“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
“Turning The Page”: Obama’s Winning Strategy On Foreign Policy
We expect some hypocrisy in politics, but it was still jaw-dropping to behold Republicans accusing President Obama of politicizing the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Wasn’t it just eight years ago that the GOP organized an entire presidential campaign — including the choreography of its 2004 national convention — around the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and George W. Bush’s response to them?
Obama’s opponents don’t just think we have short attention spans. They imagine we have no memories whatsoever.
Yet very quickly, Mitt Romney and the rest of his party began slinking away from their offensive. It’s true, of course, that Obama played the ultimate presidential trump card. He visited our troops in Afghanistan on Tuesday, the anniversary of the bin Laden raid, and, with military vehicles serving as a rough-hewn backdrop, addressed the nation from the scene of our longest war.
But the GOP retreat reflected something else as well. For the first time since the early 1960s, the Republican Party enters a presidential campaign at a decided disadvantage on foreign policy. Republicans find it hard to get accustomed to the fact that when they pull their favorite political levers — accusations that Democrats are “weak” or Romney’s persistent and false claims that Obama “apologizes” for America — nothing happens.
The polls could hardly be clearer. In early April, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 53 percent of Americans trusted Obama over Romney to handle international affairs. Only 36 percent trusted Romney more. On a list of 12 matters that a president would deal with, Obama enjoyed a larger advantage on only one other question, the handling of women’s issues. And on coping with terrorism, the topic on which Republicans once enjoyed a near-monopoly, Obama led Romney by seven points.
How did this happen? The primary reason, to borrow a term from science, is negative signaling: By the end of Bush’s second term, the Republicans’ approach to foreign policy was discredited in the eyes of a majority of Americans. The war in Iraq turned out (and this is being quite charitable) much differently than the Bush administration had predicted.
It is always worth recalling Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on March 16, 2003. Among other things, Cheney famously declared that “I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.” And when Russert asked whether “we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there” in Iraq “for several years in order to maintain stability,” Cheney replied, “I disagree,” insisting: “That’s an overstatement.”
It was not an overstatement.
More generally, Americans came to see that the war in Iraq had nothing to do with what they cared most about, which was protecting the United States against another terrorist attack. Indeed, the war in Afghanistan, which was a direct response to 9/11, was pushed aside as a priority. At one point, Bush declared of bin Laden: “I don’t know where he is. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him . . . to be honest with you.”
And this is where negative signaling turns into a positive assessment of Obama. He understood the importance of bin Laden. He addressed the broad and sensible public desire to get our troops out of Iraq. He focused on how to get a moderately satisfactory result in Afghanistan — which is probably the very best that the United States can do now.
The Afghan policy Obama announced Tuesday reflected the president’s innate caution. He wants to withdraw our troops but not so fast as to increase the level of chaos in the country. He imagines a longer engagement with Afghanistan because he does not want to repeat the West’s mistake of disengaging too quickly after U.S. arms helped the mujahedeen defeat the Soviet Union there in the 1980s.
Public opinion is on the side of getting out sooner. But most Americans are likely to accept the underlying rationale for Obama’s policy because it is built not on grand plans to remake a region but on the narrower and more realistic goal of preventing terror groups from regaining a foothold in the country.
And that’s why Republicans finally seem to realize that driving foreign policy out of the campaign altogether is their best option. After a decade of war, Americans prefer prudence over bluster and careful claims over expansive promises. On foreign policy, Obama has kept his 2008 promise to turn history’s page. The nation is in no mood to turn it back.
“Even Jimmy Carter”: From The Wimpy Guy Standing On The Sidelines
Mitt Romney informs us that the raid that took out Osama bin Laden one year ago was no big deal, because “even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.”
Grrrrr.
Necessary disclosure: I worked for Jimmy Carter and admire his intentions, his character, and many of his achievements, although I am not usually considered an uncritical booster of his record as president.
But let’s remember:
1) Jimmy Carter is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who spent ten years in the uniformed service of his country. As far as I can tell, this is ten years more than the cumulative service of members of the Romney clan. Obviously you don’t have to be a veteran to have judgments about military policy or criticisms of others’ views. But when it comes to casual slurs about someone else’s strength or resolve, you want to be careful, as a guy on the sidelines, sounding this way about people who have served.
2) Jimmy Carter did indeed make a gutsy go/no-go call. It turned out to be a tactical, strategic, and political disaster. You can read the blow-by-blow in Mark Bowden’s retrospective of “The Desert One Debacle.” With another helicopter, the mission to rescue U.S. diplomats then captive in Teheran might well have succeeded — and Carter is known still to believe that if the raid had succeeded, he would probably have been re-elected. Full discussion another time, but I think he’s right. (Even with the fiasco, and a miserable “stagflation” economy, the 1980 presidential race was very close until the very end.)
But here’s the main point about Carter. Deciding to go ahead with that raid was a close call. Carter’s own Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, had opposed the raid and handed in his resignation even before the results were known. And it was a daring call — a choice in favor of a risky possible solution to a festering problem, knowing that if it went wrong there would be bad consequences all around, including for Carter himself. So if you say “even Jimmy Carter” to mean “even a wimp,” as Romney clearly did, you’re showing that you don’t know the first thing about the choice he really made.
3) Precisely because of the consequences of Carter’s failure, Obama was the more daring in making his go/no-go decision. That’s the case I argued last year, and nothing I’ve learned since then changes my view. As a college student, Obama had seen a marginally popular Democratic president come to ruin because he approved a helicopter-based secret mission into hostile Middle Eastern terrain. Obama went ahead with a helicopter-based secret mission into nominally “allied” territory, also with huge potential for trouble if things had gone wrong.
4) And while the Osama killing reflected a decade’s worth of intelligence and effort from people of both parties, and of no party, it happened on Obama’s watch. Is there any doubt that if it had happened on Bush’s, or on a President John McCain’s, it would have been the centerpiece of every political speech and commercial? Was there a single speech in the Republicans’ 2004 convention — in New York — that did not begin and end with a reference to 9/11, or the removal of Saddam Hussein?
So: obviously the Administration will want to remind voters that Osama bin Laden is gone, and obviously the Republicans will want to minimize the political significance of that fact. All fine. But not “even Jimmy Carter.” I hope that the crack was a scripted attack line, rather than being yet another spontaneous glimpse of the way Mitt Romney feels and thinks. “Even” Jimmy Carter made a daring choice, and paid the price.
By: James Fallows, The Atlantic, April 30, 2012
“Omission Accomplished: GOP Fantasy World Foreign Policy
Perusing the text of Marco Rubio’s foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution, I notice a word that doesn’t appear: Iraq. It’s so hard to believe that I’ve read the speech twice and executed a word search three times. Did he think no one would notice? The Senator from Florida has given a lengthy address about the wisdom of American intervention without so much as acknowledging the most consequential foreign intervention that we’ve undertaken in decades.
This is the same Marco Rubio who says George W. Bush, whose presidency was defined by Iraq, did a fantastic job. As recently as last fall he was fearful that the United States was leaving the Iraq too quickly. Back in 2010 he avowed that the Iraq War made America safer and better off.
But Iraq has now disappeared from his analysis of American foreign policy. He manages to avoid talking about Iraq even as he frets that Iran is attempting to rule over the rest of the Middle East. Does Rubio ever ponder what recent military campaign effectively increased their influence in the region?
Says Michael Brendan Dougherty, “Rubio’s speech is a remarkable political document. It shows that some Senators have learned nothing from the past decade.” He’s mostly right, but there is one important caveat. The interventionists have apparently learned to stop acknowledging the Iraq War, for their vague generalities about America’s role in the world cannot survive a confrontation with a decade of costly, catastrophic intervention. Better to pretend the debacle never happened, even while ratcheting up the rhetoric about Syria and Iran.
It’s a perfect distillation of how ideological and divorced from empiricism the neoconservative project has become. A subject is raised at length — but the most relevant real world example isn’t. Rubio making foreign policy for a fantasy world, and we’d all be better off if someone bought him a Risk board so that he could work out his delusions of strategic acumen with fewer consequences.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, April 25, 2012
Republicans “Inconvenient Truth”: Why Romney Is Attacking Obama For Comments To Medvedev
Republicans and conservatives are determined to turn an unremarkable off the record comment by President Obama into a major campaign issue. Last week Obama was caught on an open mic telling Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that he would have more “flexibility” after the November election. “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for [incoming Russian President Vladimir Putin] to give me space,” Obama told Medvedev.
Romney pounced. He immediately issued a statement complaining that Obama is going to cave to Russia on missile defense.” Later he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “Russia is not a friendly character on the world stage and for this president to be looking for greater flexibility where he doesn’t have to answer to the American people in his relations with Russia is very, very troubling, very alarming…. This is without question our number one geopolitical foe.” The Republican National Committee released a statement and video criticizing Obama’s comments to Medvedev as well.
Why is Romney making such a major issue out of such a minor gaffe? The conventional explanation is that he is pivoting towards attacking Obama on foreign policy. Romney is trailing Obama in matchup polls and watching the issue he has made the centerpiece of his campaign–the weak economy–disappearing as employment picks up. So he may be seeking a new campaign strategy. As The Washington Post reported “Advisers say Romney intends to deliver a major foreign policy address in April or May, depending on the status of the primary contest, and create what one adviser described as a series of ‘platforms’ to highlight the differences between the two candidates…. The political opportunity Romney sees in foreign policy was reflected this week when he seized on Obama’s open-mike conversation with his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev.”
To Democrats this might seem odd. Obama has ended the unpopular Iraq War, decimated Al Qaeda’s leadership and overseen the killings of Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi. To a liberal, if Obama has made any mistakes in the foreign policy realm they would be ones of excessive rather than insufficient militarism.
But that is not the critique that Romney or any other Republican is making. Rather, they say that Obama shows weakness in negotiations with our adversaries. China, Iran and Venezuela are frequently invoked by Republican foreign policy figures such as John Bolton. Specific actions by Obama to bolster this sentiment can be hard to come by, so his comments to Medvedev provide a perfect opportunity. “Obama will have a good gut-check response with bin Laden, but there will be plenty to work with for a broader critique of the foreign policy of this administration,” says Republican consultant Soren Dayton regarding the political saliency of foreign policy attacks on Obama. “The Russia exchange could end up being a powerful example of how Obama offers concessions to enemies but pressures our allies, like Israel and Canada.”
This is good for stirring up the Republican base, but is unlikely to sway many swing voters. “It is a rare election that is decided on foreign policy,” says Dayton. “In all likelihood, instability in the Middle East will have an impact through things like the price of crude oil and gas at the pump.”
But perhaps the Republican political calculation is not about foreign policy. The average swing voter may not care much about U.S. policy on European missile defense but they often do care about the president’s character. “[Republicans] are just trying to neutralize the ‘etch-a-sketch’ criticisms that Democrats are lobbing at Romney,” says Darrell West, director of the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution. “They want voters to see Obama as just another politician to delegitimize him. They’re playing to public cynicism: it’s easy to portray politicians as willing to say anything.”
Leonardo Alcivar, a national Republican political consultant with Hynes Communications, agrees. “Romney was right to criticize the President’s gaffe, for both tactical and strategic reasons,” says Alcivar. “The Romney team well understands the need to position the President as a typical Washington politician whose failed economic policy is compounded by a rudderless foreign policy. The open mike gaffe supports a widely held, and largely correct, view that the President has been campaigning, not leading.”
From Obama’s perspective, trying to improve relations with Russia is leading, or at least governing. Nation contributor and Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen writes that “the United States is farther from a partnership with Russia today than it was more than twenty years ago.” As Cohen explains, partnership with Russia is essential for U.S. objectives such as preventing nuclear proliferation and access to Russia’s vast natural resources. But, as Cohen notes, the Obama administration is “refusing to respond to Moscow’s concessions on Afghanistan and Iran with reciprocal agreements on Russia’s top priorities, NATO expansion and missile defense.” That is the crucial context for Obama’s remarks. Moscow sees us placing missile defense installations near Russia’s border as a provocation.
Election year politicking such as Romney’s can make relations between the U.S. and Russia even more fraught. As Vice-President Joe Biden pointed out on Sunday, Romney’s characterization of Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe” is outdated and unhelpful. “He acts like he thinks the Cold War is still on [and] Russia is still our major adversary,” said Biden to Bob Schieffer on CBS’ Face the Nation. “I don’t know where he has been.” Back in February Cohen predicted that the election could exacerbate tensions with Russia, writing, “recent developments, including presidential campaigns and other political changes under way in both countries, may soon make relations even worse.” Obama was merely stating the truth when speaking to Medvedev. And nothing upsets Republicans like an inconvenient truth.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, April 3, 2012
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