“Whiter Than George W. Bush”: Mitt Romney’s Doomed Immigration Gambit
It seems clear that the main issue Mitt Romney is going to use to try to reestablish himself as a moderate is immigration. He told a private audience on April 15 that “we have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party” and warned that current polling “spells doom for us.” Then, on Monday, he made himself available to the media for the first time in a month—while standing beside Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a leading veepstakes name. Can Romney, who staked out an immigration position during the primaries that left him sounding like Pat Buchanan, really pull this off? My bet: He’ll be smooth, he’ll do almost everything right, he’ll say all the right things—and he’ll end up with something very much like the 31 percent of the Latino vote John McCain got, maybe two or three points more, tops. The reason is simple: Romney, like his party, is just too white.
But before we get to art, let’s start with science—the polls. Obama leads Romney among Latinos by around 40 points, maybe more. A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey said 69 to 22 percent. How does Romney need to perform among Latinos? I have no idea, actually. Republicans speak wistfully of the 42 percent of that vote George W. Bush received in 2004, so they must think of it as some kind of holy grail. Bush got elected in 2004, so apparently that’s some sort of benchmark for them. Certainly, even 37 or maybe 35 percent of the Latino vote in the Mountain West for Romney would make the Obama team revert to Plan B or C as concerns Colorado and New Mexico (nationally, Latinos made up 9 percent of the overall vote in 2008; that will be up to 11 or 12 percent this year). So Romney needs to gain around 15 points—or, put another and more daunting way, he needs to improve on his present performance by 37 percent (i.e., going from 22 to 35 percent would be a 37 percent improvement).
Is that remotely possible? What would he do? Well, start with the most obvious move, picking Rubio as vice-president. Huge media buzz, of course. All manner of breathless predictions on the Sunday shows about how this changes everything—potential first Latino president, complete paradigm shift, all the rest.
One problem. There is no signal, at least yet, that Rubio would make a whit of difference. Last weekend, a poll came out in which 1,000-plus Latinos were asked about Obama-Biden matchups against Romney-Rubio, and Romney paired with various other Hispanic Republicans—including Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico (who has said she will not accept the job) and Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada. They made no difference, the poll found. In fact, in Florida, Obama did better among Latinos against Romney with Rubio on the ticket, suggesting that maybe to know him isn’t to love him.
Now we move on to substance, or at least to symbol-substance. At that same April 15 private event mentioned above, Romney said that as president he would pass a GOP version of the DREAM Act. This is exactly what Rubio has spent this week touting. Unlike the Democratic DREAM Act, it wouldn’t include a possible path to citizenship, just to green-card status. Latino groups hate it, and it does seem like an empty-calorie kind of bill, I have to say. It’s true that there are millions of permanent residents living in the United States now—about 1.1 million green cards are granted each year. But all of these people do have a future shot at citizenship, so at least they can all dream of being citizens one day, whereas under the Rubio bill, those who win such status can’t.
This is pretty small potatoes compared to what Bush supported. Remember, he was in favor of Teddy Kennedy’s immigration bill! He put a respectable amount of political capital into it, until the shitstorm hit and he backed down. Bush took what people could see was a bit of a risk. A non-citizenship DREAM Act compares to serious and comprehensive immigration reform in about the way Plessy v. Ferguson compares to Brown v. Board of Education.
And finally—art. Art is so underestimated in politics. Romney is just sooooo white. Even whiter than the Osmonds. Bush wasn’t that white. He came from a state where these days you can’t help but know some Latinos, and he spoke him a little esspanyole, even. But Romney? He fired some guys working on his lawn because he couldn’t afford the political liability of employing them, as he openly admitted at one of those GOP debates. Aside from that—well, I admit I’m no more up on the latest salsa artists than Mitt is, but do you think that guy has ever listened to one Tito Puente record in his life? Has he ever known a Latino person, outside of those who clean his houses and trim his lawns? It’s quite possible that he does. But he sure doesn’t look like he does.
Romney, therefore, will make some moves that will impress the largely white commentariat, and he’ll bump up a little among certain high-income Latino demographics. But average Latino voters, men and women who work really hard every day for white bosses, are just going to find that he reminds them too much of the guy who docks their pay when the bus comes late. And they won’t be wrong—he basically is that guy. There’s no overcoming that. He’s a 31 percenter at best.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 26, 2012
“Omission Accomplished: GOP Fantasy World Foreign Policy
Perusing the text of Marco Rubio’s foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution, I notice a word that doesn’t appear: Iraq. It’s so hard to believe that I’ve read the speech twice and executed a word search three times. Did he think no one would notice? The Senator from Florida has given a lengthy address about the wisdom of American intervention without so much as acknowledging the most consequential foreign intervention that we’ve undertaken in decades.
This is the same Marco Rubio who says George W. Bush, whose presidency was defined by Iraq, did a fantastic job. As recently as last fall he was fearful that the United States was leaving the Iraq too quickly. Back in 2010 he avowed that the Iraq War made America safer and better off.
But Iraq has now disappeared from his analysis of American foreign policy. He manages to avoid talking about Iraq even as he frets that Iran is attempting to rule over the rest of the Middle East. Does Rubio ever ponder what recent military campaign effectively increased their influence in the region?
Says Michael Brendan Dougherty, “Rubio’s speech is a remarkable political document. It shows that some Senators have learned nothing from the past decade.” He’s mostly right, but there is one important caveat. The interventionists have apparently learned to stop acknowledging the Iraq War, for their vague generalities about America’s role in the world cannot survive a confrontation with a decade of costly, catastrophic intervention. Better to pretend the debacle never happened, even while ratcheting up the rhetoric about Syria and Iran.
It’s a perfect distillation of how ideological and divorced from empiricism the neoconservative project has become. A subject is raised at length — but the most relevant real world example isn’t. Rubio making foreign policy for a fantasy world, and we’d all be better off if someone bought him a Risk board so that he could work out his delusions of strategic acumen with fewer consequences.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, April 25, 2012
“Behind The Eight Ball”: John Boehner Flat Out Lies On Student Loans
Setting the groundwork for the GOP congressional capitulation to President Obama’s insistence that interest rates not be raised on college loans, Speaker John Boehner announced today that the House will vote to keep the rates at the current level and will pay for it from a ‘slush fund’ in the Affordable Care Act.
In making his announcement, Boehner claimed there was never any intent on the GOP’s part to raise the rates on student loans and that President Obama had simply manufactured this disagreement to score political points with young voters and their families.
I wonder, then, how the Speaker would explains the provision in the Ryan Budget—passed last month by all the Republicans in the House but ten—that doubles the student loan rate to 6.8 percent on July 1, 2012?
And that Obamacare ‘slush fund’ the Speaker intends to raid to pay for holding the line on the student loans?
It turns out, the fund in jeopardy was created in the Affordable Care Act to screen women for breast and cervical cancer in addition to providing funds for the treatment of children with birth defects.
This, apparently, is Speaker Boehner’s idea of a slush fund.
While it was clear from the start that Congressional Republicans had handed the president a political gold mine by opposing the freeze on student loan interest rates, it is not only Speaker Boehner’s troops that find themselves behind the political eight ball. Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney, after managing to work out that supporting the hike was a serious political loser, came out in support of the President’s position earlier this week. By doing so, Romney has now put himself in opposition with the Ryan budget for which he has previously offered up his strong and complete support.
BY: Rick Ungar, Contributor, Forbes, April 25, 2012
“Five Contests, Lots Of Media, Zero Drama”: The Great Republican Primary Pretense
It has all the trappings of a big election night: five primaries, live television coverage, pundits telling us what it all means.
But what if it doesn’t mean squat?
Let’s face it: The GOP presidential race ended weeks ago. You know it, I know it, and every working journalist knows it. Maybe not Newt, but most other sentient beings. If this were a boxing match, the refs would have stopped it long ago.
So why cover contests with about as much excitement as a Politburo election?
There was a time, of course, when this particular Tuesday loomed large on the calendar. Could Rick Santorum win his home state of Pennsylvania? But then Santorum dropped out, leaving Mitt Romney a clear path to the prize.
So those of us who cover politics are left with thin gruel indeed: What would Romney’s margins be in what proved to be a five-state sweep? Would there be a protest vote? How does Mitt do in key counties he’ll need in the fall?
If there was a frisson of drama, it came when Gingrich spoke after Romney was projected to win Delaware. There was some press buzz that Newt, who spent time there, might stay in the race if he carried the tiny state, even though that would have made absolutely no difference in the inevitable outcome. (Nice going, gang, Newt was buried by 30 points.) And Santorum indeed lost Pennsylvania, but then again, he is no longer an active candidate.
Fox and CNN carried Romney’s speech; MSNBC blew it off, with Ed Schultz attacking Sean Hannity instead.
Piers Morgan tried hard to prod Santorum into endorsing Romney, but Rick wouldn’t quite go there, saying the two were going to meet first. So real news was averted once again.
We can’t just call off the remaining primaries: all those congressional and local candidates need to be nominated. And even at the presidential level, the voting often determines which delegates go to the conventions. But that’s inside baseball. We already know the final score.
The cable coverage has been somewhat restrained compared to, say, the night of the Iowa caucuses. In the 8 p.m. hour, Fox stayed with a taped Bill O’Reilly show. Schultz didn’t pause during an interview, even as MSNBC threw up a breaking-news banner projecting Romney the winner in Connecticut and Rhode Island. When I first saw John King hit CNN’s Magic Wall, he was counting how the candidates could get to 270. Mitt didn’t even bother to show up in any of the five states, spending the day instead in New Hampshire.
The truth is that journalists switched to general election mode even while the primaries were still competitive. As a Project for Excellence in Journalism study noted this week, the media essentially pronounced the race over after Romney won the Michigan primary on Feb. 28, even though Santorum would go on to win several more states.
This sort of thing has happened before. Jerry Brown won a couple of late primaries in 1992, after it was obvious that Bill Clinton would be the nominee, but nobody took it very seriously.
So perhaps the events of Tuesday were more of a time-out from the endless general election slog, a last look back at a crazy season stretching back to Donald Trump and Herman Cain. That is, until the crucial North Carolina primary on May 8.
By: Howard Kurtz, The Daily Beast, April 24, 2012
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