“Believe Me Because I Said So”: Mitt Romney Goes From Etch A Sketch To Sketchy
“Lead from behind” may be a sound bite the Obama administration regrets, but debating from behind is clearly something President Obama is very good at. He got the first debate’s wakeup call while Mitt Romney let the encounter in Denver mislead him into confusing petulance with strength.
For Obama’s supporters, the fact that the president played offense, had a strategy and seemed happy in his work was reason enough for elation. But the most electorally significant performance was Romney’s. Under pressure this time, the former Massachusetts governor displayed his least attractive sides. He engaged in pointless on-stage litigation of the debate rules. He repeatedly demonstrated his disrespect for both the president and Candy Crowley, the moderator. And Romney was just plain querulous when anyone dared question him about the gaping holes in his tax and budget plans.
Any high school debate coach would tell a student that declaring, “Believe me because I said so,” is not an argument. Yet Romney confused biography with specificity and boasting with answering a straightforward inquiry. “Well, of course, they add up,” Romney insisted of his budget numbers. “I — I was — I was someone who ran businesses for 25 years, and balanced the budget. I ran the Olympics and balanced the budget.” Romney was saying: Trust me because I’m an important guy who has done important stuff. He gave his listeners no basis on which to verify the trust he demanded.
Romney’s stonewalling was so obvious that it opened the way for one of Obama’s most effective lines of the evening: “If somebody came to you, Governor, with a plan that said, here, I want to spend $7 or $8 trillion, and then we’re going to pay for it, but we can’t tell you until maybe after the election how we’re going to do it, you wouldn’t have taken such a sketchy deal. And neither should you, the American people, because the math doesn’t add up.” Obama sought to make that point in the last debate. This time he had a metaphor and a story to go with the arithmetic.
Romney also covertly disclosed that he, like George W. Bush before him, has every intention of cutting taxes on the rich. Like Bush, he used stealthy language to try to achieve a great fiscal coverup.
Here was Romney on Tuesday: “I will not, under any circumstances, reduce the share that’s being paid by the highest-income taxpayers.” Here was Bush in 2000: “After my plan is in place, the wealthiest Americans will pay a higher percentage of taxes [than] they do today.”
This really matters: Romney intends, as Bush did, to push for steep tax cuts for the wealthy. His only pledge is that he’ll keep the share of the total tax take paid by the wealthy unchanged, presumably by reducing other taxes too. And this is supposed to lead to lower deficits? How?
The most instructive contrast between Debate I and Debate II was the extent to which Romney’s ideas crumbled at the slightest contact with challenge. Romney and Paul Ryan are erecting a Potemkin village designed to survive only until the polls close on Nov. 6. They cannot say directly that they really believe in slashing taxes on the rich and backing away from so much of what government does because they know that neither idea will sell. So they offer soothing language to the middle class, photo ops at homeless programs to convey compassion and a steady stream of attacks on Obama, aimed at shifting all the attention his way.
For his part, Obama looks strong when he calmly and methodically confronts the exceptionally large philosophical and practical differences that now divide the parties. He looks weak when he fuzzes up those differences in the hope of avoiding conflict. The fight is often asymmetric because Obama speaks for balance — between tax increases and spending cuts to reduce the deficit, between a thriving market and an active government — while today’s conservatives have no interest in balance.
In the first debate, Obama let Romney back into the race by failing to shake his opponent’s self-presentation. But Romney also put himself into contention by pretending to be a moderate, shelving his plutocratic side and hiding his party’s long-term objectives.
In the second debate, the disguise fell. Romney revealed more of himself than he wanted to and asked voters to endorse a radical tax-cutting program without providing them the details that matter. Sketchy is one word for this. Deceptive is another.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 17, 2012
“Paging Private Ryan”: Paul Ryan’s Congressional Opponent Say’s “Debate Me Next”
On the heels of last night’s vice-presidential debate, Paul Ryan’s Democratic opponent for his congressional seat wants a second round—while he sits in Biden’s chair.
Rob Zerban is facing a tough road to unseating Ryan, who won Wisconsin’s 1st district with over 68 percent of the vote in 2010—and the district has since been reapportioned to include even more Republicans.
Yet, the district is still fairly purple—Obama narrowly won it in 2008, and the redistricting only added a couple Republican points. Zerban has far outraised any other Ryan challenger over the years, though he still lags far behind Ryan in that category.
But most importantly, Zerban believes that by exposing Ryan’s radical views on the safety net—Zerban notably supports a Medicare-for-all plan, as opposed to Ryan’s partial privatization—he can win over voters in the district. He believes a debate would be the best chance to do that.
“After Paul Ryan’s performance last night, a lot of questions for me were answered about why he won’t come back to the district and debate,” Zerban told supporters on a conference call Friday afternoon. “We’ve seen that on a national stage that he cannot defend his extremely out-of-touch budget, which calls for killing Medicare and trying to transfer the cost of these programs to the back of senior citizens across this country. We can see that he can’t defend his $5 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest people in this nation, again shifting that cost onto the middle class, hardworking Americans across this country.
“I’m confident that by having Paul Ryan come back to the district and try to defend his positions, which we know are indefensible—the numbers don’t add up—if he were to come back and stand side-by-side with me on a stage, the choice would be so clear we’d have this race in the bag already.”
Every newspaper in the district has called on Ryan to come back and debate Zerban.
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee has backed Zerban and raised $124,000 for him, and has placed 42,000 calls into the district through it’s Call Out the Vote program. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has also placed Zerban in its red-to-blue fundraising drive.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, October 12, 2012
“Dealing With The Cavities”: The Romney-Ryan Tax Loophole Fantasy
One point I mentioned during the live blog of the debate last night which I think is worth reiterating (over and over again) regarding Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s refusal to give details on half of their tax plan—don’t be fooled by their refusal to fill out the details of their plan.
To recap: Romney has proposed a 20 percent across the board income tax cut, to cut corporate taxes, and repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax, among other things. He claims that he will make up the lost tax revenue by closing unspecified loopholes in the tax code. This is where the $5 trillion dispute comes from about Romney’s tax plan—his tax cuts are projected to cost around $5 trillion. He argues that it’s not fair to characterize his proposal as a $5 trillion tax cut because—you’ll have to take his word on this—he’s going to offset it by closing loopholes.
Why won’t he or Ryan name the loopholes they’d be willing to close in order to pay for their massive tax cut? Because in a giant act of bipartisan magnanimousness they want to work with Congress to decide which loopholes to close. There are two things going on here.
One is that this is the political equivalent of Romney and Ryan doling out heaps of candy to the public but then saying they’ll work with the Congress to determine precisely which teeth will have to be drilled to deal with the resulting cavities. They’re willing to give out very specific goodies, in other words, and then pretend they’re being brave bipartisans by letting Congress work out the painful details of paying for them. That’s neither brave nor bipartisan.
As TNR’s Noam Scheiber noted last night on Twitter:
Why would you be specific about lowering rates 20 percent but not offsets. Wouldn’t the first part make bipartisan compromise harder too?
If they’re so intent on working with Congress, why put a specific number on one side of the tax reform equation but not the other? Why not say the goal is to lower rates by however much eliminating deductions allows but that they’ll leave the details up to Congress? The reason goes back to the origin of Romney’s tax plan in February when he was trying to win the Republican nomination. Attempting to seem bold and Reaganesque, he proposed the 20 percent across-the-board tax cut. His emphasis then was on rate cuts, including for the rich. He wanted the big bold number. Now he has to backfill the details, which bring me to the other thing going on here.
Romney’s math doesn’t work. Tax loopholes have become the modern equivalent of wasteful spending–a generic and vastly overestimated pool of money politicians can cite as offsets for their expensive policies. The Congress’s nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found that if you repealed all itemized deductions from the tax code (as in goodbye mortgage interest deduction), it would only pay for a 4 percent cut in tax rates.
And more specifically to Romney’s plan, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (whose findings the Romney campaign used to tout), has run the numbers and figured out that the wealthy don’t currently get enough breaks in the tax code to pay for the Romney tax cuts. In order to pay for the cuts middle class taxpayers would have to lose expenditures—more than offsetting the tax breaks they would see.
And while Romney and Ryan have talked about a half-dozen independent “studies” which defend his tax plan, they are actually not studies at all—rather they’re three blog posts, an op-ed, and a couple of white papers, one of which was written by Romney’s own economic advisers. Oh, and they don’t actually back up his plan, according to The Atlantic’s Matthew O’Brien.
So understand that while Romney’s goal sounds good, it’s straight out of campaign fantasy land.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 12, 2012
Why Mitt Likes To Say “I Like”: Destroying The Things He Supposedly Likes
I’m not sure if I like the way Mitt Romney likes things. As the newly empathic candidate was promising to kill Big Bird at Wednesday’s debate, did you notice how he backed into it?
“I like PBS,” Romney started out. “I love Big Bird. I actually like you [to moderator Jim Lehrer] too. But I’m not going to—I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it. That’s number one.”
“Like” is a decaffeinated form of “love” when Mitt uses it, but it’s also a mild protest, a plea for understanding. He usually lays a slight stress on the word, as if he’s revealing some vaguely surprising truth—“You may see me as an unfeeling, uncaring, bottom-line guy, but let me tell you, I enjoy life. I like things.” This man, who is so buttoned-up he can’t be honest about what he’s running on—like whether or not he’d cut taxes for the rich or cover pre-existing conditions in his health plan—uses like to establish his personal bona fides. I’m like you, he’s saying, I have “likes.”
Of course, it helps that like is such a flexible word, meaning “similar,” “approve” and just acting as a rhetorical placeholder, like, well, whatever. Mitt does like (indeed, he requires) a certain flexibility about what he means when he uses words. And because some of his most awkward moments during the campaign have hung from his “I like” tic, you have to wonder what he’s really saying:
“I like grits,” he said, “Strange things are happening to me.”
“I like seeing the lakes. I love the lakes. There’s something very special here. The Great Lakes, but also all the little inland lakes that dot the parts of Michigan…”
At Wednesday’s debate, we learned a few more of Mitt’s most likable things:
“And by the way, I like coal.”
“I like the way we did it in Massachusetts. I like the fact that in my state, we had Republicans and Democrats come together and work together.”
“Now, I like green energy as well…”
And it’s true, all those things are meant to be slightly surprising, particularly when listed by a man at a podium who’s running for president, and worthy of the faint stress he lays upon the word. He’s often pandering, as any politician will. But I also think Mitt is working hard to redefine the word. The most famous example is, of course:
“I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” And as PBS, Big Bird, and surely now even Jim Lehrer know, every man destroys the thing he likes.
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, October 7, 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
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