“Typical Of Cowards”: Romney Blames Obama For GOP Defense Cuts
For the last two weeks Mitt Romney’s campaign has incessantly attacked President Obama for the cuts to defense spending mandated by the agreement he made with Congress to lift the debt ceiling last year. Romney and his surrogates blame Obama, instead of their fellow Republicans in Congress, for this turn of events, and claim it will damage America’s national security. They are also playing hypocritical politics, and violating their own supposed principles, by complaining that the cuts will cost jobs in swing states such as Virginia. Here’s a sampling of their statements:
§ Mitt Romney, in his speech Tuesday to the VFW: “We are just months away from an arbitrary, across-the-board budget reduction that would saddle the military with a trillion dollars in cuts, severely shrink our force structure, and impair our ability to meet and deter threats.”
§ Senator Jim Talent (R-MO) on a Romney campaign conference call: “They’re planning to cut 200,000 troops. Given the state of the economy, it’s equivalent to laying them off and the military is sending them to the unemployment lines.… at a time when Iran is making progress towards a nuclear weapon, Syria is in the middle of a civil war, Chinese power is surging, we have men and women fighting and putting their lives at risk in the field in Afghanistan. So in all my years in and around Washington, it’s the most irresponsible thing a Commander-in-Chief has done.”
§ Tea Party hero and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in a Romney campaign statement: “For President Obama to play budgetary Russian roulette with national defense is shameful. The damage to our local economy here in Virginia will be enormous. But the damage to our national security is what really counts.”
§ Representative Scott Rigell (R-VA), in a statement for the Romney campaign: “The President must address—directly and decisively—the massive, violent reduction in defense spending that is headed our way. Pink slips are looming, Virginia will be reeling come January, and our Commander in Chief is eerily silent on this issue. That, in my opinion, is a breach of his duty as head of our armed forces.
§ Romney surrogate Governor Bob McDonnell (R-VA) said on CNN: “I’m worried not only about jobs in Virginia, but I’m worried about the security of the United States of America.”
As conservative Ramesh Ponnuru points out in a Bloomberg View column, Republicans are making a big-government Keynesian argument for defense spending, that it’s a necessary public employment program. They utterly reject this logic if applied to, say, retaining public school teachers or police officers. “The Republican position on federal spending could not be clearer: It doesn’t create jobs. Except when it goes to defense contractors,” writes Ponnuru.
As Dave Weigel notes in Slate, Romney and his supporters have taken to audaciously referring to “President Obama’s Massive Defense Cuts,” as if they were his alone. In fact, they are not Obama’s at all. Obama, of course, was perfectly happy to let Congress raise the debt ceiling as it always had in the past without attaching any conditions. Republicans insisted that only massive spending cuts, and no additional revenue, would have to accompany any such vote. They held the economy—which would have collapsed from a governmental debt default—hostage. So Obama gave in and agreed to spending cuts. The only concession he won in exchange for cuts to domestic spending was cuts to defense as well. But the defense cuts would have been avoided if Republicans had not been so irresponsible in the first place.
Where did Romney figure into all of this? As is typical of the coward who wants to lead the free world, he hid out, saying as little as possible. When the deal was finally reached, he simultaneously condemned it for not going far enough and for cutting defense spending. “As president, my plan would have produced a budget that was cut, capped and balanced—not one that opens the door to higher taxes and puts defense cuts on the table,” he said.
How one balances the budget without cutting defense spending remains a mystery no Republican has actually solved. Defense spending accounts for 24 percent of our total federal budget. Most of the rest is taken up by mandatory spending on entitlement programs and interest on our debt.
Republicans such as Romney make no effort to actually prove that the sequestration cuts will damage the military. They just assert it.
Any look at the statistics will demonstrate the absurdity of their claims. In 2011 the United States spent $698 billion on defense. That is 43 percent of the world’s share. China was number two, at $119 billion. Every other country in the top ten military spenders, except for Russia, was an ally. Russia and China combined, at $178 billion, spent vastly less than the United States. So which enemy is challenging us for global supremacy? How could the sequestration cuts of $500 billion over ten years, as we wind down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, possibly make us unable to defend ourselves?
Romney doesn’t say, because he does not have an answer. Rather, he is simply flailing, looking for ways to attack President Obama on national security, when polls show Obama is more trusted on the issue. The American public is hardly known for its deep knowledge of global affairs, but they do know who killed Osama bin Laden and decimated Al Qaeda’s top leadership, and it wasn’t Mitt Romney.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, July 26, 2012
“Speaking In Code”: Race And Ethnicity Never Far From Presidential Campaign
The racially offensive remark by an unnamed adviser to Republican Mitt Romney– if the painfully thin Daily Telegraph story is to be believed — is likely to be described as the injection of race, ethnicity and nationality in what has been a colorblind campaign.
While the comment may be the most blatant reference to President Obama’s background in the 2012 race, it is hardly the first. Or the last.
“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser reportedly said of Romney, who arrived in London Wednesday. “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”
Romney was born and raised in Michigan. Obama’s story is far more complicated. His mother was white and born in Kansas. His father came from Kenya. Obama was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. He is Christian, but crazy rumors persist that he is Muslim with ties to terrorists. All of this allows the president to be easily characterized as different, exotic, less American and more foreign. As “other.” And Romney and his supporters have not shied from those types of descriptions.
In one recent example, former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu told reporters in a call arranged by the Romney campaign that “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.” Sununu later walked back his remarks, saying “The president has to learn the American formula for creating business.”
Romney himself said of Obama’s approach to the economy in a speech last week in Pittsburgh: “His course is extraordinarily foreign.” He has repeatedly said Obama “doesn’t understand America.”
Romney and his team are certainly entitled to make robust criticisms of the president and his policies. There is a legitimate debate in this campaign over the role of the federal government and what kind of country we want to live in. Constant references to “America,” a word laced with images of patriotism and amber waves of grain, are nothing new to the campaign trail, where candidates are trying desperately to connect with voters.
But in this campaign, these criticisms are not made in a vacuum free of the politics of race and identity. Hillary Clinton ran into this tripwire during the 2008 Democratic primary when she said Obama’s support was waning among “hard-working Americans, white Americans.”
It would be far more enlightening for Obama’s critics to say exactly what they mean instead of speaking in code.
By: Beth Reinhard, National Journal, July 25, 2012
“What Do They Have To Hide?”: Romney, The Senate GOP And the Right-Wing Secrecy Machine
Yesterday, Senate Republicans voted, for a second time in two days, to continue their filibuster of the DISCLOSE Act, a bill that would simply require outside groups spending money on elections to tell the public where their money comes from. At the same time, not surprisingly, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is in hot water for failing to disclose more than the minimum of personal tax returns and lying about his history at the company that made his fortune — all while we know that a portion of his wealth was hidden in infamously secretive Swiss bank accounts.
Senate Republicans and Romney are spending a lot of time and energy this week to keep their financial histories secret. It’s only natural to ask: What do they have to hide?
You would think the DISCLOSE Act would be an easy bill to pass. In fact, many Republican Senators were “for it before they were against it“. What it does is simple: it requires any organization — corporation, union, super PAC or non-profit — that spends money influencing elections to report within a day any election-related expenditure of $10,000 or more. It also requires that these organizations make public the names of the individuals and corporations contributing $10,000 or more to fund this election spending. In short, all those front groups that have been pouring money into elections since Citizens United will have to disclose who their major donors are. Voters would know who was trying to tell them what.
This is not a partisan issue. Disclosure requirements, like those in the DISCLOSE Act, were endorsed as constitutional by the Supreme Court majority that handed down Citizens United. Even the conservative justices who saw no problem with more money in politics assumed that disclosure would be a check on the integrity of the election process.
But Republicans in Congress have been fighting tooth and nail to keep DISCLOSE from the books. Why? The fact that they might not want to publicize the motives of some of these super donors, and the fact that the new flood of outside political spending overwhelmingly favors conservatives, might have something to do with it.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is having disclosure problems of his own. It’s standard practice for presidential candidates to release their past tax returns — President Obama has made public his returns from the past dozen years. Even Romney called on his gubernatorial opponents in Massachusetts to release their returns. (In a classic Romney flip-flop, when he was later asked to hold himself to the same standard, he said his original demands had been wrong).
The only conclusion to draw from Romney’s tax-return reticence is that there’s something he doesn’t want us to see. The recent revelations that Romney has told conflicting stories about when he left his job at Bain Capital might give us a taste of what he’s kept hidden. And hiding part of his fortune in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and in Swiss bank accounts that have for centuries epitomized financial secrecy doesn’t help.
The issue of financial disclosure isn’t a sideshow to this election — it’s a big part of what this election is about. How can we trust senators who spend more time covering up the sources of election spending on their behalf than they do legislating? How can we trust a candidate who won’t be open and honest with voters about the source of his personal fortune and the taxes he has paid?
Full disclosure should be a no-brainer in honest politics. The public knows that. Even the Supreme Court knows that. The only people who seem to be missing the message are the politicians who are desperately trying to win elections without telling voters who might be buying them.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Blog, The Huffington Post, July 18, 2012
“The Inheritance”: George W. Bush, The Last Guy Mitt Romney Wants In The News
Maybe there’ll come a time somewhere in the future when a Republican presidential candidate jumps at the chance to associate himself with George W. Bush, but we’re not anywhere near that point yet.
In 2008, John McCain kept as much distance from the then-president as possible, appearing with him for a brief, perfunctory endorsement announcement at the White House and relegating him to a pre-taped video appearance at the GOP convention in St. Paul. This time around, Bush was absent when his parents offered a high-profile show of support to Mitt Romney in March, confirming his backing of the presumptive GOP nominee weeks later in a quick, off-camera comment to a reporter while boarding an elevator.
But by the minimal standards of his post-presidency, Bush is really stepping out this week. First, he unveiled a new book that purports to offer a road map to sustained 4 percent economic growth. Then he agreed to an on-camera interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson, who wrote speeches for George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The presidential race came up only once during their hour-long chat, with Bush explaining that he doesn’t want to be in the political game anymore, but that “I’m interested in politics. I’m a supporter of Mitt Romney. But, you know, he can do well without me.” Still, that’s more than Bush has previously had to say on the subject, guaranteeing that it will make news.
In fairness, Bush’s low profile since 2009 isn’t entirely attributable to his pariah status. His father made a point of stepping back from politics after leaving the White House in 1993 and not publicly weighing in on his successor’s administration. In part, W is simply affirming this tradition. But in the 1996 presidential election, the elder Bush was granted a prominent prime time role at the GOP’s national convention, and Bob Dole made a point of conferring with him at the height of the general election campaign.
By contrast, Romney and his fellow Republicans have spent the last three years doing their best to pretend W’s presidency never happened, acknowledging him only when they’re forced to and changing the subject as quickly as possible. The politics are understandable: The GOP’s strategy since 2009 has been to channel the public’s intense economic anxiety into a backlash against Obama that will restore control of the legislative and executive branches to the GOP. That much of the country’s suffering can be linked to the epic economic meltdown that came on W’s watch in 2008 is not something they’d prefer anyone to dwell on.
But, polls show, most voters do remember what happened in 2008 and who was president at the time. This offers President Obama a potential opening to win reelection under economic conditions that you might think would doom an incumbent president. As I’ve noted before, there is research that suggests Obama’s approval rating and standing in head-to-head match-ups with Romney is significantly better than it should be based on the state of the economy – evidence, it would seem, that the uniquely catastrophic circumstances under which he came to power are affording him the benefit of the doubt from some voters.
In that sense, Bush’s reemergence this week is only bad news for Romney, and only good news for Obama. So it’s not surprising that the president scheduled a campaign swing through Texas this week, playing the Bush card without actually mentioning his predecessor’s name:
“We spent almost a decade doing what they prescribed,” Mr. Obama said. “And how did it turn out? We didn’t see greater job growth. We didn’t see middle-class security. We saw the opposite. And it all culminated in the worst financial crisis in our lifetimes, precisely because there were no regulations that were adequate to the kinds of recklessness that was being carried out.” He added, “I don’t know how you guys operate in your life. But my general rule is, if I do something and it doesn’t work, I don’t go back to doing it.”
It’s possible the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney’s Bain background or his own tax return stonewalling will end up costing Romney a critical point or two (and thus the election) in November. But if Obama survives this campaign, it seems far more likely it will be because voters remembered exactly what he inherited in 2009 and exactly whom he inherited it from.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, July 18, 2012
“If Only They Knew”: Mitt Romney Buffeted By The Winds Of Extremism
Turns out the Romney camp isn’t all that different from other Republicans.
For a long time now, Mitt Romney and the people who work for him have seemed like the reasonable people in the Republican party. That isn’t to say that Romney’s policies or rhetoric were particularly reasonable, but we all accepted that when he started breathing fire, it was an act. Buffeted by the winds of extremism, he made a bargain with his party’s base: I’ll pretend to be as crazy as you, and you’ll learn to live with me as your nominee.
But now, Barack Obama has finally opened the can of whoop-ass on Romney that many of us had long been expecting, and as McKay Coppins reports, both Romney himself and his people don’t like it one bit. Their reaction indicates that maybe they were never that different from the Republican base after all.
“[Romney] has said Obama’s a nice fellow, he’s just in over his head,” the adviser said. “But I think the governor himself believes this latest round of attacks that have impugned his integrity and accused him of being a felon go so far beyond that pale that he’s really disappointed. He believes it’s time to vet the president. He really hasn’t been vetted; McCain didn’t do it.”
Indeed, facing what the candidate and his aides believe to be a series of surprisingly ruthless, unfounded, and unfair attacks from the Obama campaign on Romney’s finances and business record, the Republican’s campaign is now prepared to go eye for an eye in an intense, no-holds-barred act of political reprisal, said two Romney advisers who spoke on condition of anonymity. In the next chapter of Boston’s pushback — which began last week when they began labeling Obama a “liar” — very little will be off-limits, from the president’s youthful drug habit, to his ties to disgraced Chicago politicians.
“I mean, this is a guy who admitted to cocaine use, had a sweetheart deal with his house in Chicago, and was associated and worked with Rod Blagojevich to get Valerie Jarrett appointed to the Senate,” the adviser said. “The bottom line is there’ll be counterattacks.”
It might be just this one particular aide’s formulation, but the use of the word “vet” is the tell. One of the consuming fantasies on the right is that we never learned very much about Barack Obama, and if only the American people knew about Reverend Wright, or about Obama’s youthful drug use, or about his relationship with Bill Ayers, then they would as one recoil in horror and boot him from office. This is all summed up in the oft-repeated assertion, “He was never vetted.” The fact that all these things were, in fact, reported on extensively doesn’t penetrate with the people who believe this, because if the public actually knew then Obama could never have been elected in the first place, so that must mean they just don’t know. Could the voters have heard all this stuff and decided to elect Obama anyway? Impossible.
I’m quite surprised to hear this stuff coming from the Romney camp, since they were supposed to be the cold-eyed pragmatists of the GOP. But they seem to have no idea how to actually defeat an incumbent president. If they want to run the rest of their campaign on the fact that Obama knew Rod Blagojevich and did coke when he was a teenager, I’m sure the Obama campaign would reply, be our guest.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 18, 2012
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