“We Own You Mitt”: Conservatives Worrying About Romney
Are prominent conservatives panicking about Mitt Romney’s campaign? It sorta looks that way, today. The Wall Street Journal editorial board — the men who ensure that even educated, newspaper-reading rich conservatives are successfully misinformed on all the major issues of the day — has a big “Mitt Romney is blowing it” editorial today (published online late Wednesday) that seems designed to stir up as much trouble as possible for the candidate.
The first line is hilarious and patently untrue: “If Mitt Romney loses his run for the White House, a turning point will have been his decision Monday to absolve President Obama of raising taxes on the middle class.”
In reality, Mitt Romney will definitely accuse Obama of raising taxes, even if he’s squishy on the “mandate is a tax” line. Also, it’s early July, it’s guaranteed to be an incredibly close race and, honestly, the only people who will notice whether Romney decides to declare the mandate a tax are people who have been paying close enough attention to the race to have already made up their minds.
But the point is actually just to hammer Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom for being sort of feckless and horrible at messaging, and to let the Romney campaign know that the Journal will be telling them which things to say, thank you very much. (The conservative press is much better at bullying its candidates into adopting particular strategies and policies than the liberal press, which has approximately zero power over candidates and elected officials.)
This latest mistake is of a piece with the campaign’s insular staff and strategy that are slowly squandering an historic opportunity. Mr. Obama is being hurt by an economic recovery that is weakening for the third time in three years. But Mr. Romney hasn’t been able to take advantage, and if anything he is losing ground.
The Romney campaign thinks it can play it safe and coast to the White House by saying the economy stinks and it’s Mr. Obama’s fault. We’re on its email list and the main daily message from the campaign is that “Obama isn’t working.” Thanks, guys, but Americans already know that. What they want to hear from the challenger is some understanding of why the President’s policies aren’t working and how Mr. Romney’s policies will do better.
Then! The Journal compares Romney to John Kerry. So mean!
Following this explosive editorial, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, America’s wrongest and dumbest partisan pundit, weighed in with his me-too “Romney’s strategy is all wrong” column, which has the very troll-y headline “Dukakis, Kerry … Romney?” Kristol wants to hear policy specifics from Romney, which is an awful idea, frankly, because Republican policies are pretty much universally unpopular once you go into actual detail, and Romney is correct in believing that his best hope is to remain as vague as possible on as many issues as possible.
But the argument is about a broader fear that a winnable election is slipping through the Republican Party’s grasp, and if that is indeed happening, Romney and his campaign are going to be blamed for letting it happen. As Josh Marshall says, columnists and pundits actually usually don’t have much of an idea what’s going on in a campaign. Conservatives are frustrated that Romney’s not kicking ass in the polls, and if he isn’t, it’s because his stupid campaign (made up of longtime Romney associates, for the most part) is stupid and bad.
It’s possible, though, that the Romney campaign is doing the absolute best it can running against an incumbent president who remains broadly personally popular. And it’s probable that Romney, for all his flaws, was the best candidate to face Obama this year. Buyer’s remorse aside, does anyone honestly think Jeb Bush or Mitch Daniels or Tim Pawlenty or Chris Christie would be performing better right now?
As I said, the words of the WSJ editorial page carry weight, so we’ll see if Romney (who has already called the mandate a tax) makes some sort of gesture toward “shaking up” his campaign (which would lead, naturally, to headlines about his campaign being in disarray — it’s lose-lose!), but these guys are actually just whining about how it’s harder to beat Obama than they have always thought it ought to be.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, July 5, 2012
“Ignore The Republican Hysteria”: Understanding The Health Care Law Is A Public Responsibility
In a sane climate, Mitt Romney would be running for president on his one big success as a politician: achieving something close to universal private health insurance coverage as governor of Massachusetts. Romneycare cut costs, improved health care outcomes and is quite popular there.
Alas, President Obama’s election has driven many Republicans so crazy that the putative nominee makes an unconvincing show of despising his own brainchild.
Has there ever been a more unconvincing faker in American politics? Romney acts as if he thinks voters are morons. But then, right-wing hysteria over the Supreme Court’s upholding “Obamacare” shows he could be correct.
Mandating health insurance wasn’t Romney’s own idea. The conservative Heritage Foundation saw it as a way to realize the practical and moral benefits of a socialized, government-run health care system like Canada’s through private, for-profit insurance companies — the best of both worlds.
Romney even wrote a 2009 USA Today column advising President Obama about the mandate’s advantages: “Using tax penalties, as we did [in Massachusetts], or tax credits, as others have proposed,” he wrote, “encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others.”
The president put it this way in reacting to the Supreme Court’s validating Obamacare: “People who can afford to buy health insurance should take the responsibility to do so.”
So is it a tax, or is it a penalty?
The correct answer is “who cares?” Provide your family with the security of a decent health insurance policy and you don’t need to pay it.
Tyranny? Oh, grow up. The government can already make you sign up for Social Security, educate your children, vaccinate your dog, send you to fight a war in Afghanistan, limit how many fish you can catch, and put you in prison and seize your property for growing pot.
Furthermore, Justice Roberts is right. The U.S. government encourages all kinds of virtuous behavior through the tax code. You can get married, or pay higher taxes. Buy a house, have children, invest in a retirement account, even raise cattle (my personal favorite) or pay higher taxes.
And buying health insurance is an intolerable offense against liberty?
Ask Rush Limbaugh who pays for his Viagra. Answer: his employer-provided health insurance company. Only impoverished people, deadbeats and fools go without it.
And guess what? You’re already paying for their medical expenses when time and chance happens to them. As it happens to everybody, even right-wing Supreme Court justices who think it’s clever to compare an inessential food like broccoli to a universal human need like health care.
You can eat your vegetables or not; it’s entirely up to you.
But you can’t not get sick or hurt. And moral considerations aside, the rest of us can’t risk letting you lie down and die on the road. After all, it might be communicable. So there’s no non-participation in the health care system. Even if they drag you in feet-first, there you are.
And somebody’s got to pay for it.
It follows that the minority’s distinction between “activity” and “inactivity” with regard to health insurance is not merely specious legalistic jargon. Frankly, it’s downright adolescent.
Justice Scalia may increasingly resemble a small, volcanic Caribbean nation — eat your vegetables, Tony — but even he is not an island. We’re all in this together.
Previous to Obamacare, the United States has had the most inefficient health care finance in the advanced world, spending by far the highest percentage of its GDP on health care while getting worse results. Most western countries spend a fraction of what we do on health care and their citizens are demonstrably healthier.
Ending the perennial war between hospital bureaucrats and number crunchers at insurance companies and government agencies over who’s going to pay for indigent care should begin to change that.
Meanwhile, now that Obamacare has passed constitutional muster, it’s time for the wise and judicious American public to get off their lazy keisters, ignore the hysteria and learn what’s in the law and what’s not.
I recently took a brief online quiz sponsored by the Kaiser Foundation. I hope you won’t think I’m bragging by saying I got a perfect score. It’s my job to know the basics. Apparently, most Americans don’t. The percentage of citizens ignorant of even the new law’s most basic provisions was shocking.
Granted, the White House has done a terrible marketing job. But no, there’s no new government-run insurance company. If you’ve already got a policy you like, keep it. No, small businesses with fewer than 50 employees need not provide insurance; but, yes, they get tax credits if they do. No, undocumented immigrants aren’t eligible for help.
Many of you have mistakenly trusted carnival barkers like Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. Now that Obamacare’s the law, ignorance is no longer an excuse.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, July 4, 2012
“Santorum’s Prophecy Is Coming True”: Republicans Scratch Their Heads At Romney Tax Messaging Chaos
Republicans are bewildered by the Romney campaign’s declaration that the health care law’s individual mandate is not a tax. The GOP seized on the messaging opportunity handed to them by the Supreme Court, and immediately started trumpeting the idea that President Obama wasn’t just raising taxes — he was orchestrating the largest tax hike in American history. But a top Romney adviser threw water on that Monday, saying the mandate isn’t a tax. The RNC chairman then said Romney believes it is a tax.
Confused yet? Republican strategists told TPM that far from the unified voice the GOP said it would present after the Supreme Court ruling, the messaging has been chaotic, and ultimately embarrassing for Romney and the GOP. But, they believe, the disarray won’t affect down-ballot races, in which GOP candidates can still push the tax messaging.
“It’s a problem, I’m not going to lie,” said Hogan Gidley, a former top adviser to Rick Santorum’s campaign. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it’s a problem for the Republicans.”
Gidley was often the public face for Santorum’s warnings that Romney would be caught in precisely this kind of health care mess if he became the nominee. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled and Romney’s campaign has already stepped on the GOP’s messaging, he says Santorum’s prophecy has come true.
“Here we are a couple months into the general and you’re going, ‘Hey wait a minute, that Rick Santorum was right,’” he said.
Democrats are certainly enjoying the “message dichotomy,” as Gidley put it. The party has sent out multiple press releases highlighting the differences between Republican leaders and their presidential nominee. But Gidley said Democrats who believe they’ve got Romney and the GOP on the run should be warned.
“Democrats are doing a dance in the street with the fact that the RNC and the Republican nominee are on different spin planes on this issue,” he said. “But when the dust settles, again, you’re just going to realize that Romney wants to repeal it and Obama doesn’t.”
Other Republican strategists agreed that the split on whether the mandate amounts to a tax is bad optics. But they said that Republicans candidates other than Romney — who don’t have the baggage of Romneycare to deal with — can still run on the tax messaging.
“It’s not as clean and on-message as Republican strategists might prefer,” said Jon McHenry, an unaligned D.C.-based GOP consultant and pollster. “But it’s a one-day, inside-the-Beltway, ‘what are these guys doing?’ story as opposed to taking the tax issue off the table for the next five months.”
Down ballot, the tax argument still works, McHenry said.
“[Senate] Democrats aren’t going to put Mitt Romney on air defending their position. They’re just not,” he said. “It’s more a missed opportunity for the Romney campaign than it is a detriment to other [GOP] campaigns.”
Another strategist agreed that Republicans are annoyed by the Romney campaign steering the focus away from the tax-based message, which strategists think has real legs.
“A lot of people think he’s trying to get too cute,” said the strategist.
By: Evan McMorris-Santoro, Talking Points Memo, July 3, 2012
“Call It A Penalty, Call It A Fine, Don’t Call It A Tax”: Debunking The Individual Mandate “Tax”
Having lost their Supreme Court fight against the Affordable Care Act, opponents of health care reform have in recent days been attacking the individual mandate provision of the law as a “tax” on the middle class. This line of reasoning only makes sense if you think penalties for littering, speeding, or engaging in other irresponsible behavior are also “taxes.”
Yes, it’s true that conservative Chief Justice John Roberts used a tax rationale when upholding the constitutionality of the individual mandate—and the entire law—last week. But Roberts was making a technical argument and using the word “tax” in a way that really only makes sense in an arcane legal context.
First, some background: The health care law’s so-called “individual mandate” provision requires people who can afford to buy health insurance to do so, and when it’s phased in, it will assess a penalty of up to 2.5 percent of household income on those who don’t. That’s only fair, since the health care costs of the uninsured are borne by the rest of us.
You don’t need a law degree to understand the difference between a fine and a tax, and this one falls pretty neatly into the former category, as we explain below. Moreover, the vast majority of Americans—rich, poor, or middle class—will never be assessed what’s more rightly understood as the “freeloader penalty” at the center of this debate.
Still, while the tax-themed attack on the individual mandate is incoherent, it remains dangerous. Opponents of health reform well understand the power of the T-word to fire popular resentment, and will try to confuse the public about what the individual mandate is and how it works. Here are some facts to keep in mind.
Unlike taxes, this penalty is avoidable
Taxes are, for the most part, involuntary. We pay taxes on our income and when we buy things. The only way to avoid taxes is to earn less money and consume less. Penalties and fines, however, are quite different. We can avoid fines by avoiding bad behavior.
The individual mandate presents people with a choice: Either have health insurance or pay an annual penalty. The only people who will pay this penalty are those who willfully neglect to take responsibility for getting health insurance—and then stick the rest of us with the bill when they get sick or injured.
People who have health insurance will never pay the penalty
More than 80 percent of Americans today have health insurance, and the health reform law will dramatically expand coverage. When the law is fully phased in, only 6 percent of Americans will face the choice of either buying private insurance they can afford or paying a penalty, according to the Urban Institute. And only 1.2 percent of Americans will actually pay the penalty, according to congressional estimates.
Americans who can’t afford insurance will have it provided for them
Under the law, people who can’t afford to buy insurance will receive Medicaid coverage or the government will split with them the cost of buying private health insurance. Therefore, the penalty will only apply to people who can afford health insurance but would rather have taxpayers—you and me—bail them out when they need medical attention.
The individual mandate is grounded in conservative principles of individual responsibility
The idea that people should be required to purchase health insurance if they can afford to do so was first popularized by the conservative Heritage Foundation in 1989 and first implemented in law by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney—a Republican. The idea then and today is to promote individual responsibility and to prevent self-sufficient people from relying on public assistance. “[E]ach household has the obligation, to the extent it is able, to avoid placing demands on society by protecting itself,” Heritage wrote in defense of the individual mandate.
Happily, the evidence suggests that the individual mandate penalty will apply nationwide to a small fraction of the population. Less than 1 percent of residents of Massachusetts, the only state with an individual mandate in place, were assessed the penalty in 2009.
Once the federal law takes full effect in 2014 and Americans see that the individual mandate penalty only applies to a small number of freeloaders, the antitax argument should lose all power.
It already appears to be waning in some very telling quarters. An advisor to Romney on Monday said that the presumptive GOP presidential nominee agrees with President Barack Obama that the individual mandate penalty is not a tax.
By: Gadi Dechter, Center for American Progress, July 3, 2012
“Tying Themselves Into Knots”: Romney Adviser Contradicts A GOP Talking Point
Some Republicans knew that nominating a governor who had signed a healthcare reform law with an individual insurance mandate would be a problem. It would muddy their anti-Obamacare message, they warned, even if Mitt Romney could claim that he supports mandates only at the state level. Well, their fears were well-founded.
Consider the gaffe made by Eric Fehrnstrom, a top Romney campaign adviser, on MSNBC Monday morning. As I reported on Sunday night, Republicans and conservatives have tried to make the best of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act by saying that if it is justified under Congress’s taxing power, then it must be a tax increase, and a massive one at that.
But Romney, who signed a law that, just like the ACA, imposes a penalty on individuals who don’t buy insurance, does not like to admit that he raised taxes. (That’s why, as governor of Massachusetts, he mostly sought to increase revenue through new and higher user fees, including preposterously cruel ones, such as imposing a $10 fee for a certificate of blindness.)
These conflicting lines got crossed when Ferhnstrom said, “The governor disagreed with the ruling of the Court, he agreed with the dissent that was written by Justice Scalia, that very clearly said that the mandate was not a tax. The governor believes what we put in place in Massachusetts was a penalty and he disagrees with the Court’s ruling that the mandate was a tax.” This flies in the face of claims by Congressional Republicans and conservative talking heads such as Rush Limbaugh, who say that the ACA is a tax. Fehrnstrom is also contradicting his own candidate who admitted back in 2008 that the penalty for not buying insurance in Massachusetts is a kind of tax.
But Congressional Republican aides tell the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that they can continue to make this argument even as the Romney campaign says the opposite. He writes:
You’d think the fact that the GOP presidential nominee’s campaign has now confirmed that Obamacare’s mandate is not a tax would undercut the use of this talking point by GOP Congressional officials, right?
You’d be wrong. One senior Congressional aide tells me that Republicans will continue to describe it in those terms. And a second senior GOP Congressional aide emails that there is no contradiction here.…
The Romney campaign and Republican Congressional officials alike both agree with Scalia’s argument that the mandate is not a tax in the sense that claiming it is a tax makes it Constitutional, even as Republican officials continue to argue that the mandate is a tax in the sense that SCOTUS said it was in the course of upholding the law.
It’s a clever argument, and a sort of technically consistent. But, as Sargent’s Post colleague Rachel Weiner points out, “That line of attack is more easily maintained by Republicans who never imposed any such mandate.” It’s irritating to see the GOP paying so little political penalty for their complete flip-flop on the individual mandate, but it’s satisfying to see that by nominating Romney they will at least tie themselves into knots over it.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, July 2, 2012
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