The Missing “Leveling Experience”: Dull Mitt Romney Needs A “Groping” Scandal
Republican front-runner Mitt Romney is so dull that he could benefit from an eye-popping scandal because it would help tear down his plastic image and make him look more normal, according to national pollster John Zogby.
“This is the one instance where a groping incident could help a candidate,” said Zogby, in a reference to the scandal that torpedoed former GOP candidate Herman Cain’s campaign.
He said it could be the missing “leveling experience” for Romney that would make him look more human. Zogby explained that many stiff, rich men have run for office and won, but they typically had a humbling moment that made them more likeable. He gave former President George W. Bush’s alcoholism as an example of that leveling experience.
“His problem is an authenticity problem,” said Zogby of Romney, who today released his New Hampshire tracking poll that has Romney far in front. “He’s the kid who never colored outside the lines,” said the pollster.
Zogby said Romney needs to find a way to connect with an unethusiastic party that wants to vote with its brain and heart. But, he warned, he shouldn’t try to do that with a policy speech or new position. “Likability,” he said, “is a lot more than an issue.”
He echoed charges from competing campaigns and President Obama’s advisor David Axelrod that Romney’s 25 percent finish in the Iowa caucuses was an example of how he’s failed to expand his personal base of voters from the amount he received in the 2008 caucuses.
Romney, Zogby said, spent “a lot of time, money and energy to get where he was already.”
By: Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 5, 2012
Mitt Romney Reverses Position on Iraq
In an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd today, Mitt Romney asserts that “of course” invading Iraq was a bad idea now that we know Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. (“If we knew at the time of our entry into Iraq that there were no weapons of mass destruction, if somehow we had been given that information, obviously we would not have gone in.”) Four years ago, Romney said just the opposite. (“It was the right decision to go into Iraq. I supported it at the time; I support it now.”)
I can’t think of any important substantive facts that have changed between now and then that would lead Romney to alter his opinion. Indeed, Iraq is probably more stable than it was, and it’s now easier to justify invading on non-WMD grounds than it was before.
What’s changed is that Iraq is no longer so central to the Republican id. Four years ago, a Republican had to defend the Iraq war in order to defend George W. Bush. To conclude that the invasion was a mistake would be to indict Bush of a massive blunder, to subvert the commander of the War on Terror, to give in to the liberals. The importance of the issue has now receded to the point where Romney can casually take the completely opposite position without antagonizing any significant part of his coalition.
The thing I’ve always found endearing and (to some degree) comforting about Mitt Romney is that his flip-flops betray pure contempt for the Republican base. He treats them like angry children, and their pet issues as emotionally driven symbols of cultural division rather than as serious positions. Four years ago, conservatives were enraged that liberals would question Bush’s handling of foreign policy, so Romney was defending the decision to go to war and promising to “double Guantanamo.” (It made zero sense as a policy position and could be understood only as an expression of culture-war solidarity.) Likewise, conservatives are now outraged over Obamacare, so Romney promises to repeal Obamacare.
Nothing about Romney’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the right hint even slightly of genuine conversion. It is patronizing appeasement. Of course, none of this tells us the really crucial thing, which is what promises Romney would actually keep if elected. But at least it offers the modest comfort that Romney knows better.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, December 21, 2011
“The Plus-Size One”: Self-Adoration Reaches Newt Heights
Marveling over a presidential candidate’s arrogance is like noting that a hockey player wears skates. It states not just the obvious but the necessary. You can’t zip across the ice in Crocs, and you can’t thrash your way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if your confidence doesn’t bleed into something gaudier. Arrogance is the grist, and arrogance is the given.
But what flavor? And what measure?
That’s where candidates — and the presidents that some of them become — differ, in ways that shape the sorts of messes they’re likely to make. And that’s where Newt Gingrich provokes real concern. You have to take another politician’s ego, double it, and add cheese and a side of fries to get to Gingrich. An especially heaping, unhealthy diet of self-regard slogs through his veins.
His 1990s nemesis Bill Clinton had (and surely still has) no small amount of his own vanity, and it lay largely in his conviction that his charm and cunning enabled him to wriggle out of jams and get away with indulgences that would doom a lesser mortal. He fancied himself an escape artist extraordinaire.
That partly explains the risk he took with Monica Lewinsky, along with his verbal gymnastics upon the discovery of the affair. The scandal’s diminution of his presidency was the price he and we paid for his particular arrogance.
George W. Bush was in love with his own gut instinct, which he valued far above actual erudition. By heeding it, he believed, he could exceed the expectations and even surpass the accomplishments of less visceral leaders, namely his father. It’s not hard to draw a direct line from that brand of arrogance to the Iraq war, which came to an official end last week, after nearly nine years, hundreds of billions of dollars and too many lives lost.
Barack Obama’s arrogance resides in his eloquence — as a writer, thinker, symbol and story. He’s in thrall to the lyric poem of himself, and that accounts for his aloofness and disinclination to engage as deeply as some of his predecessors did in the muck of legislative politics.
Yes, we live in a grotesquely partisan moment, the main reason for gridlock, brinkmanship and super-committee ignominy on Capitol Hill. But would Clinton have stood at so far a remove from that committee? Isn’t it possible that a glad-hander more aggressive and warmer than Obama would be making a smidgen of headway?
Gingrich isn’t the answer: he’s hot-headed and truculent. And while Obama sees himself (with justification) as historic, Gingrich sees himself as epic. If Obama is The One, Gingrich is The Plus-Size One.
Lately he has been on less bloated behavior, and by lately I mean the few weeks since he emerged as the Republican frontrunner du jour. If you watched the debate Thursday, you could sense, from the clench of his jaw, that he wasn’t merely biting his tongue but making an unhappy meal of it.
Still, Gingrich the Grandiloquent sneaked through. Asked about his stated resolve to rein in federal courts, he said that “just like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and F.D.R., I would be prepared to take on the judiciary.” The company he keeps!
Over the years he has directly or indirectly compared himself to Moses, William Wallace (a k a “Braveheart,” thanks to Mel Gibson), the Duke of Wellington, Charles de Gaulle and, repeatedly, Ronald Reagan, as when he recently said, “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate.”
All the way back in 1985, when he was just a foot soldier in the House, he told The Washington Post, “I want to shift the entire planet,” adding, “This is just the beginning of a 20- or 30-year movement. I’ll get credit for it.”
As Maureen Dowd recalled in The Times last year, he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1994, “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” In a Vanity Fair profile in 1995, he referred to himself as “a mythical person” and was quoted saying, “I had a period of thinking that I would have been called ‘Newt the McPherson,’ as in ‘Robert the Bruce.’ ” His biological father’s surname was McPherson, and Robert the Bruce was a Scottish warrior of William Wallace’s era and ilk.
Gingrich also considered himself a “definer of civilization” and “teacher of the rules of civilization,” phrases he scribbled in House office notes that came to light in 1997.
He thinks a lot about himself and thinks of himself a lot. In 2007, talking about climate change, which he still believed in then, he singled out polar bears for concern, explaining that his name, Newt, “comes from the Danish ‘Knut,’ and there’s been a major crisis in Germany over a polar bear named Knut.’ ”
One of the great spectator sports of this political season has been watching one observer after another strive to trace the full contours of his ego, an arm’s race of arrogance assessments. “Modern-day Narcissus,” wrote Kirsten Powers in The Daily Beast. “Intellectual hubris distilled,” contributed George F. Will in The Washington Post. “A lead zeppelin with more baggage than the Hindenburg,” said Mark Steyn in The National Review, and while that’s not precisely about arrogance, it’s too funny to pass up.
A grandiose man, Gingrich speaks in grandiose ways, always characterizing situations too broadly and with too much needless heat, then losing chunks of valuable time, along with precious credibility, to the inevitable damage control.
He didn’t simply register disagreement with Paul Ryan’s entitlement reform proposals. He called them radical “right-wing social engineering.” He didn’t simply raise questions about child labor laws. He called them “truly stupid.” He didn’t simply contest the Palestinians’ claim to disputed land. He called the Palestinians an “invented” people.
That’s an intellectually intriguing, attention-commanding expression: Gingrich no doubt loved the nasty music of it tumbling from his lips. But it’s also gratuitously inflammatory. Mitt the Romney was right to call it that and call him out for it.
Romney has utter, exaggerated faith in his managerial know-how, his technocratic mettle. That’s the flavor of his arrogance.
Gingrich’s is sourer — and scarier. People who have worked with him say that he can’t do justice to any one initiative because he can’t hold any one thought. There are too many others rushing along, and he must pay each proper reverence, because no matter how eccentric it is, it’s his.
That self-adoration made him an infuriating House speaker. It would make him a dangerous president.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 17, 2011
How The Rich Created The Social Security “Crisis”
Now and then, George W. Bush told the unvarnished truth—most often in jest. Consider the GOP presidential nominee’s Oct. 20, 2000, speech at a high-society $800-a-plate fundraiser at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. Resplendent in a black tailcoat, waistcoat and white bow tie, Bush greeted the swells with evident satisfaction.
“This is an impressive crowd,” he said. “The haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.”
Any questions?
Eight months later, President Bush delivered sweeping tax cuts to that patrician base. Given current hysteria over what a recent Washington Post article called “the runaway national debt,” it requires an act of historical memory to recall that the Bush administration rationalized reducing taxes on inherited wealth because paying down the debt too soon might roil financial markets.
Eleven years later, the Post warns in a ballyhooed article, reading like something out of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” that Social Security—the 75-year-old bedrock of millions of Americans’ retirement hopes—has “passed a treacherous milestone,” gone “cash negative,” and “is sucking money out of the Treasury.”
Anybody who discerns a relationship between these events, that is, between a decade of keeping the “have-mores’” yachts and Lear jets running smoothly and a manufactured crisis supposedly threatening grandma’s monthly Social Security check must be some kind of radical leftist.
That, or somebody skeptical of the decades-long propaganda war against America’s most efficient, successful and popular social insurance program. It’s an effort that’s falsely persuaded millions of younger Americans that Social Security is in its last days and made crying wolf a test of “seriousness” among Beltway courtier-pundits like the Post’s Lori Montgomery, who concocted an imaginary front page emergency out of a relatively meaningless actuarial event.
All in service, alas, of a single unstated premise: The “have-mores” have made off with grandma’s money fair and square. They have no intention of paying it back. That’s the only possible interpretation of the Post’s admonition that “the $2.6 trillion Social Security trust fund will provide little relief. The government has borrowed every cent and now must raise taxes, cut spending or borrow more heavily from outside investors to keep benefit checks flowing.”
Little relief? In fact, the law’s working precisely as intended. After 28 years of generating huge payroll tax surpluses to cover the baby boomers’ retirement benefits, the system must now begin to draw upon those funds to help pay current benefits—the vast majority still covered by current payroll tax receipts.
“Rather than posing any sort of crisis,” explains Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “this is exactly what had been planned when Congress last made major changes to the program in 1983 based on the recommendations of the Greenspan commission.”
Again, this is the beneficiaries’ money, invested by the Social Security trustees in U.S. Treasury bonds drawn upon “the full faith and credit of the United States.” Far from being “meaningless IOUs” as right-wing cant has it, they represent the same legally binding promise between the U.S. government and its people that it makes with Wall Street banks and the Chinese government, which also hold Treasury Bonds.
A promise not very different, the Daily Howler’s Bob Somerby points out, from the one implicit in your bank statement or 401K (if you’re lucky enough to have one). Did you think the money was buried in earthen jars filled with gold bullion and precious stones?
Raise taxes, cut spending or borrow? What other options does the U.S. government, or any government, have?
On his New York Times blog, Paul Krugman dissects the Catch-22 logic behind the Post’s bogus crisis. You can’t simultaneously argue “that the trust fund is meaningless, because SS is just part of the budget, then claim that some crisis arises when receipts fall short of payments, because SS is a standalone program.” For practical purposes, it’s got to be one or the other.
So is Social Security a “Ponzi scheme”? No, it’s group insurance, not an investment. You die young, somebody else benefits. Its finances have been open public record since 1936. Do fewer workers support each beneficiary? Sure, but who cares? It’s denominated in dollars, not a head count. The boomers were nearing 40 when the Reagan administration fixed the actuarial tables. No surprises there.
Are longer life expectancies screwing up the numbers? Not really. Most of the rise is explained by lower infant and child mortality, not by old-timers overstaying their welcome. Kevin Drum points out that gradually raising the payroll tax 1 percent and doubling the earnings cap over 20 years would make Social Security solvent forever.
But that’s not good enough for the more hidebound members of the $800-a-plate set. See, over 75 years Social Security has provided a measure of dignity, security and freedom to working Americans that just annoys the hell out of their betters.
By: Gene Lyons, Salon, November 2, 2011
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