By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 9, 2012
“No Policy Or Vision”: The Hole In Mitt Romney’s Campaign
Criticism of Mitt Romney for lacking a coherent message is grossly unfair. He has been forthright, consistent and even eloquent in pressing home his campaign’s central theme: Mitt Romney desperately wants to be president.
Everything else seems mushy or negotiable. Romney is passionate about the need, as he sees it, to defeat President Obama — but vague or self-contradictory as to why. The lyrics of “America the Beautiful,” which Romney has recited as part of his standard campaign speech, don’t solve the mystery; Obama, too, is on record as supporting spacious skies and fruited plains.
Beyond personal ambition, what does Romney stand for? Obviously, judging by Rick Santorum’s clean sweep Tuesday, I’m not the only one asking the question. I suspect an honest answer would be something like “situational competence” — Romney boasts of having rescued the 2002 Olympics, served as the Republican governor of one of the nation’s most Democratic states and made profitable choices about where to invest his money. But with the economy improving and the stock market soaring, Romney’s president-as-CEO argument loses whatever relevance it might have had.
To conservative groups, Romney can sound like a true believer who never met a tax or a labor union he could abide — and not at all like a “Massachusetts moderate,” which is what Newt Gingrich claims Romney really is.
But Romney will never be able to match Gingrich’s record, for better or worse, as one of the key figures in the development of the modern conservative movement. And Romney — who once was pro-choice — will never be able to get to the right of Santorum on social issues.
The intended centerpiece of the Romney campaign — his 160-page economic plan — is really just a list of proposed measures with no discernible ideological framework holding them together. “Any American living through this economic crisis will immediately recognize the severity of the break that Mitt Romney proposes from our current course,” the candidate promises on his Web site. But much of what he pledges to do on “Day One” has already been accomplished, or is promised, by Obama.
Romney wants to cut the corporate tax rate; Obama has said he wants to lower rates while also closing loopholes.
Romney wants to forge new trade agreements; Obama signed into law free-trade pacts with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.
Romney wants to weed out burdensome regulations; Obama has such a project underway.
Romney wants to survey and safely exploit U.S. energy reserves; Obama says essentially the same thing.
To be sure, some other initiatives Romney promises on Day One would take us in precisely the wrong direction. He would ask Congress for a gratuitous $20 million budget cut that would fail to make a scratch, let alone a dent, in the deficit. He would propose ending the federal role in job training, thus abdicating presidential responsibility for meeting one of the central challenges facing our economy. He would sanction China for manipulating its currency — and, perhaps, launch a needless trade war. He would seek to discourage the use of union labor on government projects, purely as a sop to the conservative GOP base.
And, of course, Romney wants to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, whose centerpiece, the individual insurance mandate, was pioneered in Massachusetts. By Romney. Who continues to defend the mandate as a good idea — too good, apparently, for the rest of the country.
My point is that even Romney’s sharp disagreements with Obama’s policies don’t add up to a philosophy or a vision. They’re more like what stuck after a bunch of random tough-sounding positions were thrown at the wall.
On foreign affairs, Romney offers a lot of blah blah blah about “restoring the sinews of American power” and the like, but nothing as distinctive as, say, Santorum’s extreme hawkishness on Iran or Ron Paul’s isolationist call to bring the troops home from just about everywhere. It’s hard to find any substantive differences between what Romney would do and what Obama is already doing.
Romney does accuse Obama of “appeasement,” and perhaps the charge would have some credibility if Obama hadn’t ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, or used unmanned missile-firing drones to decimate the international jihadist leadership, or helped eliminate dictator Moammar Gaddafi, or demonstrated in countless other ways that whatever else he might be, no one can call him some kind of flower-power peacenik.
One distinction — and, really, this may be the most original position that Romney takes on anything — is that he has ruled out negotiations with the Taliban and apparently wants to extend the U.S. troop commitment in Afghanistan indefinitely.
Wish him luck with that on the campaign trail. He’ll need it.
Mitt Romney: The Front-Runner Who Leaves The GOP Cold
Okay, now it’s settled, right? I mean, it must be settled by now. Mitt Romney is going to be the nominee. Eat your peas, Republicans, and then fall in line, because Romney’s the guy. Right?
Probably.
Even at this point, after Romney trounced Newt Gingrich in the Florida primary and the Nevada caucuses, there are some fairly compelling reasons for Republicans to pause before bowing to the party establishment’s decision that Mitt must be It.
First is the fact that so many GOP voters still can’t summon much enthusiasm for their likely standard-bearer. In a poll released last week, the Pew Research Center found that an incredible 52 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents consider the field of candidates only fair or poor. Just 46 percent assessed the field as good or excellent — compared to 68 percent who were satisfied with the contenders at the same point in the battle for the nomination four years ago.
In Florida, exit polls confirmed Pew’s findings: Nearly four in 10 GOP voters said they were unhappy with their choices. It is reasonable to assume that many Republicans who didn’t bother to vote — and thus were not sampled in exit polls — are probably even less enthusiastic.
Last May, as the roster of candidates was shaping up, just 43 percent of Republicans thought the field was fair or poor, according to Pew. In other words, the better Republican voters come to know these candidates, including Romney, the less they like them.
Still, somebody is going to get nominated. At this point, Romney has shown he can beat Gingrich almost everywhere. But that “almost” is important.
Gingrich won big in South Carolina. And while Romney rolled up huge margins in the southern and central parts of Florida, Gingrich beat him in the panhandle counties that border Alabama and Georgia — a part of the state, demographically and culturally, that isn’t South Beach but, rather, just plain South.
This is significant because the South is the Republican Party’s heartland. Romney has shown in other contests that he can put a check mark in every ideological box — that despite Gingrich’s taunt of “Massachusetts moderate,” he can still win the support of voters who call themselves “very conservative” or who say they are Tea Party members. But maybe the relevant pejorative is the “Massachusetts” part.
So far, Romney has not shown that he can connect with and excite voters in the South the way Gingrich does. If the bruised, battered, underfunded Gingrich campaign can survive long enough — and if Gingrich can rediscover the in-your-face mojo that gave him such a lift in the South Carolina debates — he could potentially beat Romney in Georgia and Tennessee on Super Tuesday, March 6, and in Alabama and Mississippi a week later.
At that point, if I were a GOP pooh-bah, I’d have to worry about going into the November elections with a candidate at the top of the ticket who had received so little love from the party’s most loyal supporters.
Maybe the Gingrich insurgency will prove to be nothing more than a sad, divisive ego trip. Maybe Romney will show that he can win — or at least compete — in the South. Realistically, chances are that his superior resources, organization and discipline will prevail in the end.
Then what? Well, if you believe the polls, Romney probably loses to President Obama in the fall.
A new Washington Post poll, released Monday, shows that Obama leads Romney, 51 percent to 45 percent, among registered voters. The poll also showed that Obama’s approval rating is at 50 percent, the first time it has reached that benchmark since May, right after Osama bin Laden was killed. On protecting the middle class and dealing with taxes, international affairs and terrorism, voters believe Obama would do a better job than Romney.
But perhaps the most important figure — found not in the poll but in Labor Department statistics released Friday — is 8.3 percent. That’s the unemployment rate for January, and it is the lowest since February 2009, right after Obama took office.
Romney’s central argument for the presidency is that he will do a better job of managing the economy. Despite their overall preference for Obama, many voters buy that premise. But if the unemployment rate continues to fall, it won’t matter whether Republicans go with the safe bet or the mercurial firebrand. Economic recovery almost surely equals four more years.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 6, 2012
“Keep Your Fingers Crossed, Mitt!”: Romney’s Truth That Tells A Lie
So, no surprise, Mitt wins big last night in Nevada. He carries 91% of the 26% of the caucus goers who are Mormons, so that helps him carry overlapping categories like “extremely conservative” and “strong tea party supporter” too. But he also carries Evangelicals, so its pretty much a clean sweep for him of the extreme right of an extremely right wing Nevada Republican electorate.
More interesting were his victory remarks. You see him trying out Pavlovian culture war phrases for the Revanchist base, e.g. references to Obama’s “colleagues in the faculty lounge.” He’s not good at that—he doesn’t have the sheer ferocity required for it.
They key move he made in the speech, however, as Jonathan Chait predicted the other day, is a doubling down on hyping bad economic news and hoping that it stays bad. Last night—knowing that a decline to 8.3% unemployment was, while not good, clearly an improvement—he shifted his gaze to what economists call the u6 employment rate. The u6 is the measure, not only of the unemployed, but of those who have stopped looking for work, and those who want full time work, but who are working part time hours. It’s certainly an important metric, and, by definition, it’s always substantially higher than the unemployment rate proper.
So Romney correctly told the crowd that the “real” unemployment rate is “over 15%.” And he’s right. It’s 15.1% which is very high. Over 15% obviously sounds a lot worse than 8.3%, and suddenly introducing it into a discussion with regular voters enables Romney to play the unlikely role of “truth teller.” And talking about a “real” anything is always a nice touch for Republicans when referencing Obama because it implies that somehow Obama and the Democrats have been giving the country cooked figures or something. “Real? The guy faked his own birth certificate—he’s going to tell the country what the “real” unemployment numbers are??!”
But, as you can see in this chart, the u6 almost always perfectly tracks the conventional (u3) unemployment measure. It’s dropped from a high of 17.4%, at the height of the recession in 2009, and, like the u3, it also declined this month from last month’s 15.2%. So, as you would expect during a slow, sluggish, but continued recovery, it just keeps going down, just like the typical unemployment rate.
And that’s shows the limits of the “hype the bad news” Romney strategy. Now that he’s told the country about the u6 and started his baseline at “over 15%”, any decline below that number is going to look, by comparison, like a hoped for improvement. Than what does he do?
Nope, even the most clever rhetoric won’t work. What Romney really needs is the the unlikely duo of Merkel and Netanyahu to really wreck the world’s economy. Keep your fingers crossed, Mitt!
By: Rich Yeselson, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 4, 2012
Why Mitch McConnell Should Avoid Discussing The Debt
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was asked about an extension of the payroll tax break yesterday, but instead of answering the question, the Republican changed the subject. The subject on McConnell’s mind was the debt.
“We have this problem at the risk of being repetitious, because we spend way too much. We now have a debt the size of our economy. We look a lot like Greece. We’re heading toward western Europe. If you want to see what happens, just look across the Atlantic. That’s the direction we’re headed in.
“Under this administration, we’ve run the national debt up 43 percent in just three years.”
McConnell first started equating the U.S. and Greece last summer, and the argument is not improving with age.
In every meaningful way, the comparison is just silly. The U.S. has extremely low interest rates and foreign investors are happy to loan us money; Greece has extremely high interest rates and no one is eager to loan the country money. The U.S. has its own currency; Greece has the euro. We have a manageable debt; Greece has a debt crisis. We’re a large country with an enormous economy; Greece is a small country with a small economy. We have one of the world’s most stable systems of government (at least for now); Greece’s government structure is suspect.
For a leading senator to tell a national television audience that the United States looks “a lot like Greece” is a clear reminder: McConnell is not to be taken seriously on these issues.
Incidentally, there’s also the matter of McConnell’s credibility on fiscal issues, or in his case, the lack thereof. The Republican leader voted for the Bush tax cuts, and added the costs to the national debt. He voted to finance the war in Afghanistan by adding the costs to the national debt. McConnell voted to put the costs of the war in Iraq onto the national debt. He supported a massive expansion of the government’s role in health care (Medicare Part D) and voted to pile all of its costs right onto the national debt. The GOP leader even backed the Wall Street bailout and added the bill to the national debt.
Perhaps Mitch McConnell should choose something else to complain about.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 30, 2012
The “Truths” Mitt Romney Is Willing to Tell
The great German filmmaker Werner Herzog has an illuminating formulation to describe his unorthodox way of making documentaries. There is, Herzog says, an “accountant’s truth,” and there is an “ecstatic truth.”
Herzog is all about seeking the latter, as he explained to Slate magazine:
In his own nonfiction films, Herzog wants to tell stories and he doesn’t feel beholden to fact. His approach to documentary is an alternative to cinema vérité, the observational aesthetic that proceeds “as if presenting facts was everything.” Just because something is factually true, he argues, “it does not constitute truth per se.” Herzog likes to respond to and collaborate with his subjects; if he bends fact—by inventing dialogue, for instance—it is to the ends of “truth.” The Manhattan phone directory provides millions of correct entries, he says, “but it doesn’t inspire you”; in the film, he says it doesn’t tell you what Manhattanites dream. Instead of fact, which is the “accountant’s truth,” he is after the kind of “ecstatic truth” available to poetry: “These moments are rare but I’m trying to find them, which is why I have had different goals from some of my colleagues.”
Which “truth” is former Gov. Mitt Romney going to tell about President Barack Obama’s administration: the accountant’s truth or the ecstatic truth?
Romney telling an accountant’s truth would sound something like his interview with radio host Laura Ingraham, wherein President Obama inherited a bad economy that has improved modestly despite, not because of, the efforts of his administration:
The economy always gets better after a recession, there is always a recovery. There’s never been a time anywhere in the world where an economy has never recovered. The question is, has it recovered by virtue of something the president’s done or has he delayed the recovery and made it more painful?
To stick with the Herzog formulation, Romney is here reciting the political equivalent of the Manhattan phone directory—uninspiring, to say the least.
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s success, such as it is, lies in his willingness to tell what conservatives would consider the “ecstatic truth”: that Obama is a radical un-American to his core; that he is anti-work and pro-dependency.
Savvy conservatives know very well that telling the accountant’s truth about Obama is not going to be enough to defeat him, and they’re worried that Romney isn’t mean enough to deliver the necessary payload of ecstasy.
I think this fear is misplaced.
If you had asked me a couple months ago, I would’ve said (actually, I did say) there are places Romney just won’t go in order to get himself elected. I no longer believe that. He was posturing all along—trying to remain above the fray for as long as he could. After South Carolina, that became untenable. The Romney campaign’s self-described “destruction” of Gingrich in Florida is an indication of how much he means business.
We know this: Romney is wildly ambitious and willing to lie.
Whether enough Americans are going to buy the ecstatic truth from an uncharismatic plutocrat with a strange-seeming religion is an open question. But I have no doubt that Romney will try to sell it.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, January 30, 2012
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