Tone Deaf Mitt Romney Lacks The Common Touch
As is the case with many politicians, Mitt Romney’s greatest strength is also his biggest weakness. His experience as a corporate executive should make him a good presidential candidate in a year when the economy is bad. However, while the former liberal and former governor of Massachusetts can speak fluently about the economic big picture he is completely tone deaf when he tries to relate to the middle class families who are hurting so badly.
Romney can’t even relate to the average race fan. Yesterday, at the Daytona 500 track, a reporter asked him if he followed NASCAR. Romney said he didn’t follow the sport “as closely as some ardent fans, but I have some friends who are NASCAR team owners.” That’s Romney’s problem in a nutshell. He knows the owners of most corporations but doesn’t know any of the employees.
Friday, speaking in Detroit, which is the poorest city in America, Romney told voters that his wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.” Romney could promise to put two Cadillacs in every garage but it wouldn’t have the same ring as Herbert Hoover pledging to put a single chicken in every pot.
Last June, Romney told voters, “I’m also unemployed.” It’s easier for Romney to be unemployed than other people since he has stashed millions of dollars in bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. If he keeps talking like that he’ll still be unemployed next year.
Last August he told an Iowan, “Corporations are people, my friend.” If corporations are people, why isn’t the investment firm Goldman Sachs doing a long stretch in a federal pen for defrauding thousands of investors?
Instead of sympathy from the former Bain capitalist, voters get a 59 point economic plan and power point presentations. Then, of course, he asked Texas Gov. Rick Perry to agree to a casual $10,000 bet. I could go on and on, but I don’t have the space here to chronicle every misstep Romney has made when he tries to relate to working families.
Romney’s platform betrays his background as much as his personality.
Mitt supported the Wall Street bailout for bankers and billionaires but opposed the GM bailout that saved the jobs of thousands of auto workers.
Mitt supports the Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget which decreases federal spending for financial assistance for seniors who can’t afford to heat their homes but preserves the federal freebies to big oil to the tune of $4 billion a year.
Romney, like many other prominent politicians, is of the manor born. But Mitt, unlike the others, never developed the common touch. Franklin Delano Roosevelt came from the same privileged background as Romney, but he could talk to an assembly line worker or a farmer without sounding patronizing. When Bill Clinton told Americans in 1992 that “I feel your pain,” he meant it because he had felt the pain as a boy growing up in a poor town in Arkansas. In contrast Clinton’s opponent, the patrician president George H. W. Bush didn’t even know what a super market scanner was.
You can take Mitt out of the manor but you can’t take the manor out of Mitt.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, February 27, 2012
A Gasoline Conspiracy To Set Fire To The Obama Administration?
I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist as it is not my inclination to see evil lurking behind every bush (no pun intended.) More times than not, things are—for the most part—pretty much as they appear to be.
However, there is a strange anomaly occurring on the highways of America and in the boardrooms of some of our largest investment institutions that has caused me to consider whether a plan is afoot that, if successful, could represent the best possible strategy for ending the presidency of Barack Obama.
According to the Automobile Club of America, gasoline prices have risen, on average, 13.1 cents in the past month—despite the fact that gas prices traditionally fall in the month of February as people drive fewer miles during the wintery month.
What’s more, virtually every projection out there suggests that gas prices are about to make a dramatic rise to, potentially, record levels with some suggesting that $5.00 a gallon gas or more —double the prices of just a few months ago—could very well be in our future.
This becomes a particularly odd statistic when one considers that Americans are using less gasoline than they have at any time in the last fifteen years. Currently, we burn up 8 percent less gas than we did during the peak year of 2006 while most experts expect the trend to continue to where we will be using 20 percent less gasoline by 2030.
Says Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service,
Strangely, the current run-up in prices comes despite sinking demand in the U.S. Petrol demand is as low as it’s been since April 1997. People are properly puzzled by the fact that we’re using less gas than we have in years, yet we’re paying more.
How can this be explained?
Certainly, concerns of a potential conflict in Iran, and the impact such an event would have on the world oil market, would drive prices up. Adding fuel to this gasoline fire are the seeds of uprising that are ripening in the eastern region of Saudi Arabia where most of the nation’s oil reserves are located.
And, to be sure, an improving domestic economy typically results in higher oil prices as demand begins to rise. However, experts seem to agree that even this will not return us to our high’s of 2006.
Experts agree that even when the economy rebounds from the recession, gasoline usage will remain below the 2006 figure, which should remain forever untouched barring any massive economic boom periods or drastic fuel price cuts. That reduction can be attributed to a number of factors such as higher fuel efficiency fleet figures for manufacturers, a higher use of hybrids, an increase in bio-fuels like bio-diesel and ethanol, and continued high gas prices, among other factors.
There has to be something else at work here.
According to Kloza, a healthy percentage of the increase is the result of speculative money flowing into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year, mostly coming from hedge fund and big money mangers. “We’ve seen about $11 billion of speculative money come in on the long side of gas futures,” Kloza says. “Each of the last three weeks we’ve seen a record net long position being taken.”
These record positions that are driving up prices could certainly be the result of speculators’ legitimate belief that Middle Eastern instability and an improving economy at home make higher prices a good bet.
And yet, Middle Eastern instability is nothing particularly new. Even if speculators see an Iranian crisis putting more pressure on the oil markets than in days gone by, it is difficult to rationalize how this would result in a 100 percent increase in prices at the pump, particularly in view of the fact that we use less gasoline today than at other times of crisis.
While Wall Street’s ‘priority one’ is to make money, it is clear that, for this year, priority two is the destruction of Barack Obama’s presidency. Accordingly, from a Wall Street point of view, it certainly is a happy coincidence that that priority one, making big money on oil speculation, could directly lead to accomplishing their second highest mission.
I am left to wonder whether this is a happy Wall Street coincidence or a clever strategy that could pay off big-time come November.
Gasoline prices have a ‘real time’ impact on middle-class voters. Can you imagine a better way to make voters good and angry than to insure that they are paying five bucks a gallon for the gasoline that will be powering them to the voting booth in November? And if you subscribe to the theory that the President’s opponents would like to keep economic growth down until the election is over, what better way to accomplish such a goal than to force a precipitous rise in gas prices?
Maybe what we are seeing is nothing more than the natural and completely explainable reaction to events in oil producing countries and the promise of an improving domestic economy.
However, when you consider that we’ve faced these uncertainties more than once in the past fifteen years, and combine that with the understanding that we are currently consuming less oil products than at any time during that period, it is difficult to come up with a rational explanation as to why gas prices would nearly double in so short a period under these circumstances.
Am I simply getting paranoid as the election season is upon us?
Maybe. But there is no disputing that the higher gasoline prices go, the lower the odds that President Obama will be returned to office for a second term.
So, I’m just saying’…..
As a result of what is coming, it might be a good idea for the Obama Administration to start talking about the reasons for rising gas prices and I’d start talking about it now. This is one instance where silence is anything but golden and without a plausible explanation as to why the Administration is not responsible for what might be a dramatic rise in gas prices, it may be Pesident Obama who is left holding the pump nozzle come December.
By: Rick Ungar, Washington Monthly, February 17, 2012
“Drug-Addled Wrong”: Mitt Romney Condemns The Auto-Industry Rescue
Looking back over the last three years, there’s arguably no better example of a policy Republicans got wrong than the rescue of the American auto industry.
When President Obama launched his ambitious policy in 2009, he was taking a major gamble — not only with the backbone of American manufacturing, but with his presidency and its ability to use the power of government to repair a private industry facing collapse. As First Read noted at the time, “As the GM bailout goes, so goes the Obama presidency.”
We now know the gamble paid off. Chrysler has posted its first profit in 15 years; GM is building new American facilities; and plants are operating at a capacity unseen in a long while. General Motors went from the brink of total failure to reclaiming its spot as the world’s top automaker, and as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, “The auto industry hasn’t just turned the corner. It’s starting to accelerate.”
Had it not been for the Obama administration’s policy, these heartening headlines would have been impossible. And yet, Mitt Romney still isn’t happy.
In a new Detroit News op-ed, the former Massachusetts governor says he’s glad the industry still exists, but proceeds to complain anyway about the way in which Obama rescued GM and Chrysler from an imminent collapse.
Three years ago, in the midst of an economic crisis, a newly elected President Barack Obama stepped in with a bailout for the auto industry. The indisputable good news is that Chrysler and General Motors are still in business. The equally indisputable bad news is that all the defects in President Obama’s management of the American economy are evident in what he did.
Instead of doing the right thing and standing up to union bosses, Obama rewarded them…. By the spring of 2009, instead of the free market doing what it does best, we got a major taste of crony capitalism, Obama-style.
It takes a fair amount of chutzpah to face a crisis, get it wrong, then whine about the way in which the other guy got it right.
This is a subject Romney would be better off ignoring. After all, in 2009, he famously urged policymakers to “let Detroit go bankrupt.” Romney was so certain Obama’s policy would fail, he said Americans could “kiss the American automotive industry goodbye” if Obama’s policy moved forward in 2009. Indeed, at the time, Romney called the administration’s plan “tragic” and “a very sad circumstance for this country.” He wrote an April 2009 piece in which he said Obama’s plan “would make GM the living dead.”
With the benefit of hindsight, we now know all of Romney’s warnings were wrong. For him to double down today on the virtues of letting Detroit go bankrupt is just bizarre.
I’m reminded of this clip, which Democrats gleefully put together last summer.
Of particular interest is the last quote in the clip, in which a Chrysler executive responded to a Romney quote by saying, “Whoever told you that is smoking illegal material. That market had become absolutely dysfunctional in 2008 and 2009. There were attempts made by a variety of people to find strategic alliances with other car makers on a global scale and the government stepped in, as the actor of last resort. It had to do it because the consequences would have been just too large to deal with.”
In other words, Romney wasn’t just wrong; he was drug-addled wrong.
To be sure, the former governor wasn’t the only Obama critic whose predictions now look foolish, but Romney is the one who still likes to pretend he was right.
Even the complaints themselves are strange. As Marcy Wheeler explained, Romney’s “basically complaining that the bailout preserved the healthcare a bunch of 55+ year old blue collar workers were promised. He’s pissed they got to keep their healthcare. He’s also complaining that banks took a haircut.”
I haven’t talked to the White House about this, but I suspect if 2012 comes down to a debate over who was right about the auto-industry rescue, Obama likes his chances.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 14, 2012
A “Rich Guy’s Dilemma”: Mitt Romney’s Big Tax Reveal
One of the stickier dilemmas awaiting Mitt Romney’s campaign is the intersection between his personal wealth and his economic program. Romney is a very rich guy who enjoys a low tax rate, which is a political problem. Combine that with his tax plan, which locks in the Bush tax cuts and then cuts taxes even more, you have a ready-made political theme for the Obama campaign to deploy against him should he win the nomination.
At the same time, Romney has not wrapped up the nomination. And conservative elites are saying that his plan doesn’t go far enough in cutting taxes for himself and his economic peers. So Romney is pulled between two competing forces — Republican supply-siders who want him to cut taxes for the rich even more, and general election swing voters who not only don’t want to cut taxes for the rich at all but think they need to go higher.
It’s pretty significant, then that Romney is planning to roll out an updated and (apparently) more detailed version of his tax proposal, via Jennifer Rubin:
Will he do more on taxes? “Yes,” [Romney] responds promptly. “We’ve talked about two immediate things we can do: Bring the corporate tax down from 35 percent to 25 percent, and eliminate cap-gains for people in the middle [class].” He said he would roll out the full tax reform plan “as soon as it gets through modeling.” Romney is not the candidate to charge forward without data. It doesn’t sound like a flat tax. He talks about “lowering rates and lowering deductions and exemptions.” (That sounds more akin to the plan suggested by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).) He promises, with a not-so-subtle shot at his critics, “You can be sure I won’t be doing it to lower taxes on the top one percent. It will be pro-growth.”
But what does that mean exactly? Saying he won’t be “doing it to lower taxes on the top one percent” could mean two completely different things. It could mean he won’t be lowering taxes on the top one percent — perhaps he’ll keep the current effective tax rates on the top one percent steady. Or it could mean that he will be cutting taxes for the one percent, but he’ll just insist that he’s doing it because he cares about growth — the fact that people like himself will be getting a tax cut is merely the accidental byproduct of his pro-growth plan.
Which will it be? His choice will help signal how worried Romney really is about Rick Santorum’s polling surge. If Romney cuts taxes for the rich even more in his new plan than his old one, it shows he feels compelled to lock down the supply-siders against Santorum. If he cuts taxes for the rich less, then it shows he’s not taking Santorum all that seriously. And, of course, his decision will hold pretty important implications for the general election – either Romney will be narrowing the target profile he offers Obama or else he’ll be making it even wider.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 13, 2012
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