“Let’s Go Inside His Head”: The True Confessions Of Mitt Romney
Say you’re Mitt Romney, and you still can’t believe you lost the 2012 election. You’ve been aiming barbs at President Obama and sending heartwarming Christmas cards featuring your large family. In 2014, you star in a flattering documentary and post charming photos of your hike through the Mountain West with five of your 22 grandchildren. When asked whether you will make a third try for the White House, you and your wife say absolutely not, many times in many ways.
And then suddenly you’re giving off definitive “let’s do this thing” vibes: telling donors you will almost certainly run, calling former allies and aides, adding yourself to the program at the Republican National Committee meeting in San Diego and inviting conservative radio host Laura Ingraham to an “off the record” lunch at a ski resort in Utah, after which she tells The Washington Post you were “fully engaged and up to speed,” and seemed no longer content to be “just a passive player in American politics.”
So what catapulted you off the sidelines? Jeb Bush’s forceful entry into the emerging field was the spark. But you’ve been reconsidering for a while, looking at the other establishment favorites and wondering why the heck not. It’s not like you’re too old. The baby boom generation is still clogging up the runway. At 67, you’re about the same age as Hillary Clinton and not all that much older than Jeb, who will be 62 next month. As for old news, you’re practically a fresh face compared with Clinton, who has been in the news nonstop for more than two decades. And seriously, how damaging is a third grab for the ring when your competition is the third guy in his family to run?
What else is Romney thinking? Let’s go inside his head.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s tendency to erupt at people was fun for a while and raised lots of money, he muses. But I can raise money, too. And while I’m kind of awkward sometimes, I’m pretty sure voters won’t want a president who gets into public screaming matches. Not that I hold a grudge against Christie, even though his 2012 convention keynote was much more about him than me. But what makes him think people are going to disregard eight downgrades in his state’s credit rating, a poor job-creation performance or investigations into Bridgegate, the five-day traffic nightmare that punished a Democratic mayor? I certainly won’t.
It’s impressive, yes, that Gov. Scott Walker took on unions and has won three Wisconsin elections in six years. But would voters really pick this untested young candidate over the man who saved the 2002 Olympics and countless floundering businesses? (That would be me). And does Walker have the presence and skills to dominate a national race? I’ve already proven I can crush a sitting president in a debate.
And don’t get me started on Jeb and his family: his father’s reversal on his no-new-taxes pledge; his brother’s wars, deficits and intrusive federal education law; and his own support for comprehensive immigration reforms and Common Core education standards. All I did was sign “Romneycare” when I was governor of Massachusetts. I’ve already denied that it was the model for Obamacare. I’ve already said no other state should be required to do what I did. I’ve already said the federal law should be repealed. Problem solved.
I want to pause here to thank my good friend, the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, for his advice on how to deal with that time I dismissed 47 percent of the country as moochers who are dependent on government, believe they are victims, and will never take responsibility for their lives. Hewitt is right, everyone makes mistakes. Look at Hillary’s “we were broke when we left the White House” gaffe; Rick Perry’s “oops” moment when he forgot the third federal agency he wanted to eliminate; and Jeb’s description of illegal immigration as an “act of love” by people trying to give their families better lives. I never pretend to be poor, and I don’t start lists I can’t finish. Maybe I went a bit too far with the “self-deportation” business on immigration. You won’t hear me use that phrase again.
Above all, I won’t forget that a lot of those 47-percenters are veterans, seniors, low-income workers, the disabled and people searching desperately for jobs. And I won’t forget that a lot of them vote Republican — even for me! I won the seniors and the veterans, and I nearly won the union vote. I’m not only going to remember these folks, I’m going to focus my next campaign on opportunity and upward mobility. Wait, what do you mean, Jeb already named his political action committee Right to Rise, and stole the phrase — with permission — from my own 2012 running mate?
Back to the drawing board for the third round. I know the right message is out there somewhere.
By: Jill Lawrence, Creative Writers Syndicate; The National Memo, January 15, 2015
“When Things Go Well”: Republicans Now Take Credit For The Recovery They Sabotaged
This is unlikely to prompt anyone to break out the bubbly in the Oval Office, but last week’s poll numbers are nevertheless good news for President Obama. Since Democrats were thrashed in November’s midterm elections, the president’s approval ratings have been on the upswing.
As he prepares to deliver his sixth State of the Union address on Jan. 20, Obama’s approval has crept up to 47 percent, according to a new survey from Pew Research. That’s up 5 points since December.
Most analysts believe Obama’s recovering fortunes are the result of a much-improved economy — the one gauge that’s reliably important to voters. It’s taken a few years, but average workers are finally beginning to put the Great Recession behind them.
Take note of this now. Keep it in a spare file in your memory bank. Remember that the economy has been advancing for the six years of Obama’s tenure — a frustratingly slow process that is finally bearing fruit. The unemployment rate is now at 5.6 percent, the lowest since 2008. Foreclosures are down to pre-recession levels. The stock market is in historically high territory.
Why do I want you to remember this? In a stunning show of chutzpah, the president’s harshest critics, the hyper-conservatives who’ve done everything they could to wreck his presidency, want to take credit for the recovery they tried to sabotage.
Just take a look at the speech Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell gave on the day he took the helm of the Senate as the new majority leader.
“After so many years of sluggish growth, we’re finally starting to see some economic data that can provide a glimmer of hope. The uptick appears to coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama administration’s long tenure in Washington: the expectation of a new Republican Congress,” he said.
According to his logic, consumers spent more money and businesses hired more workers starting back in the summer because they expected Republicans to win a majority in Congress. That’s nonsense.
Obama inherited a mess from George W. Bush — a financial crisis brought on by the excesses of Wall Street. President Bush started the bailout, but most of the work was left for the Obama administration. Obama continued the Wall Street bailout, passed a massive stimulus package and rescued the auto industry. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, fought him every step of the way. That the economy has bounced back anyway is testament to its underlying resiliency.
Perhaps the greatest driver of consumers’ new optimism is the free-fall in gas prices, which haven’t been this low since the Great Recession drove down demand worldwide. Obama didn’t spur the investment in domestic oil drilling, but he has encouraged it, noting that it would help to free us from a dependence on foreign oil.
None of these hard-won gains have come a moment too soon. And, yes, there’s still much work to be done to revive the American middle class. The growing gap between the comfortable and everybody else remains one of the biggest threats to domestic tranquility. Wages are still stagnant.
Obama is well aware of that. In his State of the Union speech, he is expected to announce an ambitious new proposal to provide free access to the nation’s two-year community colleges. It’s an excellent plan.
Education experts say there are about 8 million community college students, and their average annual tuition is around $3,800. To the comfortable classes, that might not seem like much. But it presents a barrier to many working-class students trying to change their circumstances. It’s an investment that the nation can afford to make — and should make.
But like the other proposals the president has made to boost the economy, this one is likely to meet resistance from the Republicans in Congress. They want to take credit when things go well, but they’re only too willing to block a good idea if it comes from Obama.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, January 17, 2015
“A Pressing Public Health Problem”: The Study That Gun-Rights Activists Keep Citing But Completely Misunderstand
Few issues divide people like guns.
Just consider the starkly split response to our piece this week about how the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still had not resumed researching gun violence, two years after President Obama ordered the agency to do so.
Gun rights supporters argue the CDC shouldn’t get involved. The agency should stick to controlling and preventing disease, they say.
There’s also a healthy dose of distrust of any research the CDC might conduct – which is why the agency essentially stopped studying the issue in 1996 after the NRA accused the CDC of advocating for gun control. The resulting research ban caused a steep decline in firearms studies nationwide. As a University of Pennsylvania criminology professor explained it, “I see no upside to ignorance.”
But even that is a contentious point. So the recent article on the CDC’s continued failure to kick-start gun studies was met by wildly different responses.
Here’s Everytown for Gun Safety, Michael Bloomberg’s advocacy group.:
The CDC still isn’t researching gun violence, despite the ban being lifted two years ago http://t.co/fuEuehM7bw pic.twitter.com/PpUNWyokKT — Everytown (@Everytown) January 15, 2015
And the response is from Dana Loesch, a conservative talk show host and author of “Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America”:
@Everytown Seriously? Yes they did. And it wasn’t the outcome you wanted: http://t.co/SKgRhMGzhn #gunsense #MomsDemand2A — Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) January 15, 2015
Loesch’s point was echoed by many: The CDC studied gun violence in 2013, after Obama’s order, and found a wealth of facts that didn’t fit the narrative that guns are dangerous. And that’s why the study didn’t receive the attention it deserved.
An article in the New American Magazine summarized the study: “If the president was looking to the CDC report for support on how to reduce the threat of firearm-related violence through legislation restricting the rights of American citizens, he was sorely disappointed. Perhaps that’s why so few of the media have publicized the report.”
Game over, some activists declared:
@DLoesch @Everytown They need to just suck it! — Jodee (@jodeenicks) January 15, 2015
So what does the study say?
It’s hefty, running 121 pages. The title is “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence.” The National Academies’ Institute of Medicine and National Research Council published it in 2013.
And the study clearly makes the case for why more gun-violence research is needed.
The CDC requested the study to identify research goals after Obama issued his January 2012 executive order. The National Academies’s study authors clearly see gun violence as a problem worth examining: “By their sheer magnitude, injuries and deaths involving firearms constitute a pressing public health problem.”
The authors suggested focusing on five areas: the characteristics of firearm violence, risk and protective factors, interventions and strategies, gun safety technology and the influence of video games and other media. The document is peppered with examples of how little we know about the causes and consequences of gun violence — no doubt the result of an 18-year-old CDC research ban.
But gun-rights supporters zeroed on in a few statements to make their case. One related to the defensive use of guns. The New American Magazine article noted that “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”
So it would appear the “good use” of guns outweighs the “bad use.” That may be true, except the study says all of those statistics are in dispute — creating, in the study authors’ eyes, a research imperative.
The study (available as a PDF) calls the defensive use of guns by crime victims “a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed.” While it might be as high as 3 million defensive uses of guns each year, some scholars point to the much lower estimate of 108,000 times a year. “The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field,” the study notes.
The authors also say gun ownership might be good for defensive uses, but that benefit could be canceled out by the risk of suicide or homicide that comes with gun ownership. The depth of the relationship is unknown “and this is a sufficiently important question that it merits additional, careful exploration.”
Another point gun-rights activists make about the National Academies’s report is that “the key finding the president was no doubt seeking — that more laws would result in less crime — was missing.”
And they’re right. The key finding is missing. But that’s because we don’t know the answer — one way or the other.
That, some would say, is exactly why the CDC needs to conduct research.
By: Todd C. Frankel, The Wonk Blog, The Washington Post, January 16, 2015
“A Disingenuous Waste Of Everyone’s Time”: Tea Party’s Constitution Fraud; Why The Movement’s “Devotion” Is A Situational Sham
I’m hardly the first to make this point, but because it’s such a popular rhetorical tactic in our politics, it bears repeating: Policy arguments that focus on form and process instead of substance are, with notably rare exceptions, a disingenuous waste of everyone’s time.
For example: Because Republican politicians have so often worked themselves into high dudgeon over the way the Affordable Care Act cleared the U.S. Senate, a casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that opposition to reconciliation is a bedrock principle of modern-day conservatism. It is not. But arguing that the other side isn’t playing by the rules is sometimes easier, politically, than engaging in an actual policy debate — especially if your preferred policy is to allow insurers to deny sick children coverage and to renege on guaranteed healthcare for millions.
Confusing the issue is even more of an imperative if your chosen policy on a hot-button issue like immigration is to either maintain an unpopular status quo or to deport more than 11 million. And that, essentially, is the position congressional Republicans find themselves in right now, which was made crystal clear in the House on Wednesday, when the vast majority of GOPers voted to repeal President Obama’s recent unilateral moves to reduce undocumented immigrant deportations. It wasn’t much of a surprise, then, to see Speaker John Boehner try to frame the vote as having little to do with immigration policy per se, and everything to do with reversing an “executive overreach [that] is an affront to the rule of law” and a threat to the Constitution.
That said, the vote happened less than 48 hours ago. So, yes, I am a bit taken aback by a report from Politico that shows the Republicans’ facade of Constitution-fetishism and fealty to tradition has already crumbled. But that’s the unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from the article, which offers a preview of the agenda House Tea Partyers plan to unveil to their fellow Republicans during a GOP-only retreat. It’s an agenda that, in two key respects, has the ultimate goal of amending the Constitution.
One of the proposed amendments, Politico reports, would force the federal government to balance the budget, something conservatives have been trying, to no avail, to pass for decades. It’s a terrible idea, but it’s also pretty ho-hum at this point, too. However, their other proposal for how to make a document they usually speak of as nearly biblical in its sanctity even better is newer — and if it were to be accepted by anyone in the party outside its Tea Party fringe, it would represent a significant nativist shift on immigration from the GOP. It’s a proposal to tweak that pesky 14th Amendment in order to combat the phantom menace of “anchor babies” and end the long-standing U.S. practice of birthright citizenship. Needless to say, Steve King, the leader of what pro-immigration reform GOP aides derisively call the “boxcar crowd” (as in, they want to round the nation’s undocumented immigrants into boxcars for eventual deportation), is leading the charge.
Obviously, I’m not a fan of this ambitious plan to literally change the definition of who is and is not an American. But I don’t oppose it because I think the Constitution is sacrosanct or anything like that. (In fact, I’m sympathetic to those who argue that the Constitution could use a serious update.) Instead, the reason I dislike the Tea Party’s plan to amend some amendments is because I disagree with them on the substance. In my mind, the United States’ historically complicated but occasionally liberal approach to immigration is one of the strongest points in its favor; I think we need more immigration, not less. And I believe to change the Constitution so the definition of Americanness becomes more rooted in bloodlines and less rooted in simple geography — to, in effect, make it harder instead of easier to be an American — is the wrong thing to do, both symbolically and on the merits.
Admittedly, as a lefty, I don’t have to shoulder the burden of reconciling my policy preferences with my devotion to tradition and adhering to process for its own sake. The Tea Party and the GOP in general, on the other hand, are not quite as liberated. I seriously doubt that recognizing the blatant hypocrisy of deifying a centuries-old blueprint, while simultaneously urging it to undergo major revision, will disabuse these conservatives of their self-perception as the Constitution’s true friends. If that were to happen, if the right agreed to give up complaints about process arguments and simply argue for policy on its own terms, they’d likely find themselves frequently at a disadvantage. Because just like repealing Obamacare without replacing its most popular elements, booting millions of men, women and children out of the country is a political nonstarter.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, January 16, 2015
“So Much For The Deep Bench”: Republicans Look To The Past For 2016
On Friday, 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney walked back months of promises and told a group of his past donors that he is “seriously considering” another White House bid. According to the Washington Post, he then spent the weekend “calling former aides, donors and other supporters” to rebuild his political operation, and even told one senior Republican that he “almost certainly will” launch another presidential campaign.
There’s still plenty of reason to believe that Romney will not run — and that he’d struggle to win if he did. But if Romney does join the race, he won’t be the only retread candidate seeking the GOP nomination in 2016.
Romney’s runner-up in 2012, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, has made no secret of his intention to pursue the Republican nomination again. When Santorum was informed that Romney may run again in 2016, he reportedly responded, “bring it on,” and declared that he sees himself as “the winner” in what looks as though it will be a crowded field. Former Texas governor Rick Perry has also begun laying the groundwork for a campaign, huddling with donors and policy experts in the hopes of avoiding a repeat of his 2012 disaster.
If Santorum does run, he’ll likely be joined by fellow Iowa caucus winner Mike Huckabee. The former Arkansas governor recently ended his Fox News show to explore a White House bid. Huckabee won 278 delegates in the 2008 presidential race, barely edging Romney’s 271 but losing easily to Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who has dismissed 2016 speculation by quoting the late Morris Udall: “The people have spoken — the bastards.”
As Romney, Huckabee, Perry, and Santorum weigh their options, former Florida governor Jeb Bush has moved decisively towards a run and established himself as the early frontrunner. Of course, Bush isn’t exactly a fresh face, either; he has not held elected office in six years, and he would almost certainly not be mentioned as a top-tier candidate were he not the brother of the 43rd president and the son of the 41st.
There’s plenty of precedent for Republicans considering well-known national figures and former candidates for their nomination; it’s been the party’s modus operandi for decades. But this year was supposed to be different. As various pundits repeated ad nauseam during the 2012 campaign, the Republican Party was supposed be the party with a “deep bench” of “rising stars” to lead America into the future. But upon further review, anointing Bob McDonnell, Chris Christie, or Marco Rubio as the party’s standard-bearer doesn’t seem like such a great idea.
Some candidates who won media favor in 2012 (such as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and Kentucky senator Rand Paul) still seem capable of mounting serious campaigns. But they have generated so little support as to leave candidates like Romney and Huckabee confident that they could run again and win. And so the GOP once again seems poised to turn to its failed candidates of the past.
Perhaps it’s no wonder that many Republicans seem determined to take down Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton with a campaign straight out of 1994.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, January 13, 2015
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