“A Slave To The Right Wing”: Romney’s Health Care Dilemma Returns
Mitt Romney has been so busy securing his Republican base that he hasn’t had time to court independent voters, the ones who will actually decide this election. But now, probably by accident, he has an opportunity to show them that he’s something other than a slave to his party’s right wing. Will he take it?
When Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul committed the apparently unpardonable sin of praising the health care law Mitt Romney passed as governor of Massachusetts, was she making a horrible mistake that made everyone in Romney headquarters gasp in horror, or was she just reflecting what her candidate actually believes? The answer to that question would tell us where Romney is going to go from here on health care, and whether he may at long last try to find some issue on which he can convince voters he’s something more than a vessel for whatever his party’s right wing wants to do to the country.
Most everyone, myself included, initially assumed that Saul just spoke out of turn. After all, Romney had been trying to avoid any discussion of health care all through the primaries. And from a logical standpoint, there really is no good argument for him to make. Since what Romney did in Massachusetts and what President Obama did with the Affordable Care Act are identical in their major features, either they were both wise policy moves or they were both horrible mistakes, but it just can’t be the case that one was great and the other was a nightmare. That is, in fact, the argument Romney makes when he’s forced to talk about the Massachusetts reform, but you can tell he realizes how absurd what he’s saying is, and he wants to change the subject as soon as possible.
But Noam Scheiber argues that it’s oversimplified to just say that Romney has turned his back on Romneycare in order to assure Republicans that he hates Obamacare as much as they do:
As we await the Romney campaign’s decision about Saul’s fate, it’s worth reflecting on one under-reported aspect of this latest conservative blow-up: Saul was saying precisely what her superiors in the Romney campaign believe, not least of them Mitt Romney.
I spent a lot of time talking to Romney campaign officials while reporting my recent profile of Stuart Stevens, his chief strategist. The unmistakable impression I got from them is that, to this day, Romney remains extremely proud of having passed health care reform in Massachusetts.
And why wouldn’t he be? He approached a difficult problem, then came up with a solution acceptable to both parties, and by all accounts the resulting policy has been a success. There are only a small number of uninsured people left in Massachusetts, and the reform is widely popular within the state. It was without a doubt the most significant accomplishment of Romney’s one term as governor. The fact that he is running a campaign for president in which he dares not mention the best thing he did in the one job he had that was something of a preparation for the job he wants is quite insane.
Of course, it’s one thing for him to be justifiably proud of Romneycare, and it’s another for him to actually talk about it on the campaign trail. If he were to do that, it would require two things he has little desire to do: angering his base, and admitting, at least tacitly, that Barack Obama actually did something right. The former is really the biggest problem; there has not been a single occasion during this campaign (or the one he ran in 2008, for that matter), when Mitt Romney has said or done anything he thought might get the right wing of the Republican party upset. The chances that he’ll start now are slim to none.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 10, 2012
“Politics Over People”: Romney Endorses Mass Public-Sector Layoffs
Mitt Romney chatted with Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Josh Tyrangiel for a good-but-brief interview, which was published today, and which turned out to be quite informative (thanks to Tricia McKinney for the heads-up).
Tyrangiel asked, for example, about the famous Bain Capital photo featuring Romney and his colleagues posing with cash, and what Romney thinks of the image now. “Oh, that was a moment of humor as we had just done what we thought was impossible,” he said.
The editor also tried to ask the tax-return issue in a new way: “If you’re an investor and you’re looking at a company, and that company says that its great strength is wise management and fiscal know-how, wouldn’t you want to see the previous, say, five years’ worth of its financials?” Romney dismissed the comparison, saying, “I’m not a business.”
I was also delighted to see Tyrangiel ask how Romney intends to balance the budget without raising taxes, without cutting defense, and without touching Social Security. Romney responded by talking about eliminating “Obamacare,” which, of course, would make the deficit worse, not better.
But what I found most interesting was an exchange that probably won’t get as much attention. Tyrangiel asked a fantastic question about the economy: “One thing that distinguishes this recovery is that public sector jobs, government jobs, have already fallen by 650,000. Given the conservative goal of shrinking government, is this a positive development or a negative one?” Romney didn’t give a straight answer, but his take was nevertheless illustrative of a larger point.
“Well, clearly you don’t like to hear [about] anyone losing a job. At the same time, government is the least productive — the federal government is the least productive of our economic sectors. The most productive is the private sector. The next most productive is the not-for-profit sector, then comes state and local governments, and finally the federal government. And so moving responsibilities from the federal government to the states or to the private sector will increase productivity. And higher productivity means higher wages for the American worker. All right?
“America is the highest productivity nation of major nations in the world, and that results in our having, for instance, an average compensation about 30 percent higher than the average compensation in Europe. A government that becomes more productive, that does more with less, is good for the earnings of the American worker, and ultimately it will mean that our taxes don’t have to go up, that small businesses will find it easier to start and grow, and we will be able to add more private sector jobs.”
It’s far from clear that Romney’s correct about the federal government being the “least productive of our economic sectors,” but for the sake of conversation, let’s say that’s true. Let’s just assume that those rascally federal bureaucracies are just too darned “unproductive.”
This is still a deeply misguided policy position.
Remember, the question from Tyrangiel has to do with the economic recovery: is it good or bad that America has been trying to dig itself out of a brutally-deep economic hole while simultaneously laying off 650,000 public-sector workers — on purpose.
Romney’s response is about a long-term vision — a more efficient and productive federal sector will eventually be good for the private sector. That may or may not be true, but the Republican is badly missing the point: how can the economy get better in a hurry if we’re deliberately putting 650,000 out of work? The answer is, we can’t, but apparently Romney doesn’t much care.
For that matter, Romney may struggle with the details of basic economics, but it’s disconcerting that he doesn’t realize who these people are. “The federal government is the least productive of our economic sectors”? What does that have to do with school teachers, police officers, and firefighters who’ve been laid off in droves in communities nowhere near the Beltway?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 9, 2012
“Erasing W”: Republications Want To Obliterate Any Trace Of The Administration That Created This Mess
As Bill Clinton is resurrected by the Democrats, George W. Bush is being erased by the GOP — as if an entire eight years of American history hadn’t happened.
While Bill Clinton stumps for Obama, Romney has gone out of his way not to mention the name of the president who came after Clinton and before Obama.
Clinton will have a starring role at the Democratic National Convention. George W. Bush won’t even be at the Republican one – the first time a national party has not given the stage at its convention to its most recent occupant of the Oval Office who successfully ran for reelection.
The GOP is counting on America’s notoriously short-term memory to blot out the last time the nation put a Republican into the Oval Office, on the reasonable assumption that such a memory might cause voters to avoid making the same mistake twice. As whoever-it-was once said, “fool me once …” (and then mangled the rest).
Republicans want to obliterate any trace of the administration that told America there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and led us into a devastating war; turned a $5 trillion projected budget surplus into a $6 trillion deficit; gave the largest tax cut in a generation to the richest Americans in history; handed out a mountain of corporate welfare to the oil and gas industry, pharmaceutical companies, and military contractors like Halliburton (uniquely benefiting the vice president); whose officials turned a blind eye to Wall Street shenanigans that led to the worst financial calamity since the Great Crash of 1929 and then persuaded Congress to bail out the Street with the largest taxpayer-funded giveaway of all time.
Besides, the resemblances between George W. Bush and Mitt Romney are too close for comfort. Both were born into wealth, sons of prominent politicians who themselves ran for president; both are closely tied to the nation’s corporate and financial elites, and eager to do their bidding; both are socially awkward and, as candidates, tightly scripted for fear of saying something they shouldn’t; and both presented themselves to the nation devoid of any consistent policies or principles that might give some clue as to what they actually believe.
They are both, in other words, unusually shallow, uncurious, two-dimensional men who ran or are running for the presidency for no clear reason other than to surpass their fathers or achieve the aims and ambitions of their wealthy patrons.
Small wonder the Republican Party wants us to forget our last Republican president and his administration. By contrast, the Democrats have every reason for America to recall and celebrate the Clinton years.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, August 10, 2012
“A Panicky Pick From A Position Of Weakness”: The Illogic Of Romney Picking Paul Ryan For Vice President
Do you hear that noise? It’s the sound of millions of conservative hearts going pitter-patter over this week’s speculation boomlet regarding the prospect of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney tapping House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan to be vice president. Maybe they’ll get their fondest wish, maybe Tampa will be flooded with Romney-Ryan signs and bumper stickers in a couple of weeks. But I think there’s a basic illogic to the notion that makes it hard to see it coming to pass.
NBC’s “First Read” and others have pointed to Romney’s comments to the network about wanting a visionary vice president as a nod in Ryan’s direction. Romney said Thursday that, “a vision for the country that adds something to the political discourse about the direction of the country. I mean, I happen to believe this is a defining election for America that we’re going to be voting for what kind of America we’re going to have.” Certainly Ryan has a well-established vision for where he wants to take the country—but therein lies the danger. Whose candidacy would this be anyway? If Romney decides to import the Ryan vision for America lock, stock, and barrel, he’ll run the risk of seeming to be a me-too nominee: He doesn’t have a vision for America of his own so he decided to embrace someone else’s. What then is the raison d’etre for a Romney presidency if it’s a Ryan agenda? Certainly Romney has endorsed the Ryan budget, but adopting it as his own would be taking that to a whole different level.
This potential problem would be mitigated if Romney had laid out a strong vision for the country so far, but he has run a campaign which has become famous (infamous?) for its lack of policy specifics and detail. At the same time, Romney has by apparent design remained something of a personal blank slate for the general public (except for the devastating definition Democrats gave it in July). Romney’s basic campaign message has been: I’m not-Obama (since the middle of June, more than 90 percent of the ads Romney has run have been negative, according to the Washington Post’s ad tracker). Is his campaign really going to fill in that blank slate with someone else’s detailed agenda?
There’s an argument that the three polls out yesterday giving Obama an outside-the-margin-of-error lead could also spur a game-changing pick a la Ryan. “The conventional wisdom had been that Romney was going to be picking a running mate in a coin-flip race. Well that’s not the case now. How does that change his mind? Does it help Paul Ryan?” asks “First Read,” adding that Romney has gone from picking a running mate from a position of strength to “picking one from a position of weakness.” That seems a bit strong, especially based on one set of polls. Does the Romney team want to exacerbate a perception of weakness by making what could be seen as a panicky pick (a sop to a jittery base, a Hail Mary in the face of a widening gap in the polls, and a whiplash-inducing strategic change from deliberate policy vagueness to a highly controversial off-the-shelf economic agenda).
Exit question: Given Ryan boomlet this week, how can the Romney campaign let the faithful down gently if they do indeed go with a more conventional choice?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, August 10, 2012
“Selective Accountability”: Louisiana Gives Us A Taste Of Mitt Romney’s Education Policy
Ed Kilgore has been sounding the alarms over Mitt Romney’s education proposals for a couple of months now, and I keep meaning — but somehow forgetting — to link to his posts about this. It’s probably all part of my love-hate relationship with education policy in general. But today he’s got another post up on the subject, so let’s take a look. He’s riffing on a TPM piece about the kudzu-like growth of Bobby Jindal’s voucher program in Louisiana:
In heading his state in the direction of universally available vouchers rationalized by public school failure, Jindal is not, of course, holding any of the private school beneficiaries accountable for results, or for common curricula, or, it appears, for much of anything.A big chunk of the money already out there is being snapped up by conservative evangelical schools with exotic and hardly public-minded curricular offerings, with the theory being that any public oversight would interfere with the accountability provided by “the market.” So if you want your kid to attend, at public expense, the Christian Nationalist Academy for Servant-Leader Boys & Fecund Submissive Girls, that’s okay by Bobby.
Does that last sentence sound a wee bit unfair? Well, here’s a Reuters report from a few weeks ago about where kids with vouchers are actually likely to end up:
The top schools [] have just a handful of slots open….Far more openings are available at smaller, less prestigious religious schools, including some that are just a few years old and others that have struggled to attract tuition-paying students.
The school willing to accept the most voucher students — 314 — is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition.
….At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains “what God made” on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution. “We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children,” Carrier said.
But let’s not be too hasty. If these kids are doing well, maybe we shouldn’t care if they get their lessons from DVDs liberally sprinkled with Bible verses. The problem is that while public schools — and, increasingly, public school teachers — are being held rigidly accountable for their students’ test scores, most voucher schools aren’t. Here’s the Louisiana Budget Project:
Louisiana requires almost no accountability from voucher schools….While voucher students are required to take the same assessment tests as public school students, there are no penalties for private schools if they fail to measure up to their public counterparts. In fact, Gov. Jindal vetoed language in a 2011 appropriations bill that would have removed participating schools if their students’ scores lagged those in the lowest performing schools in the Recovery School District, which incorporates most New Orleans public schools.
So if public schools have lousy test scores, they’re failures and their students all get vouchers. But if the private schools have lousy test scores, then….nothing. Presumably the magic of the free market will fix them up.
And maybe it will. But this has always been the Achilles’ Heel of the voucher movement: its virulent opposition to holding private schools to the same standards as public schools. In some places this means not requiring students to take standardized tests at all, while in other places — like Louisiana — it means requiring the tests but not using them to evaluate how well schools are doing. In other words, they want taxpayer dollars without being accountable to taxpayers.
To the best of my knowledge, research on school choice remains inconclusive. Some studies show benefits from voucher and charter schools, others don’t. Part of the reason for this is that test data on voucher schools just isn’t always available, largely thanks to lawmakers who are afraid of what it might show. So if Mitt Romney plans to adopt vouchers as his main education proposal — and he does — it would be nice to hear a little bit about accountability from him to go along with it. Unfortunately, because the true core of the voucher movement is made up of social conservatives who just want taxpayer help sending their kids to Bible schools and consider “accountability” to be a code word for an assault on religious freedom, he’s not likely to do anything of the sort.
By: Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, July 2, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 