The Meaning Of “That”: Romney Finds Words To Twist Around To Make A Deceptive Point
If you’re Mitt Romney, it can mean whatever you want.
Mitt Romney is, without doubt, a representative of contemporary capitalism, a spectacularly rich financier who got his money not by making things but by buying and selling companies, exploiting leverage, and a whole bunch of other things folks like you and me will never have the privilege of understanding. So it isn’t surprising that this campaign has featured a debate about the nature of our economic system. That debate could be a salutary and educational discussion that leaves us all more informed and aware. Or it could be an occasion for some of the most vile demagoguery you could imagine. Do you need to ask which course it will take?
By now, we can all agree that a large portion of the Republican party has created in their minds an imaginary Barack Obama, one who is either a literal or philosophical foreigner (Romney has begun dropping the word “foreign” in as often as he can when discussing Obama), who hates America (here’s Rush Limbaugh on Monday: “I think it can now be said, without equivocation—without equivocation—that this man hates this country”), and one who hates success, hates rich people, and hates capitalism itself. And if you can’t find any actual evidence for these propositions—if “Barack Obama hates job creators so much he actually wants to increase the top income tax rate by 4.6 percentage points!” doesn’t have quite the ring you’d like—then it isn’t hard to find words you can twist around to make your point.
Which brings us to the word “that.” If you’ve been to a Mitt Romney speech in the last day or so, or if you’ve watched Fox News or listened to conservative talk radio, or even if you’ve watched some mainstream news*, you would have heard that Barack Obama said that people who own businesses didn’t actually build their businesses. Only a secret socialist could say such a thing, and Romney and his allies assure us that Obama did indeed say that and he is indeed that kind of person. But here’s what Obama actually said:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.
When this quote worked its way up from the conservative media to the Romney campaign, they knew they had something. Sure, it’s obvious that when Obama said “you didn’t build that” he was talking about roads and bridges. But who cares? You can take that one sentence out of context, lie about what “that” in the quote refers to, and you’ve got evidence of Obama’s America-hating heart.
And yes, it is a lie, a word I use carefully. Romney and the people who work for him know full well what Obama was and wasn’t saying. But they decided to go ahead and engage in an act of intentional deception anyway, and I’m sure he’ll be repeating it many times.
There’s actually a discussion to be had about the radical individualism that has taken over the conservative movement, which Obama was responding to in his speech. I’d be interested to hear Mitt Romney’s thoughts on it, not in a “gotcha” kind of way, but because I genuinely want to know what his response to Obama’s arguments would be. Does he think that every rich person got rich completely on their own and owes nothing to the society that created the context that allowed their wealth to be created? I really have no idea. But the deeper into this campaign we go, the more it becomes clear that we’ll never know what Romney really believes about anything. And he may not be the most dishonest presidential candidate we’ve ever seen, but give him time—he’s working on it.
*Last night I saw Peter Alexander on NBC Nightly News do a story in which he showed Obama’s quote clipped exactly as Romney did, making it seem that Romney was being absolutely truthful. It was one of the most maddening acts of journalistic jackassery I’ve seen in some time.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 17, 2012
“The Courage Of Convictions”: Dear Mr. Romney, I Want More Free Stuff From The Government
Dear Mr. Romney, I was hoping you could tell me how to get more free stuff from the government, and I see that you took up that question after your speech to the NAACP last week. You were speaking to a group of white people in Hamilton, Montana, and you told them that, at the NAACP, you had said that you were “going to get rid of Obamacare.” You said that they “weren’t happy” about that. And you said that if people want “more free stuff” from “the government,” they should “go vote for the other guy.”
Well, I want more free stuff from the government, but, actually, if you want free stuff from Obama, you’d be better off as a banker than as a black person.
Maybe you heard that Obama’s TARP and stimulus programs already gave $4.5 trillion in bailout money to the big banks and investment houses on Wall Street. There’s a lot more if you count loan guarantees and emergency lending from the Federal Reserve.
If I had gotten any of that free stuff, like your friends on Wall Street did, I could have done what they did—use those public funds to pay myself really well.
Some of your friends are praising you for your “straight talk” to the NAACP, for having the courage of your convictions and letting the chips fall where they may. But actually you didn’t tell the black people they should vote for the other guy because they want free stuff. Instead, you told a white audience afterwards that’s what black people should do.
Some people, like Matt Taibbi at RollingStone.com, thought your post-NAACP remarks were “shockingly offensive” and “cynically furthering dangerous and irresponsible stereotypes in order to advance some harebrained electoral ploy involving white conservative voters.” I can see his point.
But at the Center for the Study of Mitt Romney, they found that this isn’t the first time you said that people who want “free stuff” from the government should “vote for the other guy.” (Actually it was Rachel Maddow who found this.)
A few months ago, Rachel reported, you responded to questions about contraception access by saying, “If you’re looking for free stuff you don’t have to pay for, vote for the other guy.” You also complained that Obama was trying to buy students’ political support by offering them “free stuff.”
Rachel thought she could see a pattern here: “If you’re a woman who wants access to preventive care you might not otherwise be able to afford, Romney sees you as wanting ‘free stuff.’ If you’re a young student who can’t afford higher-ed tuition, Romney assumes you expect ‘free stuff.’ And if you’re a black person who wants your family to have access to affordable healthcare, Romney thinks you too are just looking for “free stuff.”
Of course, there’s another way to look at all this. You could say we are taking on the responsibility to see that everyone gets decent medical care, whether or not they can afford it. We want our friends and family and neighbors and co-workers who are uninsured or underinsured to be able to go to the doctor when they’re sick. We want the same thing even for people we don’t know. That’s the way minister Leslie Watson Malachi of People for the American Way explained it.
One other thing—it’s not just black people who will benefit from Obamacare. Most of the beneficiaries will be white—just in case the white people in Hamiltion, Montana got the wrong impression from your speech.
By: Joe Wiener, The Nation, July 14, 2012
“Severe Stonewalling”: Can Mitt Romney Hide His Taxes Forever?
Add Brit Hume to the growing list of prominent conservative voices suggesting that Mitt Romney release more than just two years of tax returns.
“Anytime it’s disclosure versus nondisclosure, you always wonder whether it isn’t better just to put it out there,” he said on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show last night.
Hume’s comment came a few hours after Haley Barbour used an interview with ABC News to reiterate his call for Romney to put out more tax records. “The advice I would give Romney is, Who cares about your tax returns?” Barbour said. “Release ‘em! We need for this campaign to be about Obama’s record.”
Other conservatives who have offered similar advice include George Will, who said on Sunday that the Romney campaign is “losing in a big way” on the topic, Bill Kristol, and Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley.
So far, Romney has released his returns from 2010 and an estimate for 2011, with a promise that he will release that year’s full return when it’s completed. But he’s drawn a line at putting out information for any other years. This is causing him two problems. The first is with the Obama campaign, which is jumping at the chance to paint Romney as a man with something to hide. Today, for instance, Obama’s team launched this ad: http://youtu.be/uMo5pykT4uw
The bigger problem for Romney, though, is that the media has also latched on to the story, pressing him to explain why he won’t release more and exploring all of the possible reasons he might be reluctant to share his past returns – especially the possibility that his effective tax rate might have been at or close to zero in some recent years.
Romney and his team haven’t helped themselves by offering bogus precedents for a presidential candidate releasing so little tax information, a response that has only encouraged the media to push harder. A measure of how big the story has become to the nonpartisan press came last night, when CNN’s Erin Burnett abandoned her neutral pose and excoriated Romney for not coming clean.
It’s hard to believe Romney can ride out the next four months without offering up some additional records. Of course, as Joan Walsh noted yesterday, it’s possible the returns Romney is now sitting on contain information that would be more damaging than what he’s now enduring. Then again, what little tax information Romney has released already reveal investments in Swiss bank accounts and offshore havens and an effective tax rate of just 13.9 percent. So the image of him as an extravagantly rich man who benefits from a tax system that’s skewed toward the investor class is already established. Assuming he’s done nothing illegal (surely the IRS would have taken notice if he had), would it really be that much worse for Romney if documents came out showing he paid an even lower effective rate in some years?
Maybe the calendar offers a clue about Romney’s thinking. In just over a week, the London Olympics will kick off. If you’re going to release more embarrassing tax returns, maybe that would be the ideal time?
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, July 17, 2012
“An Exercise In False Equivalency”: It’s Not “Swift Boating” If It’s True
Outlining the growing controversy about the timeline of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital career, CNN’s Jim Acosta recently asked the candidate if he believed he was “being swift-boated in this campaign.” Later that same evening, reporting on Anderson Cooper 360, CNN’s Tom Forman forged a tighter connection, suggesting “Republican analysts fear Mitt Romney could become the second politician from Massachusetts swift boated out of the presidency.”
Here’s how Forman described the Swift Boat affair [emphasis added]:
FORMAN: He’s talking about the Swift Boat campaign, in which President Bush’s challenger John Kerry was demonized over what his campaign considered an attribute. His decorated service as a soldier in Vietnam. The Swift Boat ads, backed by a group of pro-Bush veterans, questioned the Democratic challenger’s conduct in the war, his anti-war activities later and his patriotism.
Kerry was slow to respond and never very effective in refuting their claims even though his critics offered little in the way of proof. He lost the election of course. And for many Democrats, swift-boating became a catch-all term for any unfair, untrue, personal assault on a candidate.
Trying to tie contemporary questions about Romney’s Bain past with an infamous GOP smear campaign is an exercise in false equivalency. “The Swift Boat campaign was completely a lie,” Esquires’ Charles Pierce recently reminded readers. “Nothing the Swifties said about John Kerry was true.” And yet, despite the cavernous gap between the Swift Boat affair and the ongoing Bain story, the comparison continues to gain currency.
The conservative Washington Examiner editorial page on Monday lamented the “Swift-Baining of Mitt Romney.” What had the Obama campaign done that was so unfair to the Republican candidate? It had “seized on reports by liberal websites Mother Jones and Talking Points Memo — and later by the Boston Globe — citing Securities and Exchange Commission filings that listed Romney as the CEO of Bain after he was said to have left for the Olympics.”
Quoting news outlets that cite government documents regarding Romney’s employment record now constitutes a smear campaign?
Let’s stipulate this fact going forward: A candidate having his résumé or biography examined during the course of a presidential campaign does not constitute being “swift boated.” Enthusiastic “vetting” of candidates’ backgrounds is a routine aspect of general elections.
The distinguishing feature of a Swift Boat smear campaign, of course, was that virtually every single war-era allegation made against Kerry’s military service proved to be false, leaving the assumption that the entire point of the coordinated, deep-pocketed attack was to purposefully spread as manly lies as possible. And not just small fibs, but truly unconscionable lies about a serviceman’s record during the unpopular Vietnam War.
That’s what being Swift Boated is about. Prior to 2004, modern campaigns had never seen anything like it. And in the two White House campaigns that have unfolded since, nothing has approached the radical brand of prevarication that epitomized the lowly Republican attacks on Kerry.
By contrast, there’s no dispute regarding the fact that 2002 SEC documents indicate that Romney was listed as Bain’s chairman, managing director and CEO years after he claimed to have left the company. The only debate is regarding what that means. Romney suggests the titles were symbolic and that he had no influence over the management of the company during those three years. Skeptics suggest it’s not likely that a company’s president, managing director and CEO would remain permanently out of the business’ loop for three years (while still drawing a salary).
Either way, the dispute hardly rises to the level of a smear campaign, let alone a Swift Boat-like assault on Romney’s honor. Note that government documents support the claims about Romney’s ongoing links to Bain until 2002, whereas government documents in 2004 routinely undercut right-wing fabrications about Romney’s war record.
Meanwhile, this clumsy Swirt Boat comparison remains in play. From the New York Times:
Conservatives have lit up talk radio programs across the country, worrying whether Mr. Romney’s business record has been ”Swift Boated,” referring to attacks waged against Senator John Kerry’s military record in 2004.
So conservatives fret Romney’s being “Swift Boated,” yet conservatives insist to this day there was nothing unethical about what Swift Boat veterans did to Kerry.
Previously, from Michelle Malkin:
A reminder to conservatives: “Swift-Boating” does not equal smearing. Swift-Boating means exposing hard truths about corrupt Democrats.
From Rush Limbaugh:
[Swift Boat Veterans] were right on the money, and nobody has disproven anything they claimed in any of their ads, statements, written commentaries, or anything of the sort.
In truth, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign represented a singularly awful chapter in American politics. Let’s not pretend every time a candidate has to answer uncomfortable questions about his past that the Swift Boat Vets are riding again.
By: Eric Boehlert, Sr. Fellow, Media Matters, July 17, 2012
“Un-American Ignorant Exceptionalism”: Why John Sununu Is Romney’s Favorite Attack Dog
Stop the presses — John Sununu said something over-the-top.
The 73-year-old former governor of New Hampshire, a top surrogate for Mitt Romney, told reporters on a conference call Tuesday, “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.” He also said President Obama comes from “that murky political world in Chicago where politician and felon has become synonymous,” and brought up what he described as a “smarmy” real estate deal with convicted felon Tony Rezko. And he called the Obama campaign “stupid” and “a bunch of liars.”
Before the call was even over, Sununu was backpedaling on the “learn how to be an American” bit, saying that what he meant was that “the president has to learn the American formula for creating business,” which is not government-driven but creating “a climate where entrepreneurs can thrive.” But it was hardly an isolated outburst. Earlier in the day, Sununu had posited that Obama’s lack of appreciation for the American system of job creation stemmed from the fact that he president “spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something.”
No one should be shocked to hear this kind of language from Sununu. He’s long been the Romney campaign’s designated attack dog and provocateur, from calling Newt Gingrich “self-serving” in December to decrying Rick Santorum’s “emotional outbursts” in March. Sununu’s trademark bluster follows a famously undisciplined career as White House chief of staff under President George H.W. Bush, a job he left under fire in 1991 after such memorable stunts as taking a military jet for a trip to the dentist and a taxpayer-funded limousine to attend an auction of rare stamps.
When the Romney campaign wants to make headlines by going aggressively on the offensive, it summons Sununu, and he never fails to oblige. Sununu’s occasional gaffes are the price of admission; they may even be desirable for a campaign trying desperately to change the subject. If you want the fire of Sununu’s passion, you have to accept a burned-down building every once in a while.
The question is whether, in describing Obama as un-American, the Cuban-born Greek-Palestinian Sununu crossed a line, dog-whistling to those on the fringes who persist in believing that the president wasn’t born in the United States. But even the Obama campaign didn’t see it as that sinister. Campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith issued a statement accusing Sununu of having “gone off the deep end” — more of an eye-roll than a denunciation.
But it would also be a mistake to see this as the singular case of a particularly undisciplined surrogate. If it’s out of bounds to imply that Obama is less than fully American, Romney has been treading close to the line for quite some time. He frequently asserts that the president “doesn’t understand America,” a claim that, like Sununu’s, comes in the context of accusing Obama of insufficiently appreciating entrepreneurial capitalism, but carries other overtones as well.
Sununu, Romney, and plenty of other Republicans really do believe that Obama harbors a deeply un-American worldview — one that sees the amassing of wealth as suspect and favors a more communitarian society. Sununu may have articulated it particularly artlessly on Tuesday. But he wasn’t so much going off message as taking Romney’s message to its logical conclusion.
By: Molly Ball, The Atlantic, July 17, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 