“There He Goes Again”: Mitt Romney’s ‘92 Percent’ Lie
And they say Mitt Romney can’t be trusted! Why, the man is as consistent as the sun coming up in the morning.
Mitt Romney can always be counted upon—for intellectual dishonesty.
In the latest example of his egregious lack of intellectual integrity, Romney—desperate to reverse the GOP’s catastrophic loss of popularity among women voters—invented a fictitious Obama administration “war on women” and then claimed as proof the disproportionate job losses suffered by women during the second wave of the recession.
Romney’s misrepresentation of labor-force trends was hardly surprising; we’ve come to expect misleading and untruthful statements from a candidate infamous for denying he ever said things he did say and insisting he didn’t do things he did do.
“The real war on women has been waged by the policies of the Obama administration,” Romney claimed on This Week. “Did you know that of all the jobs lost during the Obama years, 92.3 percent of them are women?”
It’s enough to make you wish that Ronald Reagan were still around to shake his head sorrowfully and say, “There he goes again.”
In the absence of Reagan and his famous line, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner dutifully made the rounds yesterday, trying to explain what was wrong with Romney’s charge. “It’s a ridiculous argument,” Geithner said, noting that the first round of job losses affected mostly men, particularly in construction and manufacturing, while subsequent budget cuts by state and local governments eliminated many jobs held primarily by women, many of them teachers.
The Obama administration was far from alone in rejecting Romney’s claims; virtually every independent analysis dismissed them as “mostly false,” as the nonpartisan fact-check site Politifact put it.
But Romney’s accusations were worse than false; they were the political equivalent of that old joke about the guy who begs the judge for mercy, saying he shouldn’t be convicted of murder because he’s an orphan—while neglecting to mention that he’s an orphan because he killed his parents.
As any debater knows, making your case is about the facts you include, but it’s also about the facts you leave out. And when it comes to the nation’s economic woes, the facts that Romney leaves out include the culpability of Republican policies and office holders for the dismal state of the labor market—particularly when it comes to women.
First of all, most of the catastrophic job losses affecting men actually occurred while President Bush was still in office. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men lost 5,355,000 jobs between December 2007 and June 2009, whereas women lost less than half that number—“only” 2,124,000 jobs.
But after that devastating first hit, men’s job losses slowed, whereas women’s accelerated. Between January 2009 and March 2012, men lost 57,000 jobs, but women lost 683,000 jobs. Of those 683,000 jobs, 64 percent were in government, and 36 percent were in the private sector.
And it was Republican office holders at the state and local level, not Democrats at the federal level, who were responsible for a disproportionate share of those losses. According to a study by the Roosevelt Institute, 11 states that went Republican in 2010 accounted for more than 40 percent of all state- and local-government job losses.
But Romney’s claim that President Obama has destroyed women’s jobs leaves out that part, just as it omits any acknowledgment of the terrifying fiscal mess that Obama inherited from a disastrous Republican administration when he came into office.
Although Romney’s specious statistics were designed to scare women into thinking that the Obama administration has somehow vaporized huge numbers of women’s jobs while leaving men virtually unscathed, that’s hardly the reality. Of all the jobs lost since 2007, only 39.7 percent were held by women; more than 60 percent were held by men. The recession has been terrible for everyone, and it hit women’s jobs somewhat later than it hit men’s jobs, but it’s not as if anyone escaped unscathed.
Mitt Romney surely knows this—and yet his attack on Obama might just as easily have been leveled by someone who was completely clueless about labor-force trends, the structural reasons that explain how they happen, and what they mean.
No one who’s followed the presidential campaign, let alone Romney’s political career, could possibly be surprised that he distorted the facts; he’s an old hand at that stuff. But what’s really startling is how stupid his analysis was.
Romney keeps telling voters they should elect him because Obama broke the nation’s economy and he’s such a smart businessman he knows how to fix it.
But if his latest salvo is any indication of how well Romney understands the economy, Harvard Business School should demand that he give back his M.B.A.
By: Leslie Bennetts, The Daily Beast, April 16, 2012
“Outsourcing Jobs”: Mitt Romney Can’t Leave Women Voters To His Wife
Outsourcing the job to his wife isn’t going to solve Mitt Romney’s problem with women voters.
That, though, does seem to be the candidate’s first instinct. Romney, when asked last week about the gender gap, twice said he wished his wife could take the question.
“My wife has the occasion, as you know, to campaign on her own and also with me,” Romney told newspaper editors, “and she reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy.”
Note to candidate: Women aren’t a foreign country. You don’t need an interpreter to talk to them. Even if you’re not fluent in their language, they might appreciate if you gave it a try.
As if to emphasize their candidate’s unfamiliarity with the territory of gender, the Romney campaign then released a fuzzy-wuzzy video, titled “Family” and starring, of course, Ann Romney, reminiscing over grainy film and vintage snapshots.
“I hate to say it but often I had more than five sons,” Ann recalls. “I had six sons, and he would be as mischievous and as naughty as the other boys. He’d come home and” — here Romney makes the sound of a building blowing up — “everything would just explode again.”
Somehow I doubt that Ann Romney, circa 1982, having finally managed to get her five boys under control, was all that happy about their father coming home only to “get them all riled up again.” Somehow I doubt that beleaguered moms, circa 2012, listen to her story and think, “Oh, Mitt is so much more fun than I thought.” Rather, I suspect, they wonder whether he should have been doing more to lend a hand.
Indeed, the video offers an unintentional glimpse of Ann’s own frustrations. “It was hard to maneuver,” Ann notes. “I could do okay when I had the two. Three, not so bad. Four, it got to be a little much.” On the campaign trail with her husband, Ann often talks about the old days when she would be at home dealing with her rambunctious brood and Mitt would call from the road. “His consoling words were always the same: Ann, your job is more important than mine.”
This story is supposed to buttress Mitt’s bona fides as a supportive husband, and Ann is, no doubt, a more tolerant spouse than I am. But every time I hear that patronizing line, I imagine responding, “Great. If my job is more important, then you come home and do it and I’ll check into the nice room at the Four Seasons.”
Romney’s biggest problem with women voters is among those with college educations and among those under 45. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll, for example, showed President Obama leading Romney by 57 percent to 38 percent among registered women voters, while Obama lagged with men, 44 percent to Romney’s 52 percent.
However, the gender gap was markedly bigger among college-educated women, 65 percent of whom supported Obama, compared to 52 percent of those without a college education. Same with age, with 63 percent of female voters 18 to 44 backing Obama, compared to 54 percent of those 45 and older.
How many of these younger and/or better-educated women are going to identify with Ann Romney’s father-knows-best description of life in chez Romney? I understand that the candidate badly needs humanizing but, especially for general-election purposes, it would be more powerful to combine the family story with examples, assuming they exist, about Workplace Mitt promoting women or adopting family-friendly policies.
Even as Mitt was playing a bit role in his wife’s video, Obama was hosting a “White House Forum on Women and the Economy.” In an unstated yet unavoidable contrast with stay-at-home mother Ann Romney, Obama described his wife as “the woman who once advised me at the law firm in Chicago where we met” and related how Michelle Obama, after their daughters were born, “gave it her all to balance raising a family and pursuing a career.”
Obama and Romney come from different backgrounds and generations, and their experience of gender roles is inevitably different as well; if Obama connects better with younger, working women, that’s no surprise. And Romney is not alone in performing poorly with women voters. The GOP has suffered from a gender gap in every presidential election since 1980.
So Romney can lose the women’s vote and still win, but not if the gap remains this big. Narrowing it will be, in this case, a man’s job.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 10, 2012
Republicans “Marvelously Looking Forward To Tampa”: Godfathers, Caterpillars And Golf
Republican to-do checklist:
1) Pooh-pooh all the talk about a war on women.
“If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars, and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars,” said the Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, during a week when a USA Today/Gallup poll found Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney among women in key swing states by 18 points.
This comment was extremely unsettling. What was it that made Priebus think about caterpillars? At least if you mess with women, women can fight back. We’re already losing all the bees, and the bats are in trouble. We do not want these people picking on caterpillars at all.
2) Seek out news about the mood of the womenfolk.
“My wife has the occasion, as you know, to campaign on her own and also with me, and she reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy,” Mitt told a meeting of editors in Washington this week.
It sounded as if Ann Romney was, say, a native of Turkmenistan who had occasion to return to her native people and bring her husband back word of their hopes and concerns.
3) Make Rick Santorum get out of the race.
This is becoming a Republican obsession, and I am sure it will be a hot topic of conversation at Easter and Passover dinners, when American families will get together and express their amazement at the news that Rick Santorum is still running for something.
4) Keep Mitt on script.
The other day Romney reacted spontaneously to a comment by David Plouffe, an Obama adviser, that Mitt was the “godfather” of the individual mandate in health care reform.
“If I’m the godfather of this thing, then it gives me the right to kill it,” Romney said.
Think about that for a minute. What do you think he was going for there? A Mafia metaphor? Romney also tossed in a mention of Rumpelstiltskin, so maybe either a Mafia metaphor or some sort of weird fairy-tale image? (“I am your evil fairy godfather, and I am putting you into a coma from which you will never awake. Especially since your health insurance expired.”)
5) Watch the Masters golf tournament.
But not with approval! “Don’t you think it’s time Augusta National joined the 21st century — or the 20th — and allowed women members?” tweeted John McCain. (O.K., possibly not personally. Possibly tweeted by a minion on behalf of John McCain.)
“If I could run Augusta, which isn’t likely to happen, of course, I’d have women,” said Romney.
There are two ways to look at this. One is that this is another sign of an increased gender consciousness in the Republican ranks, albeit a teensy-weensy, poll-driven one. Another is that it is heartening that the whole men-only-golf-club thing now seems so pathetic, even the Republican high command wants to steer away from it.
Although, in that case, somebody had better tell John Boehner to ditch his.
6) Prepare for the next big primaries.
“On April 24 — is that — what day is April 24? Is that a Tuesday?” Mitt asked the crowd at a rally this week. “It’s a Tuesday! I need you to — it’s not that coming Tuesday. It’s the one after that, or is it the one after that? It’s the one after that!”
As Mario Cuomo said, we campaign in poetry, govern in prose.
7) Prepare for the convention.
Which will be held in Tampa, Fla., on Aug. 27. Where, in the name of safety, the City Council is attempting to ban water guns from the area around the coliseum but is prohibited by Florida state law from banning handguns. Sure looking forward to Tampa.
8) Try to figure out what to do for the four months in between. That’s enough time to run an entire season of a TV series.
Star Trek, the Mitt Generation — A time machine takes Romney 100 years into the future, where Newt Gingrich is plotting his next political comeback.
Romney Top Chef — Ann impresses the judges with Mitt’s favorite meal of meatloaf cakes with catsup and brown sugar.
Undercover Boss Reunion Show — Mitt goes back to visit workers who were laid off after Bain Capital bought their factories and discovers that every one of them is doing great.
The Amazing Race: Michigan — Team Romney overcomes a Roadblock in which Tagg is challenged to measure the height of the trees.
Republican Swamp People — The Romneys move to the Everglades in an effort to woo the swing state of Florida. Excitement ensues when Mitt tries to drive to a rally with an alligator strapped to the roof of the car.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 6, 2012
“In No Position To Tout Consistency”: Mitt Romney Half Steps To The GOP Nomination
The former Massachusetts governor responds to President Obama with nothing but weak sauce.
In an election year, political speeches have more in common with hip-hop “diss” tracks then they do with anything else. In which case, President Obama’s speech last night was the “Ether” to the Republican Party’s “Takeover”—an assured, aggressive response that methodically destroyed the GOP’s rationale for its slavish devotion to the rich.
Today, I expected Mitt Romney to hit back with a diss of his own. As the presumptive standard-bearer of the Republican Party, it falls on him to make the party’s case against a second term for Obama. In his speech today before the American Society of News Editors, he tried to hit the president on both his record and the tenor of his campaign. And in fairness to the former Massachusetts governor, he makes a few well-placed swipes—it is true that the administration has yet to release a budget, and it is true that Obama has abruptly changed pace on energy issues, accommodating the oil and gas industry in a way that wasn’t true last year.
With that aside, however, the speech fell completely flat. But this had nothing to do with Romney’s delivery—which was actually quite good—and everything to do with the fact that Romney oscillated between contradictions and outright falsehoods. Here the most stunning examples:
“[I]nstead of answering those vital questions, President Obama came here yesterday and railed against arguments no one is making—and criticized policies no one is proposing. It’s one of his favorite strategies—setting up straw men to distract from his record.”
Not only did Mitt Romney praise Paul Ryan’s latest budget—which was adopted by congressional Republicans—but he was a support of last year’s “Roadmap,” and he pledged to sign a Ryan-like budget if it came to his desk. What’s more, in numerous campaign speeches, he has promised to “cut, cap, and balance” the federal budget, referencing a plan to slash federal spending and implement a balanced-budget amendment. If either policy were ever passed, it would have disastrous effects on programs for ordinary Americans. Romney may not have an explicit policy to kick children off of Medicaid or deny food aid to poor families, but if he were to follow through on his ideas and promises, that’s exactly what would happen.
President Obama’s answer to our economic crisis was more spending, more debt, and more government. By the end of his term in office, he will have added nearly as much public debt as all the prior Presidents combined.
If Romney is as knowledgeable about the economy as he says he is, then he must know that the increase in public debt has everything to do with the Great Recession and the drastic reduction in tax revenue that comes with economic collapse. Moreover, there’s the Bush tax cuts, which has kept revenue at historically low levels for more than a decade. If you remove both things from the equation—which, to my mind, is the fair thing to do—then Obama is responsible for far less debt than any of his recent predecessors.
In over three years, [Obama] has failed to enact or even propose a serious plan to solve our entitlement crisis. Instead, he has taken a series of steps that end Medicare as we know it.
He is the only President to ever cut $500 billion from Medicare. And, as a result, more than half of doctors say they will cut back on treating seniors.
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this doesn’t make any sense. How is it possible to both cut $500 billion from Medicare and fail to enact a plan to deal with our entitlement problems? Presumably, a plan to fix entitlements would contain cuts to entitlement programs. Indeed, if it stands, the Affordable Care Act will implement cuts and attempt to control the overall growth of health spending. If successful, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the law will save $1 trillion over the next decade. That, to me, sounds like an entitlement plan.
Unlike President Obama, you don’t have to wait until after the election to find out what I believe in—or what my plans are.
The last month has been dominated by questions over Romney’s sincerity. Is he serious about the policies he proposed during the Republican primary, or will he abandon them as soon as he reaches the general election? And if he wins the presidency, there’s no clear sense of which Romney will emerge to take the oath of office; will it be the conservative ideologue who won the GOP nomination, or will it be the moderate businessman who pioneered health-care reform during his last stint in government? The only thing we truly know about Mitt Romney is that he wants to be president and that he’ll say whatever it takes to get there. He’s certainly in no position to tout his consistency.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, April 4, 2012
“Dangerously Unmoored From The American Consensus”: The GOP Is Crazier Than You Thought
In his latest speech, the president presents the modern Republican Party as a radical aberration from the American consensus.
If there was a question President Obama tried to answer with his speech this afternoon to the Associated Press, it was this—“what happened to the Republican Party?” And to that end, he marshaled evidence from a century of political history to show that today’s Grand Old Party is dangerously unmoored from the American consensus, with a budget proposal that amounts to “thinly veiled social Darwinism.”
To a large degree, Obama’s speech was filled with the frustration of liberals who see the extent to which the Republican Party has rejected the notion of a government that works positively within the economy. “It was Dwight Eisenhower who launched the interstate highway system and made investments in scientific research … Reagan worked with Democrats to save Social Security … It was George W. Bush who expanded Medicare to include prescription drug coverage,” he said, citing Republican presidents who worked to strengthen the social safety net over the course of the last century. “What leaders in both parties have traditionally understood,” he declared, “is that these programs aren’t schemes to redistribute wealth … they are signs that we are one nation.”
Today’s Republican Party, Obama argued, has abandoned this traditional understanding, in favor of a “failed approach” of trickle-down economics. “In this country, broad-based prosperity has never come from the success of a wealthy few,” he said.
Case in point is Paul Ryan’s latest budget, which—like his Roadmap released last year—would require massive cuts to existing social spending and destroy any semblance of fairness in the economy, as the rich received huge benefits from an economy slanted in their favor. As Obama described it, “The Republicans have doubled down and proposed a budget so far to the right that it makes the Contract for America look like the New Deal.”
Indeed, Obama took the time to illustrate the extent to which the Ryan budget would demolish the federal government as we know it, citing the millions of people who would lose health care coverage with Medicaid cuts, the millions of children who would lose access to healthy food with WIC cuts, and the millions of students who would lose a shot at college because of cuts to Pell Grants and other programs designed to make school more affordable.
He pointed out that while Republicans refuse to say where they would make cuts, cuts have to happen if we adopt their budget, “Perhaps they will never tell us where the knife will fall, but you can be sure that with cuts this deep, there will never be a secret plan to protect the investments we need for our economy to grow. This is not conjecture, I am not exaggerating, these are facts.”
From his aggressive tone to his sharp and clear language, this was a campaign speech, and he took care to tie his likely competitor—former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney—to the policies pushed by congressional Republicans. “He called it ‘marvelous’,” said Obama, highlighting the degree to which the “Path to Prosperity” is the Republican Party platform for 2012.
I said this morning that thanks to the short-sighted ideological fervor of Paul Ryan, Obama can make a strong and clear case against the Republican Party. I didn’t realize that this would also be a brutal indictment of the party’s priorities. With his speech, Obama presented the GOP as the defenders of a failed ideology that would leave most Americans trapped in their station, struggling in a hostile economy. If this sounds far-fetched, look no further than the last three years—Republicans have either pushed to eliminate regulations and cut taxes on the rich, or they have stood against any effort to make the economy more fair, or put some restraints on those who caused the financial crisis.
Obama’s challenge is to convince the public that Republicans would continue on that path if elected to office. At the risk of sounding too certain, I think he can do it.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, April 3, 2012
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