“Crimes Against Accuracy”: Mitt Romney’s Truth-Free Campaign
The former Massachusetts governor has no use for honesty in his campaign.
If you haven’t already, you should read Ed Kilgore and Greg Sargent on Mitt Romney’s speech yesterday in Michigan, where he tried to clarify and contrast his approach on the economy. The message was typical of Romney’s rhetoric; an attempt to flip an attack and direct it at his opponent. In this case, Romney decried Obama as the purveyor of failed policies, and presented himself as a reform conservative in the mold of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats.
As Kilgore argues, the argument is laughable on its face. The Obama administration is staffed with Clintonites. It’s core policies—on health care, especially—were variations on policies pushed during the Clinton years, and Obama’s foreign policy falls well within the approach of the Clinton administration. What’s more, as Greg Sargent points out, there is no way in which Romney is running as a departure from the previous Republican administration. An RNC spokesperson summed this up well—the Romney agenda is the Bush platform, “just updated.”
But if there’s anything that truly stands out about Romney’s speech in Michigan, it’s the extent to which its stuffed with falsehoods, misrepresentations, and outright lies. Romney claims that Obama has brought “big government” “back with a vengeance”—the truth is that government spending has fallen sharply after a decade increase under President Bush (note: this isn’t a good thing). Romney attacks Obama’s plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts on the rich as a “throwback to discredited policies”, but doesn’t tell his audience that those are Clinton-era rates. He attacks the Affordable Care Act as a takeover of American health care (false), blames Obama for the accumulation of debt (false), and warns—apocalyptically—that Obama will “substitute government for individuality, for choice, for freedom.”
For political reporters with time and space constraints, there is no way to counter all of this, even if you had the inclination. On a regular basis, the Romney campaign issues so many distortions—so many lies—that it’s nearly impossible to keep up. New York Times editorial editor David Firestone is as frustrated as I am on the relentless march of Romney’s dishonesty:
[F]or months he and his campaign have pushed the boundaries of veracity on a huge range of subjects, from the number of jobs created during the Obama administration to the economy’s effect on women to the phony “apology tour” he claims the president has taken. For these crimes against accuracy he is chided by newspaper fact checkers and denounced by editorialists. […]
Otherwise, the Romney campaign hasn’t paid much of a price for its untruths. Mr. Obama has done his share of exaggerating, too, and voters may figure that all politicians do it. That’s a false equivalency: unlike Mr. Romney’s campaign, the president’s is grounded in reality.
Constant mendacity is the norm for Romney and his campaign, and odds are good that he won’t suffer for it. Campaign reporters don’t have a strong incentive to challenge him on his misrepresentations, and interested parties have a hard time dealing with the deluge. In other words, we should strap ourselves in and prepare for five more months of Romney’s truth-free operation.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, May 9, 2012
“Trying To Rewrite History”: Mitt Romney’s Views On The Detroit Bailout
Over the weekend, a top GOP aide said President Obama got the idea from Romney. A look at his past positions shows that’s not true.
Over the weekend, top Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom made an audacious claim:
“[Romney’s] position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed. I know it infuriates them to hear that…. The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice.”
As Fehrnstrom predicted, liberals are reacting with irritation and incredulity. They point out — not for the first time — that Romney published a New York Times op-ed in November 2008, even before Obama had taken office, headlined, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”
The case is actually a little more complex than that, although Fehnstrom’s claim is still hard to take seriously. To understand how we got here, here’s a brief history of Romney’s statements on the car industry.
During the 2008 primary campaign, Romney won Michigan, a victory that was in part attributed to his promises to save the Motor City’s main industry. “If I am president, I will not rest until Michigan is back,” he said. “Michigan can once again lead the world’s automotive industry.” His campaign contrasted that with John McCain, who said, “I’ve gotta look you in the eye and tell you that some of those jobs aren’t coming back.” Romney’s main policy prescription was a series of federal spending for retraining and green tech, to be doled out in $20 billion chunks over five years. The McCain campaign derided thisas a “$100 billion bailout of the auto industry.”
By November 2008, shortly after Obama’s election, the economy was in free-fall. Here’s an excerpt from Romney’s now-infamous column:
If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed. Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself …. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
Romney called for a “managed bankruptcy,” in which company’s executives would be replaced and union contracts would be renegotiated with more favorable terms. Reversing his position during the Republican primary, he said shedding excess workers was now essential. He wanted the government to oversee the bankruptcy but for it be paid for with private-sector funding. But as former Obama administration “car czar” Steven Rattner and others have pointed out, there did not appear to be any private money on the sidelines. Markets were in disarray and credit was drying up fast — and so, they argue, the federal government’s coffers were the only thing standing between GM and the company’s total demise.
In May 2009, Romney appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, who pressed him on the issue:
WALLACE: Wouldn’t that, at a time when we were in the depths of the recession, when we were really right in the midst of what looked like a financial crisis — wouldn’t that have been disastrous for the economy?
ROMNEY: It’d have been precisely the right thing to do for the economy. To help General Motors at that point, before it had received tens of billions of dollars from the government, go through a structured process either in court or out of court to rid itself of its excessive union contract obligations, would have been the right course, and at that point the government could have helped with warranty guarantees and so forth, with debtor possession financing …. We wouldn’t have closed the business down or liquidated it, we instead would have helped it restructure. It was the right course to take, it’s being taken now, too late unfortunately, and as a result the government ends up with more than 70 percent of GM.
Already, we can see Romney struggling with the issue. But the gist of his main answer is already in place: The government funding was wrong, but the restructuring was right.
In June 2011, he reprised this point on the CBS Early Show: “When I wrote that the auto industry was asking for a bailout, we are unwise to send billions of dollars [to companies], instead — finally — the president recognized I was right, and finally took the company, in the case at General Motors, the company finally went through bankruptcy and went through a managed bankruptcy, came out of bankruptcy and is now recovering.”
With the Michigan primary looming in late February 2012, and his numbers sagging as Rick Santorum surged, Romney was again on the defensive. On February 14, he wrote an op-ed in the Detroit News (now paywalled online), writing, “The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.” He appeared with Wallace a few days later, and the host again pressed him. Romney once again insisted that GM could have gone through a managed bankruptcy without federal bailout funds.
That brings us to the present day, and Fehrnstrom’s comments. There have been two important shifts in Romney’s position. The first is from pre-recession, 2008 campaign Romney, who supported a $100 billion government investment in maintaining Detroit jobs, to recession-era Romney, who adopted the idea that the automakers needed pain — including potentially significant job loss — to survive. The major questions here are (1) whether it was feasible for the companies to find private financing to restructure and (2) whether the associated job loss and economic ripple effects would have been acceptable. While Romney is correct that the restructuring was what he suggested, his idea at the time was hardly unique; there was a consensus that the companies needed to be significantly reshaped. The question was how to do it, and he said the answer was without federal funds.
The second shift is from the the stance Romney has taken since his op-ed to Fehrstrom’s comments on Sunday. Fehrnstrom is overreaching in claiming that Obama adopted “exactly” what Romney recommended, given his longstanding opposition to the bailouts. It’s understandable that Romney would want to align himself with the successful rescue of the auto industry: While the bailouts are still unpopular with Americans overall, a plurality agree that they helped the economy. Moreover, the move is comparatively popular in Rust Belt states and among working-class white voters with whom Obama is otherwise weak.
Romney’s position on how to handle the carmakers may not have been realistic, but it was far less cartoonish than his liberal critics have suggested. Trying to rewrite history, however, won’t answer their attack.
By: David A. Graham, Associate Editor, The Atlantic, April 30, 2012
“Spewing Horsepucky”: Dear Republicans, Contraception Is An Economic Issue
Republicans on the Sunday talk show circuit spent a lot of time insisting that contraception isn’t a real issue for women voters, that it’s unimportant and will take a back seat to the economy. Colorado Republican Chair Ryan Call said much the same thing on a local Colorado political show Friday night when he insisted access to contraception was a “small issue.”
Horsepucky. There is no more fundamental economic issue for women than determining if and when they will have children. Fertility is destiny. The Pill was the catalyst for the sexual revolution and the full entry of women into the American workforce because, for the first time in history, women could themselves control their own reproduction. Approximately 99 percent of reproductive age American women have used birth control—and something used by almost every woman in America isn’t a small issue, it’s huge.
A March 6, 2012 blog post in the New York Times, “The Economic Impact of the Pill”, summed it up:
Those changes have had enormous impacts on the economy, studies show: increasing the number of women in the labor force, raising the number of hours that women work and giving women access to traditionally male and highly lucrative professions in fields like law and medicine.
A study by Martha J. Bailey, Brad Hershbein and Amalia R. Miller helps assign a dollar value to those tectonic shifts. For instance, they show that young women who won access to the pill in the 1960s ended up earning an 8 percent premium on their hourly wages by age 50.
Such trends have helped narrow the earnings gap between men and women. Indeed, the paper suggests that the pill accounted for 30 percent—30 percent!—of the convergence of men’s and women’s earnings from 1990 to 2000.
Republicans have also argued that when it comes to reproductive healthcare, affordability and access are two separate issues. Right, and I suppose Dick Cheney paid for his six-figure heart transplant by washing dishes in the hospital commissary. Furthermore, pregnancy prevention programs, including subsidized contraception, save taxpayers money—anywhere from $2 to $6 for every $1 spent, according to a study by a Brookings Institution scholar.
Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, a repeat winner for the Mad Men Chauvinist of the Week Award, undermined his own spin on Meet the Press when he falsely stated that women don’t earn less than men do. Some single women without children are able to close the income gap in some metropolitan areas for precisely that reason—they don’t have kids, and can replicate men’s hours at the office. Women with children often fall behind economically because they’re working a double-shift, at home and at work, and our child care system in this country is wildly inadequate.
Contraception isn’t just a big issue to women voters, it’s obviously a big issue to Republicans, despite their protest to the contrary now that it’s costing them with women voters. It’s big enough that they threatened to shut down the entire U.S. government over it last spring. It’s big enough that Republican governors like Mitch Daniels have made defunding Planned Parenthood a top priority, as has their presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Romney even wants to eliminate federal funding for Title X, which provides family planning funding for five million low-income Americans.
Which begs the question: If contraception is key to women’s economics, why are Republicans trying to keep women from getting it?
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, April 30, 2012
“Campaigning In Fiction”: Mitt Romney’s Campaign Pledges Raise Questions For Conservatives
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is making campaign promises that could produce an economic miracle – or a more predictable list of broken vows.
Romney says he wants to put the nation on a path to a balanced budget while also cutting an array of taxes, building up the Navy and Air Force and adding 100,000 active-duty military personnel. He says he would slash domestic spending and reduce tax loopholes but has offered few details.
His comments raise eyebrows in Congress, long accustomed to easier-said-than-done promises. And even some conservatives have their doubts.
Christopher A. Preble, a vice president for the libertarian Cato Institute, says Romney’s promise to push military spending to 4 percent of the national economy would require dramatic increases that would raise, not lower, the federal deficit.
Citing “the absurdity of Romney’s plan,” Preble wrote recently that the candidate “hasn’t said what other spending he will cut, or what taxes he would increase.”
“Until he does,” Preble wrote, “it is logical to conclude that he plans to pile on more debt.”
Romney says he will avoid that problem by making courageous cuts to federal programs if elected.
“I have three major ways that we can get ourselves to a balanced budget,” he told voters this month in Warwick, R.I. “Number one is to eliminate some programs. Stop, eliminate them. Not just slow down their rate of growth. But look at programs and say, `Too many, too big, too expensive, too ineffective, get rid of it.’ Some programs you’re going to like. I’m going to ask for sacrifice. But the sacrifice will not be taking more from your wallet…. I’m not going to give anybody any free stuff.”
Other Romney proposals would make states responsible for programs such as Medicaid, and reduce the federal workforce by 10 percent “through attrition.”
It’s not uncommon for candidates to promise unspecified spending cuts. Often, however, they find it extremely difficult to fulfill the pledges once elected. That’s one reason the nation’s debt has soared under Republican and Democratic presidents and congresses alike.
Romney has shown little willingness to cut popular programs so far. He joined President Barack Obama, and bucked some House Republicans, by backing an extension of low college loan rates for middle-income students, a $6 billion government cost.
Voters may understand that candidates can’t or won’t keep all their promises.
“You campaign in fiction, and govern in fact,” said Tom Davis, a former congressman who headed the Republicans’ House campaign committee from 1998 to 2002.
He noted that Obama quickly backed off his campaign promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. Obama also pledged to tamp down Washington’s partisan tone and to overhaul immigration laws, neither of which has happened.
Davis said it’s the general thrust of Romney’s proposals that matters most, not every specific item.
“What he’s trying to do is sketch a different vision,” Davis said. Details of how Romney’s proposals will pan out, if he’s elected, “will be determined by Congress and events,” he said.
Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio, said Romney’s proposals “are aspirations” more than firm promises. If elected, Romney may have to revisit his current rejection of tax increases and his vow to leave Social Security and Medicare unchanged for current and soon-to-be recipients, LaTourette said.
Romney and Obama “have to come to the realization that a big deal,” which includes tax increases, spending cuts and changes to Social Security and Medicare, “is the only way” to address the nation’s deficit dilemma, LaTourette said.
Romney calls for a host of tax cuts. But independent analysts say they will worsen the deficit unless offset by deep and politically unpopular spending cuts.
Romney would keep the Bush-era tax cuts, and further reduce all marginal income tax rates by 20 percent. He says he would lower the corporate tax rate, eliminate the estate tax, push a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution and make $500 billion in unspecified domestic discretionary spending cuts in 2016.
He wants wider exploration for energy, including oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR.
Such promises draw loud cheers at GOP rallies. But for decades, Republican-run and Democratic-run congresses alike have rejected ANWR drilling, a balanced budget amendment, deep spending cuts and other mainstays of Romney’s campaign.
Whether these campaign ideas are called proposals, aspirations or promises, they are easier to talk about than to achieve.
By: Charles Babington, The Huffington Post, April 27, 2012
“Ignoring The Facts”: Romney’s Fiscal Fantasy Plan
Political arithmetic is always suspect, and one should always examine carefully the claims of those seeking votes. Smart observers have learned to distinguish between the claims of political candidates and their advisers and proposals that have been evaluated by independent scorekeepers such as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
This principle was aptly illustrated by the “budget analysis” Mitt Romney’s chief economic adviser, Glenn Hubbard, recently put forward. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, Hubbard constructs a budget plan that he imagines President Obama might propose someday, engages in a set of his own extrapolations and then makes assertions about it. He does not discuss the actual Obama plan or how it has been evaluated by the CBO. Nor does Hubbard invest his credibility in defending the claims that Romney has made about his own fiscal plans. He simply states that “Yes, President Obama and Mitt Romney have budgets with competing visions. But Gov. Romney’s budget makes tough choices” — without delving into the specifics or trade-offs that Romney’s “tough choices” entail.
The president put forward a plan this year that would reduce deficits by more than $4 trillion over the next decade. It would bring federal discretionary spending to its lowest levels since the 1960s. It includes $2.50 in spending cuts for every $1 in additional revenue. It also asks everyone to pay his or her fair share of taxes, repealing the Bush tax cuts for families making more than $250,000 a year and closing loopholes and shelters such as preferences for private jets, hedge fund managers and offshore investments.
The independent CBO confirms that the Obama budget would stabilize the debt as a share of the economy — returning us to a tenable fiscal path. It would do that while allowing increased investments in education, research and infrastructure that are critical to stronger, shared economic growth in the years to come. By focusing on building a strong economy, the budget expands the tax base and reduces pressures for future tax increases.
Rather than criticize this approach, Hubbard ignores it — and instead chooses to invent assumptions that bear no relationship to the president’s actual policies. His figures are not explained, but they apparently arbitrarily assume that the president must raise taxes to pay for spending above a level of Hubbard’s choosing.
Rather than filling imaginary gaps in the president’s budget, which has been spelled out in sufficient detail to permit evaluation by independent experts, Hubbard should perhaps address some of the many gaps in Romney’s plans.
Start with the taxes. The Romney campaign has been very clear about what the former governor is promising: $5 trillion in tax cuts on top of extending the Bush tax cuts, with those benefits heavily weighted toward the country’s wealthiest taxpayers. Romney himself has acknowledged the lack of details, stating in reference to his tax plan that “frankly, it can’t be scored.” I have been party for many years to searches for “high-income tax shelters” that can feasibly be closed. I know of no reputable expert in either political party who would find that there is anything even approaching $5 trillion in potential revenue to be generated from this source.
Romney has also proposed a massive defense buildup, even while he says he will cut spending deeply enough to balance the budget. I think it’s clear why he won’t tell voters which cuts he would make: In the past, disclosing his planned budget cuts was politically damaging.
We have seen this movie before. When President Bill Clinton left office, our country was paying down its debt on a substantial scale. I was privileged as secretary of the Treasury to be buying back federal debt. George W. Bush campaigned on a program of tax cuts supported by economic advisers who were not subject to the rigors of official budget scorekeeping. The results — trillions of dollars of budget deficits — speak for themselves.
This is a consequential presidential election. As the country continues to recover from the largest economic crisis in generations, we need to strengthen the job market, address big fiscal challenges and build an economy that is based on sustainable, shared economic growth. Voters should have a chance to choose between clear alternatives. Obama — consistent with his obligations as president — has laid out a multiyear budget embodying his vision for the future, and it has been evaluated by independent experts. It is time for Romney to do the same.
By: Lawrence Summers, Opinion, The Washington Post, April 26, 2012
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