“The Wrong Résumé”: The Myth Of The Businessman President – A Prelude To Disaster
Lost in the exhaust of mendacity left in Las Vegas this week, after Donald Trump brought his birther fantasies to town on behalf of Mitt Romney, was a curious statement by the man who has now cinched the Republican nomination for president.
On Tuesday, the same day Trump proved yet again that money and truth, like money and taste, are seldom twined, Romney talked about amending the Constitution to require the president to have business experience. He spoke approvingly of a notion from a store owner who wanted to make anyone who does not have at least three years of business background ineligible to lead the country.
“He said, ‘I’d like to have a provision in the Constitution that in addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birth place of the president being set by the Constitution, I’d like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States,’” said Romney, cheerfully summarizing this rewrite of the founders’ governing blueprint.
Well, there goes Teddy Roosevelt, the writer, rancher and police commissioner, not to mention his distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt, the assistant naval secretary and politician, or Dwight Eisenhower, the career soldier. Ike’s résumé, which includes defeating the world’s most concentrated form of evil in Nazi Germany, would not be enough to qualify him for the presidency.
Romney has made business experience the main reason to elect him. Without his business past or his projections of business future, there is no there there. But history shows that time in the money trade is more often than not a prelude to a disastrous presidency. The less experience in business, the better the president.
In a scholarly ranking of great presidents, a 2009 survey conducted by C-Span,6 of the 10 best leaders lacked sufficient business experience to be president by Romney’s rumination. This list includes Ronald Reagan, the actor, union activist and corporate spokesman, and John F. Kennedy, the naval officer, writer and politician. There is one failed businessman on the list of great presidents, the haberdasher Harry S. Truman.
By contrast, two 20th century businessmen — George W. Bush, whose sweetheart deal with the Texas Rangers made him a multimillionaire, and Herbert Hoover, who came by his mining fortune honestly — were ranked among the worst presidents ever by the same historians. Bush left the country in a sea of debt and an economic crisis rivaled only by the one that engulfed Hoover.
Both George W. Bush and Romney are Harvard Business School graduates, further padding their business cred. Once they started governing, both men failed to improve the economic lives of those under them.
At Bain Capital, Romney as C.E.O. practiced a very Darwinian form of capitalism for 14 years; he points to his time there as a model for how he would turn around the American economy. But it’s clear that enriching a handful of shareholders often has very little to do with job creation. The point of private equity, after all, is to make deals that turn investments into profits — nothing more. In that realm, Romney has succeeded.
Once he moved from running Bain to running the Bay State, Romney was a failure at job creation. His state ranked 47th. Job growth nationwide, even under the sluggish economy of George W. Bush, was five times higher than it was in the Massachusetts run by Romney from 2003 to 2007. This was reflected in his approval ratings — 34 percent in the last full year of his term, making him one of the most unpopular governors in the country, ranked 48 out of 50.
The biggest job creator of modern times, Bill Clinton, wouldn’t know a spreadsheet from a cooked derivative. His business experience was nil, but he had governing smarts, and his instincts were usually right. Under Clinton’s watch, the United States added 23 million new jobs — this after he raised “job-killing” taxes on the rich.
Romney never mentions Clinton’s formula for prosperity, or that of Franklin Roosevelt, the other business-challenged president who took the American economy to new highs. Roosevelt had been through a traumatic life experience, the diagnosis of polio, that made him a man of resolve, with empathy for the average person.
“If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toes, after that anything would seem easy,” said Roosevelt. When he ran for president in 1932, his theme was “the forgotten man.”
Romney has shown a strange tendency to fetishize wealth, from his belief that “corporations are people” to his boasting of how many Cadillacs his wife drives. His European role model would have to be Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s richest man. A media tycoon, the Rupert Murdoch of his country, Berlusconi was laughably bad as a three-time prime minister.
The verdict is still out on Barack Obama, the community organizer, lawyer and writer. Because he got hit with the Bush hangover, his overall job numbers show a net loss of about 850,000, from January 2009 to the present. But if you start a year into his presidency, Obama has added almost four million jobs.
We aren’t electing a C.E.O. to occupy the White House. We’re looking for good judgment, broad life experience, flashes of wisdom. Still, for those who insist on making business the bottom line in who they pick, the past is indeed predictive.
By: Timothy Egan, The New York Times, May 31, 2012
“The Panicky Man”: Mitt Romney’s Ridiculous Unemployment Reaction
Unemployment, which is high but generally dropping, ticked up a tenth of a percent in May to 8.2 percent. This is not good news. There were 69,000 jobs created—a big improvement over the months when the country was hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs—but still not what economists had hoped for or expected.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney, the soon-to-be GOP presidential nominee, called it “devastating news.”
Devastating? Seriously? It’s a disappointment, to be sure. But “devastating” is a word used to describe rubble-making crises, things like Hurricane Katrina or the 9/11 attacks. It sounds over-the-top from anyone, but in Romney’s case, the hyperbole is worse, since it just ends up underscoring Romney’s fatal flaw.
Romney’s not a passionate guy. He has a very calculating manner about him—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since it means he’s capable of making tough decisions without being overly influenced by emotion. This is a man who withdrew from the 2008 Republican presidential candidate race in February of that year, and endorsed Sen. John McCain soon afterward. This is not the behavior of a man given to delusion or hysteria. This was the behavior of a man who took an objective look at his own situation and concluded he could not win the nomination. So he wasn’t going to continue on a quixotic and ultimately losing quest.
It’s that sort of businesslike calm—or coldness, if you will—that is both Romney’s greatest asset and liability. He fails to connect with voters in large part because he appears to be driven by cold statistics instead of compassion, or indeed any emotion. But he also can use that to his advantage, casting himself as the person able to make hard decisions during tough times.
Calling a one tenth of 1 percent uptick in the unemployment rate “devastating” makes Romney look ridiculous. It makes one wonder how he’d react in a far worse crisis. But mostly, it appears phony. Romney already has trouble convincing people he has a solid core of principles, since he has changed his position on gay rights and abortion. Pretending to be Panicky Man doesn’t help.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, June 1, 2012
Romney-Trump In 2012: The “I’ve Got Mine And The Hell With You” Financiers
What could Romney’s handlers be thinking when they hyped his connection with Donald Trump — fundraising with Trump, offering supporters the possibility of a meal with Trump, relishing Trump’s attention and endorsement?
Trump signifies everything Romney presumably doesn’t want people to associate with himself — conspicuous wealth, arrogance, hubris, and a distinct preference for money over all other human values.
Trump, like Romney, represents almost everything that’s wrong with the American economy today — an unprecedented amount of wealth and power at the very top, widespread insecurity and declining real wages for everyone else, and a form of casino capitalism that places huge bets with other peoples’ money and depends on everyone else to bail it out when the bets turn sour.
But wait a minute. Perhaps Romney’s handlers are smarter than they seem. Maybe Mitt has decided to let it all hang out. Rather than try to hide what’s obvious to everyone, the new strategy is to make Romney’s liabilities into assets by flaunting them. Be even bigger and bolder. Money rules!
In fact, they’re mulling an even bigger and bolder move. They recall how Bill Clinton’s choice of Al Gore as running mate in 1992 — someone very much like Clinton — accentuated Clinton’s youthful energy, the new generation he represented, and the new start Clinton wanted to give America.
So they figure Mitt’s choice of Trump as running mate will allow Mitt to celebrate his boundless capacity to make money, the “I’ve got mine and the hell with you” financiers and CEOs he represents, and the social Darwinism that he and the regressive right are convinced will be good for America.
The new bumper-sticker: ROMNEY-TRUMP IN 2012. YOU’RE FIRED!
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, May 29, 2012
“Can’t Touch This”: It’s Time To Stop Letting Mitt Romney Off Easy
Mitt Romney wants the presidential election to be all about Barack Obama. If the press doesn’t start asking Romney some difficult questions about the core arguments upon which his entire presidential candidacy is based, he may very well get his way.
Case in point: Check out Mike Allen’s preview this morning of the Romney campaign’s next attack on the President’s economic record…
A senior aide tells us Mitt Romney plans to begin hitting specific stimulus projects as he travels, arguing that President Obama has actually subtracted jobs:
“Were these investments the best return on tax dollars, or given for ideological reasons, to donors, for political reasons? He spent $800 billion of everybody’s money. How’d it work out? It was the mother of all earmarks, not a jobs plan. By wasting all of this money, you had the worst of all worlds: It destroyed confidence in the economy, and makes people less likely to borrow money. Dodd-Frank has been a disaster for the economy. Where are the steady hands? Who’s in charge of energy? Where’s the strong, confident voice on the economy?”
So Romney will now go back to claiming Obama subtracted jobs. But there’s a new twist: Romney will claim that the effect of the stimulus has been to destroy jobs. As it has in the past, the Romney camp will justify this by pointing to a bogus metric — the net jobs lost on Obama’ watch. That includes the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost before the stimulus went into effect. Really: The Romney camp’s claim is that we can calculate that the stimulus destroyed jobs overall with a metric that factors in all the jobs destroyed before the stimulus took effect. That’s not an exaggeration. It really is the Romney campaign’s position. It’s time to ask Romney himself to justify it.
The Romney camp will also begin claiming that Obama has “never created a job.” Will anyone ask Romney about the two dozen straight months of private sector job creation we’ve seen?
And if Romney is now going to start hitting individual stimulus projects, it’s also time to ask him what he would have done if he had been president in January of 2009. He has previously said positive things about stimulus spending. Are those no longer operative? Would Romney really not have proposed any government spending to stimulate the economy when it was in free fall? What would he have done instead? This question is absolutely central. How about asking it?
Then there’s the claim that “Dodd-Frank has been a disaster for the economy.” Romney has pledged to roll back financial reform completely, but he hasn’t said with any meaningful specificity what he woud replace it with, beyond claiming (after the J.P. Morgan debacle forced him to do so) that he supports “common sense regulations.” How about asking Romney what, if anything, he would do instead to guard against future Wall Street recklessness after rolling back Obama’s regulatory response to the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression?
Many of the claims that form the foundation of Romney’s entire case for the presidency are going without any meaningful national press scrutiny to speak of. Why?
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post Plum Line, May 29, 2012
“Much Like Sarah Palin”: Why Mitt Romney Only Does Fox News Interviews
The only Sunday morning talk show Mitt Romney has appeared on this election season is Fox News Sunday, and the other networks are annoyed that the Republican presidential candidate is ignoring their invitations. “I know he does Fox,” Bob Schieffer said to senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie on CBS’s Face the Nation this weekend, “but we’d love to have him some time, as would Meet the Press and the ABC folk, I would guess.” Gillespie replied: “We’re going to take our message to the American people. You saw him talking to schoolchildren last week.” And it’s not just the Sunday shows Romney is avoiding. Aside from two sit-downs alongside his wife, Ann — on CBS and ABC — and appearances on CNBC and CNN, Romney has only talked with Fox News since securing the GOP nod nearly two months ago. Why is Romney sticking with the “fair and balanced” network? Here, five theories:
1. He only wants softball questions
Romney is following the lead of other conservative Republicans, says Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice, “using Fox News as a way to avoid having to answer those pesky, non–public relations, non-softball questions and follow-up questions that he’d get on CBS, NBC, ABC.” Much like Sarah Palin, he has “had a hard time in other interviews beyond Fox,” says Ron Chusid at Liberal Values. Romney doesn’t like to get into specifics on his secret plan for the economy or why his Bain Capital record is an asset, and heaven forbid “clips of his past statements were brought up.”
2. Romney learned his lesson from the primaries
Sticking with Fox is a deliberate strategy by Team Romney “to limit national media exposure this time around,” says Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post. Romney did the Sunday shows and magazine profiles in 2008, and his GOP rivals “made the weekend rounds” this year, and how well did any of that work out? After the contentious primary, Romney has “benefited from learning the importance of hammering home a singular message on safe turf,” says Justin Sink at The Hill.
3. He’s still shoring up his right flank
Team Romney is working hard to strengthen its bridges to the Right, and Fox News is just part of that strategy, says Calderone at The Huffington Post. Along with his two appearances on Fox News Sunday, the former Massachusetts governor recently held an off-the-record meeting with “dozens of conservative columnists, reporters, and bloggers,” followed by interviews last week with two of the sites represented at the meeting, Hot Air and Townhall. One attendee at the private sit-down said Romney’s message to conservatives is “we want you on our side and working with the campaign.”
4. He has no reason not to stick with Fox
Appearing on Fox News gives Romney a lot of advantages, says The Moderate Voice‘s Gandelman. Like other Republican candidates, he is almost guaranteed as much air time as he wants, “where the candidate can regurgitate talking points” in front of huge amounts of right-leaning voters. Plus, if he makes a verbal misstep, “more likely than not his interviewer would gloss over the gaffe, try to discreetly explain it away, and re-ask the question.” It’s smart PR, and today, unlike a decade ago, “Romney can get away with it.”
5. He’s getting bad advice
Can you really “run for the presidency more or less exclusively through Fox News?” says Richard K. Barry at Lippmann’s Ghost. Maybe: After all, the only people who really pay attention to public affairs programs are political junkies and reporters. But “I think it is foolish to try.” Not only is it risky to alienate reporters who help shape the campaign narrative, but I doubt ignoring the press “plays well with the mainstream of the country, the kind of people you need to vote for you outside your conservative base if you hope to win the presidency.”
By: The Week, Best Opinion, May 29, 2012
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