“Republican Playbook”:The Politics Of Fear And The Party Of Non-Voters
The latest Pew Research Center poll shows Mitt Romney ahead of President Barack Obama among likely voters, 49% to 45%. But the latest Gallup poll shows the President Obama leading Romney among likely voters, 50% to 45%.
What gives? The Pew poll covered the days immediately following last Wednesday’s presidential debate. It didn’t include last weekend. The Gallup poll, by contrast, included the weekend — after September’s jobs report showed unemployment down to 7.8 percent for the first time in more than three years.
So it’s fair to conclude the bump the President received from the jobs report bump made up for the bump Romney got from the debate. No surprise that voters care more about jobs than they do about debate performance.
But don’t be misled. The race has tightened up.
Moreover, polls of “likely voters” are notoriously imprecise because they reflect everyone who says they’re likely to vote – including those who hope to but won’t, as well as those who won’t but don’t want to admit it.
Remember: The biggest party in America is neither Democrats nor Republicans. It’s the party of non-voters — a group that outnumbers the other two.
So the real question is which set of potential supporters is more motivated on Election Day (or via absentee ballot) to bother to vote.
The biggest motivator in this election isn’t enthusiasm about either of the candidates. The Republican base has never particularly liked Romney, and many Democrats have been disappointed in Obama.
The biggest motivator is fear of the other guy.
There’s clear reason for Democrats and Independents to fear Romney and Ryan — their reverse Robin-Hood budgets that take from the poor and middle class and reward the rich; their determination to do away with Medicare and Medicaid, as well as Dodd-Frank constraints on Wall Street, and ObamaCare; their opposition to abortion even after rape or incest, and rejection of equal marriage rights; their support for “profiling” immigrants; and their disdain of the “47 percent,” to name a few.
And the thought of the next Supreme Court justices being picked by someone who thinks corporations are people should strike horror in the mind of any thinking American.
Yet Romney is such a chameleon that in last Wednesday’s debate he appeared to disavow everything he’s stood for, hide many of his former positions, and even sound somewhat moderate.
Meanwhile, for four years the GOP and its auxiliaries in Fox News and yell radio have told terrible lies about our president – charging he wasn’t born in America, he’s a socialist, he doesn’t share American values. They’ve disdained and disrespected President Obama in ways no modern president has had to endure.
They’re drummed up fear in a public battered by an economic crisis Republicans largely created, while hiding George W. Bush so we won’t be reminded. And they’ve channeled that fear toward President Obama and even to the central institutions of our democracy, casting his administration and our government as the enemy.
They’ve apparently convinced almost half of America of their lies – including many who would suffer most under Romney and Ryan.
Republicans are well practiced in the politics of fear and the logistics the big lie. The challenge for Obama and Biden and for the rest of us over the next four weeks is to counter their fearsome lies with the truth.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, October 9, 2012
“Caught In A Bind”: Taxes Are Certain, But What About Mitt Romney’s Cuts?
Republican Mitt Romney started his campaign calling for big tax cuts, but now he has changed course. He’s warning middle-class families not to raise their hopes too high.
Romney couldn’t have been more emphatic than he was last November at a candidates’ debate in Michigan.
“What I want to do is help the people who’ve been hurt the most, and that’s the middle class,” he said. “And so what I do is focus a substantial tax break on middle-income Americans.”
He put a middle-class tax cut at the top of his priority list: a 20 percent reduction in tax rates across the board.
“Right now, let’s get the job done first that has to be done immediately. Let’s lower the tax rates on middle-income Americans,” he said.
Then, at a debate in Tampa this January, Romney got a little more specific.
“The real question people are gonna ask is, who’s going to help the American people at a time when folks are having real tough times? And that’s why I’ve put forward a plan to eliminate the tax on savings for middle-income Americans,” he said. “Anyone making under $200,000 a year, I would eliminate the tax on interest, dividends and capital gains.”
Shaking Up Tax Plans
But then came Romney’s victory in the primaries, and a new set of goals to meet.
“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes,” campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said on CNN. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”
Romney shook up his plans on the tax cuts. He still wanted to lower the tax rates, but now he was more emphatic about the need for tax changes to be revenue-neutral.
In September, he had words of caution for the crowd that filled the gym at a suburban Ohio high school.
“By the way, don’t be expecting a huge cut in taxes, because I’m also going to lower deductions and exemptions,” he said.
In other words, your tax rate might be lower, but your taxable income might be higher. He elaborated in the Wednesday night debate with President Obama.
“I will not, under any circumstances, raise taxes on middle-income families. I will lower taxes on middle-income families,” he said.
But he avoided details. He said he would work with Congress, and he quickly moved to talk about another goal: lowering the tax rate for small-business people.
“If we lower that rate, they will be able to hire more people. For me, this is about jobs,” he said.
Will The Tax Cut Stick?
As the campaign goes on, Romney gives the tax cuts more and more to do: Help the middle class, produce more jobs, keep the same amount of money flowing into the government, and more.
At the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, research fellow Michael Strain says Romney has plenty of tax variables he can adjust.
“There are a lot of different levers to pull here. You have the marginal tax rates, you have the amount of income that’s subject to taxation, you have the amount of income that you can deduct from your gross income to calculate your taxable income,” Strain says.
Is a middle-class tax cut possible with everything else? Strain thinks it is.
“In order to do that, you would have to have a specific plan. And we haven’t seen that from Gov. Romney yet,” he says.
But at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, co-director William Gale says Romney is caught in a bind.
“He has made a set of proposals that are jointly impossible to fulfill. And so something has to give,” he says.
It may be that what’s giving — as Romney told the crowd in Ohio — is the middle-class tax cut.
By: Peter Overby, NPR, October 7, 2012
“The Usual Litany Of Bogus Economic Promises”: Romney Avoids Social Issues On The Campaign Trail
Colorado is supposed to be Mitt Romney’s most promising major swing state. According to Politico’s Mike Allen, Republicans’ internal polls show Romney ahead in Colorado, even as they acknowledge that he has fallen behind in Florida, Ohio and Nevada. Other Republican-leaning polls, such as Rasmussen Reports, show Romney with a slight edge here, although Rasmussen’s most recent poll is two weeks old. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows Obama ahead in Colorado by three points, which is consistent with Virginia and Florida, but smaller than Obama’s commanding leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa.
But Colorado presents Romney with a challenge. In order to win it he must simultaneously appeal to three constituencies: the ardent conservatives—both religious social conservatives and current and retired military personnel—in the Colorado Springs area, the more economically focused Republicans in the Denver suburbs and at least half of the state’s large independent electorate.
The Romney campaign is aware of the importance of the state’s nine electoral votes. Romney has already visited the state repeatedly, and in advance of Wednesday night’s debate in Denver his campaign has scheduled a series of events. Ann Romney will hold a rally here on Tuesday and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) will hold one on Wednesday. On Monday night, Romney spoke in a warplane museum—Republicans seem to love that as a setting for campaign stops—in Denver. It was apparent from Romney’s remarks that he is carefully trying to balance the aforementioned constituencies. But, ultimately, he is betting that he already has the most ardent conservatives in his pocket and so he avoids any mention of his party’s polarizing stance on social issues.
Romney was introduced by John Elway, the legendary Denver Broncos quarterback, who just endorsed Romney. In what passes by Romney’s standards as regular guy sports talk, Romney effused, “You guys have some real teams here, no doubt about that!” He then went on to list to the Denver area’s other assets: “This is the home of the Air Force Academy, of NORAD, that helps keep our skies safe, home to great universities.” It appeared not to have dawned on Romney, nor his enthusiastically clapping audience, that the US military is a government program and that Colorado’s universities are all either public or draw heavily upon federal support for student tuition and research. But the biggest applause by far came when Romney said, “and it’s the home of Focus on the Family.” (The socially conservative advocacy organization, like NORAD and the Air Force Academy, is based in Colorado Springs, about an hour from Denver.)
Given the subtle signal his crowd sent—that these are what used to be called “family values” voters—you might have expected Romney to talk about how he plans to stifle gay marriage, appoint judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade and free Catholic organizations from covering employees’ health insurance for contraception.
But no. Romney delivered his usual litany of vague, bogus economic promises. He will simultaneously increase free trade and get tough on China. He will hand out drilling rights on federal land like it’s candy, and somehow that will create millions of jobs by magically bringing back the manufacturing sector thanks to cheap energy. He will defenestrate teachers unions, so that our workforce is better educated and cut spending to balance the budget. And by extending the Bush tax cuts he will make small businesses grow and then they will go on a hiring spree. Isn’t Romney lucky that every long-held Republican plot to please a group of Republican donors, or antagonize a group of Democratic donors, is also sure to induce economic growth?
In case the message were not clear enough, there were giant letters behind Romney’s lectern: “J-O-B-S.” The only supplement to his economic message was a nauseating pander to Colorado’s large military population. Romney attacked the sequestration defense spending cuts that President Obama agreed to with the Republican Congress, and for which his own running mate, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), voted. “It will cost thousands of jobs here, and millions of jobs across the country,” Romney complained.
Millions of jobs? That sounded exaggerated to me. And sure enough, it is. Romney did not cite a source. Knowing Romney, he may have simply made it up out of thin air. But most likely he is referring to a report by the Aerospace Industries Association, which claimed, “A total of 1,090,359 jobs with a total labor income of $46.5 billion would be lost due to DOD budget cuts in FY 2012-FY 2013.” However, as the Brookings Institution explained, the AIA estimate is totally bogus. (This should come as no surprise, given AIA’s vested interest in the subject.) As Brookings notes, the AIA is predicting that a 10 percent cut to defense spending will lead to one-third of all jobs in the defense and aeronautics industries being eliminated. This is extraordinarily unlikely, especially in light of the fact that not even all of those jobs are defense-related.
But even if what Romney said were true, it’s a disgusting sentiment. We should spend everyone else’s hard-earned tax dollars on building weapons simply to keep people employed? This is wasteful big government at its absolute worst.
“I do not believe in shrinking the military,” declared Romney. “I believe it should be second to none in the world.” Romney did not bother to explain why the sequestration cuts would make the US military lose its spot as number one in the world. Nor did he say who would replace us. The United States spends about six times as much as its nearest competitor, China. So it would still vastly outspend China if the sequestration cuts do occur.
Romney’s effort to tie his views on military spending to his economic pitch was a vague statement that “we need a strong economy to support a strong military.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “We need strong homes.”
And that was about it, as far as social conservatism was concerned. Not a single one of the infamous “three Gs”—God, guns and gays—that Republicans once used to peel away working-class and rural white voters appeared in the speech. There was no mention of abortion or stem cell research. The only time Romney came to close to mentioning any of that was when he claimed, “The founders [had a] great insight that rights come from the Creator, not the government.” That’s a nonsensical false dichotomy: the founders saw fit to enshrine those same rights in the Constitution, the basis of their new government. But Romney was not trying to be historically accurate. His purpose was to nod to theocrats while wrapping even his token religious reference into an argument for small government. Except for military spending, everything with Romney comes back to fiscal conservatism.
That may not please of all his supporters. A young woman named Carol whom I met on the way into the speech said she likes Romney “because he is a conservative like me, he is pro-life, like me.” But you would never know Romney opposes abortion rights from hearing him speak. Lee Ann Barnhart, a middle-aged mother in attendance, told me that she was disappointed that social issues were never mentioned. Still, she is growing to like Romney, she said. (She supported Gingrich during the primaries.)
Romney’s calculation is clearly that he can count on these voters coming out for him in opposition to Obama, and so he can avoid reminding swing voters of the Republican War on Women. It’s probably wise politics. But Democrats devoted much of their convention to making sure women are not fooled. The question now is whether that message gets through.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, October 2, 2012
“Truly Transformative”: Why The Stimulus Made America Better Off Four Years Later
President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on February 17, 2009, with the hopes of jump-starting a depressed U.S. economy and initiating his agenda for healthcare, energy, and education. Larger in constant dollars than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Obama’s stimulus is one of the most misunderstood pieces of legislation in U.S. history, says Time journalist Michael Grunwald. The author of The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era recently spoke to U.S. News about why Republicans were so successful in their campaign against the bill, and why Americans don’t understand how truly transformative it was. Excerpts:
Why did Obama pursue the Recovery Act?
The economy had fallen off a cliff, and in the past, this idea that when the private sector shuts down, the public sector needs to step up was totally uncontroversial. Bush had passed a stimulus bill with overwhelming bipartisan support when the economy started to go soft in 2008. All the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates had their own stimulus plans in 2008. Mitt Romney’s was actually the largest. And House Republicans, including Paul Ryan, voted in 2009 for a $715 billion alternative to the stimulus that was quite similar to President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus. It was never really clear how the Republican plan could be good public policy and how Obama’s pretty similar policy was radical socialism.
While the Recovery Act was partly about recovery, it was also really the purest distillation of what Obama meant when he talked about change we can believe in, in terms of transforming energy, starting to reduce healthcare costs, reforming education with things like Race to the Top, and then the largest infrastructure investments, the largest middle-class tax cuts since Reagan, the largest research investments ever. That’s the new New Deal.
Why does the stimulus have such a bad rap?
First, you have to say that the Republicans did a brilliant job of completely distorting the substance of the bill. They turned this into an $800 billion boondoggle that was full of levitating trains to Disneyland and mob museums and snow-making machines in Duluth and all kinds of nonsense that wasn’t actually in the bill. They’ve been very disciplined and unified in portraying this as just a big mess. This thing was just hard to sell at a time when the financial earthquake had hit but the economic tsunami hadn’t reached the shore. It wasn’t like when FDR took office after three years of depression, so everybody knew it was Hoover’s depression. But Obama took office during a freefall, and January 2009 was the worst month for job losses. And then he passed the stimulus, and then the next quarter was the biggest jobs improvement in 30 years, but it improved from absolutely hideous to just bad, and it’s hard to sell a jobs bill when the job situation is bad.
What was the value of programs that weren’t necessarily shovel-ready?
After a financial meltdown, the recoveries are always going to be long and slow. That’s one reason the money was spread out over several years. Right up front they wrote big checks to states to help governors balance their budgets without doing mass layoffs of public employees and mass cutbacks of Medicaid spending on the poor. Tax cuts went out quickly to get money into people’s pockets. So all that stuff was obviously shovel-ready; you just shovel the money out the door. Then you had some stuff that really wasn’t supposed to be all that shovel-ready at all, like building the world’s largest wind farm or bringing our pen-and-paper healthcare system into the digital age, or building high-speed rail lines. It was always understood that those were going to take longer. The idea was that even if it wasn’t shovel-ready, it was shovel-worthy.
How are Republicans using the stimulus against President Obama?
Republicans had always supported stimulus up until January 20, 2009, and most of what’s in the stimulus were things that had always enjoyed plenty of bipartisan support. Highway spending and unemployment benefits and middle-class tax cuts and even clean energy, but of course Republicans had decided before that that they were in absolute lock-step opposition. They couldn’t have clean bipartisan support. They had to portray him as a radical partisan.
Why should Mitt Romney read this book?
What Republicans can learn from this is that a lot of the things they’ve been trashing as big government nonsense have actually had an effect.
Are Americans better off than they were four years ago?
I think the answer is yes. What people forget is just how catastrophic our situation was four years ago. Gaining 150,000 jobs isn’t that great, but it’s way better than losing 800,000. And that’s always going to be the difficulty for Obama: selling the notion that things could have been worse, and that things were worse.
By: Teresa Welsh, U. S. News and World Report, September 7, 2012
“A Sensible Plan, An Obstructionist GOP”: The American Jobs Act One Year Later
On September 8, 2011 — exactly one year ago tomorrow — President Obama delivered an important speech to a joint session of Congress. In it, the president unveiled a proposal he called the American Jobs Act.
You may recall the economic circumstances at the time, and how similar they are to 2012 — though job growth looked strong in the early months of the year, the summer proved disappointing. Obama sought to shift the national conversation away from austerity and towards job creation, and presented a sensible plan, filled with ideas that have traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support.
Independent analysis projected the American Jobs Act, which was fully paid for, could create as many as 2 million jobs in 2012.
I mention this now because what happened a year ago is incredibly relevant to what’s happening now. This morning’s jobs report was disappointing, and we know exactly how the political world will digest the news — if the job market is underperforming, it’s Obama who’ll get the blame.
There’s not much I can do to change the course of that conversation, but if we’re going to play the blame game, we should at least try to keep some semblance of reality in mind.
The American electorate was clamoring for action on jobs; the Obama White House crafted a credible plan that would be helping enormously right now; and congressional Republicans reflexively killed the Americans Jobs Act for partisan and ideological reasons.
With this recent history in mind, how are we to assign responsibility for high unemployment? Should we condemn the person who threw the job market a life preserver, or those who pushed it away? Or put another way, are we better off now as a result of Republican obstructionism and intransigence, or would we have been better off if the popular and effective job-creation measures had been approved?
By any reasonable measure, the GOP argument, which will be trumpeted loudly today, is completely incoherent — they were wrong a year ago and now we’re paying the price.
As we talked about in June, for Republicans, when there’s discouraging economic news, Obama deserves all the blame. When there’s good economic news, Obama deserves none of the credit. Job losses in 2010 were Obama’s fault; job gains in early 2011 and 2012 have nothing do to with Obama; and tepid growth in the spring of 2012 are back to being Obama’s fault again.
Remember learning the “heads I win, tails you lose” game as a kid? It’s the GOP’s argument in a nutshell — whether the president deserves credit or blame for a monthly jobs report is due entirely to whether the report is encouraging or not.
But even this doesn’t go far enough in explaining the absurdity on display. If we’re going to assign blame to Washington policymakers for the state of the nation’s job market, how is it, exactly, that Congress bears no responsibility at all? This is, after all, a Republican-led Congress that has plenty of time to fight a culture war — I’ve lost count of the anti-abortion bills that have reached the House floor — but has shown passive disinterest to the jobs crisis.
Follow this pattern of events:
1. With the job market struggling, Obama unveils the American Jobs Act, a State of the Union agenda filled with economic measures, and an economic “to-do list.”
2. Republican lawmakers ignore the proposals, and the job market deteriorates.
3. The GOP then blames Obama for the failure his policies, which Congress didn’t pass.
The accepted truth this morning is that weak job numbers are absolute, concrete, incontrovertible proof that the president’s jobs agenda isn’t working. News flash: we aren’t trying Obama’s jobs agenda.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 7, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 