“Glib Ideological Purity”: Mitt Romney Would Pass The Buck On Disasters
Back when he was being “severely conservative,” Mitt Romney suggested that responsibility for disaster relief should be taken from the big, bad federal government and given to the states, or perhaps even privatized. Hurricane Sandy would like to know if he’d care to reconsider.
The absurd, and dangerous, policy prescription came in a GOP primary debate in June. Moderator John King said he had recently visited communities affected by severe weather and noted that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “is about to run out of money.”
“There are some people . . . who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role,” King said. “How do you deal with something like that?”
Romney replied: “Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.”
Romney went on to express the general principle that, given the crushing national debt, “we should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, ‘What are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do?’ ”
King gave him a chance to back off: “Including disaster relief, though?”
Romney didn’t blink. “We cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids,” he said, adding that “it is simply immoral . . . to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids.”
Now, with an unprecedented and monstrous storm bashing the East Coast, this glib exercise in ideological purity is newly relevant. Was Romney really saying that the federal government should abdicate the task of responding to natural disasters such as the one now taking place? Yes, he was. Did he really mean it? Well, with Romney, that’s always another question.
As the legendary Watergate source Deep Throat never actually said: “Follow the money.”
The dishonest “solution” proposed by Romney and running mate Paul Ryan for the federal government’s budget woes relies largely on a shell game: Transfer unfunded liabilities to the states.
Most disastrously, this is what Romney and Ryan propose for Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor. The GOP plan would give the states block grants that would not begin to cover Medicaid’s rising costs. Governors and legislatures would be forced to impose draconian cuts, with potentially catastrophic impact for millions of Americans.
Medicaid’s most expensive role — and thus, under Romney, the most imperiled — is to fund nursing-home care for seniors who classify as “poor” only because they have exhausted their life savings. Transferring the onus of Medicaid and other programs to the states would save money only by making it impossible to provide services at current levels.
For the hard-right ideologues who control the Republican Party, this would be a good thing. Our society has become too dependent on government, they believe, too “entitled” to benefits; we are unwilling to “take personal responsibility and care for” our lives, as Romney said in his secretly recorded “47 percent” speech.
Romney’s budget proposals would end all this coddling — except for the Pentagon and its contractors, who would get a big boost in federal largess, and of course, the wealthy, who would get a huge tax cut.
So-called “discretionary” federal spending would be sharply reduced. This would include spending for such agencies as FEMA. So yes, even if Romney was just pandering to the right-wing base at that June debate, one consequence of his policies would be to squeeze funding for federal emergency relief.
I guess having to survive a few hurricanes, tornados and earthquakes on our own would certainly foster personal responsibility.
And by the way, why is it that we’re having such a huge hurricane make landfall in such an unusual place at such a late date in the season? Is this another of those freakish once-in-a-century weather events that seem to be happening so often these days?
I know it’s impossible to definitively blame any one storm on human-induced atmospheric warming. But I’m sorry, these off-the-charts phenomena are becoming awfully commonplace. By the time scientists definitively establish what’s happening, it will be too late.
As has been noted, the words “climate change” were not spoken during the presidential debates. Hurricane Sandy wants to know why.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 29, 2012
“A Man Is Known By The Company He Keeps”: John Sununu And Mitt Romney Are Not So “Strange Bedfellows”
The saying goes: A man is known by the company he keeps.
If that is true, what does the company Mitt Romney keeps say about him?
This week Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama again, as he did in 2008. That apparently set John Sununu, a co-chairman of the Romney campaign, on edge. Powell’s endorsement couldn’t possibly be the product of purposeful deliberation over the candidates’ policies. In Sununu’s world of racial reductionism, Powell’s endorsement had a more base explanation: it was a black thing.
On Thursday, Sununu said on CNN:“When you take a look at Colin Powell, you have to wonder whether that’s an endorsement based on issues or whether he’s got a slightly different reason for preferring President Obama.” He continued: “I think when you have somebody of your own race that you’re proud of being president of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him.”
Talk about damning with faint praise. In other words, Sununu was basically saying that he was applauding Powell’s inability to see past the color of his own eyelids.
Sununu is the same man who said that the president performed poorly in the first debate because “he’s lazy and disengaged.” He is also the same man who said of the president in July, “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.”
Could Sununu be unaware that many would register such comments as coded racism? Or was that the intent?
To understand Sununu, it is important to understand his political history.
For starters, he is no stranger to racism controversies. When George H.W. Bush selected him as chief of staff in 1988, The New York Times reported:
“Mr. Sununu’s selection was shadowed by concern among some key Jewish leaders. The 49-year-old New Hampshire Governor, whose father is Lebanese and who takes pride in his Arab ancestry, was the only governor to refuse to sign a June 1987 statement denouncing a 1975 United Nations resolution that equated Zionism with racism.”
But that wasn’t his undoing. It was his actions. In 1991, Sununu became enmeshed in a scandal over using government planes for personal trips.
After the embarrassment of the incident, Bush ordered Sununu to clear all future flights in advance. What happened later you must read for yourself, and it is best stated by Time Magazine in a July 1, 1991, article:
“If Sununu hadn’t exactly been grounded, he had certainly been sent to his room. But Bush underestimated the depth of Sununu’s ethical obtuseness and his zeal at finding a way around the rules. Like a rebellious adolescent, Sununu sneaked down the stairs, grabbed the car keys and slipped out of the White House. After all, the old man had only said, ‘Don’t take the plane.’ He didn’t say anything about the car.”
The piece continued:
“Overcome by a sudden urge two weeks ago to buy rare stamps, Sununu ordered the driver of his government-paid limousine to drive him 225 miles to New York City. He spent the day — and nearly $5,000 — at an auction room at Christie’s. Then he dismissed the driver, who motored back to Washington with no passengers. Sununu returned on a private jet owned by Beneficial Corp.”
By the end of 1991, amid sagging poll numbers, Bush began to see Sununu as a drag and unceremoniously relieved him of his post. As The Times reported then, Sununu was made to plead for his job before he was pushed out anyway:
“Mr. Sununu and the White House portrayed the departure as voluntary. But it followed meetings in which Mr. Bush listened to Mr. Sununu’s arguments that he should stay on and then decided to follow the advice of top-level Republicans who urged the removal of his chief of staff.”
R. W. Apple Jr. wrote in The Times after the move that Bush’s “indirectly soliciting and then promptly accepting” Sununu’s resignation had made it abundantly clear what actually happened.
Sununu has apologized, somewhat, for his racial attack on Powell’s motives. But what should we make of all this?
We have a very racially divided electorate. As The Washington Post reported Thursday, “Obama has a deficit of 23 percentage points, trailing Republican Mitt Romney 60 percent to 37 percent among whites, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News national tracking poll.”
The report pointed out that nearly 80 percent of nonwhites support Obama, while 91 percent of Romney’s supporters are white.
I worry that Sununu’s statements intentionally go beyond recognizing racial disparities and seek to exploit them.
What does that say about Romney, and what does it say about his campaign’s tactics?
Remember: A man is known by the company he keeps.
By: Charles Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 26, 2012
“The Ugly Strain Of GOP Racism”: Right Wing Fumes As General Colin Powell Endorses President Obama
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed President Barack Obama for re-election this morning, crossing party lines — and setting off an ugly reaction from the right wing.
Powell, a retired four-star general who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the George H.W. Bush administration before becoming George W. Bush’s top diplomat, told CBS’s “This Morning” that “I voted for [Obama] in 2008, and I plan to stick with him in 2012. I’ll be voting for he [sic] and for Vice President Joe Biden next month.”
Powell credited President Obama for stabilizing the financial system, ending the war in Iraq, and beginning to end the war in Afghanistan. By contrast, Powell criticized Romney’s economic plans and expressed concern that Romney is a “moving target” on foreign policy.
“The governor who was speaking on Monday night at the debate was saying things that were quite different from what he said earlier,” Powell said. “So I’m not quite sure which Governor Romney we would be getting in terms of foreign policy.”
“Sometimes I don’t sense that he has thought through these issues as thoroughly as he should have,” Powell added. “And he gets advice from his campaign staff that he then has to adjust and modify as he goes along.”
Predictably, many on the right could not accept that Powell — who maintains that he is still a Republican despite endorsing both of Obama’s presidential runs — could have serious policy reasons for supporting the president. Instead, the fringe came up with the same answer that they embrace to explain almost every Obama-related event: it’s all about race.
A brief scan of right wing message boards and media figures reveals the ugly strain of racism that lurks barely beneath the surface of many hyper-partisan criticisms of the president. Note that no Caucasian is ever labeled as a racist for endorsing a white candidate.
Some mainstream Republicans were also critical of Powell’s endorsement. Arizona Senator John McCain went on Brian Kilmeade’s radio show this morning and slammed Powell’s decision, saying “General Powell, you disappoint us and you have harmed your legacy even further by defending what is clearly the most feckless foreign policy in my lifetime.”
This is an especially interesting critique, given that Powell is the man who stood before the United Nations in 2003 and made the disastrously faulty case for an invasion of Iraq. Powell considers the incident to be a “blot” on his record that will always be “painful” to him. If anyone would understand the value of restraint — which McCain and his colleagues in the Republican foreign policy establishment tend to consider “feckless” — it would be a man like Powell, who has seen firsthand what type of damage Romney and his foreign policy team can do.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, October 25, 2012
“A Deeply Ironic Twist”: Conservative Media Ignore GOP Voter Registration Fraud
Republicans passed new voting restrictions in more than a dozen states since the 2010 election that were purportedly designed to stop voter fraud. Yet, in a deeply ironic twist, the most high-profile instances of election fraud this cycle have been committed by Republicans in states with new voting restrictions.
The RNC-funded Strategic Allied Consulting, run by checkered GOP operative Nathan Sproul, is under criminal investigation in Florida for submitting fraudulent voter registration forms to election officials. (Sproul is still running voter-canvassing operations for conservatives in thirty states.) Sproul’s associate Colin Small, who had worked for Strategic Allied Consulting and as “Grassroots Field Director at the Republican National Committee,” was charged last week with eight felony counts and five misdemeanors for trashing voter registration forms in Virginia.
Republicans claim that the voter registration fraud was committed by a few bad apples and pales in comparison to the fraud committed by ACORN in 2008. But ACORN was never funded by the DNC. And the abuses committed by Sproul and Small were far worse than those attached to ACORN. Unlike Strategic Allied Consulting, ACORN never changed the party affiliations on fraudulent voter registration forms and self-reported suspicious materials to election officials. Nor did ACORN ever destroy valid voter registration forms, as Small is accused of doing. (Not to mention that none of the fictitious characters falsely registered by ACORN workers, like Mickey Mouse, ever voted.)
Despite the right’s preoccupation with voter fraud, Sproul and Small have received scant coverage from conservative media outlets. Fox News, which ran 122 stories on ACORN from 2007–08, mentioned Strategic Allied Consulting only three times since the scandal broke in late September and hasn’t aired a single report on voter registration fraud in Virginia. Nor have National Review or The Weekly Standard, the pre-eminent conservative magazines, run an article about either case.
ACORN was far from perfect, but it did not deserve the witch-hunt treatment it received. In 2009, Peter Dreier of Occidental College and Christopher Martin of Northern Iowa studied the media’s shameful coverage of ACORN during the 2008 election and found:
• 82.8% of the stories failed to mention that actual voter fraud is very rare
• 80.3% of the stories failed to mention that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as required by law
• 85.1% of the stories about ACORN failed to note that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its (mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems
• 95.8% of the stories failed to provide deeper context, especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of “voter fraud” to dampen voting by low‐income and minority Americans, including the firing of U.S. Attorneys who refused to cooperate with the politicization of voter-fraud accusations—firings that ultimately led to the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Republicans, it turns out, have committed the very voter registration fraud they once accused ACORN of perpetrating. Nor did new voting restrictions in states like Florida and Virginia, which could collectively make it harder for 5 million Americans to cast a ballot in 2012, prevent the fraud they were supposedly meant to combat.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, October 23, 2012
“The Neocons’ Long Game”: Don’t Expect Fuzzy Moderate Feelings To Last If Romney Ends Up In The White House
Most of the snap polls taken after last night’s foreign policy debate, the last before the November 6 election, gave the win the President Obama—if not an outright knockout then at least a TKO on points. But beyond the candidates themselves, the debate did have one clear loser: neoconservatives.
During the many years Mitt Romney has been running for president, he’s taken a number of fluid positions on foreign policy. In addition to reflecting Romney’s character as an eager-to-please shape-shifter, the changing positions also represent a genuine—and growing—policy tension among foreign policy factions within the GOP establishment.
Even though old school realists like Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft retain some influence, and more isolationist voices like Senator Rand Paul represent a rising challenge, the neoconservatives remain the most dominant. But even though Romney had worked diligently since 2009 to build ties to the GOP’s neoconservative wing, and relies heavily on a number of them as his key advisers, the foreign policy vision he articulated last night indicates that he understands that American voters (at least the ones he needs to eke out an Electoral College victory) just aren’t that into the expensive, world-transformative schemes that neocons are still busy dreaming up.
Romney’s new foreign policy tack was evident on the very first question of the night, in which moderator Bob Schieffer served the issue of the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks to him on a plate. Romney chose not to re-boot his fumbled criticism of the Obama administration from the last debate, something his hawkish surrogates and the GOP’s Fox News annex have been pushing hard for over the last week. Rather, Romney chose to draw back to a broader view of a region in chaos. His Obama-esque declaration that “We can’t kill our way out of this mess,” while surely appealing to voters tired of war in the Middle East, was sure to disappoint the neocons, for whom there are few problems in the world that can’t be solved through the application of American ordnance.
It wouldn’t be the last time Romney echoed the president last night. With regard to the prospect of U.S. military interventions, Romney insisted that “We don’t want another Iraq,” even though neocons still proclaim the Iraq war a success (a commanding majority of Americans disagrees). On Iraq itself, though he criticized the failure to achieve a new status of forces agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments, Romney recoiled from President Obama’s suggestion that he didn’t support withdrawing American troops. On Syria and Afghanistan, Romney took positions 180 degree opposite what his neoconservative supporters have been advocating, assuring viewers that “I don’t want to have our military involved” in the former, and agreeing with President Obama’s withdrawal timetable for the latter.
One moment where Romney did let his inner neocon out to play was in his claim that President Obama’s efforts to engage the Iranians in diplomatic talks were taken by Iran as a sign of weakness. “I think from the very beginning, one of the challenges we’ve had with Iran is that they have looked at this administration and—and felt that the administration was not as strong as it needed to be,” Romney said. “I think they saw weakness where they had expected to find American strength.”
First, when one considers how Iran’s hardliners profited—both domestically and in regional influence—from the Bush administration’s reckless show of “strength” in the Middle East, this claim falls apart. But it also seriously misunderstands the manner in which U.S. diplomatic outreach to Iran has discombobulated an Iranian regime that much prefers to deal with an openly hostile U.S. government.
As Israeli analyst Meir Javedanfar noted, President Obama “called this regime’s bluff by recognizing it. This is the worst thing you can do to your enemy, to unmask them.” Exploring this dynamic in a 2010 column, David Ignatius wrote, “White House officials argue that their strategy of engagement has been a form of pressure, and the evidence supports them.”
Perhaps the most brutal moment of the night was President Obama’s takedown of Romney’s claim that the president had gone on an “apology tour” after taking office, a treasured conservative myth despite its pantaloons being rendered aflame by virtually every fact-checking organization in existence. True to form, the Romney campaign blasted out a new “Apology Tour” ad this morning, which notably doesn’t include any footage of President Obama apologizing.
It tells us a lot about Romney’s lack of a clear foreign policy agenda that this was the moment his campaign thought most-worthy of highlighting from last night—a cheap attack based not on any substantive policy difference, but a stylistic difference founded on a complete falsehood, the idea that President Obama hasn’t proclaimed or exerted American power boldly enough.
Which is why, despite Romney’s momentary embrace of President Obama’s policies, we should still be concerned with the role that neoconservatives would play in a Romney administration. It’s important to keep in mind that, as a candidate, Governor George W. Bush made a lot of moderate, reasonable-sounding noises about foreign policy too. But when faced with a crisis on 9/11, the inexperienced president with unformed foreign policy ideas fell back on the comforting but naive idea that America’s greatness could be proclaimed, and its deterrence re-established, through the massive exercise of military force. The next president will likely face a similar crisis, even if not likely on the scale of 9/11. It very much matters who has his ear.
By: Matthew Duss, The American Prospect, October 23, 2012
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