By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 10. 2012
“Throwing Crumbs To The Bottom Feeders”: Mitt Romney, The “Fighting Moderate”
The latest meme making the Beltway rounds at the urging of Mitt Romney’s staff is that their candidate has really pulled a fast one on the “conservative base” of his party: he’s a “moderate” (you know, like Bill Clinton) who’s figured out he can keep the wingnuts happy just by being a Breitbartian badass towards Obama. Give’ em Solyndra photo ops, the meme suggests, and they won’t make Romney endorse the Gold Standard or a Personhood Amendment. McKay Coppins wrote up the meme today for Buzzfeed:
The conventional wisdom of the chattering class has been that Romney is captive to the Republican Party’s conservative base, desperate and anxious to maintain their tepid support. But his new appeal to the right marks a recognition that he can court conservatives without, in any traditional sense, “tacking right.” His aggressive tactics stand in for the sort of policy compromises that could damage him in November; better, his advisers argue, to court conservatives with a press conference shouting match than with a high-profile fight over abortion or gay marriage. What’s more, they say, the media obsession with Romney “pandering” to the right represents a misunderstanding of conservatives, who can live with Romney’s moderate record – as long as he’s a fighting moderate.
So the idea here is that every time Romney pleases the crazy people by echoing one of their favorite attack lines on Obama, or simply looks the other way when they pursue craziness (e.g., Trump’s neo-birtherism), it’s a sign Mitt is actually being faithful to his “moderate” course, giving the Right bread and circuses while intending to offer swing voters—and America—that fine “moderate” governance.
If anyone buys this meme, then they’re falling for a stunt a lot more transparent than the base-tending hijinks that have supposedly fooled the right-wing rubes.
It should be enough for anyone that Romney has endorsed two large and violently immoderate measures: the Ryan budget, and Jim DeMint’s Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, those twin substantive litmus tests for a candidate’s commitment to a long-term agenda focused on a radically reduced government at all levels supported by a more regressive tax system. He’s also promised to try to make abortion and same-sex marriage illegal through federal policy if possible and judicial appointments if necessary; there is nothing “moderate” about reversing 40 years of legalized abortion. And don’t get me started on Romney’s foreign policy views, which seem to combine the worst features of Dick Cheney and John Bolton.
Are there right-wing policy positions too extreme for Romney to embrace unless he has to? Of course; there always are and always will be; we’re living in a moment of movement conservative triumphalism so powerful that no one is safe of the charge of being insufficiently pure. That doesn’t make Mitt some sort of safe “centrist” alternative to Obama who’s managed to outmanuever a weak field and trick the Right into accepting his nomination, and is now tricking hard-core conservatives again by giving them the sizzle of the psychotic campaign they crave instead of the steak.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 1, 2012
“A Platform To Revitalize America”: An Idiotic Wish List Of Conservative Senate Tea Party Caucus Policies
When Bill Clinton left the White House just 12 years ago, the federal budget deficit was quite literally gone, and the nation was running a surplus for the first time in a generation. After Republicans approved two massive tax breaks, expanded Medicare, put two wars on the national credit card, and crashed the economy, the fiscal mess Clinton had cleaned up was back.
We’ve seen some modest progress on this front, but even under the most optimistic of scenarios, a balanced budget is nowhere in sight.
That is, unless we adopt a new plan from three far-right senators, who’ve mapped out a way to get us back to 2001 figures in a hurry.
Members of the Senate Tea Party Caucus on Thursday announced a plan to balance the budget in five years, cutting spending by nearly $11 trillion compared to President Obama’s budget.
The plan, dubbed “A Platform to Revitalize America,” is a wish list of conservative policies, none of which have any chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate or being signed into law by a liberal Democratic president.
The ambitious blueprint would achieve a $111 billion surplus in fiscal year 2017.
“The whole point here is to show we can reasonably balance the budget within a five-year period,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), one of the sponsors of the plan.
Well, “reasonably” is a subjective term.
The plan, also endorsed by Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), would produce a surplus by 2017 by effectively repealing most of the 20th century.
The “Platform to Revitalize America” has it all figured out: Medicare would be privatized out of existence; Social Security eligibility would be restricted; while Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, food stamps, and child nutrition programs would all be gutted through state block grants.
The federal departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development would also all be eliminated. Pentagon spending, by the way, would not be touched.
See how easy it is to balance the federal budget in hardly any time at all?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 9, 2012
“Jim DeMint’s Doormat: GOP Presidential Nominee Only Needs Enough Working Digits To Handle A Pen
The most quoted speech at CPAC this year was Mitt Romney’s, but my vote for the most significant goes to Grover Norquist’s. In his charmingly blunt way, Norquist articulated out loud a case for Mitt Romney that you hear only whispered by other major conservative leaders.
They have reconciled themselves to a Romney candidacy because they see Romney as essentially a weak and passive president who will concede leadership to congressional conservatives:
All we have to do is replace Obama. … We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. … We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.
The requirement for president?
Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.
This is not a very complimentary assessment of Romney’s leadership. It’s also not a very realistic political program: congressional Republicans have a disapproval rating of about 75%. If Americans get the idea that a vote for Romney is a vote for the Ryan plan, Romney is more or less doomed.
To date, sad to say, Romney has worked hard to confirm this image of weakness.
Nobody wants a president who acts as the passive instrument of even generally popular groups like labor unions. (Did you know that—despite decades of declining popularity—unions still have an approval rating of 52%? I didn’t until I looked it up.)
But a candidate who appeases the most disliked people in national politics? That guy will command neither public affection nor respect.
Mitt Romney badly needs his Sister Souljah moment. Instead, he’s running as Jim DeMint’s doormat.
By: David Frum, The Daily Beast, February 13, 2012
CPAC: “Nattering Nabobs Of Negativism”
“How many of you,” Scott Rasmussen asked the crowd at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, “have ever mocked or made fun of the president’s call for hope and change? Raise your hands.”
Most people in the Marriott Wardman Park hotel ballroom raised their hands. There were cheers and whoops.
“With all due respect,” the conservative pollster and commentator told them, “I’d like to say that’s really stupid.”
This time, there was uncomfortable laughter. “Voters are looking for hope and change as much today as they were in 2008,” Rasmussen explained, and “you ought to be encouraging Republican candidates, people you support, to offer that positive step forward.”
Rasmussen had put his finger on a major problem for Republicans in 2012, and conservatives in particular: At a time when the national mood has begun to improve, they remain nattering nabobs of negativism. At CPAC, any hint of a “positive step” was buried in vitriol.
This worked well for Republicans in 2010, because it matched the sour mood of the electorate. But now, with optimism and confidence finally on the rise, Republicans are left with an anger management problem. They risk leaving the impression that they are rooting against an economic recovery.
Take, for example, the speech to CPAC by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. Among his criticisms of the Obama administration: It “made an art form out of the orchestrated attack”; it will “go after anybody or any organization they think is standing in their way”; it releases “the liberal thugs” on opponents; it “used the resources of the government itself to intimidate or silence those who question or oppose it”; it engages in “attacking private citizens or groups for the supposed crime of turning a profit”; it takes it on itself to “dig through other people’s tax returns”; and it has no higher priority “than picking on Fox News.”
“The president seems to have forgotten . . . that he was elected to be president of the United States, not the Occupy Wall Street fan club,” McConnell lectured, spitting out the words.
The unrelenting anger in the ballroom was an extension of what’s been happening on the campaign trail. In the week preceding the Florida Republican primary, 92 percent of the political ads were negative, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group. There was only one positive ad for Mitt Romney — and it was in Spanish.
The Republican candidates for president visited CPAC on Friday to deliver more of the same: “We’re going to win by making Barack Obama and his failed policies the issue in this race” (Rick Santorum); “History will record the Obama presidency as the last gasp of liberalism’s great failure” (Romney); and “My goal, with your help, is that by the time President Obama lands in Chicago, we will have repudiated at least 40 percent of his government on the opening day” (Newt Gingrich).
The dour message has contributed to low voter turnout and an enthusiasm gap among GOP voters — a worrisome development that the Washington Times’ Ralph Hallow tried to warn the CPAC participants about. “None of these things I see are particularly good,” he said during one of the conference panels. “Intensity and enthusiasm about voting is now with the Democrats.”
On the same CPAC panel, conservative activist Ralph Reed argued that “it isn’t going to be enough to be anti-Obama. . . . We have to have a forward-leaning, positive conservative reform agenda.”
But at the moment, the message remains backward-looking and negative. At CPAC, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) used his speech to decry a “totalitarian state that’s descending upon us” and to assert the existence of the administration’s “Stasi troops” — a reference to the East German secret police.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) claimed, “Our country has never been in as much trouble as we’re in today, and I’m not exaggerating.” Speaker John Boehner recalled his defiant stand against Obamacare on the House floor: “Hell no, you can’t!” And former presidential candidate Herman Cain argued that “stupid people are ruining America.”
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) even dismissed the significance of the death of Osama bin Laden, the fall of Moammar Gaddafi and the birth of the Arab Spring. They are “tactical successes” that pale against the “mess that Barack Obama has created,” she said.
On another CPAC panel, conservative commentators were asked to respond to conservative columnist David Brooks’s argument that Romney needs “to actually have some big policies” rather than “cruising on a bad economy.”
Radio host Roger Hedgecock disagreed. “We know that this economy is not recovering,” he said.
McConnell was similarly grim. “Last week’s jobs report happened in spite of the president’s policies, not because of them,” he told the gathering. “It’s the Obama economy now. And we’re not going to let people forget it.”
Such nattering is exactly what Obama needs.
The “Mau-Mauing” Of Mitt Romney
With Mitt Romney showing vulnerability yet again, it’s an interesting time to study the behavior of Republican elites. Most of them swarmed all over Newt Gingrich and denounced him as unacceptable after the South Carolina primary, when Gingrich had a window to win Florida and seize command of the race. In the course of doing so, many of them offered some kind words for Rick Santorum, who at the time was an also-ran. But you’re not seeing Party leaders try to rally around Santorum as the alternative to Romney. Instead they’re trying to jack up Romney for more policy concessions.
Romney’s plan for his campaign against Barack Obama is simple, and rooted in a clear-eyed reading of the data. He has one enormous asset, which is that Obama presided over an economic crisis. He wants to run against that. He does not want to run a campaign comparing the Republican vision to Obama’s vision, because Obama is both personally more popular than the Republicans, and his ideas are, in general, more popular as well. The House Republican budget is filled with wildly unpopular ideas — cutting taxes for the rich, privatizing and cutting Medicare, and deregulating Wall Street and the health insurance industry. Romney has endorsed the budget, which is now party scripture, but he does not want to run on it.
Conservative Republicans want to make sure that Romney isn’t just telling them what they want to hear only to get into office and govern the way he governed in Massachusetts. So they’re mau-mauing him, raking him over the coals for his timidity, and trying to force him to commit himself more publicly and openly to their agenda. The Wall Street Journal editorial page takes Romney to task today for proposing to index the minimum wage to inflation. (The minimum wage is set by law at a fixed dollar amount, so over time inflation erodes its value unless Congress passes regular increases.) Conservatives urge him to box out Santorum by adopting more right-wing position:
“There is not exactly Romney-mania right now,” Senate GOP Whip Jon Kyl told POLITICO, adding that the former Massachusetts governor “absolutely” must shore up the weaknesses with the GOP base that were on such vivid display Tuesday.
“Playing it safe, which Romney tends to do, is not going to get it for him,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a 2008 Romney supporter and a leading voice of his party’s conservative bloc, who called the results this week “a signal.”
And Paul Ryan, in a speech tonight to the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual Washington crazy-fest, prods Romney to abandon his strategy of running against Obama simply on the theme that the economy stinks:
I know there are people in this town who are terrified at the prospect of an election with real alternative visions at stake. “Make it a referendum. Win by default,” they say. “Just oppose — we can win that way. Don’t propose bold ideas — that’s too risky.” I’ll admit, the easy way is always tempting. But my friends, if that’s all we stand for, then what are we doing at here CPAC — the place where so many giants of our movement came to advance their boldest ideas? The next President will face fiscal and economic challenges that are huge, almost unprecedented. He can’t resolve these challenges if he wins by default. He needs a mandate — not just to displace Barack Obama, but to preserve and strengthen the very Idea of America.
This is, in fact, horrible advice. The bad economy is the only reason Republicans have a chance to defeat Obama in 2012, and Romney elevating the profile of Ryan’s ideas would be Obama’s best chance of hanging on if the recovery is still limping in November. Romney can still implement Ryan’s ideas if he wins without a mandate — look at George W. Bush in 2000, running as a compassionate, bipartisan critic of the GOP Congress, losing the popular vote, and implementing his agenda anyway.
I suspect conservatives don’t actually believe Romney needs to campaign on their ideas in order to implement them. They’d be perfectly happy with him running a stealth campaign, winning by being the out-party during a recession, and then implementing an agenda he soft-pedaled during the campaign. What they want is to ensure that Romney will really do it. So they’re trying to force him to shout it rather than whisper it. Once he wins the nomination, they’ll have no more leverage, so this is the time to make him do it.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 9, 2012
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