The “War on Religion”: GOP Still Placating The Hard Core Base
Is anyone who doesn’t already hate Obama for the usual right-wing reasons really going to believe the new Romney ad, that Obama’s health-care law wages a “war on religion”? I doubt many people will. It’s just right-wing fever-swamp rhetoric that I think your average person will, in his or her bones, recognize as such, because we’ve now reached the point in history where we’ve heard a lot of this, and it no longer shocks or traduces the way it once did.
Romney is still placating the hard-core GOP base. It’s getting a little late for that, isn’t? August isn’t really the time to be trying to nail down the scary-lazy-black-people and the Democrats-hate-God voting blocs. August is when you start making your pitch to swing voters.
This is starting, just starting, to remind me of the Rick Lazio 2000 Senate campaign against Hillary, when he, under the brilliant hand of Mike Murphy, made a crucial mistake conservatives are naturally prone to make. He confused “regular New Yorkers” with “right-wing Hillary haters” and thought they were functionally the same thing. Thus he couldn’t for the life of him understand why middle-of-the-road New Yorkers weren’t impressed and persuaded when he and the state GOP accused the First Lady of the United States of sympathizing with the terrorists who blew up the USS Cole. The Romney camp is edging into the same territory.
If Romney wants to talk about wars on religion, I really hope he names Paul Ryan as his veep. The Catholic Bishops called the Ryan budget “immoral.” Unfortunately, the Democrats probably wouldn’t even point this out, wouldn’t want to lean on the bishops. And this raises a problem with today’s Democratic Party.
I’d love to see the party become less skittish about using religion to defend and support its policies. Many elected Democrats, indeed most, are religious people. Obviously, their religious beliefs inform their political views, and vice versa. They ought to be more comfortable talking about it.
Why should Republicans be the only ones to invoke Jesus, and only for conservative reasons and ends? I think it would be delicious if Democrats started quoting more Scripture in behalf of liberalism. After all, a lot of Scripture is liberalism. I’m not religious myself, but I think it’s a shame that liberalism is so guardedly secular.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, August 9, 2012
“Go Ahead, Make That Statement”: Why Obama Would Love To Run Against Paul Ryan
Sorry, conservatives: Having the Wisconsonite on the ticket would make it easier for the president to portray Romney as a heartless plutocrat.
As Beltway anticipation builds for Mitt Romney’s vice presidential announcement, conservative pundits have re-upped their calls for a “bold” and adventurous choice. This morning, the Wall Street Journal editorial page took the lead with a plea to add House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan to the ticket.
The Journal acknowledges the appeal of VP frontrunners Tim Pawlenty and Rob Portman—working-class roots and high-level experience, respectively—but says that Ryan is the only politician with the gravitas and vision to campaign on a presidential level. Here’s the op-ed:
Too risky, goes the Beltway chorus. His selection would make Medicare and the House budget the issue, not the economy. The 42-year-old is too young, too wonky, too, you know, serious. Beneath it all you can hear the murmurs of the ultimate Washington insult—that Mr. Ryan is too dangerous because he thinks politics is about things that matter. That dude really believes in something, and we certainly can’t have that. […]
The case for Mr. Ryan is that he best exemplifies the nature and stakes of this election. More than any other politician, the House Budget Chairman has defined those stakes well as a generational choice about the role of government and whether America will once again become a growth economy or sink into interest-group dominated decline.
The Journal’s broader argument is that Romney can’t win if this election is fought over “small issues,” like Bain Capital or his taxes. The only way he can prevail, they argue, is if he turns this into a fight over big ideas. Placing Ryan on the ticket would go a long way to making that a reality—he is the architect of the Republican Party’s policy platform.
It’s hard to escape the impression that conservatives view Ryan as a consolation prize for the fact that their best chance for rolling back the welfare state resides in the former Massachusetts governor who gave Democrats the bluebrint for Obamacare. But Ryan would be a terrible choice, and if you aren’t ensconsed in the conservative movement, it’s easy to see why: Ryan’s plan—low taxes on the rich and higher defense spending, funded by sharp cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and most social programs—is wildly unpopular with the public.
Last year, the Washington Post and ABC News surveyed Americans on key elements of the Ryan plan. Would you support reforming Medicare such that beneficiaries “receive a check or voucher from the government each year for a fixed amount they can use to shop for their own private health insurance policy?” Sixty-five percent of respondents said they would oppose such a plan. If told that the cost of private insurance would eventually outpace the value of the voucher—projected under Ryan’s proposal—opposition rises to 80 percent.
The same goes for new tax cuts. By two-to-one (44 percent to 22 percent), according to the Pew Research Center, Americans say that cutting taxes for the rich would harm the economy. The same percentage says that raising taxes on the rich would make the tax system more fair than it currently is.
Both realities have already caused problems for Romney. He does as much as possible to obscure his support for the Ryan plan from the public, but most Americans identify him as someone who would help the rich over ordinary people. Putting Ryan on the ticket would exacerbate that problem, and give Obama a huge boost as he begins the second phase of his attacks on Romney.
Remember, the focus on Bain Capital—and Romney’s tax returns—are a means to a end: showing Romney as a heartless plutocrat who will use the presidency to enrich the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. That image will allow Obama to pin the Ryan plan on Romney, and to (accurately) present him as the avatar for selfish reactionaries.
Without Ryan on the ticket, this is a little difficult: The Ryan/Romney plan is an astoundingly right-wing proposal for the future of the country, so much so that voters refuse to believe that any politican would endorse it, much less make it the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. This was somewhat alleivated by the Tax Policy Center analysis—which shows the degree to which Romney would have to raise taxes on middle-class Americans to pay for his upper-income tax cuts—but would be simple to accomplish if Paul Ryan himself were the vice presidential nominee.
Already, with ads like the recent one from Priorities USA, Democrats are painting a picture of America under the Ryan/Romney plan: less mobility for most Americans, less security for middle-class families, and an explosion of income inequality. A Romney/Ryan campaign would allow Democrats to turn those attacks to eleven, and hammer the extent to which Republicans intend to transform government’s role in shaping our society.
Putting Paul Ryan on the ticket is the election-year equivalent of the Republican strategy on health care reform—high stakes, high reward. If the health-care strategy had worked, categorical opposition to reform would have blocked the law and destroyed Obama’s presidency. But it didn’t, and Democrats passed a health care bill that was more compehensive—and more liberal—than it would have been with Republican support.
A Romney/Ryan ticket could conceivably win, of course, and Republicans could then claim an ideological mandate for sweeping changes to the social contract. In all likelihood, though, Ryan’s vulnerabilities would weigh down the ticket and keep Romney from winning a critical number of undecided voters. By satisfying conservative cries for “substance,” Romney would all but condemn the GOP to four more years of an Obama presidency, allowing Democrats to entrench the major changes of the last three-and-a-half years (namely the Affordable Care Act) and gain a long-term upper hand.
Yes, it’s unsatisfying for ideologues, but for this election Republicans might want to stick to the small stuff, rather than risk it on a “statement.”
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, August, 9, 2012
“The Last Nutball Standing”: Dancing With The Mitt That Brung Ya
Conservatives picked him, and now they have to live with him.
In the early days of the 2012 Republican primaries, many thoughtful commentators took the position that it was simply impossible for Mitt Romney to win his party’s nomination. Despite all his evident strengths as a candidate—money, the most professionally run campaign in the group, the endorsement of many establishment figures—Romney simply would not find a way to get past the fact that as governor of Massachusetts he had passed a health care plan that became the model for the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans had come to see as the very embodiment of evil in the modern world. The party’s base would never abide it.
Yet he did. Without all that much trouble too. And he didn’t deal with the health care issue through some brilliant strategy, either. He made no dramatic mea culpa, and never repudiated Romneycare, at least not directly. Whenever he was asked about it he would give a convoluted and utterly unconvincing argument about how what he did in Massachusetts was great, though of course it shouldn’t be applied anywhere else, and even though the ACA is almost exactly the same as Romneycare, the latter was a pragmatic and effective policy solution while the former is an abomination so horrific that putting a copy of the bill in the same room as an American flag could cause said flag to burst into flames and be sucked through a demonic portal to the very pits of hell. Democrats shook their heads at the hypocrisy and smiled at Romney’s pain, while Republicans narrowed their eyes and listened skeptically. I feel fairly confident that there was not a single person anywhere who upon hearing Romney try to make these absurd distinctions responded with, “Well that makes sense—I’m convinced.”
And amazingly, it almost seems as if Romney thought he could get through the rest of the campaign without this coming up. Yet come up it did, when his chief campaign flak Andrea Saul responded to an ad from pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA that attacks Romney with the story of the spouse of a worker laid off from a Bain Capital-owned company who died without health insurance by saying, “To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care.” Saul was right, of course—in Massachusetts, as in the rest of the country after the ACA fully takes effect in 2014, losing your job doesn’t mean losing your coverage. But conservatives became apoplectic that the Romney campaign would tout Romney’s greatest achievement as governor and imply that people having secure health insurance might actually be a good thing. The less thoughtful among them insisted that Romney and his team need to be “housebroken.”
All of which, I’m sure, has caused no small amount of panic at Romney headquarters. As I keep saying, it’s just incredible that Romney still has to invest so much energy in keeping his restive base in line. By this time he’s supposed to be going after independent voters, but he can’t, because every time he turns around the right has found a new reason to be mad at him.
But really, Republicans have no one to blame but themselves. Just look at the desiccated husk of a man they’ve turned their nominee into, a candidate terrified of his own shadow, devoid of anything resembling principle, so frantic to morph into whatever anyone wants him to be that there’s barely anything left of him at all. And it isn’t as though he was imposed on them or something–they picked him. Granted, he was running against a truly remarkable collection of nutballs and buffoons; imagine being a Republican and having to explain to someone a few years from now how it came to pass that at various times, your party’s front-running candidate for the presidency of the United States was Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich. But still. In the end Republicans went with Mitt Romney. He’s what they chose, and they should have known that the guy they’re looking at is exactly what they’d get.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 9, 2012
“Romney And His Fictional Obama”: A Man Who Exists Only In The Imagination Of Mitt’s Ad Makers
Here’s a chance for all who think Obamacare is a socialist Big Government scheme to put their money where their ideology is: If you truly hate the Affordable Care Act, you must send back any of those rebate checks you receive from your insurance companies thanks to the new law.
This is just common sense. If you think free enterprise should be liberated from Washington’s interference, what right does Uncle Sam have to tell the insurers they owe you a better deal? Keeping those refunds will make you complicit with Leviathan.
And here’s a challenge to Mitt Romney: You are running a deceitful ad about waivers the Obama administration has yet to issue based on rules allowing governors to operate their welfare-to-work programs more effectively. Will you please stop talking about your devotion to states’ rights?
Up until now, you were the guy who said that wisdom on matters related to social programming (including health insurance) lies with state governments. Five governors, including two of your fellow Republicans, thought they had a better way to make welfare reform work. The Department of Health and Human Services responded by proposing to give states more latitude. Isn’t that what honoring the good judgment of state governments is all about?
Oh, yes, and if Romney thinks President Obama is gutting welfare reform, I anxiously await his criticism of Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Gary R. Herbert of Utah, GOP governors who requested waivers. If Romney means what he says, doesn’t he have to condemn those who asked Obama to do what Obama did?
Political commentary these days is obsessed with the triviality of this campaign. Most of it is rooted in the refusal of conservatives to be candid about the implications of how their beliefs and commitments would affect the choices they would have government make — and how they differ from the president’s.
In Romney’s case, this often requires him to invent an Obama who exists only in the imagination of his ad makers. So they take Obama’s statements, clip out relevant sentences and run ads attacking some strung-together words that have a limited connection to what the president said. In the welfare ad, Romney lies outright.
But this is part of a larger pattern on the right, illustrated most tellingly by conservative rhetoric around the Affordable Care Act. In going after Obamacare, conservatives almost never talk about the specific provisions of the law. They try to drown it in anti-government rhetoric. “Help us defeat Obamacare,” Romney said after the Supreme Court declared the law constitutional. “Help us defeat the liberal agenda that makes government too big, too intrusive, and is killing jobs across this great country.”
Well, the new law does intrude directly in the insurance market. It requires that at least 85 percent of large-group premiums and 80 percent of small-group and individual premiums be spent directly on clinical services and improving the quality of health care. Imagine the radicalism: The government is telling insurance companies that they must spend most of the money they take in on actual health care for the people and businesses paying the premiums.
If the insurers spend below those levels, they have to refund the difference. According to Health and Human Services, 12.8 million Americans will get $1.1 billion in rebates. That comes to an average rebate of $151 per household. In 12 states, the rebates will average $300 or more.
Here’s your chance, conservatives. Big, bad government is forcing those nice insurance companies to give people a break. From what you say, you see this as socialism, a case of the heavy hand of Washington meddling with the right of contract. You cannot possibly keep this money. So stand up for those oppressed insurers and give them their rebates back!
As for the waivers on welfare, Romney’s position is dispiriting. Here’s a former governor whose Massachusetts health-care plan — the one that resembles Obamacare — was made possible by federal waivers; who, like other governors, wanted flexibility to do welfare reform his way; and who has said he would roll back Obamacare through the waiver process he now assails. He’s turning away from what he claims to believe about state-level innovation for the sake of a cheap and misleading campaign point.
I’d also be curious to know whether Romney got a rebate on his health insurance premiums courtesy of Obamacare and whether he plans to return it. But given his attitude toward disclosure, we’ll probably never find out.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 8, 2012
“Romney’s Elitist Snobbery”: Harry Reid Is Right To Focus On Mitt’s Taxes
Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada alleged, both in an interview with the Huffington Post and then later on the Senate floor, that Mitt Romney had not paid taxes in 10 years. The battle continues.
Romney called on Reid to reveal the source for his claim that he has not paid taxes for 10 years, stepping up pressure as two major fact-check sites ruled Reid had no basis for the “incendiary” allegation. (Sidebar: Those fact check sites also ruled that Romney’s claim of creating 100,000 plus jobs had no basis in truth.) Romney said he doesn’t believe Reid has a credible source but urged the Senate Democratic leader to reveal who it is.
“I don’t really believe that he’s got any kind of a credible source,” Romney said. “I don’t know who gave him this line of reasoning, whether it came from the White House or the DNC or a staffer, but he ought to say where it came from, and then we can find out whether that person has any credibility. I know they don’t.”
Reid said this is not about him; it is about Romney and his unwillingness to share his tax returns with the American people. Republicans got on the president and press secretary Jay Carney for not pushing Reid to back off or reveal his source, as if Reid were a child in a daycare center that the Obama administration runs. When I debated my usual sparring partner on the right, talk host Lar Larson, he alleged that Reid was doing this to help the president, calling it “sleazy.”
Reid’s remarks are his remarks. He’s an adult, and is not controlled by some imaginary string between the White House and the Senate, regardless of the right wing’s perception. Romney said that Reid “lost a lot of credibility.” And if that’s the case, Romney should be thanking Reid, not chastising him.
So which is it? A sleazy tactic by Reid to help the president? An unsubstantiated remark by an angry Democratic senator who refuses to leak his source?!
I’ll tell you what it is. It is Romney, continuing to look down his nose at the American people with the elitist snobbery that gets him the low likeability in poll after poll after poll. The same attitude that got both the Brits and the Palestinians angry with him on his world tour. But it goes beyond that.
This goes back to 1973 when then Vice President Spiro Agnew plead no contest to tax evasion. It was then that the American people demanded to see the tax returns of candidates for president and vice president. And although this practice is not a law and is not in our Constitution, it has been a tradition that has been agreed to by all presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle.
We all know Romney’s father provided numerous years of tax returns. We know that Ronald Reagan provided six, Sen. John Kerry 20, Sen. Bob Dole 29, and President Obama 12! And Mitt Romney? One. Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, when running for president, provided two years of tax returns, the lowest provided by any presidential candidate left or right. (The only exception was Gerald Ford, who was sworn in as president after the resignation of Richard Nixon—and he even provided a summary of years of returns.) And McCain has provided other tax returns for Senate campaigns throughout his career. Romney has provided the American people with one year (2010) and a summary for 2011.
So, this is not about Reid’s source as Romney wants you to believe. Romney should thank Reid for the diversion. This is about what voters, both left and right, have asked Romney to do, which has been to do exactly what presidential candidates have been doing for decades: provide their tax returns.
For a man who says he wants to run this country like he ran his companies, we need to know: How much did you make? Give to charity? Pay in taxes?
Last week Romney said that Reid should “put up or shut up,” Romney needs to heed his own advice. And in doing so, would prove if Reid’s comments are true or false. Romney, America’s waiting.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, August 8, 2012
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