”
A million bucks? Come on, man.
Gingrich got $1.6 million being a lobbyi—, er, historian for Freddie Mac. He gets $60,000 a pop for speeches, by his own boastful account. He reportedly has generated $100 million in revenues by trading on his Washington connections.
Offering him $1 million to drop out of the presidential race is the political equivalent of Dr. Evil’s plan to hold the world hostage for — ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
But if Savage was a few zeros short on Gingrich’s price tag, his instincts were correct: Gingrich and his rivals are most definitely for sale. The Republican nominating contest resembles nothing so much as a Christie’s wine auction, as candidates accept, and toss about, dollar figures beyond the comprehension of the people they would serve.
“Tell ya what. Ten thousand bucks? Ten-thousand-dollar bet?” Mitt Romney proposed to Rick Perry in his now-infamous attempt at Saturday’s debate to resolve a dispute over health care.
Criticized for that high wager, Romney went on Fox News to say that Gingrich should return the $1.6 million from Freddie Mac. That led Gingrich, just days into his vow to stay “relentlessly positive,” to suggest that Romney should “give back all the money he’s earned on bankrupting companies and laying off employees.”
The positive front-runner also took a gratuitous pop at Perry, saying of the longtime public servant: “I couldn’t imagine he could cover a bet like that.”
To most Americans, lacking a spare $10,000 wouldn’t be considered a character flaw. But Gingrich is different: a member of Donald Trump’s Trump National Golf Club, he boasted on the campaign trail recently that he didn’t have to be a lobbyist because he was getting rich on the celebrity speaking circuit.
Romney can’t exploit Gingrich’s $100 million in revenues, nor his $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany’s, because his own net worth is $264 million and his own speeches bring in up to $68,000. If corporations are people, as Romney says, he is a man among boys — and his vast campaign stash is the main reason he still has a good chance to beat Gingrich.
President Obama (worth: as much as $11 million) would no doubt enjoy taking on either man, although the fun will be tempered by his own struggle to bring in $1 billion for his campaign, up from $750 million last time. For now, the task of taking on the plutocrats falls to GOP candidate Jon Huntsman, whose new Web site, www.10kbet.com, features a photo of Romney and his Bain Capital colleagues playing with cash.
For Huntsman to pursue this attack is a bit rich (his net worth: between $16 million and $71 million). But the problem is not the candidates’ net worth or their campaign cash. It’s the impression they are giving that corporate interests are receiving something in exchange for the worth they’re helping to build and the cash they’re providing.
Even the relative pauper Perry got in trouble earlier in the campaign for supporting mandatory HPV vaccination after the vaccine’s maker, Merck, gave money to his campaign. “If you’re saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended,” he said.
But could he be bought for the $28,000 he actually got from Merck? And could the billions now regularly generated in campaign contributions — nearly $4 billion in the 2010 elections alone — have something to do with all the goodies for pet corporations?
Though it’s difficult to trace specific government actions to contributions, there is no doubt in the aggregate that corporate interests can buy candidates for a modest investment.
Compared to $4 billion, Michael Savage’s $1 million won’t buy much: maybe a new, better-fitting suit for Ron Paul, a nice Christmas present for Herman Cain’s wife or enough cushion so that Sarah Palin doesn’t need to pitch another reality show.
In recent days, the gadfly Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, proposed a way out of this mess: a constitutional amendment that would outlaw corporate campaign contributions, overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
Ten thousand bucks says the idea goes nowhere.
By: Dana Milbamk, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 13, 2011
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