“Sending A Message To White Moderates”: Mitt Romney “Expected” Boos From People Who Want “Free Stuff”
Members of the NAACP will no doubt be excited to know they weren’t just used as props to send a message to white moderates that Mitt Romney would be all inclusive and stuff—they were also used to send a message to the Republican base that Romney is not afraid to talk sternly to and be booed by the colored people:
“I think we expected that,” he said on Fox Business Network, referring to the audience’s negative response. “I am going to give the same message to the NAACP that I give across the country, which is that Obamacare is killing jobs.”
See that, Republican base? Mitt Romney really really hates Obamacare, no matter who he’s talking to. Does that not light your hair on fire? Well, I hope you saved some of your hair, because here’s another hair-lighter: Speaking at a Montana fundraiser later in the day, Romney took it a step past having expected the boos, saying:
When I mentioned I am going to get rid of Obamacare, they weren’t happy … That’s okay, I want people to know what I stand for, and if I don’t stand for what they want, go vote for someone else, that’s just fine. But I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from the government, tell them to go vote for the other guy—more free stuff. But don’t forget nothing is really free.
So he was making a stand at the NAACP convention, making sure people knew they were not going to be getting any free stuff from him, no sir (not unless you’re super rich and by “free stuff” you mean giant tax breaks). Steve Benen puts this in context with a reminder that black people aren’t the only ones whose desire for free stuff Romney likes to talk about. In fact, he also thinks women needing preventive health care and young people struggling to pay their college tuition are just in search of free stuff.
To an outsider, Romney is doing a pretty good job looking like the asshole the Republican base wants its candidate to be, but the fact that at this late date he is still forced to send signals to the Republican base that he’s one of them, rather than being able to take their commitment to him for granted and focus solely on making white moderates think he’s inclusive, is a sign of weakness no matter how he tries to spin those boos.
By: Laura Clawson, Daily Kos, July 12, 2012
“Radical And Anti-Thought”: Remember The Party Of Personal Responsibility?
The House Republicans are going to vote today to repeal the ACA, and the message they’re going to be sending to people who have cancer or diabetes or any number of other diseases but don’t have insurance is simple, and forgive my bluntness in this non-family newspaper where such language, I’m given to understand, is occasionally permisslbe. The message is: Fuck off.
Matt Miller put the matter powerfully in his Post column yesterday:
Here’s what you should do, Mr. President. In the debates this fall, pull out a small laminated card you’ve had made as a prop for this purpose. Then remind Mitt Romney that the ranks of the uninsured today are equal to the combined populations of Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky, Arkansas, Utah, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming.
Read that list slowly, Mr. President. Then ask your opponent: Would America turn its back on the citizens of these 25 states if everyone there lacked basic health coverage? That’s what we’ve been doing for decades. You knew it was right to act when you were governor of Massachusetts, Mitt. How can you pretend we don’t need to solve this for the nation? And how can you object with a straight face when your own pioneering plan was my model?
Can I get an amen to that? And then he might add something like, “As you said many times yourself, Governor, the point of requiring people to buy insurance is to instill a sense of personal responsibility. No free riders. No trips to the emergency room that the rest of us pay for. Why did you believe in personal responsibility then but are against it now?”
I swear, as I noted yesterday, this is starting to smell to me like an issue the Democrats can win votes on this fall. Believe me, if I thought the opposite, I’d say so. I did think the opposite just a few weeks ago. What changed?
John Roberts, basically. Politically, his signing on to the decision lends a bulletproofness to the Democratic position, changes the whole mentality of the debate. If it had been Kennedy with the liberals, meh. But Roberts’ stamp of approval on the plan allows the Democrats some room to play offense. And that offense is built around one simple claim: Republicans would deny coverage to sick people and let them die.
Sprinkling a little personal responsibility sugar on top can’t hurt. Use their blind extremism against them. Here is a position that was once theirs, that they came up with and that they’ve now abandoned, just because Obama took it up. It’s a great marker of how radical and anti-thought they’ve become, that they’re now willing to let people suffer and die in the hopes that they can defeat a political adversary.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 11, 2012
“Bootstrapping Your Way To The Top”: The Myth Of Rags To Riches
In the latest version of SimCity, a computer game that let’s you pretend to be an urban planner, city residents are born into an economic class and there they remain for life. This may have been done for simplicity’s sake, but the scenario makes the popular computer game disturbingly similar to the situation of most Americans.
The latest report from Pew Charitable Trusts, “Purusing the American Dream,” deals a stunning blow to any romantic notions of bootstrapping your way to the top. It turns out only 4 percent of those raised in the bottom 20 percent ever climb into the top 20 percent. Rather, people raised on one rung of the income ladder are likely to stay pretty close to it as adults. As the report notes, “Forty-three percent of Americans raised in the bottom quintile remain stuck in the bottom as adults and 70 percent remain below the middle class.”
The report, from a non-partisan group that’s far from ideological, shows that while in absolute numbers, the vast majority of Americans are making more than their parents, those increases are rarely enough to help move Americans up the class ladder. In other words, even after adjusting for inflation, most Americans make more than their parents—but few have actually been able to change their socio-economic class. (The report uses the ladder analogy, and the rungs represents 20 percent marks.) That’s because the rich are getting richer faster; income growth has been disproportionately high among those who are already in the top 20 percent. That makes the distribution of classes significantly uneven, finds the report. “The difference between the size of the rungs between the two generations means that while the vast majority of Americans exceeded their parents’ family incomes, the extent of that increase—particularly at the bottom—was not always enough to move them to a different rung of the income ladder.” For 20 percent of Americans, they’re making more money than their parents but are still in a lower class rung.
Among African Americans, the cycle of poverty is even worse. They’re more likely than whites to get stuck in the bottom income quintile—more than half of blacks born in the bottom rung of the income ladder stay there as adults, compared with 33 percent of whites. Even more disturbing: Fifty-six percent of blacks raised in middle class families fall to the bottom two quintiles as adults.
The report confirms what many see in their daily lives: if you’re born rich or born poor, you’ll probably stay that way for the rest of your life. Right now, the American Dream seems to be just that—a myth with little relation to the reality. The implications are impossible to overstate. Our country’s identity is heavily rooted in the idea of economic mobility, and as far back as Alexis de Toqueville, commentators have discussed the importance of that belief. Conservative political rhetoric goes cheerfully on, of course, assuring us that anyone can be successful in this great country if they so choose. Meanwhile our public institutions are increasingly punitive to the poor: Whether it’s the humiliations of getting welfare or the difficulties of escaping student loan debt, we make the poor (and increasingly, the middle class) pay for the sin of not getting born in the right rung of the ladder.
Unlike a computer game, however, a static class system isn’t inevitable and doesn’t have to be permanent.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, July 11, 2012
“Everybody Is A RINO But Me”: The Wind Is Blowing In Just One Direction In The Republican Party
One of the odder phenomena of contemporary political discourse is the regular denial by Republicans that their party has significantly moved to the right in the last few years. No! they insist, it’s Democrats who’ve moved left! (you know, by embracing what used to be Republican policy positions like a a private-sector based system for expanding health insurance via an individual mandate, and a market-based cap-and-trade system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions). You’d think self-conscious conservatives would be a little louder and prouder of their victory over the moderate Republicans of yore (a victory confirmed by the fact that virtually no Republican pol would dare self-identify as “moderate”).
This act of deception finds its most definitive refutation in Republican primaries, where candidates call themselves “conservatives” or “true conservatives” or “constitutional conservatives” with almost every breath, while describing opponents as though they were Jacob Javits reincarnated. Check out this snippet from Dave Weigel about the reaction to the Supreme Court decision on ACA from the two GOP candidates running for the Senate in Texas, which began with the observation that Ted Cruz used to talk about John Roberts as his favorite jurist:
When Roberts helped save “Obamacare,” Cruz immediately blasted the Court for having “abdicated its responsibility to safeguard the Constitution.” He didn’t mention Roberts by name, but he insisted that the decision was more proof that Republicans needed to reject Cruz’s opponent, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. “My opponent is, by nature and by over a decade of political office, a conciliator. Now is not a time for conciliation.” Take that, Larry Tribe. Stuff it, Walter Dellinger.
Over to Dewhurst. Cruz has campaigned against him as a liberal sellout — on blogs, he’s become known as “Dewcrist.” Was he going to blow the chance to point out that Cruz’s ally had saved Obamacare? No. “Supreme Court Justice John Roberts,” said Dewhurst, “sold constitutional conservatives down the river.”
Maybe the point is that conservatives can’t admit they’ve taken over the GOP and driven it straight to Goldwater Country (the 1964 Goldwater, not the one who took to criticizing the Christian Right in his older years) because then it would be hard to describe it as a rat’s nest of RINOs that needs to be cleaned out by fill-in-the-blank.
Still, it’s odd. I recall from way, way back a runoff for Lieutenant Governor in Georgia between the famous ax-handle seggie Lester Maddox and a better-educated but still flamboyant right-wing demagogue named Peter Zack Geer. Each of the two race-baiters tried to label each other an “extremist” (Geer won, though Maddox went on to become Governor later after edging out some guy named Jimmy Carter for a runoff spot). Were they around today and running in a Republican primary, I imagine Maddox and Geer would be calling each other “sellouts” and “conciliators.” The wind is blowing in just one direction in the contemporary Republican Party, and it’s not towards the Left Coast.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 10, 2012
“Something Smells”: About That Fishy Romney Individual Retirement Account
haven’t been much of a fan of the personalized Romney-bashing this campaign season. I avoid the rudely juvenile moniker “Willard.” I thought the whole “Corporations are people” supposed-gaffe was a stupid nothing. I find thinly-veiled attacks on Romney’s LDS heritage to be idiotic and reprehensible. I don’t know enough about Romney’s conduct at Bain to intelligently praise or criticize his managerial performance there.
If you are going to mount a direct personal criticism of a candidate, you should know what you’re talking about. You should say it straight without smarminess or insinuation. And you should put your name to it.
I’ll put my name to one issue. Governor Romney has–in practical, though quite possibly not legal terms–evaded paying his proper taxes. Of course, as a matter of broad policy, he’s taken advantage of loopholes to pay way too little. He and his Bain colleagues are exhibits A, B, and C in the case to tighten the carried interest thing and related provisions. His roughly-14 percent tax rate is galling. Yet the particulars of this suff go further, too.
I’ve presumed all along that whatever he did was legal and standard fare for the uber-wealthy. Now I’m rwondering. He’s been weirdly and unacceptably secretive about these matters. He hasn’t released the full history of his returns. His stance is doubly weird when one considers how strange it is for a major presidential contender to hold complicated offshore bank accounts in Switzerland or the Caymen Islands at all.
Then there’s that fishy IRA, which has a reported rough valuation of between 20 million and 100 million dollars. Given the $30,000 (or lower) annual contribution limits for an IRA, It strains credulity to believe that properly-valued securities of the legally-permitted value would swell by a factor of 1,000, as such securities apparently did.
It seems patently obvious that whatever securities Romney and his Bain colleagues initially contributed were under-valued for strategic tax purposes. The convoluted details of Bain’s divided classes of IRA securities hardly assuage my concerns. That wasn’t ethical or right. I’m not so sure it was legal, either.
By: Harold Pollack, Ten Mile Square, The Washington Monthly, July 9, 2012
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