Good afternoon: It’s Sunday, August 5th, 2012, and Mitt Romney has still not released more than two-years’ worth of tax returns. Why is that? Only Mitt and Rafalca know for sure. The rest of us poor souls must continue to sit here and speculate, potentially forever. As you are perhaps aware, Harry Reid has floated one improbable explanation for the secrecy surrounding the documents, which is that Romney did not pay taxes for a decade. The candidate has, of course, denied this, but Reid keeps pushing back, forcing Romney’s surrogates to attack him and thereby ensuring that the story — and the general tax return theme — remain in the news.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus got particularly feisty on ABC’s This Week, calling Reid a “dirty liar who hasn’t filed a single page of tax returns himself, complains about people with money but lives in the Ritz Carlton here down the street.” Senator Lindsey Graham called Reid’s accusations “out of bounds,” while Virginia governor Bob McDonnell said they were “reckless and slanderous.” McDonnell added that, “People don’t care about Mitt Romney’s tax returns. They are [worried] about their own tax returns,” which would probably be mostly true in a world in which Mitt Romney had released more tax returns.
Meanwhile, the Democrats did their best to contain their glee over the situation, with varying degrees of success. Former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell gently peer pressured Romney to share his filings, saying, “We all do it. It’s become commonplace in American politics…Mitt, go ahead and do it.” Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs suggested that Romney “go to Kinko’s,” where he could “put this to rest” by making copies of the documents for “a nickel a page.” (Gibbs was nice enough to offer to send him the nickels.):
“The whole world would know exactly what loopholes he’s taking advantage of,” alluding to Romney’s having placed some of his money in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.
Asked repeatedly whether the Obama campaign in Chicago had told Reid to stop making those tax claims, Gibbs would only reply: “I don’t think anybody controls Harry Reid.
Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wassermann Schultz was more subdued: “This question is not just generated by Harry Reid,” she said. “It’s been asked by countless reporters, by voters that want to know more about Mitt Romney’s finances.” And David Axelrod stuck to what has become an Obama campaign mantra, asking, “Why don’t they just put this to rest? What is it that he’s hiding?”
Finally, Reid himself weighed in once again via a statement sent to Talking Points Memo this morning which read, in part, “It is sad that the most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon has forced his party to defend his decision to hide the truth about his tax returns.” Sad is one word for it.
By: Caroline Bankoff, Daily Intel, August 5, 2012
August 6, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | David Axelrod, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Harry Reid, Mitt Romney, Politics, Reince Priebus, Robert Gibbs, Tax Evasion, Tax Returns |
Leave a comment
Campaigns often feature a division of labor when it comes to speaking about the candidate’s opponent, one in which the candidate makes polite but firm criticism, while the surrogates (campaign staff, other elected officials) say much harsher and more personal things. A good campaign makes sure that the two proceed along the same thematic lines so that they reinforce one another, but the fact that the candidate himself is more genteel in his language is supposed to preclude a backlash against him for being too “negative.” Frankly, I’ve always thought this is overblown, particularly the strange custom whereby it’s deemed a bit unseemly to refer to your opponent by name, such that saying “Mitt Romney is a jackass” would be horribly uncouth, but saying “My opponent is a jackass” is somehow more acceptable.
As the campaign goes on, this protocol fades away. Candidates’ comments take on a harder edge, beginning to resemble the comments their staffs make. It seems we may be entering this phase, as witnessed by this, which Obama said in an interview yesterday:
And the fact that a whole bunch of Republicans in Washington suddenly said, this is a tax—for six years he said it wasn’t, and now he has suddenly reversed himself. So the question becomes, are you doing that because of politics? Are you abandoning a principle that you fought for, for six years simply because you’re getting pressure for two days from Rush Limbaugh or some critics in Washington?
One of the things that you learn as President is that what you say matters and your principles matter. And sometimes, you’ve got to fight for things that you believe in and you can’t just switch on a dime.
That last part sounds identical to the things George W. Bush said about John Kerry in 2004, and it’s more personal than what we usually hear from Obama when he talks about Romney. Obama is talking about this not because a majority of the public agrees with him on the Affordable Care Act (it’s a wash) but because it is all but impossible for Mitt Romney to talk about health care without twisting himself into a logical pretzel that reinforces everything people believe about him being a flip-flopper. The personal attack (Mitt Romney is unprincipled) is the point, not the substantive attack (Mitt Romney flip-flopped on the mandate).
The election is in four months, and I think we’ll be hearing more and more of these kinds of criticisms from Obama. One of the big reasons is that when David Axelrod says Mitt Romney has no principles, it isn’t news, but when Barack Obama says it, it is.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 6, 2012
July 7, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama, David Axelrod, GOP, Mitt Romney, Politics, Republicans |
Leave a comment
Let’s say you’re a Democratic political consultant who has never worked for Barack Obama. How do you feel about him and his team? Well, chances are that although you respect their skill, you also think they’re too insular and too unwilling to listen to outside advice. Like yours! Because after all, if you’re a Democratic political consultant and you don’t work for the Obama campaign, you probably wish you did. There’s a lot of prestige, and not a little money, in working for the president’s re-election effort. If you didn’t work for the historic 2008 effort, you probably feel a little left out. And you probably also feel that you’re just as smart as David Axelrod or David Plouffe, and you ought to be going on Meet the Press to share your wisdom just like they do.
But you can’t. So what can you do? You can complain anonymously to reporters that the Obama campaign is doing it wrong:
That kind of unflappability is a hallmark of the Obama political operation — and was a crucial ingredient in its success in 2008. But some Democratic veterans are wondering whether the reelection campaign, run by the same tight-knit group that led it four years ago, is equipped for what lies ahead.
“The bad thing is, there is no new thinking in that circle,” said one longtime operative in Democratic presidential campaigns who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.
Eight other prominent Democratic strategists interviewed shared that view, describing Obama’s team as resistant to advice and assistance from those who are not part of its core. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity as well.
When a consultant says the Obama team is “resistant to advice,” what he or she means is, “They won’t take my advice.”
I’m not saying every decision the Obama campaign has made has been perfect. But you know what? They’re pretty good at this running for president thing. The economy is stuck in the crapper, which should spell doom for an incumbent president, yet they remain a couple of points ahead of their opponent. They have a voter contact operation that is light years ahead of anything that’s ever been done before. They’ve barely begun airing ads attacking Mitt Romney. All in all, things are going pretty well.
Again, I’m not saying they can’t lose, and I’m not saying they haven’t made mistakes or won’t make more. But it’s important to remember that these kinds of complaints from people who aren’t working for the campaign happen in every single election. And the fact that these complaints are coming from political professionals tells you virtually nothing about how valid they are, since they are likely heavily motivated by professional jealousy.
You’ll do a lot better emotionally over the course of the next four and a half months if you keep this in mind: The polls are going to go up and down. At some point, Mitt Romney will be leading. This will almost certainly happen just after his convention; that’s usually how things go (John McCain led Barack Obama after his convention in 2008, and so did a lot of other candidates who went on to lose, perhaps most famously Michael Dukakis, who led by a remarkable 17 points). The important thing is not to assume that all is lost and everything the campaign has done has been a failure when those movements in the polls happen. Just chill out.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 13, 2012
June 14, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | Barack Obama presidential campaign 2008, David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Democrats, Mitt Romney, Politics, Pundits, Strategists |
1 Comment
Unknown Feed
mykeystrokes.com 