“The Second Coming”: Women Don’t See GOP’s War On Contraceptives As About Religion
Some Republicans thought the fight over birth control coverage would cost President Obama the election. Instead, it may have unleashed a second coming of the Anita Hill controversy, alienating women who otherwise might be attracted to a fiscally conservative, small government message.
The Obama administration looked weak at first when the Catholic Church balked at regulations requiring religious-affiliated institutions such as universities and hospitals to cover birth control under their employees’ health insurance. The White House had not lined up women to defend birth control as a critical part of preventive healthcare, so the chaste church elders dominated the dialogue, presenting it as an issue of religious liberty. The idea that women had the liberty, as well, to decline the rules offered by the church—particularly in cases where the female employees did not practice Catholicism—took longer to emerge.
But now, lawmakers at the state and federal level (along with presidential candidates) are continuing to hammer away at the issue, and it’s a dangerous game. The Senate today voted down a bill that would allow any employer to deny healthcare coverage of anything if it violates his or her moral principles, a standard so broad it invalidates any federal health insurance standards (which may well be the point). Even if the law were limited to religious teachings only, what would prevent a business owner who is a Jehovah’s Witness from denying coverage of transfusions? Or a Christian Scientist from denying coverage of any kind of medicine at all?
As if on script, supporters of the bill say, “It’s not about contraception,” and it is this repeated comment that stands to get them into the most trouble with female voters. If you’re not of the gender that can get pregnant, you have the luxury of seeing the issue as theological. If you stand to lose control over your life and future because you can’t prevent yourself from becoming pregnant, it is indeed all about contraception. The lecture sounds particularly annoying to a woman when it is being made by men, as has largely been the case on the moral exception bill. It’s the same as when male lawmakers were so utterly baffled and skeptical when Anita Hill told a story of sexual harassment that has been shared by so many, many other women.
Virginia state lawmakers took it even further, considering a bill that would have required women to have ultrasound exams before getting an abortion. Many women found the whole basis of the bill to be fairly insulting, since it suggested that women really have no idea what goes on in their bodies and need to be schooled about it before having an abortion. That could be the only reason a woman would seek an abortion, the thinking went—she simply was too simple or ignorant to know what she was doing. But the mostly male lawmakers knew.
Except that they didn’t. Remarkably, in seeking to teach women about their own bodies, they hadn’t done much learning on their own. They did not know that the jelly-on-the-belly sonogram that makes for such touching scenes in movies is not done in the first trimester of pregnancy (when the vast majority of abortions are performed) because the pregnancy hasn’t developed enough at that point to see anything. Women at that stage of pregnancy must undergo a “transvaginal probe,” an invasive procedure. The phrase itself made some lawmakers so uncomfortable that they didn’t want it uttered aloud during debate, so as not to offend the young pages. The bill was watered down somewhat, so that women would not have to endure a procedure critics described as state-sponsored rape. But the guts of the bill passed the state Senate and are making their way to the governor, who will sign it.
The contraception legislation may well do what it was intended to do—shore up the social conservative base of the Republican party and convince some people that Obama or Democrats are antireligion and pro big government. But proponents also risk energizing a group of women who long ago earned the right to control the size and timing of their families. For those women, it is, indeed, all about contraception.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, March 1, 2012
Mitt Romney’s “Sense Of Entitlement”: He Believes He “Deserves” To Be President
If he weren’t so smug, it would almost be possible to feel sorry for Mitt Romney. Beyond the flip-flopping, has any worse actor ever attempted the role of presidential candidate? It’s beyond Romney’s powers to persuade most people of his sincerity about things he does believe, much less the many tenets of contemporary GOP faith he probably doesn’t share — assuming for the sake of argument that anybody, including himself, knows which is which.
There’s little doubt, however, that Romney believes he deserves to be president, in rather the way the fictional Lord Grantham deserves to preside over Downton Abbey. It’s his inability to conceal that sense of entitlement that makes him such an awkward politician.
The candidate’s cringe-inducing attempts to present himself as a Regular Joe almost invariably end in boasting. Campaigning in his native Michigan, he assured voters that his wife drives not just one $50,000 Cadillac, but two — one at their Boston home, the other at their seafront mansion near La Jolla, Calif., as aides subsequently clarified. No word how Mrs. Romney gets around at their New Hampshire lakeside compound or their Park City, Utah, ski palace.
Visiting the Daytona 500, Romney admitted he’s not a keen NASCAR fan, but does have friends who own racing teams. Defending himself on CNN from the perception that his wealth leaves him “out of touch,” he allowed as how, “If people think that there is something wrong with being successful in America, then they better vote for the other guy, because I’ve been extraordinarily successful and I want to use that success and that know-how to help the American people.”
On the “Today” show, Romney explained that people concerned with income inequality are simply jealous. “You know, I think it’s about envy,” he said. “I think it’s about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus 1 percent—and those people who have been most successful will be in the 1 percent — you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country, which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”
Got that, peasants? God’s behind the 13.9 percent tax rate Romney paid on $43 million he earned in 2010 while technically unemployed. Anybody who thinks differently is merely eaten up with resentment. In my experience, the more money people inherit, the more they’re tempted to lecture others about talent and hard work. And to cry the blues about the indignity of paying taxes.
Romney’s air of personal superiority appears to be the one topic about which the poor dork is absolutely sincere. That’s what makes him such a terrible liar. He’s almost frantic with it, like a golden retriever with his ball. Even with the mute button on the TV pressed, you can almost hear him panting.
Look — modest, humble people don’t run for president. President Obama often appears to have trouble restraining his bemusement at the antics of less intelligent people. Nevertheless, Romney’s unrestrained egotism is the reason I think Paul Krugman (among others) has made far too much of an offhand remark the candidate made seemingly renouncing the central tenet of GOP economic dogma.
“If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting [government] spending,” Romney told a group of Michigan voters, “as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy.”
Well, no kidding.
To Krugman, Romney’s slip of the tongue revealed him as a “closet Keynesian” who “believes that cutting government spending hurts growth, other things equal.” The columnist added that, after all, “Mr. Romney is not a stupid man. And while his grasp of world affairs does sometimes seem shaky, he has to be aware of the havoc austerity policies are wreaking in Greece, Ireland and elsewhere.”
Oh no he doesn’t.
Or, to be more precise, Romney can be perfectly aware and blithely unconcerned. Krugman left off the next sentence where Romney stipulated that cutting spending alone wasn’t enough. “You have to, at the same time, create pro-growth tax policies.”
Translation: even lower taxes for multimillionaires.
But I’d never presume to argue economics with professor Krugman. My point is that Romney’s tycoon capitalism has only partly to do with jobs, money and the real economy. It’s also about cultural revanchism, putting the right people back firmly in charge and the lower orders back in their place.
Tycoon capitalists like Romney see a prolonged slump as an opportunity to render the workforce more docile and grateful. Remember, this is the same guy who opposed government loans to save Chrysler and General Motors. Better to crush the Auto Workers Union. Who said the best way to resolve the national foreclosure crisis would be to speed it up, so that “investors” could buy people’s houses cheaply and rent them out.
In the end, it’s all about No. 1.
By: Gene Lyons, Salon, February 29, 2012
“More Than Gaffes”: Mitt Romney’s Two Cadillacs Fallacy
Maybe Rick Santorum is helping Mitt Romney after all: Santorum’s wacky statements about college and snobbery, along with his upset stomach over a 52-year-old John F. Kennedy speech, are distracting attention from Romney’s extremist economic ideas.
Yes, Romney needs Santorum to keep doing his exotic fan dance on social issues because the stage act diverts everyone (especially journalists) from examining the reactionary and regressive ideas that Romney is cooking up on substantive questions. If Romneyism is what now passes for “moderation” in the Republican Party, no wonder the authentically moderate Olympia Snowe decided to end her distinguished career in the Senate. There is no room anymore for proposals remotely worthy of the moderate label.
Romney’s plan is simultaneously extreme and very, very boring. It draws on the one and only idea that today’s conservatives offer for solving any and every problem that comes along: just throw yet more money at rich people.
At his moment of triumph Tuesday night after his necessary victories in Michigan and Arizona, a bit of inspiration from Romney would have been nice. Instead, he detailed a list of tax changesthat might lift the spirits of accountants and lawyers for wealthy Americans across our great nation, while sending everyone else off to the fridge for a beer.
Romney promised to enact an “across-the-board, 20 percent rate cut for every American,” pledged to “repeal the alternative minimum tax” and said he’d abolish the “death tax” (conservative-speak for the estate tax paid by only the most affluent Americans.) He’d lower the corporate tax rate to 25 percent, “make the R&D tax credit permanent to foster innovation” and “end the repatriation tax to return investment back to our shores.”
It’s not exactly “Ask not what your country can do for you,” but these ideas do appeal to Romney’s most faithful constituency in primaries: Republicans earning more than $200,000 a year. In Michigan, they backed him over Santorum by 2 to 1.
They’re Romney’s base for good reason. That “across-the-board” tax cut sounds fair and balanced. But a Tax Policy Center study in November of the impact of a 20 percent across-the-board rate cut showed that the wealthiest 0.1 percent would get an average tax reduction of $264,000. The poorest 20 percent would get $78, and those smack in the middle would get $791.
And the candidate who says that he’ll eliminate the deficit does not let on, as a new Tax Policy Center report noted Wednesday, that his tax giveaway would add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. Romney talks vaguely about closing loopholes to recoup some revenue, but aren’t “moderates” supposed to see deficit reduction as urgent?
There is a terrible bias in the mainstream media that judges “moderation” almost entirely in relation to positions on social issues such as abortion or gay marriage. The media love these issues because they often involve sex, which everyone likes to read about, and do not demand elaborate explanations, charts or tables.
Go right on social issues, and the extremist charge can’t be far behind. But the media rarely peg an extreme economic conservative as “extreme” because doing so requires tedious math-laden paragraphs. Besides, people in pinstriped suits who are driven by money don’t seem “extreme.”
So here’s a counterintuitive argument: These primaries have damaged the Republican candidates’ images in the short run. But in the long run, they may yet help Romney — if he prevails — because by comparison with Santorum and Newt Gingrich, he seems “moderate,” and his supporters are more “moderate” than the voters backing the other guys. And Romney has been on so many sides of so many issues that pundits can arbitrarily imagine their own Romney.
My friend and colleague Matt Miller wrote recently that “everyone knows Romney is basically a pragmatic centrist.” No, “everyone” does not know this. The evidence from his tax plan, in fact, is that he’s an extremist for the privileged.
We’re witnessing what should be called the Two Cadillacs Fallacy: Romney’s rather authentic moments suggesting he doesn’t understand the lives of average people (such as his comment on his wife’s two Cadillacs) are dismissed as “gaffes,” while Santorum’s views on social issues are denounced as “extreme.” But Romney’s gaffes are more than gaffes: They reflect deeply held and radical views about how wealth and power ought to be distributed in the United States. These should worry us a lot more than Santorum’s dopey “snob” comment or his tasteless denunciation of JFK.
“The Quality Of Civic Debate “: The GOP’s Radioactive Anti-Obama Rhetoric
The debates this presidential primary season have been less like Lincoln-Douglas than former heavyweight champ Buster Douglas — punch-drunk pugilism, providing entertainment and some great upsets along the way.
But for all the excitement of the fights, there is a civic cost to the radioactive rhetoric that gets thrown out to excite the conservative crowds.
It’s not just that the most irresponsible candidates can play to the base and get a boost in the polls, while more sober-minded candidates like Jon Huntsman fail to get attention. The real damage is to the process of running for president itself. Because when low blows get rewarded, the incentive to try to emulate Lincoln — holding yourself to a higher standard — is diminished. And one barometer of this atmospheric shift is in the increasingly overheated rhetoric by candidates attacking the current president. This serial disrespect ends up unintentionally diminishing the office of president itself.
Look, I know that politics is a full-contact sport: Elbows get thrown and egos get bruised. But ask yourself if Ronald Reagan ever called Jimmy Carter a socialist or a communist on the stump. Sure, there were deep philosophical and policy disagreements between them, and Carter was called a failed president many times. But there was a lingering respect for the office that retained an essential bit of dignity. It was only the far-right fringe who indulged in the kind of rhetoric we now hear routinely from presidential candidates.
For example, Newt Gingrich gained steam early in the primary process by accusing President Obama of having a “Kenyan anti-Colonial mindset,” and invoking the specter of a “Obama’s secular socialist machine.” As a highly compensated historian, Newt should have known better than to say that Obama is the “most radical president in American history.” But then accuracy — or even aiming in the general vicinity of the truth — isn’t the point.
Rick Santorum raised eyebrows this past weekend for saying Obama wants to impose a “phony theology” on America. Santorum has since tried to clarify that he was not trying to raise doubts about the president’s religion and I’ll take him at his word. Likewise, when Santorum compares GOP primary voters to members of the “greatest generation” called to act against the rise of Nazi Germany, I’ll assume that Santorum isn’t intentionally comparing the president to Hitler.
But a month ago, when a Santorum supporter accused Obama of being “an avowed Muslim” who “constantly says that our Constitution is passé” and “has no legal right to be calling himself president” — Santorum did nothing to correct her.
Instead, he told CNN: “I don’t feel it’s my obligation every time someone says something I don’t agree with to contradict them.”
But I think standing up for the truth in the face of unhinged hate is part of a potential president’s job. So did John McCain.
Four years ago, at the height of the general election, when a supporter called then-candidate Obama an “Arab,” McCain corrected her. He said, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man … (a) citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” That’s the voice of a loyal opposition, putting patriotism above partisanship.
Even the sober-minded Mitt Romney has gotten into the hyper-partisan pandering game lately. Maybe he’s trying to compensate for a lack of enthusiasm on the far-right with red meat rhetoric, but the effect is desperate.
For example, when Mitt was barnstorming through Florida, a standard part of his stump speech was this: “Sometimes I think we have a president who doesn’t understand America.” This line was straight out of the “Alien in the White House” playbook, a riff that reinforced the worst impulses of some in the audience, as one woman at a Romney rally named Katheryn Sarka eagerly reaffirmed when I asked her what she thought of the line: “Obama doesn’t understand America. He follows George Soros. Obama is against our Constitution and our democracy.”
After his big Nevada win, this line of Mitt’s scripted victory speech stood out: “President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy.” Romney knows this isn’t true, but he’s been convinced that it works and he seems to be willing to say whatever it takes to make the sale.
Here’s what’s most troubling about this trend: It doesn’t seem remarkable anymore. For the candidates and many in the press, it is just the new normal, the cost of doing business. The overheated rhetoric simply reflects the conversation that’s been going on at the grassroots for a long time.
Like a frog in a slowly boiling pot of water, we don’t realize that the heat is killing us until it is too late — except that the casualty here is the quality of our civic debate and the bonds that are bigger than partisan politics.
It’s naïve to think it will stop when Mr. Obama is no longer president, whether that is in one year or five. Because the next Republican president will inherit the political atmosphere that’s been created and find that it is almost impossible to unite the nation absent a crisis. Some Democratic activists will no doubt take a tactical page from recent conservative successes. This cycle of incitement — where extremes inflame and empower each other — will make our politics more of an ideological bloodsport and less about actually solving problems.
Perspective is the thing we have least of in our politics these days. But perspective is what the presidency is all about — rising above divisions and distractions to make long-term decisions in the national interest. By pouring gasoline on an already inflammatory political environment, the GOP presidential candidates not only diminish themselves, they diminish the process of running for president, and make it less likely that they would succeed in uniting the nation if they actually won the office.
By: John Avlon, CNN Contributor, CNN Opinion Page, February 22, 2012
“Everyday Mitt”: A Few Of Mitt Romney’s Favorite Things
Mitt Romney Visits Michigan
“I love this state. It seems right here. The trees are the right height. I like seeing the lakes. I love the lakes. There’s something very special here. The Great Lakes, but also all the little inland lakes that dot the parts of Michigan. I love cars. I dunno, I mean, I grew up totally in love with cars.”
—Mitt Romney, February 16, 2012
Mitt Romney Visits Arizona
“I love this state, too. It seems right here. Even more right than Michigan. The heat is the right temperature. The spines on the cacti are just the right sharpness. I like drought. I enjoy canyons. I grew up totally in love with canyons. There were pictures of canyons on my bedroom wall. I also love mountains.”
Mitt Romney Visits the Dentist
“I love this place. I love drills and fillings. I love plaque, and also the removal of plaque. I like teeth that are inside the mouth, but I also like teeth that are outside the mouth. I grew up totally in love with novocaine. I’m addicted to novocaine. I wish I could go to the dentist every day, and get a shot of novocaine. My dentist is just the right height. He’s also approximately the right width.”
Mitt Romney Visits the Bathroom in the Coach Section of a Commercial Airplane
“I am absolutely in love with this place. The toilet is just the right size. I love cramped spaces that smell like human waste. I’m totally in love with used paper towels. I like it when other passengers flush the toilet, but I also like it when they don’t.”
Mitt Romney Visits a Department of Motor Vehicles
“I love this place, so much. The lines are just the right length. Not too short. I hate short lines. I love how this place hearkens back to a simpler time in our history, before we knew how to efficiently process people through a system that could very easily be automated. I grew up in love with civil servants struggling to perform simple tasks. There’s something very special in here. The eye charts. I love eye charts.”
Mitt Romney Visits Rick Santorum’s House
“I really love this place. I love tiny houses that only cost one or two million dollars. I grew up in a bedroom about the size of three of these houses. I love the domestic staff that works inside a house, but also the staff that works outside a house. Where is all the staff? I don’t see them. I think this house is terrific, especially given the size of Rick Santorum. I think he is the perfect depth.”
By: Jeremy Blackman, The New Republic, February 24, 2012
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