“Class-Warfare Plutocrat”: Weak Man Romney Running For President
Newt Gingrich isn’t right about much. But he’s onto something about Mitt Romney’s weaknesses as the GOP candidate. Gingrich has been saying that the idea that Romney is electable is “just silly”: “I find it amazing the news media continues to say he is the most electable Republican when he can’t even break out in his own party. But the fact is that Gov. Romney in the end has a very limited appeal in a conservative party.” There are ways in which Romney is the least electable of the remaining plausible candidates. These issues, all having to do with economics (the country’s and Romney’s own), surfaced this week, and assuming he is the nominee, they’ll get plenty of air time between now and November.
On Thursday, we got the first major analysis of Romney’s tax plan, and it’s predictably reactionary. Taxes on the working poor would actually increase, says the Tax Policy Center. Households in the $50,000 and slightly above range would see a small decrease of 2.2 percent, or around $250. Households bringing in more than $1 million a year would see a decrease of 15 percent, or roughly $146,000. In some other country, this alone would be shocking and self-disqualifying. In 2012 America, sad to say, it marks Romney’s plan as slightly less extreme than those of his competitors. But the essential instinct to genuflect to the ultra-rich is intact.
In the Occupy era, Romney’s plan will be vulnerable to attack on those grounds alone. People aren’t exactly taking to the barricades demanding more tax cuts right now, least of all more giveaways to the very top earners. One poll just before Christmas asked people to rank the importance of addressing unemployment, reducing the deficit, or cutting taxes. Results, respectively: 55, 29, and 12 percent. Most people have a sense that taxes are pretty low these days, which, viewed historically, they are.
But Romney’s tax plan is most vulnerable on the deficit. The Tax Policy Center found that Romney’s tax plan would add $600 billion to the deficit in 2015. That’s a lot of cabbage; nearly half of the current deficit, which is now right just under $1.3 trillion (and projected to go under $1 trillion next year). So in other words, just as the deficit is starting to come down—an issue of great importance to swing voters, by the way—Romney is proposing a massive increase in the deficit, so the rest of us can write $146,000 checks to people who take home $1 million (not “millionaires”; people who make $1 million every single year). Obama—whose own tax plan, by the way, is estimated to reduce the deficit by around $300 billion over five years—ought to be able to destroy such a plan. The Romney people will respond, as they have to this study, with the usual lie about lower tax rates unleashing the dynamism of a newly free people and so on. It will be just as false as it was in the 2000s when the Bush people said it, and I think this time around, enough voters will be able to smell the rat.
So far, all this just makes Romney your run-of-the-mill class-warfare plutocrat. But combine it with the second Romney tax issue—his own—and I start to see the guy’s jaw turning into glass before my very eyes.
Romney will not release his tax returns. Why he won’t is a matter of speculation, but it seems a reasonable guess that he doesn’t want people to see what he’s been still making off of his earlier work at Bain Capital (remember, he’s been “unemployed” for a few years now), and he doesn’t want them to see that he’s been paying tax on this income at a rate of 15 percent rather than 35 percent. Last October, Michael Scherer of Time reported that the Romneys made somewhere between (love the size of these categories!) $6.6 million and $40 million—the vast majority of it in capital gains, which are taxed at 15 percent. A couple earning together around $100,000 in straight salary almost certainly pays a higher effective rate than the Romneys.
Then there are all of Romney’s clumsy lies about the number of jobs he created at Bain, which Greg Sargent first exposed earlier this week. Basically, Romney counted jobs gained at firms Bain reorganized long after he left the firm in 1999, but he didn’t count any jobs lost at firms Bain reorganized. I’d love to do my household budget that way, counting only the good stuff.
An ultra-rich man whose economic plan helps the ultra-rich and explodes the deficit, and who can’t be straight with the public about his own income taxes—that’s who’s leading the GOP field. He’s still probably more electable than Gingrich, or Rick Santorum, whose skeezy, Abramoff-related entanglements will soon see the light of day. But that isn’t saying much. Romney is vastly overrated by liberals as a general election foe. Sure, if the economy backslides, Romney could win, simply by not being the incumbent. But short of a new economic crisis, he’s a huge target. If Democrats want something to worry about, they can worry about the EU, or terrorism. But Mitt Romney? He may be the GOP’s only non-joke candidate, but that doesn’t mean he’s a strong one.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 7, 2012
Why Romney’s Relationship With GOP Voters Is Like An Arranged Marriage
Other than the losing candidates themselves, the people unhappiest with the Iowa results must be journalists and Democrats.
Journalists for the simple and obvious reason that a fierce battle is a lot more interesting to watch, and to write about, than a triumphal march. And Democrats because, even though Mitt Romney didn’t emerge from the caucuses entirely unscathed, what he suffered was, as they used to say in old cowboy movies, “just a flesh wound.” And since Democrats know Romney is the most dangerous — arguably the only dangerous — Republican presidential candidate in the field, they would like to have seen him injured far more grievously than actually occurred. An eight-vote win isn’t much of a win (his margin of victory was even narrower than Al Gore’s in the 2000 presidential election), but no one can call it a defeat.
Perhaps the best way to think about Republican primary voters this year is to imagine them as the bride in an arranged marriage. Her parents have chosen well for her, better than she had any right to expect; she has no grounds for complaint and knows it. The groom they have found for her is responsible, decent, reliable, a good provider, and even very handsome. But he just doesn’t excite her. There’s nothing about him that makes her heart beat faster. When she contemplates a future being wedded to him, something inside her shrivels up and dies.
So in the months before the marriage she goes a little crazy. Spends her nights at the bars in a bad section of town. Lets inappropriate strangers buy her drinks, and goes home with more than a few of them. Deep in her heart, she knows her behavior isn’t merely ill advised, it’s foolhardy. These guys (and even one woman!) won’t make her happy even for a night, let alone a lifetime. They’re all wrong, and some of them are even a little nuts. But they’re dashing and dangerous and transgressive, and she’s in that heedless mood where she just doesn’t give a damn. By morning, she always realizes she’s made a dreadful mistake. But that’s desperation for you: She doesn’t want to be reasonable, she wants to rebel. And this is looking like her last chance. Of course, on some level, she’s aware she’s going to be marching down the aisle with Mr. Sensible soon enough.
For those of us watching this matrimonial crisis closely, the only question remaining prior to Iowa was whether there was time for one more folly before she came to her senses. We knew the identity of the one guy on a bar stool she hadn’t hooked up with, we just didn’t know if she’d have an opportunity to plant herself on the back of his Harley before reality set in. Well, as became evident in the last week before the Republicans caucused, the answer was yes.
As with each of her previous flings, she didn’t begin to know enough about this fellow before deciding he might be worth a tumble. Rick Santorum appears personable, boyish, and pleasant. He gives every indication of being an upright sort of person. But his politics are genuinely abhorrent, so far outside the American mainstream as to be almost Falangist. Once his views become more widely known, he would drive voters away in droves; with sufficient exposure, it’s unlikely he could carry a single state outside the deep South. The only reasons he did so well in Iowa are a) he was the last alternative still standing, and b) while he’s known to be conservative, a buzzword that makes Republicans salivate without requesting a definition, the full extent of his views aren’t well known at all, and would not survive scrutiny.
The battle isn’t quite over. Santorum hasn’t yet undergone the sort of examination that undid, in turn, Trump, Bachmann, Cain, Perry, and Gingrich. He might have time to make a little mischief in New Hampshire before that happens, and South Carolina might be congenial territory for him regardless. And he has a spirited, spiteful ally in Newt Gingrich. Gingrich feels aggrieved, and when Gingrich feels aggrieved, he gets mean. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he gets meaner. He must know he’s going down, but he’s going to do everything he can to pull Mitt Romney down with him. Pure personal vengeance. Many of Romney’s vulnerabilities are well enough known by now to occasion no surprise, but I think we’re going to see him suffer some serious new knife wounds, front and back, during the next few debates.
Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. But he will be a damaged nominee. Which isn’t to say he will lose — it’s much too early for those kinds of predictions — but it does mean his path to victory is steeper and more tortuous than it had to be.
Two other thoughts: President Obama’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray was, yes, an appropriate and justified exercise of executive power. But it was also, in a modest and opening-gambit sort of way, an announcement of how he is going to run for re-election this year: Like Harry Truman in 1948. His opponent will be not only Mitt Romney, but the Congressional Republican Party.
And most interestingly, I suspect Iowa may mark the turning point in the way the country views the Supreme Court’s recent, indefensible decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It was a decision most conservatives embraced when first issued, but the mischievous and entirely foreseeable consequences of this idiotic piece of jurisprudence are now visible for all to see. The fact that the State Supreme Court of a conservative state like Montana seems to agree has to be taken as a great big fat straw in the wind.
By: Erik Tarloff, The Atlantic, January 6, 2012
Mitt Romney Has A Big Tax Problem
Mitt Romney has been insisting for a while that he will not cut taxes for the rich, which everybody took to mean that he would lock into place the enormous, expiring Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, but cut taxes no deeper than that. He has said so over and over again. Here he is saying, “If I’m going to use precious dollars to reduce taxes, I want to focus on where the people are hurting the most, and that’s the middle class. I’m not worried about rich people.” And here’s Romney insisting, “I’m proposing no tax cuts for the rich.”
Today the Tax Policy Center analyzes his plan, and it turns out that Romney would, in fact, cut taxes for the rich, even below current levels. The highest-earning one percent would get an additional tax cut averaging $82,000 a year. Romney’s plan would also raise taxes on the lowest quintile by an average of $157 a year.
That the leading Republican wants to cut taxes for the rich is not exactly man-bites-dog. But it is a huge political liability for him. Raising taxes on low-income earners is unpopular, cutting taxes for the rich is unpopular, and doing it when you’re a wealthy scion who looks like a wealthy scion is extremely unpopular. That’s why Romney has been furiously insisting he won’t cut taxes for the rich.
Ross Douthat, taking Romney’s claims at face value (like many of us did), confidently asserted yesterday that he has avoided exposing himself to the charge of cutting taxes for the rich. Romney, he wrote, is “campaigning instead on a revenue-neutral tax reform and a modest tax cut for middle class investors, neither of which leaves him particularly vulnerable to the charge of “giving massive tax breaks to the rich.”
Turns out he’s not. And his plan isn’t revenue-neutral, either. It would add $180 billion to the deficit in 2015.
What makes this report tougher for Romney is the timing. He’s already under pressure from conservatives upset with his pledge not to cut taxes for the rich. If he had already wrapped up the nomination, Romney could just say, “oops, we screwed up the plan,” and release a new one that holds taxes for the rich at their Bush-era levels and doesn’t raise them on the working class. But that would be a tricky move in the midst of a primary. Anyway, the changes he’d have to make would be very large — $180 billion a year is big money, requiring a major revamp of his plan.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, January 5, 2012
The GOP’s Peculiar Vocabulary Of Race
If Rick Santorum is upset that pretty much nobody believed him when he said he wasn’t talking about “black people” living off “somebody else’s money,” he has Newt Gingrich to blame. A day after the GOP’s flavor of the week changed stories and claimed, “I didn’t say black,” when he said, “I don’t want to make [something sounding like black] people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” Gingrich again called President Obama “the food stamp president.” He told reporters in New Hampshire, “I will go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.”
On Thursday I performed the mental exercise of giving Santorum the benefit of the doubt, and laid out the way the GOP’s ’60s era rhetoric about “welfare queens” and “welfare cheats” has been updated to include much of the multiracial working class, including whites – including anyone who has a public sector job, a union-protected job, or collects unemployment, Social Security or Medicare. It seemed theoretically possible – while still hard to believe – that Santorum was merely sharing the new GOP line that we’re all welfare queens now, any of us who’ve ever benefited from a government program.
Then Gingrich made my thought exercise seem unduly kind, by demonstrating exactly why people should be inclined to distrust Santorum’s new story and believe he was talking about black people: The modern GOP seems unashamed of its prejudice.
It’s impossible not to believe that having our first black president unleashed a new round of GOP race-baiting, even leaving birtherism aside. In August, one of Obama’s few Republican friends, Sen. Tom Coburn, lapsed into shameful racial stereotyping trying to “defend” the president, telling an Oklahoma constituent that Obama’s “intent is not to destroy … It’s to create dependency because it worked so well for him … As an African-American male, coming through the progress of everything he experienced, he got tremendous benefit through a lot of these programs.” A black guy raised by a (white) single mother gets into Harvard Law School: In the everyday vocabulary of today’s Republican Party, he’s looking for a handout.
Ronald Reagan wrapped up the ugly racism of earlier Republicans in pretty paper when he claimed, “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,” and made the case that welfare — which he associated with Democrats — created “dependency” that harmed its recipients. You didn’t have to be angry or racist anymore to oppose welfare programs; you could say you were trying to help their recipients. Reagan also muted the rhetoric that associated welfare with race, at least a little. More than 30 years later, having a black president makes it seem safe, and necessary, to unwrap Reagan’s pretty paper and once again make plain the GOP’s political association between welfare and African-Americans. Make that, having a black Democratic president. This wouldn’t happen to President Herman Cain, would it?
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 6, 2012
Iowa And Beyond: “Common Sense” Racism And The Tea Party GOP
The 2012 Republican presidential field, a hydra which self-destructively feeds on itself, had one more battle royale in Iowa. Fighting to a standstill, Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Paul bloodied each other. While the Tea Party GOP is still a house divided, their leading candidates share a common, uniting, go to issue: hating on the blacks makes for good politics; it pays substantial political dividends.
As Iowa demonstrated, be it Gingrich’s yearning to have lazy black and brown kids pick up mops and brooms as janitors in work houses, Romney’s nativist Klan inspired opines to keep “America America,” Santorum’s appeals to a belief that African Americans find sustenance by stealing from hardworking white people, or Ron Paul’s assertion that the Civil Rights Act (with its bringing down of Jim and Jane Crow) was an unfair intrusion on white people’s “liberty” and “freedom,” the Tea Party GOP remains addicted to the crack rock of dog whistle politics.
Decades after the founding of the Southern Strategy in the 1960s, the old school remains the true school. Ultimately for conservatives, demagoguing the negroes can still help stir up support among the white populist faithful.
Precision matters here. Research on public opinion and political behavior has demonstrated that not all conservatives are racist. However, racists are much more likely to be conservative–and to identify as Republicans.
Social scientists, historians, psychologists and others have developed an extensive vocabulary to talk about the lived politics of the color line. These terms include such notable phrases as symbolic racism, white racial resentment, the white racial frame, in-group and out-group anxiety, ethnocentrism, prejudice, realistic group conflict, colorblind racism, systems of structured inequality, racial formation, and front stage vs. backstage racism.
In thinking through the politics of race at work in the white conservative political imagination, this seemingly disparate terminology is connected by a common thread. Race and racial ideologies are ways of seeing the world, of locating people and individuals relative to one another, and are a cognitive map for making sense of social relationships. While shocking to outsiders, the type of racism played with so casually by Gingrich, Romney, Santorum, Paul and other conservatives is a type of “common sense” for their public.
For example, the audiences that cheer Romney’s speeches about a country that is lost, one led by an anti-American usurper, are not necessarily “bad people.” They are motivated by a sense of belonging, and made to feel special by virtue of being “real Americans,” part of a special tribe anointed with unique insight and wisdom by their oracles.
Likewise, those who embrace Gingrich’s habit of stereotyping “inner city blacks” as lazy, unmotivated, and criminal, probably identify as “compassionate conservatives,” or “good Christians.” There is no intended malice on their part. To them, “everyone knows” that these observations about black and brown people are “true.”
Rick Santorum’s Iowa speech on the nature of black people’s greed and degeneracy is an especially instructive example of this broader pattern:
“It just keeps expanding – I was in Indianola a few months ago and I was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don’t sign up more people under the Medicaid program,” Santorum said. “They’re just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That’s what the bottom line is.”He added: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” “And provide for themselves and their families,” Santorum added, to applause. “The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling again.”
“Right,” responded one audience member, as another woman can be seen nodding.
There are several elements at work here.
First, poverty in America is racialized. The image in the public imagination is of black welfare queens, or illegal aliens birthing “anchor babies” who live off of the government tit, profiting from food stamps and the generosity of the American people. The white poor rarely, if ever, enter the picture. Second, black people are in a parasitic relationship with white Americans (Santorum’s “someone” else). In sum, black people are “lazy,” and a dependent class, unable to take care of their families except for the generosity and benevolence of white people.
The most powerful part of Santorum’s appeal to his white audience in Iowa is the implication that black people are receiving some type of “reparations.” For Santorum and the Tea Party GOP, blacks are plagued by “bad culture” and are existentially prone to poverty. Therefore, in a country where labor, capitalism, and citizenship are inexorably connected, blacks are outside of the political community.
In the age of Fox News and the Right-wing echo chamber, one cannot forget how the conservative imagination is constituted as a dream world: it is a mature fulfillment of some of the most sophisticated propaganda in the post World War 2 period.
In this imagination, it does not matter that whites are the majority of America’s poor.
It does not matter that most people on public assistance and welfare in Iowa are white.
It does not matter that there is a deep history which explains how conservatives have spun a fiction about black and brown poverty while ignoring structural economic inequality, and how many of the policies endorsed by the Tea Party GOP in the name of economic austerity and punishing people of color (who are coded as “the poor” or “unproductive citizens”), also disproportionately harm the white working and middle classes.
This local type of common sense helps to explain the feelings of defense, denial, and injury that many white conservatives exhibit when challenged about the racism of the Tea Party GOP and the Right-wing establishment. While the leadership and media elites from which they take their cues skillfully play the race baiting game, rank and file Fox News conservatives simply feel aggrieved at the suggestion that anyone would take their common sense understandings of the world to be racist, bigoted, or based on false understandings about the nature of racism and white privilege in the Age of Obama.
In the same way that a fish does not know that it is wet, the politics of nativism, an authoritarian-like embrace of the politics of us and them, and a fear of the Other, are so central to contemporary white populist conservatism, that they are taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of the world.
Moreover, politics is essentially about the creation of an imagined community. The stump speeches about evil liberals who hate America, the cheering of dying cancer patients who lack insurance, the booing of gay soldiers, and the numerous fictions about the economy, science, the Constitution, and public policy more generally are taken as divine gospel. These fictions are standing priors for contemporary conservatives which help to mark out the boundaries of their political world.
During an election year, and as a function of a highly polarized 24 hour news environment, it is a given that the incumbent president will be the target of vicious attacks by the out party. By implication, the election of Barack Obama, America’s first black president, has amplified all of these tensions. The election of a member of the racial out-group has made the stakes especially high for white conservatism. Obama is anathema to the Tea Party GOP soul, the living embodiment of a world turned upside down, for no man who looks like him could ever be leader of the free world, where whiteness is inseparable from being “American.”
By implication, there is a short line from the white racial appeals of Gingrich, Santorum, Paul, Romney and others directly to President Obama. He has been called “the food stamp president” and a “ghetto crackhead.” Obama is stained by the Birthers who say he is not an American citizen. The appeals to American exceptionalism are naked arguments that a black man like Obama cannot help but be outside of the “normal” political culture of this country. It has also been implied that President Obama is a perpetual “they,” a member of a marginalized group who by association is lazy, anti-white, unqualified, and an “affirmative action baby” that somehow managed to steal a presidential election and win the popular vote.
Many may laugh at such a formulation. However, the Tea Party GOP, Iowa voters, and others who clamor to participate in the Republican primaries, would take such claims as common sense knowledge. For people of color, the outsider, the Other, and those who are not (in their eyes) “quintessentially American” (and thus have to prove their authenticity to the white conservative gaze), this is not your country.
You people may have built and improved this country, but it is not yours. For the Tea Party GOP and the populist conservatism of the present moment, you people are just guests. They will remind you people of that fact at every moment.
Why? Because it is common sense. Didn’t you know that?
By: Chauncey DeVega, Open Salon Blog, January 4, 2012
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