“Mitt Romney Enjoys Your Pain”: Normal People Don’t Smile About Unemployment
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s reaction to high unemployment is creepy.
During an interview with CBS reporter Jan Crawford last week, Romney smirked as he mentioned that unemployment has remained above 8 percent for 39 months. Then, as the interview ended, he smirked again after saying President Obama had hoped the Recovery Act would reduce joblessness to 6 percent by now.
Romney is loving high unemployment. Just like the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives that has repeatedly blocked President Obama’s proposals to increase hiring, Romney believes high joblessness is good for the GOP. It’s one thing for a politician to know in his heart of hearts that a calamity for the country may help him achieve his ambitions. It’s another to be so callous as to beam about it on TV.
The nation’s sustained high unemployment disheartens any normal human being. Friday’s report that only 69,000 jobs were created in May was troubling — that is, to anyone who has ever been laid off or had a friend or relative or neighbor who lost a job. They know the feelings of fear, depression and guilt that accompany job loss. They’ve experienced the suffering as job applications are rejected, bills pile up and foreclosure is threatened. Normal people don’t smile about high unemployment; they cringe.
Romney contends he’s the fella to fix those unemployment numbers. But his record as CEO of Bain Capital and governor of Massachusetts provides little evidence of that. The focus of Bain was never job creation. It was money making. And if making money meant destroying jobs, that’s what Bain did.
An analysis by the Wall Street Journal of the companies Bain bought in the 15 years Romney ran it found that 22 percent went bankrupt or closed within eight years. That’s untold thousands of workers who lost their jobs and untold thousands of Bain creditors who endured losses because of bad Bain business practices.
Romney has frequently contended Bain created 100,000 jobs while he led it. The Washington Post fact checker awarded that claim three Pinocchios. After Republican rivals Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry chanted, “show us the jobs,” Romney lowered the number. Kinda significantly. Down to tens of thousands of jobs. Finally, Romney cut the figure even further, releasing a campaign video saying he’d created “thousands of jobs.”
If “thousands” is true, that’s good. But, frankly, “thousands” over 15 years is hardly a bragging point for a candidate who contends his private sector experience will enable him to create the millions of jobs the nation needs.
Romney’s job generation as governor of Massachusetts doesn’t instill much confidence in his ability to perform on the national level either. Massachusetts added 45,800 jobs in the four years he was governor. While that’s positive, it occurred during a time of economic expansion nationally, not during the grave recession President Obama inherited.
In addition, Massachusetts’ net jobs growth declined to 1.4 percent during Romney’s governorship, significantly lower than the 5.8 percent growth in the rest of the nation. In fact, Massachusetts dropped to 47th for job growth during Romney’s reign, far lower than during his predecessor’s time.
Romney claimed at one point during the campaign that he was unemployed, and laughed about it. But this quarter billionaire doesn’t have a clue what it’s like to really be jobless or desperate. This is the silver-spoon son of a car company executive, a man who attended exclusive private schools, a man who handed his own son $10 million to help start his business, a man who has a car elevator in his $9 million California beach house.
This is a candidate who mocked NASCAR fans for wearing cheap rain slickers while his wife wears $1,000 silk t-shirts. This is an owner of three homes valued at a total of $20 million who opposed helping underwater homeowners, saying the foreclosure crisis should “run its course and hit bottom.”
This is a man who actually said he likes to fire people. Not hire people. Fire people. Here’s what he said:
“I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”
The slow jobs growth in May is not surprising, frankly, considering the economic contraction occurring in Europe and even in China. In the 17-nation Eurozone, unemployment now has risen to a record 11 percent, far higher than in the United States where Obama’s Recovery Act prevented the country from falling off the cliff into another Great Depression.
Unlike the United States and China, both of which invested in stimulus, Europe chose austerity. Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland and Great Britain now are suffering economic contraction and distress caused by austerity.
That’s what Romney and the Republicans propose for America. Austerity. Job contraction. Recession. Suffering.
It’s not true what Romney says about Americans. They aren’t jealous of his wealth. They don’t care that he and his wife ride $100,000 horses. They just want to be able to afford a rocking horse for their kid. They don’t care about the Romneys’ vacations in France. They just want to be able to save enough to get the kids a season pass to the municipal pool.
They don’t, however, want their country run by a guy who can’t conceive what it’s like to be unemployed and has made no effort to find out. They don’t want to be led by a guy who likes firing people. They don’t want a president who finds enjoyment in high unemployment.
BY: Leo W. Gerard, The Huffington Post, June 4, 2012
“We’ve Heard it All Before”: Hey Mitt, You Can’t Cry For Teacher When You Started The Fight
The latest attack from the Obama campaign takes aim on Romney’s rhetoric and record in Massachusetts.
The latest Obama campaign ad—which will air mainly in swing states—continues the attack on Mitt Romney’s record in Massachusetts: http://youtu.be/oWdZEJW1vWY
This attack goes directly to the heart of Romney’s presidential campaign. The Republican nominee has based his entire on argument on the claim that—by dint of his business experience—he is uniquely qualified to lead the country into a more robust recovery. Indeed, private sector experience has totemic properties in Romney’s narrative; Obama is a failure because he’s “never met a payroll” and “doesn’t understand the economy,” while Romney sees business as the most important qualification a president can have.
But, with a quote from Romney’s gubernatorial campaign—“I know how jobs are created”—the Obama campaign raises a basic question: When Romney ran for governor of Massachusetts he used his business experience as proof he could create jobs for Massachusetts, instead, he led the state to the bottom of the pack for job creation. Now, running for president, he’s using the same arguments. Why should we expect different results this time? This is a play on the familiar trope of the businessperson who talks more than they deliver, and it could be an effective assault on Romney’s perceived competence, especially if paired with continued attacks on Bain Capital.
The Romney campaign has had an interesting and familiar response to this attack. As Pema Levy points out at Talking Points Memo, the Romney team correctly hits Obama for neglecting the extent to which the former governor inherited a bad situation. Here’s Ed Gillespie, a surrogate for the Romney campaign:
“This is what they’re doing, Chris,” Gillespie said. “You take the first year, which is a low base year when the governor came in and took office, because it was 50th in job creation out of all of the states, dead last … and they’re averaging out over the four years. So, they are bringing down the gains of his fourth year in office, which shows the real impact of his policies and diluting it with the first year in office.”
This is exactly what the Romney campaign is doing with regards to Obama’s economic record. By blaming Obama for job losses that occurred before his policies passed or took effect, the Romney team is able to say that the United States lost jobs under his tenure. But if you count from when Obama’s policies took effect, then you end up with more than two years of private sector job growth.
This situation is similar to the one that developed last year, when the Romney team hammered Obama with a deeply misleading ad that took the president’s words out of context. When Democrats responded with their own set of context-free attacks, the Romney campaign cried foul. In other words, if the Romney campaign insists on using misleading attacks, then it has to expect that the same treatment in response. You can’t cry for teacher when you’re the one who started the fight.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, June 4, 2012
“A Service To The Nation”: Obama Has The Right And Duty To Highlight Romney’s Record
Has the Obama Campaign Gone Too Negative?
Your question presumes “negative campaigns” are a problem. Like everything else they can go too far, but negative campaigning began with the very first elections. In ancient Rome, Cicero railed against his opponents for incest with a sister, debauchery with actors, thuggery with gladiators, not to mention child molestation with boys so young they were “almost in their parents’ laps.” In our first presidential election, Thomas Jefferson’s opponents argued that if he were elected, “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced…” In our more genteel times, such attacks would be far out of bounds.
Negative campaigning happens because it works. It works in part because negative information is useful. We naturally look for the negative. When an employer rummages through a pile of resumes, she is looking for the easy disqualification, the reason to discard a few candidates. Unlike their more pleasant, positive counterparts, negative ads tend to include at least one verifiable fact. While positive ads often feature a candidate, jacket slung over a shoulder, mouthing platitudes in the company of an adoring family, negative ads describe votes cast, positions taken, failed efforts, and values forsaken.
Our brains are wired to weigh this kind of information heavily. Decades of research in psychology demonstrates that negative information is processed more quickly and more deeply than positive information, providing a biological basis for negative campaigns. They conform to human nature.
So-called negative campaigning isn’t all bad—and sometimes it’s both fair and necessary. The natural state of an election involving an incumbent president is to be a referendum on that incumbent—an up or down vote on the individual occupying the Oval Office. That’s not only unfair to the president, its unhealthy for the country. Elections actually confront us with choices, choices between two different individuals with different histories, different philosophies, different values, and different platforms. Voters should think of the campaign as a choice.
Bringing former Gov. Mitt Romney’s faults to the fore helps the American people see this election as the choice it is. That’s both good for the president and good for the country. As long as the blows aren’t below the belt and focus on what former Governor Romney has done, what he believes, and what he will do, there is nothing at all untoward about the tack taken by the president’s campaign. In fact, it’s a service to the nation.
“Elizabeth Warren Is No Martha Coakely”: Another Imaginary Democratic Crisis, In Massachusetts
If you’ve been following either conservative or MSM coverage of the Massachusetts Senate race, you are probably under the impression that the recent brouhaha over Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren’s occasional self-identification as a Native American has taken over the contest and vastly boosted Scott Brown’s prospects for reelection.
Now comes a new poll from Suffolk showing (a) Warren making significant gains since the last Suffolk poll in February, and (b) voters not paying much attention to the “Cherokee” flap, despite saturation coverage in local and national media.
The Politico story on the poll by David Catanese notes that respondents adjudged it as “not a significant story” by a 69-27 margin. A lot of this sentiment reflects the usual partisan polarization, but if you look at the crosstabs, self-identified independents (over half the sample) called the story insignificant by a 66-29 margin, and even 40% of Republicans didn’t think it mattered.
That’s pretty interesting, since anyone reading the Boston Herald the last few weeks would have though the “controversy” doomed Warren, doomed affirmative action, and doomed Barack Obama, the supposed beneficiary of affirmative action.
As Catanese notes, the poll is generating sighs of relief from Democrats in Massachusetts and in Washington, particularly given the general impression that Warren’s campaign hasn’t handled the attacks terribly well:
The Suffolk poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent, produced a result similar to an internal poll taken by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to quash speculation that Warren was hemorrhaging support due to the ancestry flap.
The DSCC survey, taken by Harstad Strategic Research May 8-10, resulted in a deadlocked race at 46 percent.
While Republicans argue that Brown has been outspent by Warren on advertising over the past month, Democrats are heartened by the pair of surveys showing the damage to their candidate to be minimal.
“When you look at the last month or so that Elizabeth Warren has had, you have to say she weathered the storm. The fact that she’s picked up 8 points shows she’s a better candidate than people think, a more resilient candidate than some would’ve thought,” said Boston-based Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh.
There’s a long way to go until November, but it’s increasingly likely that Warren will be able to get back on track and on message, promoting economic themes where she has a natural advantage over Brown. In the end, MA is a heavily Democratic state; Scott Brown is in the Senate thanks to a flukey victory in the general election; and as a candidate, Elizabeth Warren is no Martha Coakely.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 24, 2012
“The Governor Behind The Curtain”: Bain Capital Is Not Just Fair Game, It’s Beyond Fair Game
Obama supporters are seething and the RNC is dancing with delight in the aftermath of Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s nonsensical comparison of ads exposing Mitt Romney’s real record on job creation with racially tinged attacks on Barack Obama’s former pastor.
The RNC thinks that it caught the Dems with their pants down, inadvertently admitting that Romney’s work at Bain Capital should be off limits. But the indisputable fact is that Romney’s experience at Bain is completely fair game — Romney himself made that choice when he decided to present it as his chief qualification for the presidency. In fact, it’s beyond fair game: if this election is truly about jobs and the economy, then Bain is one of the only games in town.
Romney, attempting to shed his record as Massachusetts governor as fast as he can, has chosen to run almost exclusively on his record as a “job creator” at Bain. Pay no attention to the governor behind the curtain, whose state ranked 47th of 50 states in job creation during his term! In the process, he’s mixed up some of his “job creation” numbers and cherry-picked the facts he’s chosen to tell the American people. Romney keeps telling us his side of the Bain story. But are we to completely ignore the very real stories of factories shut down and American jobs lost? Let’s hear all sides of the story. Isn’t that what elections are all about?
And let’s also have an honest conversation about whether or not Romney’s success in making money for investors through his position at Bain qualifies him to be president. Venture capital and private equity have a role to play in our economy. But making money for investors doesn’t mean that you know how to make the economy work for all Americans. As President Obama pointed out yesterday, the goal of a private equity firm is to create wealth, not jobs — most often, to make as much money as possible for a few investors. The goal of a president needs to be an economy that works for everybody. That’s a critical difference.
Both candidates agree that this election is about the fundamental direction that our country will take for the next four years. We should embrace this. How about this simple concept: Let’s have that full debate about all aspects of the relevant experience of both candidates and let the voters decide.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, May 22, 2012
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