“Where’s The Data?”: Paul Ryan Claims 30 Percent Of America Happy To Freeload
One of the more enduring ‘knocks’ on the candidacy of Mitt Romney is that he incorrectly views many of those who are in need of government provided assistance as being people who prefer to live life at the expense of the taxpayer rather than pursue a more meaningful existence of hard work and self-sufficiency.
Whether this perspective on Romney is fair or unfair, most would agree that the GOP standard bearer’s now infamous 47% speech—delivered at a Boca Raton fundraiser—has done little to dispel this meme as we head in to the dwindling days of the 2012 presidential campaign.
Now, Romney’s running mate, Congressman Paul Ryan, has weighed in with his own assessment of what drives a significant portion of the American public—and it’s not pretty.
Speaking at the annual American Spectator Robert L. Bartley Gala Dinner in November of 2011, Ryan had this to say-
“Today, 70 percent of Americans get more benefits from the federal government in dollar value than they pay back in taxes. So you could argue that we’re already past that [moral] tipping point. The good news is survey after survey, poll after poll, still shows that we are a center-right 70-30 country. Seventy percent of Americans want the American dream. They believe in the American idea. Only 30 percent want their welfare state. What that tells us is at least half of those people who are currently in that category are there not of their wish or their will.”
While it is certainly interesting that Ryan predicates his remarks on the belief that one who does not self-identify as “right of center” necessarily opposes the the American dream, leaving it to follow that such an individual would prefer to allow the government to pay for his or her existence (quite a stretch by any reasonable standard), what most interested me about Ryan’s address was the source for his assumptions.
Who says that America is a center-right nation by a 70-30 margin? And if that is the basis of Ryan’s calculations in determining how many of us prefer the welfare state to hard work, wouldn’t a source for such a claim be appropriate?
As I simply could not recall there being any such ‘survey after survey’ and ‘poll after poll’ that would support Congressman Ryan’s conclusions, it struck me as a worthwhile venture to go looking for the same.
Bearing in mind that the Ryan address was given November of 2011—and wanting to be fair to Congressman Ryan—I went off in search of any poll conducted within a reasonable window of the time frame of Ryan’s address that might support his allegations.
I found that virtually every single one of the major polls conducted in the nation during the months leading up to Ryan’s speech revealed that the overwhelming majority of Americans (64.5 percent when the polls are averaged) believed we should be raising taxes to help cut into the deficit—an odd conclusion in a nation so heavily slanted to the right of center as claimed by Mr. Ryan.
I found that the Gallup Poll conducted on September 20th of 2011 revealed that 70% of Americans wanted to increase taxes on corporations by eliminating certain tax deductions the public believed to be unfair. The same poll also discovered that Americans widely supported the jobs plan that President Obama sent to Congress where it failed thanks to Congressman Ryan and his cohorts.
Again, a shocking result if we are to believe Ryan’s assessment that seven out of ten Americans are committed to the very ideology that Ryan professes to be his own.
I found a CBS/New York Times poll conducted just a few months before Ryan’s speech reporting that 72 percent of those polled disapproved of the way his party handled the default crisis.
And in a Time Magazine poll conducted less than one month before Ryan’s labeling 30 percent of our fellow Americans to be a bunch of bums, 79 percent of the public believed that the gap between the rich and the poor had grown too large, 86 percent believed that Wall Street and its lobbyists have far too much to say about what happens in Washington and a majority of Americans supported the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Do you know what I could not find?
Not so much as one survey or poll suggesting that the United States is a right-of–center electorate by a margin of 70-30 or that 30 percent of the public is content to live their lives courtesy of the United States government with no interest or desire in taking control of their own support and sustenance if given the chance.
While it might not be forgivable, it would at least be understandable had Ryan made this speech in the heat of a campaign where he has proven himself willing to say or do just about anything to solidify his base. However, these comments were made well before Congressman Ryan was chosen for the GOP ticket. Thus, it seems reasonable to accept that this is either what Mr. Ryan believes or what he thinks he can sell—despite an apparent lack of any evidence whatsoever to support so shrill and offensive a claim.
Congressman Ryan owes us some authority for his remarks. If these polls and surveys exist, his campaign should make them available to us.
Otherwise, Paul Ryan—a man whose own living has long come solely at the expense of the American taxpayer—is simply making this stuff up out of whole cloth and, in the process, deeply offending the millions of Americans who want more than anything to find work and get ahead but are struggling to do so.
Talk about being out of touch….
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, Forbes, October 3, 2012
“Nowhere To Go”: There Is No Brilliant Strategy Waiting For Mitt Romney To Use
I’m sure that right about now Mitt Romney is drowning in unsolicited advice. That’s what happens when you’re behind—everybody from the consultants you weren’t wise enough to employ to the donors funding your campaign to the guy who delivers your mail fancies themselves a political genius, and will be happy to tell you that all your problems would be solved if only you’d follow their advice. But I wonder: Is there anything all these people are telling Romney and the people who work for him that might help?
Because I don’t know what it might be. Sure, we can all agree that the Romney campaign hasn’t exactly been deft, but their biggest problem isn’t one of strategy or message, it’s that their candidate is unskilled and unappealing. In a long article out today, the National Journal explains that people’s expectations of the economy have just been lowered, and the Romney campaign’s belief that eventually voters would come around to blaming Obama for the country’s troubles just hasn’t materialized: “Each passing day and each new poll brings further evidence that the Romney team has miscalculated. Obama has erased a once-formidable Romney lead on the question of who would handle the economy better as president; in some polls, the president has seized the advantage on that front. Economy-first independent voters are drifting Obama’s way. Voters increasingly say that the economy is on the right track.”
OK, but what was the alternative for the Romney campaign? You can argue that they should have come up with something “bold,” but then you’d have to answer, what exactly? A 9-9-9 plan? When was the last time a president got elected not because of who he was and the national conditions surrounding the election, but because of a particularly striking policy proposal? Never, that’s when.
I’m guessing that most of the people giving Romney that unsolicited advice are telling him to “take the gloves off.” Because it’s obvious, to them at least, that Barack Obama is a horrible president and a horrible person, and if you just tell the voters that, eventually they’ll realize the truth. In that vein, here’s an interesting article in the Boston Globe (h/t Andrew Sullivan) explaining how Romney came from behind to win his 2002 governor race by getting tough:
Shortly after the poll came out, Romney huddled with his aides during a barbecue at his Belmont home, and they decided to shift tactics. He would drop the gentlemanly role he had assumed, one that prompted some voters to see him as a smug, programmed front-runner.
The campaign would drop the feel-good, family-focused ads in favor of sharper, more combative ones criticizing O’Brien’s management of the state treasury. Romney would start delivering attack lines himself, rather than leaving the dirty work to surrogates.
“We knew we needed to use debates and other methods to get our message out in a crystal-clear way,” said Mike Murphy, who was one of Romney’s chief strategists. “We needed to turn the boat a little bit, so to speak. Mitt was totally on board and we hit our stride.”
Within weeks, the polls began to shift. Voters responded to Romney’s negative ads, the most memorable of which portrayed O’Brien as a hapless, sleeping basset hound instead of a watchdog on Beacon Hill. The ad — humorous, yet cutting — is still talked about by political observers in Massachusetts.
The problem is, Shannon O’Brien was the state Treasurer, not the incumbent president of the United States. Voters already know Obama pretty well, so you aren’t going to change what they think about him with a few pointed attacks. And for the last year, Romney has been doing little except attacking Obama, saying that he doesn’t understand or care about America, and that everything he’s done in office has been a disaster. It’s not like there’s some place of greater toughness Romney could go to—at least not one that’s likely to work.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 2, 2012
“Purveyors Of Garbage”: Right Wingers Hitting Rock Bottom, Then Crawling Beneath The Rock
I have, at times, marveled at some of the more ridiculous efforts to smear President Obama and his family. Dinesh D’Souza, for example, wrote a strange book attacking Obama for trying to carry out an “anti-colonial” agenda he inherited from his Kenyan father. It’s a thesis as silly as it is ugly, based on bizarre assertions about the president having the mindset of an African “Luo tribesman.”
The Weekly Standard criticized it for “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.” When D’Souza’s thesis first appeared as a piece in Forbes, one of the magazine’s own columnists blasted D’Souza’s “intellectual goofiness,” “factual problems,” and “unsubstantiated ideological accusations.” The Columbia Journalism Review called D’Souza’s piece “a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia” and a “singularly disgusting work.”
By the time the disgusting attack was turned into a movie, it was tempting to think the deranged attitudes of Obama’s most over-the-top detractors couldn’t get any worse. Michelle Goldberg’s latest report proves otherwise — now they’re launching nauseating attacks against the president’s mother (thanks to my colleague Vanessa Silverton-Peel for the heads-up).
For a while now, pictures purporting to show Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, modeling in 1950s bondage and fetish porn have been floating around the darker corners of the Internet. Now, though, they’ve made their way into a pseudo-documentary, Joel Gilbert’s Dreams From My Real Father, which is being mailed to voters in swing states, promoted by several Tea Party groups and by at least one high-level Republican. At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Obama’s America—the first of all his works to hit the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list—has a chapter essentially calling Dunham a fat slut. […]
What matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right. Gilbert claims that more than a million copies of Dreams From My Real Father have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000 to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire. “We’re putting plans in place, as of next week, to send out another 2 [million] or 3 million, just state by state,” he told me.
It may seem hard to believe that even the most gullible, wild-eyed fools would find such garbage credible, but there are those on the right who are actually embracing this. Goldberg added, “[T]he fact is, people are reporting receiving the disc in the mail. Tea Party groups and conservative churches are screening it. It was shown at a right-wing film festival in Tampa during the Republican National Convention, and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council in Missouri. Alabama GOP Chairman Bill Armistead recently recommended it during a speech.”
We’re well past the point at which these right-wing activists care about basic levels of decency, but if there’s any justice, this kind of attack will backfire, and make the purveyors of the garbage look far worse than their intended targets.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 28, 2012
“Magic Moment Instinct”: Mitt Romney’s Secret Debate Weapon
With the first presidential debate coming on Wednesday, further details are emerging about how the two candidates have been preparing for the face-offs. The debates have a special importance for Mitt Romney, who trails President Obama by 4.3 points in both Real Clear Politics’s composite of national polls and their aggregation of polls in most swing states. Many politicos believe that the debates are Romney’s last chance to turn the race around. So what’s his secret weapon? Zingers.
This from Peter Baker and Ashley Parker in today’s New York Times:
Mr. Romney’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August. His strategy includes luring the president into appearing smug or evasive about his responsibility for the economy.
This nicely illustrates one of the big problems that the Romney campaign has brought upon itself: They keep trying to find one magic moment on which they can turn around the race. They banked first on the vice presidential roll out and then on the GOP convention as instances where the American people would see and embrace a new Mitt Romney while finally turning on President Obama in the manner Republicans believe he deserves. That magic bullet instinct also explains the campaign’s jumping around from attack message to attack message (see: welfare attacks, “you didn’t build it,” “bumps in the road,” and so forth).
But as I argue in my column in U.S. News Weekly this week (subscription required), while we remember big moments in debates, they rarely if ever actually turn elections. The classic example is Gerald Ford’s declaration that the Soviet Union wasn’t dominating Eastern Europe—it’s remembered as a crippling gaffe, but he closed on Carter during the period of the debates that year. And while conventional wisdom (and, apparently, the Romney campaign) holds that Ronald Reagan only broke through after decisively besting Jimmy Carter with “there you go again” and “are you better off…?” in their late October debate, he was already leading in the polls at that point. It’s true that the polling trend line shows a Reagan surge after the debate, but he had been leading Carter since the late spring and had been creeping upward since late August. The Reagan-Carter debate accelerated an existing trend; it didn’t turn the election or change its dynamics.
And there’s another reason why the Romney campaign shouldn’t bank on zingers to turn around their flailing, failing effort. As The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison observes on Twitter today, “if people don’t like a candidate to start with, they aren’t going to be impressed when he uses one-liners and put-downs.” He goes on to wonder whether Team Romney realizes that candidates with high negatives (and Romney’s are so very high) shouldn’t be relying on zingers. People already find Romney unlikable, in other words; coming across as more of a smarmy smart-ass isn’t going to help him.
On a lighter note, the idea of Mitt Romney’s arsenal of prepared one-liners has given rise to a new Twitter meme: #MittZingers.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, September 29, 2012
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