Regressive Politics: Why Herman Cain Scares Me
When Herman Cain said he was on the GOP panel of candidates for the presidency for comic relief, I laughed, because I thought “this guy’s a joke.” But he isn’t. The polls show he is gaining more and more acceptance and popularity among those on the right; and, the facts show, this man is dangerous.
Let’s start with Mr. Cain’s racism. I believe he is a bigot.
From saying that a Muslim would have to go through certain requirements to ensure he or she isn’t a terrorist to work for him, to stating that communities should be able to ban mosques from their cities and towns, Cain has made several bigoted statements.
I am sure that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would roll in his grave listening to Mr. Cain’s remarks. And Mr. Cain forgets where he came from. He grew up in the segregated, racist South. Has Mr. Cain looked in the mirror lately?
Or how about glancing at our Constitution? Dr. King gave his life for to ensure the civil rights for all Americans, Muslims included. And how about that First Amendment? You remember that one, something about religious freedom for all?! Hmmm.
Having a Muslim prove he isn’t a terrorist is as bigoted as requiring a black man (like Cain) prove he isn’t lazy, living on welfare, and father to numerous children with different mothers. Both are disgusting negative stereotypes and are not true.
Oh yes, I know, Mr. Cain apologized to the Muslim community; like Mel Gibson apologized to the Jewish community. An apology doesn’t change one’s heart nor one’s prejudices.
And speaking of bigotry, how about toward his own community, African-Americans?
His 9-9-9 plan makes me want to call 9-1-1!
This plan benefits the rich and places the tax burden on the middle and lower income families in America; the African-American community would be hit especially hard.
Let’s look at a few of the problems with the 9-9-9 plan, shall we?
- Capital Gains: This would ensure that a large portion of the rich’s income would essentially go untaxed. Middle and lower income families do not have the resources to invest and benefit from this tax break.
- Cutting the federal budget by 70 percent: The federal government is one of the largest employers in the United States. How many people would lose their jobs as a result of this?
- Does the 9 percent apply to purchasing homes? Stocks? What about businesses?
- Where’s the math to prove that this would work?
- When it comes to sales tax, this would amount to a tax increase for the middle, lower, and poorer income levels in America.
Herman Cain says on his website that he has top economists and well known people who back the 9-9-9 plan and can speak to its merit; yet he refuses to list them.
A vote for Herman Cain, in my opinion, is a vote for moving backward. Back before our civil rights laws, perhaps even before the First Amendment, as Mr. Cain has repeatedly dodged the question regarding former Gov. Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion being a cult or not Christian.
The bottom line is, if you want to be commander in chief of this country, you need to be able to make decisions to benefit all of this country: black, white and yes, Muslim. Oh, and Mr. Perry, that means Mormons as well.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and Woeld Report, October 12, 2011
They Don’t Like You, Mitt. They Really Don’t Like You
Republican moneymen and pundits are starting to flock to the Mitt Romney banner, sending forth the word that it is time to bow to the inevitable. But the Republican voters just do not like Mitt Romney.
The depth the of the base’s resistance to falling in behind next-in-line Romney has continuously shocked observers, resulting first in the rise of Donald Trump, then Michele Bachmann, then Rick Perry. Now Perry is swooning, and his support has gone to … Herman Cain!
In the latest Washington Post poll, Perry’s support has halved over the last month, but Romney remains stuck at 25 percent. Cain has risen to 16 percent. The new CBS poll has Cain tied, at 17 percent, for first place with Romney. PPP polled Republicans in North Carolina, Nebraska, and West Virginia, and found Cain leading in all three states.
I don’t think Cain can win the nomination, and I’m not sure he really wants it (as opposed to a nice Fox News gig.) Saying you might vote for Herman Cain for president — of the United States, not of a pizza chain — can only be read as a cry of protest.
I don’t see how Republicans could be making this any more plain. They do not want to nominate Mitt Romney.
His problem is summed up neatly by today’s The Wall Street Journal editorial:
The main question about Mr. Romney is whether his political character matches the country’s huge current challenges. The former Bain Capital CEO is above all a technocrat, a man who believes in expertise as the highest political virtue. The details of his RomneyCare program in Massachusetts were misguided enough, but the larger flaw it revealed is Mr. Romney’s faith that he can solve any problem, and split any difference, if he can only get the smartest people in the room. …Republicans need a nominee who can make the opposing case on practical and moral grounds, not shrink from it out of guilt or excess political caution.
This encapsulates the main difference between the two parties. I’ve made this point many times before, but I think it’s pretty fundamental. The conservative movement is committed to a series of strong philosophical principles about government. They believe in a smaller government that takes less from the rich on moral grounds, as the Journal says. The Democratic Party does not have the same kind of deeper philosophical commitment, and is much more comfortable with technocracy.
Romney’s technocratic skills are not only not a plus for him. For many conservatives, they are something close to a disqualification. On many of the largest public issues, the technocratic consensus binds the center-right with the center-left and excludes the Republican position. Technocrats generally agree that we should increase short-term deficits while simultaneously decreasing long-term deficits through a combination of reducing tax expenditures and entitlement spending. There’s a somewhat less strong technocratic consensus that we should find a way to put a price on carbon emissions. These are all policies supported by the Obama administration and fiercely opposed by the GOP because they do violence to conservative anti-government principles.
Conservatives don’t want a president who’s open to different means of achieving ends (ending the recession, controlling health care costs.) They want somebody who’s set in stone on using the right means — less government.
Romney, because of the bizarre succession of real and potential foes removing themselves from consideration, may win the nomination by default. But the mismatch between him and the party he wants to lead is not going away.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Inte, New York Magazine, October 5, 2011
Desperately Seeking A Candidate: Republicans Falling In And Out Of Love
Here’s my question for the Republican Party: How’s that Rick Perry stuff workin’ out for ya?
You’ll recall that Sarah Palin asked a similar question last year about President Obama’s “ hopey-changey stuff.” Indeed, hopey-changey has been through a bad patch. But now the GOP is still desperately seeking a presidential candidate it can love. Or even like.
That Perry was crushed by Herman Cain — yes, I said Herman Cain — in the Florida straw poll Saturday confirms that the tough-talking Texas governor’s campaign is in serious trouble. He’s the one who put it there with a performance in last week’s debate that was at times disjointed, at times disastrous.
Perry was supposed to be the “Shane”-like Western hero who brought peace to the troubled valley that is the Republican presidential field. A month after he rode into town, however, increasingly frantic GOP insiders are begging New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to saddle up and save the day.
After watching Perry in the debate, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol — a card-carrying member of the Republican establishment — had a one-word reaction: “Yikes.”
Perry got off to what his supporters consider a strong start, which means he spoke in complete sentences. After the first hour, however, he began to slip into gibberish — as when he said his program for controlling the border with Mexico without building a fence includes putting “the aviation assets on the ground,” and when he described the nation between Afghanistan and India as “the Pakistani country.”
Then he wound up for his big attack on Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper. This is what came out:
“I think Americans just don’t know sometimes which Mitt Romney they’re dealing with. Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of — against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment? Was it — was before — he was before the social programs from the standpoint of — he was for standing up for Roe versus Wade before he was against Roe versus Wade? Him — he was for Race to the Top. He’s for Obamacare and now he’s against it. I mean, we’ll wait until tomorrow and — and — and see which Mitt Romney we’re really talking to tonight.”
Yikes, yikes and double yikes.
The prospect of Perry standing next to Obama on a debate stage may have freaked out the GOP establishment, but what angered the party’s base was Perry’s position on illegal immigration. It is both reasonable and compassionate, meaning it is also completely unacceptable.
At issue was Perry’s initiative to let the sons and daughters of illegal immigrants in Texas pay in-state tuition at state universities. “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” Perry said.
Two days later, in the straw poll, Florida Republicans showed him just how heartless they can be.
I don’t know anyone who believes that Cain’s big victory — he captured 37 percent of the vote, compared with Perry’s 15 percent and Romney’s 14 percent — is a sign that the Hermanator’s campaign is about to catch fire, except perhaps Cain himself. Instead, it was a vote of no confidence in what still looks like a strikingly weak field.
Michele Bachmann swiftly rose and fell in the polls. If Perry traces the same arc, the temptation would be to conclude that the party has resigned itself to Romney and is ready to fall in line. But Romney has been running for nearly five years now and still hasn’t overcome an uncomfortable truth: The party’s just not that into him.
At this point, you have to wonder if the GOP will fall in love with anybody. I’m trying to imagine the candidate who can maintain credibility with the party’s establishment and Tea Party wings. If the ultra-flexible Romney isn’t enough of a political contortionist to do it, who is?
Given the state of the economy, Obama’s going to have a tough re-election fight no matter what. But while the president flies around the country knitting the Democratic Party’s various constituencies back together, Republicans are still waiting for Mr. or Ms. Right to ride over the horizon.
I don’t know if Christie can ride a horse, but this movie’s not over yet.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 26, 2011
The GOP Magical World Of Voodoo ‘Economists’: Repeal The 20th Century
If you came up with a bumper sticker that pulls together the platform of this year’s crop of Republican presidential candidates, it would have to be:
Repeal the 20th century. Vote GOP.
It’s not just the 21st century they want to turn the clock back on — health-care reform, global warming and the financial regulations passed in the wake of the recent financial crises and accounting scandals.
These folks are actually talking about repealing the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970s.
They’re talking about abolishing Medicare and Medicaid, which passed in the 1960s, and Social Security, created in the 1930s.
They reject as thoroughly discredited all of Keynesian economics, including the efficacy of fiscal stimulus, preferring the budget-balancing economic policies that turned the 1929 stock market crash into the Great Depression.
They also reject the efficacy of monetary stimulus to fight recession, and give the strong impression they wouldn’t mind abolishing the Federal Reserve and putting the country back on the gold standard.
They refuse to embrace Darwin’s theory of evolution, which has been widely accepted since the Scopes Trial of the 1920s.
One of them is even talking about repealing the 16th and 17th amendments to the Constitution, allowing for a federal income tax and the direct election of senators — landmarks of the Progressive Era.
What’s next — repeal of quantum physics?
Not every candidate embraces every one of these kooky ideas. But what’s striking is that when Rick Perry stands up and declares that “Keynesian policy and Keynesian theory is now done,” not one candidate is willing to speak up for the most important economic thinker of the 20th century. Or when Michele Bachmann declares that natural selection is just a theory, none of the other candidates is willing to risk the wrath of the religious right and call her on it. Leadership, it ain’t.
I realize economics isn’t a science the way biology and physics are sciences, but it’s close enough to one that there are ideas, principles and insights from experience that economists generally agree upon. Listening to the Republicans talk about the economy and economic policy, however, is like entering into an alternative reality.
Theirs is a magical world in which the gulf oil spill and the Japanese nuclear disaster never happened and there was never a problem with smog, polluted rivers or contaminated hamburger. It is a world where Enron and Worldcom did not collapse and shoddy underwriting by bankers did not bring the financial system to the brink of a meltdown. It is a world where the unemployed can always find a job if they really want one and businesses never, ever ship jobs overseas.
As politicians who are always quick to point out that it is only the private sector that creates economic growth, I found it rather comical to watch the governors at last week’s debate duke it out over who “created” the most jobs while in office. I know it must have just been an oversight, but I couldn’t help noticing that neither Mitt Romney nor Perry thought to exclude the thousands of government jobs included in their calculations — the kinds of jobs they and their fellow Republicans now view as economically illegitimate.
And how wonderfully precise they can be when it comes to job numbers. Romney is way out front when it comes to this kind of false precision. His new economic plan calculates that President Obama would “threaten” 7.3 million jobs with the ozone regulation that, in fact, the president had just canceled. By contrast, Romney claims his own plan will create 11 million jobs in his first term — not 10, not 12, but 11 million.
When you dig into such calculations, however, it turns out many are based on back-of-the-envelope extrapolations from industry data that totally ignore the dynamic quality of economic interactions.
One recent example comes from the cement industry, which now warns that new regulations limiting emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide could close as many as 18 of the 100 cement plants in the United States, resulting in the direct loss of 13,000 jobs.
Then again, where do you think all those customers of the 18 plants will get their cement? Do you think they might get some of it from the other 82 plants, which in turn might have to add a few workers to handle the additional volume? Or that a higher price for cement might induce somebody to build a modern plant to take advantage of the suddenly unmet demand? Or perhaps that higher prices for cement will lead some customers to use another building material produced by an industry that will have to add workers to increase its output? And what about the possibility that the regulation will encourage some innovative company to devise emissions-control equipment that will not only allow some of those plants to remain open but generate a few thousand extra jobs of its own as it exports to plants around the world.
Such possibilities are rarely, if ever, acknowledged in these “job-scare studies.” Also left out are any estimates of the benefits that might accrue in terms of longer, healthier lives. In the Republican alternative universe, it’s all costs, no benefits when it comes to government regulation. As they see it, government regulators wake up every morning with an uncontrollable urge to see how many jobs they can destroy.
If consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, then these Republican presidential candidates are big thinkers, particularly on fiscal issues.
In the Republican alternative universe, allowing an income tax cut for rich people to expire will “devastate” the U.S. economy, while letting a payroll tax cut for working people to expire would hardly be noticed. Cutting defense spending is economic folly; cutting food stamps for poor children an economic imperative.
My favorite, though, is a proposal, backed by nearly all the candidates along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to allow big corporations to bring home, at a greatly reduced tax rate, the more than $1 trillion in profits they have stashed away in foreign subsidiaries.
“Repatriation,” as it is called, was tried during the “jobless recovery” of the Bush years, with the promise that it would create 500,000 jobs over two years as corporations reinvested the cash in their U.S. operations. According to the most definitive studies of what happened, however, most of the repatriated profits weren’t used to hire workers or invest in new plants and equipment. Instead, they were used to pay down debt or buy back stock.
But fear not. In a new paper prepared for the chamber, Republican economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin argues that just because the money went to creditors and investors doesn’t mean it didn’t create jobs. After all, creditors and shareholders are people, too — people who will turn around and spend most of it, in the process increasing the overall demand for goods and services. As a result, Holtz-Eakin argues, a dollar of repatriated profit would have roughly the same impact on the economy as a dollar under the Obama stimulus plan, or in the case of $1 trillion in repatriated profit, about 3 million new jobs.
It’s a lovely economic argument, and it might even be right. But for Republican presidential candidates, it presents a little problem. You can’t argue, at one moment, that putting $1 trillion of money in the hands of households and business failed to create even a single job, and at the next moment argue that putting an extra $1 trillion in repatriated profit into their hands will magically generate jobs for millions.
It took a while, but even Richard Nixon came around to declaring himself a Keynesian. Maybe there is still hope for Perry and the gang.
Politics Without Purpose: September 11 Should Not Be Another Media Event
It was another one of those weeks in the capital when our leaders debated matters crucial to the survival of American civilization.
Did President Obama try to upstage the Republican presidential debate by asking to address a joint session of Congress that same night? And did House Speaker John Boehner dis the president, and the presidency, by denying him that slot?
Tempted though I was to weigh in on this important matter, I decided instead to head over to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, to preview a small but immensely powerful exhibit marking the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
There, displayed for the first time, are sacred relics of 9/11: the crumpled piece of the fuselage where the American flag had been painted on the Boeing 757 that crashed in a Pennsylvania field, a flight-attendant call button from the plane, a window shade, a landing gear strut, and a log book with the pages intact. The exhibit is simple and raw, without glass or showcases. Some dried mud caked on an airplane seatbelt was flaking off onto a tablecloth.
Nearby is the door from a fire truck crushed at Ground Zero and the beeper of a man who died in the South Tower. There’s a Pentagon clock frozen at about the time American Airlines Flight 77 struck the complex and the phone on which Ted Olson received the last call from his wife on the doomed plane. Most poignant, perhaps, is the postcard from another passenger, written to her sister the day before the crash to give the address of a new home in which she would never live.
The spare exhibit brought back the horror of that time. But it also reminded me of the pride in what followed, the national unity and sense of purpose.
The warm feelings didn’t last long, of course, destroyed by the war in Iraq and the politicization of homeland security. By now, we have lost all sense of purpose in politics, alternately distracted by Sarah Palin’s bus tours, Anthony Weiner’s private parts, David Wu’s tiger suit, Donald Trump’s birth-certificate campaign, and Dick Cheney’s broadsides.
Obama, whose uncertain trumpet has ceased to rally even his own troops, contemplated his long-delayed jobs agenda while lounging on Martha’s Vineyard last month. His leading Republican rival for the presidency talks of treason and secession. Another challenger arranges to quadruple the size of his California home (his defense: He’s only doubling the living space). Lawmakers play games with the debt ceiling and wound the nation’s credit rating but can’t agree on anything to put Americans back to work.
The political extraneousness of the moment, in other words, is like that of early September 2001. We spent those days amusing ourselves with Gary Condit and shark attacks. President George W. Bush spent August on a record-long ranch vacation. The biggest issue under debate: stem-cell research. Warnings about Osama bin Laden were ignored while the administration obsessed over rewriting a missile treaty with Russia.
What will it require to end the drift this time? A depression? Another attack? Or is there a less painful way to regain national purpose?
“For most people,” curator David Allison told me as I toured the Smithsonian exhibit, “Sept. 11 is only a media event.” The exhibit is a modest attempt at changing that, taking that day’s ruins out of storage and rekindling memory. The lucky few who see the exhibit during its short run will be reminded that there are things more important than whether the president addresses Congress on a Wednesday or a Thursday.
Consider the simple postcard, written by Georgetown economist Leslie Whittington to her sister and brother-in-law, as Whittington, her husband and their 8- and 3-year-old daughters headed off to Australia for a sabbatical. The card, postmarked Sept. 12 at Dulles Airport, must have been mailed just before the family boarded American Flight 77. The note says, in its entirety:
9/10/01
Dear Sara & Jay,
Well, we’re off to Australia. When we return we will have a new address (as of 11/30): 8034 Glendale Rd. Chevy Chase, MD 20815
We don’t know our phone # yet. While we are in “Oz”, email will work best for contacting us: whittinl@georgetown.edu.
Love, Leslie, Chas, Zoe & Dana
I thought about Sara receiving that postcard from her dead sister, and about those little girls who never made it to Glendale Road – because of 19 evil men and a government distracted by less important things.
Then I went out onto Constitution Avenue, where, across from the museum, a bus labeled “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” had just parked.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 2, 2011
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