Mitt Romney’s Problem With Conservatives: He’s Not Selling What They Want
The press has offered basically two explanations for Mitt Romney’s failure to win over conservative voters. The first is ideological: conservatives know that Romney was once a moderate, and they don’t consider his swing to the right sincere. The second is personal: whether because of his money, his faith, or his hair, average Republican voters just don’t relate to him.
There’s clearly something to both of these arguments, but they don’t fully explain Romney’s struggles. After all, moderates-turned-conservatives have won GOP nominations in the past. George H.W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1996, and John McCain in 2004 all won their party’s nomination despite histories of deep tension with the conservative movement. Steve Forbes, who had spent most of his life as a Rockefeller Republican, amassed so much conservative support in the run-up to the 2000 campaign that he briefly challenged George W. Bush from the right. Republicans also have rallied behind candidates from elite economic backgrounds (George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush) and candidates uncomfortable speaking about their faith (George H.W. Bush, Dole, McCain).
There’s a third explanation for Romney’s woes: he’s just not selling what conservative Republicans most want to buy. Going into this campaign, I suspect, Romney and his advisers figured it would be the perfect confluence of man and moment. Americans are obsessed with restoring jobs. Economic management, Romney likes to say, is his “wheelhouse.” As he put it last year, “That is what I know and what I do. I’ve had experience in turning things around that are going in the wrong direction.” From management consulting to the Olympics to the state of Massachusetts, Romney describes himself as a man who, through a combination of smarts, toughness, and pragmatism, nurses struggling enterprises back to health.
For the general election, it’s a pretty good shtick, which helps explain why Romney runs close to Obama in a head-to-head matchup. But while reviving the economy may be the issue that Americans care about most, it’s not the one that the Republican base cares about most. For conservative activists, the 2012 election isn’t fundamentally about jobs, it’s about freedom. The essential question is not how best to use government to restore economic growth. It is how best to keep government from destroying liberty.
When CBS News and The New York Times surveyed Tea Party supporters in 2010, for instance, they found that 45 percent described the movement’s goal as scaling back the federal government, compared with only 9 percent who described it as creating jobs. Asked what they were angriest about, 16 percent said the new health-care law, 14 percent said a government that doesn’t represent the people, 11 percent said government spending, and only 8 percent said unemployment and the economy. (This may be partly because, according to CBS and The Times, Tea Partiers are wealthier than other Americans and thus more insulated from the economic downturn.)
Obviously, conservatives see shrinking government and boosting the economy as interconnected: they’re convinced that if you do the former, the latter will follow. But when conservatives talk about limited government, it isn’t the prospect of enhanced economic growth that inspires them most, it’s the prospect of greater freedom. For a century now, American progressives have found the suggestion that boosting marginal tax rates or increasing anti-poverty programs threatens freedom to be downright baffling, but from Calvin Coolidge to Barry Goldwater to Glenn Beck, it’s been a core belief of the American right. And it has particular resonance in an era dominated by fears of national decline and after three years of a president who, more than his two Democratic predecessors, really has increased the federal government’s reach.
From Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul to Newt Gingrich to Rick Santorum, the candidates who have stirred passion on the right this presidential season have been those who have defined the election not as a struggle between economic stagnation and economic prosperity but between government tyranny and individual freedom. That’s why Obamacare is such a potent issue for grassroots conservatives; it also explains the right’s obsession with the Obama administration’s “war on religious liberty.” It’s why Gingrich gets such huge applause when he promises to abolish the Obama administration’s “czars.”
Listen to what Santorum said after he thumped Romney last week in Missouri. “People have asked me, you know, what is—what is the secret?” Santorum declared. “Why are you doing so well? Is it your jobs message? And, yes, we have a great jobs message … [but] the real message—the message that we’ve been taking across this country and here in Missouri—is a message of what’s at stake in this election … we have a president of the United States, as I mentioned, who’s someone who believes he knows better, that we need to accumulate more power in Washington, D.C., for the elite in our country to be able to govern you, because you are incapable of liberty, that you are incapable of freedom. That’s what this president believes. And I—and Americans—understand that there is a great, great deal at stake. If this president is reelected, and if we don’t have a nominee that can make this case and not be compromised on the biggest issues of the day, but can make the case to the American public that this is about the Founders’ freedom, this is about a country that believes in God-given rights and a Constitution that is limited to protect those rights.”
This is a bad general-election message. The Americans who decide presidential elections, especially in tough economic times, are pragmatic. They want candidates willing to do whatever it takes—no matter whose ideological ox is gored—to make the economic pain stop. It was FDR’s kitchen-sink pragmatism—along with his optimism and sense of urgency—that propelled him to victory over the doctrinaire Herbert Hoover. Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush in 1992 with the campaign motto, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Ronald Reagan won in 1980 in part because—unlike Goldwater 16 years earlier—he convinced Americans that when it came to popular government-spending programs, he would not let his conservative economic beliefs cause middle-class Americans any pain.
I suspect that Romney understands this. I’m sure he’d like to frame this campaign as a contest between a real-world, problem-solving businessman and a haughty academic who doesn’t understand what happens when ideas leave the blackboard. The problem is that at the very moment Romney wants to attack Obama for seeing the economy in abstract, ideological terms, his own party base is demanding that he do exactly the same thing.
Poor Mitt Romney. I actually think he’s interested in fixing the economy. But his party’s base is more interested in fighting the culture war by other means.
By: Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast, February 13, 2012
Why The Catholic Contraception Controversy Is A Phony Battle
Public health and women’s autonomy collided with religion last week. Elders in the Catholic Church were incensed as the regulations implementing the federal healthcare law would have required institutions affiliated with the Church (but not the Church itself) to provide health plans covering contraception. The rules (part of the normal regulation-writing process that comes after a sweeping law is enacted) would not have forced the Church or its clergymen to hand out birth control; they only would have required Catholic-affiliated schools, hospitals, and universities to play by the rules everyone else has to follow, and provide for full healthcare coverage for women.
The Obama administration, under fire as the health issue turned into a political issue, offered a compromise: health insurance companies would have to provide the free birth control to the female employees (some of whom are not even Catholic), but the religious-affiliated institutions would not have to pay for it.
It was a dodge of sorts, to be sure, but it gave the bishops the cover they needed to maintain the Catholic Church standard opposing contraception. Still, it was a generous compromise. And now the bishops are suggesting it is not enough, citing “serious moral concerns” about the compromise, particularly as it might apply to entities that self-insure.
That, on its own, is a bit of a stretch. The Church, after all, has given marriage annulments to politically-connected people who had not only been married for years, but have had children. If that’s not an inartful dodge around the Church rule forbidding divorce, nothing is. And while it’s probably not helpful to resurrect the painful episode of the decades of child sexual abuse by priests and the failure of the Church to stop them, it’s also true that the institution of the Church is still rebuilding its “moral” brand.
Picking a fight with the Obama administration does nothing to advance that goal. Nor does it improve the Church’s power over its own flock—98 percent of whom have used birth control. Government should indeed protect religious freedom, which is why no one’s asking priests to marry same-sex couples or forcing Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. But what the Church is dangerously close to doing is an equally invasive reverse: asking the government to try to enforce a rule the Church has been wildly unsuccessful in imposing on its own members.
There’s one clear reason why both the Church and the GOP presidential candidates have been raising the tired old accusations of the a war on Catholicism (an allegation that is extremely insulting to Catholics, to whom faith in God is sincere and unshakeable—certainly not threatened by a coworker getting free birth control pills). It’s an election year, so it’s prime time for making hyperbolic and incendiary accusations that have little basis in fact. Social issues have been largely absent from the campaign so far, and for a reason: the economy has been so bad that it was enough of an issue for GOP candidates to run on. But now that the unemployment rate is creeping slowly down and the stock market is stabilizing, the economy may retreat somewhat as an issue. And that leads candidates to insert wedge issues like the contraception debate.
Remarkably, opponents of the Obama administration rule, along with self-described liberal pundits, are convinced that the “Catholic vote” will rise up against Obama in the fall. That analysis assumes that all Catholics vote according to their Church’s dictates, which is absurd, especially in this case. If nearly all Catholics use birth control, why on earth would they vote against a president who tried to make access to birth control easier? Those who are that upset about contraception weren’t planning to vote for this president, anyway.
There will be more social issues raised during this election year, especially after the GOP nomination is sealed. But the contraception debate is a phony one.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, February 13, 2012
Romney Shows He Hasn’t Read Obama’s Modified Birth Control Reg During Rowdy Maine Town Hall
Mitt Romney doubled down on his new-found objection to contraception coverage during a town hall in Maine on Friday. Romney — who remained mum as Massachusetts implemented a measure requiring insurance companies to cover contraception in 2003, signed into law a health care reform bill that has greatly expanded access to state-funded birth control, and required Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims — told a rowdy crown in Portland, Maine that President Obama’s modified contraception rule does not go far enough:
At the event, Romney also waded into the political fray over the decision by the Obama administration today to require insurers, rather than private employers, to pay for coverage of contraception. The move reversed an earlier decision that would have required religious-affiliated organizations, such as Catholic hospitals, to provide the coverage, prompting an outcry from across the political spectrum.
“Today he did the classic Obama retreat all right, and what I mean by that is, it wasn’t a retreat at all. It’s another deception,” Romney said, arguing that that religious organizations still will have to pay for contraception after insurance companies pass the costs along to employers.
“Companies consist of people, and someone has to pay — the owners, the employees or the customers, and they pass those costs on to the customers,”
he said.
But it’s Romney who is being devious here. Actuaries and real world experiences in covering contraception in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP) have found that contraception coverage is at the very least cost neutral within the context of the benefits of the health care plan. And in announcing its compromise on Friday, the administration pledged to work with insurers to issue future regulations that would specifically stipulate that if a religiously affiliated nonprofit chooses to avoid offering contraception in its health care plan, “there be no charge for the contraceptive coverage” for the employer or the employee.
As a senior administration official explained to the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff, “Our policy is saying that the Catholic hospital doesn’t want to cover contraceptives, and they don’t include that in their policy. It also says that Aetna needs to provide contraceptive services for free to workers in the plan. Aetna sets the premium, but it cannot be higher than it would have been without birth control. The premium does not include contraception.” “There is a sort of bank account,” says the official. So, in this particular hypothetical, “Aetna is sucking it up.”
In other words, providing contraception without additional cost sharing will become “a legitimate cost of doing business” for health insurers who work with religious nonprofits, and while they may not be all too thrilled at the prospect, administration officials expect them to agree “that this is going to be a cost-neutral benefit.”
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, February 13, 2012
“Boundaries Of A Mindset”: The Undermining Of The Freedoms Of Others
How a political party, movement — or nation — thinks is more important than WHAT it thinks. This is the larger lesson to be learned in the dispute between President Obama and the Catholic bishops over birth control.
With the President’s reasonable compromise announced on Friday the controversy with the Catholic leadership has been resolved in ways that I think strengthens the President’s hand and exposes the Republican Party, yet again, as the faction of reactionary anti-women extremists.
Some have mocked the President for stumbling into a dispute with a powerful religious constituency, which conventional wisdom says is the last thing a president up for contract renewal wants to do in an election year. I am not so sure and think critics of the President — both liberal and conservative — reveal their own bias in favor of the Catholic hierarchy at the expense of the Catholic faithful when critics speak so confidently about what “the Church” believes about anything in this controversy.
Nevertheless, the deeper and more important issue in the present controversy between Obama and the bishops is what are we to make of the claim by an absolutist institution, the Catholic Church, that a republic’s guarantee of freedom of religion gives to that church absolute sovereignty over all those areas of society where the Church’s interests intersect?
Fundamentalism is not a religion. It is a mindset. A liberal society can accommodate the demands of radical freedom expressed by the Catholic Church just so long as liberalism itself remains the dominant governing mentality. But a society in which the radical freedom of religious fundamentalists prevails would be a society that sooner or later descends into either anarchy or tyranny.
And this is an autonomy the Church says exists not only over the Church proper where actual religious worship takes place. It also extends everywhere the Church has business and economic interests, such as its schools, hospitals, universities — even it’s pizza parlors and taco stands if the Church decided to diversify into the fast food business as well.
The reason this issue matters is that we are talking about the governing mentality of our republic — HOW our republic will think as it tries to solve the problems we face, not only WHAT we eventually do think about the possible solutions to embrace. And it matters a great deal whether that overriding mentality is a liberal one or is one authoritarian, fundamentalist, or absolutist in nature.
The Founding Fathers were not anti-religious. But the wall of separation they built between church and state recognized that the absolutism so necessary in giving church followers the comforting sense of certainty they require was death to democratic republics where secular authorities had to accommodate and reconcile many such faith-claims. As James Madison said when talking about the system of federalism within the Constitution and of the mediating and political qualities thus necessary in democratic office-holders: When you “extend the sphere you enlarge the views.”
When they are working to attain power, and before they do attain it, “the fascist and communist parties invoke all the guarantees of the bill of rights, all the prerogatives of popular parties, of elections, of representation of the assemblies, of tenure in the civil service. But when they attain power, they destroy the liberal democratic institutions, as on a broad staircase, they climbed to power.”
That was written by the great American journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1955 classic, Essays in the Public Philosophy, and it applies equally to all illiberal political parties that seek to impose a faith or political ideology on an unwilling audience.
It was a book Lippmann started when Hitler’s rise in Germany threatened Western civilization and concluded during the height of the Cold War. Lippmann’s aim was to better understand the inner dynamics and pathologies by which liberal democracies were nearly made extinct in the 20th century — and often with the connivance of those democracies’ own citizens.
Democracy, Lippmann concluded, is for those who are for it. Democracy is for those willing to do more than simply claim a democracy’s freedoms for their own but to protect those freedoms for others. And this requires, first of all, recognizing the danger which non-negotiable and absolutist faith-claims by anyone pose to the fabric that supports the democratic way of life.
And the “borderline between sedition and reform,” writes Lippmann — the borderline between legitimate and illegitimate politics — is the boundary between a mindset that says there can be only one “Truth” and another that accepts the “sovereign principle” that in a democracy “we live in a rational order in which, by sincere inquiry and rational debate, we can distinguish the true and the false, the right and the wrong.”
Indeed, using a religious metaphor, Lippmann says that “rational procedure is the ark of the covenant of the public philosophy” of democratic republics. There are no election laws or constitutional guarantees which cannot be changed, says Lippmann. But what must always be unchangeable if a democracy is to survive “is the commitment to rational determination.”
The counter-revolutionists, says Lippmann, will in the end try to “suppress freedom in order to propagate their official doctrine.” They will, he says, “reject the procedure by which in the free society official policy is determined.”
And among these counter-revolutionaries I would include the present right wing, politically aggressive Catholic Church hierarchy that is now demanding the entire society give to the Church the same deference in the political realm which the Church demands of the faithful in the religious one, by accepting and accommodating the Church’s non-negotiable and absolutist faith-demands on birth control wherever the writ of the Catholic Church runs — whether in the sphere of religious worship or wherever the Church has business interests of any kind — as it uses its resources to carve out little Vatican Cities within our republic where the Church claims ultimate sovereignty and might as well start appointing ambassadors.
It is not possible to reject this faith in the efficacy of reason over absolutist faith, says Lippmann, “and at the same time believe that communities of men enjoying freedom could govern themselves successfully.”
It it not possible, in other words, to give the Catholic Church the power it seeks to shape a political agenda based on its own internal dogmas alone and at the same time still believe we have a democratic republic, not really.
Conservatives have tried to change the subject in order to deflect criticisms of them that they are ideologues who seek to impose reactionary beliefs on an unwilling American public. They have done this by trying to redefine liberalism — or “secularism” — to be somehow a competing “religion” itself so as to assert that liberals are equally dogmatic in trying to “impose” their “religious beliefs” of religious tolerance, open-mindedness and official state neutrality regarding all forms of religious worship on an unwilling traditionalist or fundamentalist audience that thinks Judeo-Christian orthodoxy ought to be the law of the land.
Like all religious fundamentalists and absolutists who seek political power, the Catholic Church is showing us again that the undermining of the freedoms of others begins with the demands for absolute freedoms for themselves.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, February 12, 2012
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