“What Romney Left Behind”: He’s Devoted His Life To The Conservative Base
One of the common misconceptions about the presidential candidate version of Mitt Romney is that he disavowed his greatest achievement in public office, health care reform, in an attempt to appeal to his party’s base. The truth is that he never actually disavowed it or said it was a failure or a mistake. What he did was tell primary voters that Romneycare was really nothing at all like Obamacare, and anyway Romneycare shouldn’t be tried in any other state. His comments were utterly unconvincing, but since they were always accompanied by a thunderous denunciation of Obamacare, Republican voters were assuaged enough to let it slide.
Which means that had he wanted to, Romney probably could have entered the general election making a positive case on health care beyond “Repeal Obamacare!” By continuing to maintain that Romneycare was in fact a good thing when he was challenged on it (even if he didn’t want to talk about it all that much), he gave himself enough rhetorical room that he could now be using the issue to show voters that he’s both competent and compassionate, that he successfully tackled a difficult policy problem in a way that improved people’s lives. Instead, his entire case for competence is that he got really rich in private equity, and his entire case for compassion is that his wife seems nice.
As Charles Pierce explains, he could even use the issue to portray himself as someone who can get past Washington partisanship:
Mitt Romney would be well within his rights to assert that he had this idea first, and that he’d managed to get it passed without the kind of political bloodletting occasioned by the president’s efforts. There was no uprising in Massachusetts over the individual mandate, no howling about “death panels.” A popular bipartisan solution was devised to a vexing social problem, and Romney would be justified fully in basing his campaign purely on the fact that, in an era of gridlock and paralysis, he could get something like health-care reform done.
Pierce tells his own story (he has a pre-existing condition that might have made him uninsurable in any state other than Massachusetts) and reminds us of how thousands of people there have been helped, and in many cases literally saved, because of what Mitt Romney did. But Romney won’t talk about it even now, despite the fact that the pivot from what he said during the primaries really wouldn’t have been that hard to make. And here’s a partial clue why:
Mitt Romney’s campaign has concluded that the 2012 election will not be decided by elusive, much-targeted undecided voters — but by the motivated partisans of the Republican base.
This shifting campaign calculus has produced a split in Romney’s message. His talk show interviews and big ad buys continue to offer a straightforward economic focus aimed at traditional undecided voters. But out stumping day to day is a candidate who wants to talk about patriotism and God, and who is increasingly looking to connect with the right’s intense, personal dislike for President Barack Obama.
You can characterize this as a new strategic turn, but it seems to me that the Romney campaign has never been about independent voters, not for a minute. My theory about why is that for five years, nearly every waking moment of Mitt Romney’s life was devoted to the conservative base—massaging them, figuring out what makes them happy and what makes them angry, determining who they wanted to be their candidate, and trying, trying, trying to be that person. After working so hard at it for so long, he just can’t stop, and he and everyone around him are convinced that it’s the only way to win.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 17, 2012
“Trust Me, I’ll Figure It Out”: Mitt Romney Re-Explains Why He Can’t Be Trusted On Health Care
Over the weekend, Mitt Romney muddied the waters about where he stands on health-care reform with a series of vague statements from himself and his campaign about health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions.
His floundering is a subset of a larger problem: He has committed himself to a set of positions that won’t allow for a replacement of Obamacare with something that actually fixes the problem of tens of millions of Americans without health insurance, including those with pre-existing conditions.
Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post describes Romney’s progression on pre-existing conditions:
It started with the Republican presidential candidate saying during an appearance on “Meet the Press” that he liked the Affordable Care Act’s provision that requires insurers to cover preexisting conditions, and would support something similar. Hours later, his campaign clarified he did not, however, support a federal ban against denying coverage for preexisting conditions. Around 10 p.m., the Romney camp had circled back to the same position it held back in March: that the governor supports coverage for preexisting conditions for people who have had continuous coverage.
The “continuous coverage” distinction is key: In order to retain the right to insurance that covers your pre-existing condition, you need to make sure to pay health insurance premiums every month. But often, the reason people lose health insurance because they have lost their job. Telling the recently unemployed to pay out of pocket for continuous coverage, typically at a cost of several hundred dollars a month for an individual or more than $1,000 for a family, is often not viable.
It’s worth noting that the purpose of the continuous coverage requirement is similar to the purpose of the individual mandate: It provides an incentive for healthy people to stay in insurance pools, avoiding a “death spiral” in which only sick people buy insurance.
Unaffordability is not a fatal problem for Romney’s continuous coverage proposal. It could be fixed with a range of subsidies that make it affordable for people to maintain continuous health coverage. Essentially, that’s what Obamacare does, and what Romney’s health plan in Massachusetts did.
For a conservative approach to fix at least part of the affordability problem, see this article from National Affairs by James Capretta and Tom Miller. Capretta and Miller propose to combine a Romney-style proposal on pre-existing conditions with significantly expanded funding for high-risk insurance pools, in hopes of covering up to 4 million uninsured Americans with pre-existing conditions.
But Capretta and Miller estimate that their plan would cost somewhere on the order of $200 billion over 10 years. Where is the indication that Romney plans to make such a significant financial commitment, let alone get one out of a Republican Congress? Romney’s platform is full of expensive promises — restore $700 billion in Medicare cuts, grow defense spending to 4 percent of GDP, cut tax rates. It funds these promises in part by drastically cutting spending on health care for the non-elderly. Implementing something like the Capretta-Miller proposal would be a significant reversal of course.
And what about the tens of millions of Americans who are uninsured not because they have pre-existing conditions but simply because they cannot afford insurance coverage? Romney says he wants to replace Obamacare, but his plans do not signal much help for them.
Romney has talked about leveling the playing field for individual purchasers of insurance, so they would get the same favorable tax treatment as businesses buying insurance for their employees. This would make it easier for individuals to buy their own health plans, but it’s not a substitute for Obamacare-style subsidies. Any way you structure a tax incentive, it’s likely to over-subsidize the wealthy and under-subsidize the poor, leaving huge swaths of America still unable to afford insurance.
Romney hasn’t said exactly how his tax incentive would work. But it would probably be a tax credit (whose value is static across incomes) or a tax deduction (whose value rises with income). In 2008, John McCain proposed a $5,000 per family tax credit for health insurance. Scaled up for health-care inflation, that would likely be closer to $6,000 today.
The average health plan premium for a family is now $15,745. Some middle- and upper-middle-income families can be expected to cover a gap of about $9,000. But poorer people need a larger subsidy if we hope to get them covered.
(It is also worth noting that if Romney plans to convert the existing tax exclusion for employer-provided health care into some other health-care subsidy, he cannot also use it as an area for tax-base broadening to pay for his cuts in tax rates, and he needs a lot of base-broadening to make his tax-cut math work.)
The key to the subsidy structure in both Romney’s Massachusetts plan and Obamacare is that the subsidies decline in value as people’s incomes rise. Under Obamacare, people with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty line get Medicaid, which has very little cost to the beneficiary. Above that, they get sliding-scale subsidies for private insurance; the poorest beneficiaries pay just 2 percent of their incomes. Middle-income people get smaller subsidies, and wealthy people have to pay their own way.
Republican rejection of the Medicaid expansion is especially problematic, because Medicaid is cheaper than private insurance, and people earning less than 133 percent of the poverty line have almost no money of their own to contribute toward premiums.
Telling these people the federal government will pay 40 percent of their health insurance premiums will not get them insured. The options aside from Medicaid are to provide them private insurance at significantly higher taxpayer cost than in Obamacare, or leave them uninsured. It is easy to guess which option Republicans in Congress would prefer.
Romney doesn’t want to get into these details about who will get what subsidies. But the details are important. They are the difference between expanding health insurance coverage to the vast majority of Americans, and leaving tens of millions of Americans without access to the health care they need. And they are the difference between actually making it possible for people with pre-existing conditions to get the coverage they need, and not making it possible.
As on so many issues, Romney’s line on health reform is essentially, “Trust me, I’ll figure it out.” But uninsured Americans stand to gain a lot from the implementation of Obamacare. They have no particular reason to believe that Romney’s vague alternative would bring them similar benefits.
By: Josh Barro, Bloomberg, September 13, 2012
“Politicians Who Don’t Like People”: The Danger Of Looking At Past Presidents’ Personalities And Extrapolating To General Principles
New York magazine’s John Heilmann makes an interesting point about Barack Obama in this interview (via Andrew Sullivan):
JH: Obama is an unusual politician. There are very few people in American politics who achieve something — not to mention the Presidency — in which the following two conditions are true: one, they don’t like people. And two, they don’t like politics.
KC: Obama doesn’t like people?
JH: I don’t think he doesn’t like people. I know he doesn’t like people. He’s not an extrovert; he’s an introvert. I’ve known the guy since 1988. He’s not someone who has a wide circle of friends. He’s not a backslapper and he’s not an arm-twister. He’s a more or less solitary figure who has extraordinary communicative capacities. He’s incredibly intelligent, but he’s not a guy who’s ever had a Bill Clinton-like network around him. He’s not the guy up late at night working the speed dial calling mayors, calling governors, calling CEOs.
Despite the phrase “doesn’t like people,” Heilmann isn’t saying that Obama is some kind of misanthrope; there’s a whole spectrum of introversion and extroversion. But let’s assume this is a reasonably accurate assessment. Does it matter? You can look at Clinton and say his appetite for schmoozing is in part what made him successful. On the other hand, George W. Bush is a people person too. There’s a famous story about him from when he was pledging DKE in college, and one day they asked the pledges to name as many of their group as they could. Most could only come up with five or six names, but George named all 55 pledges. But you know who else didn’t really like people? Ronald Reagan. He was dynamite in front of an audience, but had few friends and was estranged from some of his own kids. And come to think of it, an unusual number of people who have lost presidential campaigns in recent years (Kerry, Gore, Dole, Dukakis) were skilled at some aspects of politics but obviously tolerated the endless fundraisers and handshaking without actually enjoying it.
Mitt Romney, interestingly enough, doesn’t really like people but tries to pretend that he’s more like Clinton than like Obama. I think this is part of what’s so grating about Romney. It isn’t just that he’s awkward at all the glad-handing politicians have to do. Lots of us (myself included) wouldn’t be any good at that. It’s that he’s awkward at it but thinks he’s convincing us that heloves it. Just can’t wait to get to the next fish fry to sit down and shoot the breeze with the folks. This is probably my favorite Romney video of all time, from his 1994 run for Senate. He comes into a restaurant, looks around at a rather grim group of elderly diners just trying to have a meal, and says loudly to no one in particular, “My goodness! What’s going on here today? Look at this! This is terrific!” It’s beyond painful: http://www.tubechop.com/watch/529289
It does seem that a love of people can be very helpful in becoming president, but it’s far less important once you get to be president. As Heilmann notes, members of Congress were used to getting massaged by Clinton, and they don’t get that treatment from Obama. But would anything in his term have gone better if he had spent more time on that? Legislatively, Obama has been pretty darn successful. He succeeded in one big area where Clinton failed (health care reform). And even Clinton couldn’t have convinced today’s Republicans to be any less obstructionist than they have been.
Maybe this shows the danger of looking at past presidents’ personalities and extrapolating to general principles about what makes for a successful presidency.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 10, 2012
“The Last Nutball Standing”: Dancing With The Mitt That Brung Ya
Conservatives picked him, and now they have to live with him.
In the early days of the 2012 Republican primaries, many thoughtful commentators took the position that it was simply impossible for Mitt Romney to win his party’s nomination. Despite all his evident strengths as a candidate—money, the most professionally run campaign in the group, the endorsement of many establishment figures—Romney simply would not find a way to get past the fact that as governor of Massachusetts he had passed a health care plan that became the model for the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans had come to see as the very embodiment of evil in the modern world. The party’s base would never abide it.
Yet he did. Without all that much trouble too. And he didn’t deal with the health care issue through some brilliant strategy, either. He made no dramatic mea culpa, and never repudiated Romneycare, at least not directly. Whenever he was asked about it he would give a convoluted and utterly unconvincing argument about how what he did in Massachusetts was great, though of course it shouldn’t be applied anywhere else, and even though the ACA is almost exactly the same as Romneycare, the latter was a pragmatic and effective policy solution while the former is an abomination so horrific that putting a copy of the bill in the same room as an American flag could cause said flag to burst into flames and be sucked through a demonic portal to the very pits of hell. Democrats shook their heads at the hypocrisy and smiled at Romney’s pain, while Republicans narrowed their eyes and listened skeptically. I feel fairly confident that there was not a single person anywhere who upon hearing Romney try to make these absurd distinctions responded with, “Well that makes sense—I’m convinced.”
And amazingly, it almost seems as if Romney thought he could get through the rest of the campaign without this coming up. Yet come up it did, when his chief campaign flak Andrea Saul responded to an ad from pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA that attacks Romney with the story of the spouse of a worker laid off from a Bain Capital-owned company who died without health insurance by saying, “To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care.” Saul was right, of course—in Massachusetts, as in the rest of the country after the ACA fully takes effect in 2014, losing your job doesn’t mean losing your coverage. But conservatives became apoplectic that the Romney campaign would tout Romney’s greatest achievement as governor and imply that people having secure health insurance might actually be a good thing. The less thoughtful among them insisted that Romney and his team need to be “housebroken.”
All of which, I’m sure, has caused no small amount of panic at Romney headquarters. As I keep saying, it’s just incredible that Romney still has to invest so much energy in keeping his restive base in line. By this time he’s supposed to be going after independent voters, but he can’t, because every time he turns around the right has found a new reason to be mad at him.
But really, Republicans have no one to blame but themselves. Just look at the desiccated husk of a man they’ve turned their nominee into, a candidate terrified of his own shadow, devoid of anything resembling principle, so frantic to morph into whatever anyone wants him to be that there’s barely anything left of him at all. And it isn’t as though he was imposed on them or something–they picked him. Granted, he was running against a truly remarkable collection of nutballs and buffoons; imagine being a Republican and having to explain to someone a few years from now how it came to pass that at various times, your party’s front-running candidate for the presidency of the United States was Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich. But still. In the end Republicans went with Mitt Romney. He’s what they chose, and they should have known that the guy they’re looking at is exactly what they’d get.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 9, 2012
“Mitt vs Stubborn Facts”: A Difficult Relationship For The Romney Campaign
John Adams once said, “facts are stubborn things.” These days, another Massachusetts politician has found that saying to ring especially true.
While it’s still unclear how Mitt Romney can be the CEO, chairman, president and sole shareholder of Bain Capital, a company that he claims no responsibility for, it’s become increasingly evident that candidate Romney simply doesn’t want to talk about the facts of his business record.
In an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, Romney suggested that to question his experiences is to “attack success.” If this is the case, and if we’re also not supposed to talk above a whisper about Mitt’s record as governor, including his signature accomplishment in health care reform, then which parts of his biography remain on the table?
Romney clearly prefers his largely undisclosed experiences in the private sector over his publicly poor record in Boston. At every turn, Romney and his campaign have attempted to steer the discussion toward business matters for just this reason.
But when the Washington Post took him up on it last month and published an article headlined “Romney’s Bain Capital invested in companies that moved jobs overseas,” the Romney campaign was caught flatfooted. The Post found that Bain Capital, the firm Romney spent much of his professional life building up, had invested in companies that had not only shipped jobs overseas — a practice of some concern to working- and middle-class Americans — but had pioneered the practice.
Romney’s campaign pushed back hard, claiming that the Post had its facts wrong. The campaign met with the Post’s editors and demanded a retraction, claiming that Romney had left Bain in 1999, supposedly before the outsourcing investment began. The Washington Post listened to the Romney side of the story but stood its ground.
Now we know why. The Boston Globe reported two weeks ago that Romney had signed official documents claiming to be the president and CEO of Bain Capital as late as 2002, when the company was actively building up firms that outsourced American jobs. He didn’t just say this casually at some dinner party; he swore it was the truth on Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
What did the Romney campaign do this time? It hit the “repeat” button and demanded a retraction from the Globe. Who are you going to believe, the campaign asked its hometown paper, me or your lying eyes? Once again, the investigative journalists stood by their reporting.
Since the Globe story, the hits have kept coming. The AP reported this week that Romney stayed in “regular contact” with Bain during his so-called absence, “personally signing or approving a series of corporate and legal documents through the spring of 2001.” Several sources are now saying that Romney made repeated trips to Boston to meet with Bain executives during this period, even though he recently told CBS’s Jan Crawford that he doesn’t “recall even coming back once to go to a Bain or a management meeting” during the period in question.
So despite what the Romney campaign claims, media interest in this story has nothing to do with attacking personal success in the private sector. It has nothing to do with avoiding the real issues of the campaign.
It has everything to do with attempting to get to the bottom of a situation in which what a candidate is saying seems to have come unglued from the stubborn facts.
Americans know that a level playing field empowers a successful economy. You want to talk about soaking the rich? Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney, paid an effective tax rate of nearly 37% in 1967. The elder Romney didn’t complain and released his tax returns to prove his compliance with the law of the land he wanted to lead. In 2010, Mitt Romney’s tax rate bobbed and weaved its way below 15% — and we know that only because the public had to pry his return (he has released only a full one) out of his clenched hands.
Even more fascinating than the fact that Romney’s father released 12 years’ worth when he ran for president in 1968 is the reason why. “One year could be a fluke,” the elder Romney said, “perhaps done for show.”
This country has a noble habit of withholding elected office from people who have trouble with the facts. Romney could end these discussions overnight by releasing his tax returns, as he has been called on to do by Republicans like Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.
Until he makes peace with the facts, Romney will be stuck at the intersection of what is both a character issue and a policy issue. If Romney won’t stand by his record at Bain, just like he won’t stand by his record as governor of Massachusetts, how exactly is the American public supposed to evaluate the candidate? And if he won’t disclose his own relationship with tax loopholes and offshore tax havens, leaving voters more questions than answers, how can the American people trust him to reform our tax code in a way that closes loopholes, eliminates free-riding and ensures that everyone is playing by the same rules?
Facts and the Romney campaign have a difficult relationship these days. But they do share one thing in common: They’re both stubborn.
By: Donna Brazile, CNN Contributor, CNN Opinion, July 27, 2012
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